Our road from Church Stretton to the start of our Shropshire walk.
Shropshire’s one of England’s forgotten counties, and full of secret landscapes for the lucky traveller to discover. We found a few ourselves this week, when visiting ex-Riponian friends Hatti and Paul.
Here’s our route, as shown on the OS map.
They took us on a walk along one of those characteristic long, narrow scenic ridges which offer easy walking, and wonderful long distance views to east and to west. So there we were, rambling from Wentnor to Bridges along the ridge for a rather good pub lunch, and then back to Wentnor along the valley floor.
To the right of us was the Long Mynd, a gently sloping plateau. To the left, and higher above us were the more rugged Stiperstones. Both hillsides were covered with an intensely purple carpet of flowering heather.
You’ll want to know how the ridge of Stiperstones came to be covered with an untidy tumbling of large and rugged boulders.
The Devil’s Chair (Wikimedia Commons)
It was the devil who dropped them there. He’d once noticed an old crone carrying her eggs to market by holding them before her, nursing them in her apron. That was the way to do it! That was how he carried a large bundle of rocks all the way from Ireland to Shropshire, where he planned to drop them in the valley called Hell’s Gutter. It was heavy work, and he sat for a rest at the very top of Stiperstones on a rock known since that day as the Devil’s Chair.
As he stood up again, his apron strings snapped. Out those rocks tumbled, all over the ridge. He didn’t bother to pick them up. They’re there to this day.
Look carefully, there on the skyline are the devil’s carelessly-lost rocks.
Climatologists and geologists have a different explanation, more credible but less fun. If you get the chance, go to Shropshire, savour its varied and delightful landscape, and decide for yourself.
Two posts in quick successsion. Sorry. But this one is topical now, although I first posted it exactly four years ago. And it made me sad. And cross.
Four years ago, England was in the grip of Olympic Fever, and we were in London, sharing all the optimism and the feel-good factor with Londoners from every possible cultural background. Today seems so different. The country seems suffused in post-Brexit economic gloom, post-Brexit immigrant antipathy, often towards citizens who’ve lived here thirty years. Only the headlines from the Daily Express and the Daily Mail promote the fiction that all is well, and all will continue to be well. It’s all very depressing.
A fortnight ago, our local paper, La Dépêche du Midi had ‘Londres, capitale du monde!’ as its banner headline. The story was, of course, the Olympics. We’re unaccustomed to this particular paper taking much notice of anything that occurs outside south-west France, but ‘les JO’ (Jeux Olympiques) have been big news.
Not as much as in England though. When we arrived in the UK, we were unprepared for Olympic Fever. Red white and blue banners and flags hang from houses. Shops have Olympic-themed window displays, and if you want to buy mugs, some paper napkins, or fancy a new cushion, you’d better want them plastered with the Union Flag.
Across the Thames: a view of St. Paul’s Cathedral
Still, we enjoyed staying with Tom and Sarah in Olympic-happy London, and spent an evening round the South Bank area. Eat near Borough Market and you’re sure of a tasty…
My goodness. What a can of worms I opened when I decided to research a bit of family history. Originally, I simply planned to gather together all the stories, legends, bits of fact and fiction that all families accrue around themselves and record them in my new blog ‘Notes on a family’. But then, you can get a free trial period of a fortnight on Ancestry UK, so why not take things a little further?
I think the site may have sucked me in, just as it wanted to. Sleuthing around, tracking my family through the generations has been quite a lot of (frustrating) fun. But all that’s for the other blog. Here’s where I wanted to tell you about some of the incidental stuff I’ve found.
Did you know, for instance, that the census recorders used to have to note anybody they found who could be described as:
Deaf and dumb
Blind.
Lunatic
Imbecile, feeble minded.
I remember that my mother told me that when she was a child, the use of such terms as ‘moron’, ‘imbecile’ and ‘idiot’ was quite normal and not necessarily offensive, while my father, never known for his political correctness, had no problem in winding down his car window to yell ‘cretin’ at any passing jay-walker.
One of the shocks is just how large my ‘family’ is, potentially. My grandfather was one of ten, his father one of nine. Add in their spouses, their children, and their children’s spouses and children, and sudenly you’re wondering if the person you hold a door open for at the library might be your seventh cousin, five times removed.
And then all those wonderful occupations. My grandmother’s family came from the textile districts of Yorkshire and Lancashire, so whole streets full of people worked at the busy mills. But nothing as dull as ‘Mill worker‘ will do as a job description. Try these: *‘worsted spinner’; ‘overlooker, stuff factory’; ‘stuff weaver’; ‘scribbling overlooker’ (what?), ‘woollen piecer’. An entire road’s worth of houses were inhabited by people had jobs such as these. Just occasionally, someone else got thrown into the mix. ‘Lamplighter’; ‘washerwoman’; ‘Roman Catholic priest’, as well as the odd ‘domestic servant‘, a young girl of 15 to 20, usually.
I couldn’t think how to illustrate this piece. Then I remembered a couple of old family albums, full of photos I have no possible means of identifying. Let’s give them their last outing.
Here I am, still slaving away at Blogging 101, the University of Blogging. I’m beginning to get a bit on edge when I fire up the laptop in the morning, because I know Senior Lecturer and Course Director Michelle W will have sent out yet another assignment requiring us to tweak and tinker with our blogs, and generally bring them up to scratch. I even played hooky the day before yesterday, and the day before that. Doesn’t she know I have a LIFE to lead?
However, here I am again, back in the University Libary (aka our study). Today we have to write a post. And it’s to be inspired by a blog we found yesterday, a blog new to us, which we felt moved to comment on.
I discovered Katherine Price. She can write in a way that takes me to her world, her street, her little stretch of the Thames and help me to savour with her the local trees and the daily rhythms of the birds, whether a clamour of rooks, or a solitary kingfisher streaking past. The first post I read was a bit of a hymn to staying put and not moving on, a hymn to her home in suburbia.
And it got me thinking about where I live now, and where I used to live… and the time before that… and the time before that. It reminded me of a post I wrote almost 5 years ago, and I thought it was maybe time to revisit it and re-work it.
I spent my childhood in London: population 8.5 million.
Then I went to University in Manchester: population 2.5 million.
A few years later I was living in Leeds: population 751,000.
And then we moved to Harrogate: population 76,000.
Then we went to France and I started a blog. We lived in Laroque d’Olmes with about 2,500 other people.
And now we’ve come back to England, and we live in North Stainley. This is a village whose population is about 730.
Can you see a pattern here?
Everwhere I’ve lived has seemed special at the time. I used to relish all that a big city could offer, whether the museums, cinemas, or the huge choice of shops. As I moved onwards and downwards, I remembered instead and with some horror the crowds, the dirt, the general busy-ness of the place before. Good heavens, even Laroque, not big enough to support a range of shops, much less a cinema or a swimming pool seems rather exotic compared with the facilities in North Stainley (a village hall, a church, and a pub, to be re-opened in early spring). We’ve traded cinemas for a film on Saturdays once every 6 weeks in the village hall, and shops for the chance to buy eggs from the farm not far from here. And this blog is where I often report on what we discover as we explore our local countryside .
I’ll leave you with a quiz: can you identify each of the places I’ve lived in from these images?
December in the north of England has been the month of the flood. Until Boxing Day, it was Cumbria that saw all the action, with some communities flooded out not once, not twice, but three times. They were told to stand by for more on Boxing Day. They readied themselves…. and nothing happened, because the torrential rains prophesied swept south and east of them, firstly into Lancashire, and then Yorkshire
We were staying with my daughter’s family in that part of Greater Manchester that used to be in Lancashire. They live near a Nature Reserve through which Bradshaw Brook passes. I’d say ‘flows’, but such a phrase is normally far too active a description for this narrow little watercourse.
This was Bradshaw Brook yesterday.
Bradshaw Brook, Boxing Day 2015
We were due to travel home from their house to ours, in Yorkshire. Highways England, the BBC, and motoring organisations all had conflicting information on their websites. But they all agreed that our usual route, a scenic drive over the Pennines, was largely impassable.
It would have to be the motorway. Longer, duller, but surer. We’d not long been travelling when we noticed that traffic on the other carriageway was at a complete standstill, for miles…and miles. It was only when we got home that we found out that a 20′ sinkhole had opened up near Rochdale. So much for safer-by-motorway…..
Where to leave the motorway though, for the final few miles home? There were floods in Leeds, floods near Harrogate – there were sure to be floods in Boroughbridge too. What about Knaresborough? It turned out there were floods near there too, as we discovered when warning notices turned us back on the road we’d come on, and sent us back by several miles to look for another route. Familiar fields had turned into lakes, deep and almost unfordable road-side puddles were unavoidable.
This doesn’t look too bad. Trust me. It’s deep.
We’re lucky. We were flood-tourists on our journey home, gawping at rivers-become-seas, and roads-become-rivers. Our home wasn’t flooded, nor will it be. Others aren’t so fortunate. They’re either contemplating the devastation of their own home or business – or both, or anxiously shoring up the front door with as many sandbags as they can lay their hands on, in anticipation of the days ahead, when the forecast continues to be grim. We could all do with a bit of an old-fashioned winter cold snap, with a touch of frost, but positively no rain.
You see that bridge, centre left? That’s a bridge over the River Ure, in Ripon. This lake in the foreground is not a lake, but open ground at the edge of the city, favoured by dog-walkers and children.
You all know Castle Howard, that magnificent 18th century stately home, and one of Yorkshire’s treasures. I’ve even blogged about it. It provides the backdrops in endless films and TV dramas.
This time, though, as it’s Christmas, I just want to show you how its been decorated for the season. A few weeks ago they shut the doors for a whole fortnight, and everyone from groundsmen and gardeners to guides and caretaking staff turned to and spent their time dragging trees into place, painting, placing baubles, candles and foliage, gilding, and generally making the place festive. Then they re-opened. We came away from our afternoon there, admiring everyone’s hard work and enthusiasm, feeling Christmassy for the first time this year. Happy Christmas everyone!
What could be more fun than pottering round the back roads of England on a sight-seeing outing? Even more memorable than charming village greens, ancient market towns, and ever-changing scenery are certain English place names.
Image courtesy of anglotopia.net
What about Affpuddle (Dorset), Barton-in-the-Beans or Burton-le Coggles (both in Lincolnshire), Dirty Gutter (Staffordshire), Dirdle Door and Gussage St. Michael (both in Dorset), Great Cockup (Cumbria), Lower Slaughter and Tomtit’s Bottom (both in Gloucestershire), Oh Me Edge (Northumberland), Ryme Intrinseca (Somerset), Sheepy Parva (Warwickshire) or Wyre Piddle (Worcestershire)? Or dozens and dozens of others.
Somehow, the names themselves give a clue about where in the country they’re situated, to those of us born and bred here. Yorkshire, for instance, often has a gritty edge to the names of its towns and villages, which are characterful, rather than pretty. Blubberhouses is where the houses by the bubbling streams were found: Grimwith was the wood haunted, once upon a time, by ghosts and goblins. And Arncliffe never used to be simply a well known landmark beloved of rock climbers and ramblers, but was instead the eagle’s cliff.
These place names should intrigue us. As elsewhere, those in Yorkshire reveal a history in which migrants from Celtic, Viking and Saxon lands, from Rome and from France populated the teritory, making homesteads and small holdings in a landscape which was not always welcoming.
Long before the Romans, the whole area was dominated by a powerful Celtic tribe, the Brigantes. They could be found in Ireland too, and even the Greek geographer Ptolemy had heard of them. They gave us place names still important round here: Pen-y-ghent – one of the Three Peaks – reminds us that to the Celts, ‘penno‘ meant ‘hill‘. They named three rivers too: the Nidd (‘brilliant‘), the Wharfe (‘winding‘) and the Ure (‘strong’, or ‘sacred‘).
The Romans had a large presence in Yorkshire – especially in York itself – and we live quite near another large and important settlement, Aldbrough. They left artefacts, buried settlements, fragments of their long straight roads, but here in Yorkshire, no place names.
When the Romans left, Eastern England was the destination of waves of invaders from Germanic peoples we now know collectively as Anglo-Saxons. They came, they conquered, they settled. They made homes – ‘hams‘ -for themselves (Clapham), and farms: ‘tun’ means farmstead (Horton). They made clearings in the woodland (‘leys’), and small towns grew up – Leyburn. They were the first to identify Yorkshire as a large geographical entity, and divided the area into Thyrdings, which we later called Ridings. Read all about it in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle of 1065!
During the same period, Vikings also came from Scandinavia. We think of them swashbuckling their way across the land, raping and pillaging and laying waste to all in their path. But the fact that 2/3 of settlement names in Yorkshire can be traced back to Old Norse tells a different story. The Vikings too wanted land on which to settle and make a living. Their names include terms like ‘slack‘ (‘hollow‘), keld (‘spring‘), ‘gill‘ (‘ravine‘) and ‘foss‘ (‘waterfall‘). In particular, those very many settlements whose name includes ‘– thorpe‘(‘outlying farmstead‘), ‘– thwaite‘ (‘clearing‘) and ‘– dale‘ (‘valley‘) betray their Viking origins.
And then it was 1066 and All That. The Normans came and they conquered. In particular, Wiilliam conducted a campaign of ‘harrying of the north’, systematically devastating the countryside in order to isolate and destroy his enemies. Unsurprisingly, there is little French influence on Yorkshire place names – apart from that left by the monks. Several Cistercian Abbeys in Yorkshire have left their names behind: Jervaulx (that means ‘by the River Ure‘) and Rievaulx (‘the valley of the river Rye’), as well as Fountains Abbey – ‘font‘ meant ‘spring‘ in Norman French, and the area on which the abbey is built is rich in water sources.
So by this time, most settlements in Yorkshire had acquired the names by which we recognise them now. Here are a few of my favourites. Enjoy their names, enjoy their meanings, and maybe add a few more of your own favourites?
Appletreewick (pronounced ‘Aptrick‘): dairy farm by the apple tree. (OE)
Arkengarthdale: the valley where Arkil (ON personal name) had his enclosure.
Buttertubs: perhaps named after the potholes used by the farmers to cool their butter on the way to market.
Conistone Cold: the King’s farm exposed to the cold (ON &OE)
Crackpot: the crevice where crows nest (ON & ME)
Giggleswick: Gikel’s (OE personal name) dairy farm.
Gordale: the dirty valley or the valley covered in manure: (ON &ON/OE)
Hardraw: the shepherds’ row of cottages (OE)
Ingleton: the farm on the hill (OE)
Langstrothdale: the valley with a long stretch of marsh overgrown with brushwood (OE &ON)
Muker: small cultivated field (ON)
Settle: a dwelling place (ON)
Swinithwaite: a clearing made by burning (ON)
Trollers Gill: troll’s arse ravine (ON &OE)
Whernside: the hillside where querns (millstones) were found (ON)
ON – Old Norse
OE – Old English
ME – Middle English
The landscape of Buttertubs, only a little tamed since Viking times.
* Faggergill: the ravine in a sheep enclosure (ON)
^ Scaleber: The hill with the shieling (hut or high pasture) (ON& OE)
We’ve just come back from Herefordshire, where we’ve been helping our friend Hatti celebrate a Big Birthday. She and her family have a cottage there – it’s been in their family for decades now – in the back-end of nowhere, alongside the River Lugg. If you don’t like fishing, or walking the hills and vales, or mooching along woodland paths, best not go there. If you’re in a hurry, don’t go. You’ll only meet a tractor on a narrow single-track road and be forced to reverse all the way back to the last junction. There’s no nightlife, no shopping malls, no nearby towns, not much of any evidence of 21st century life – the family cottage doesn’t even have electricity, for goodness sake: gaslight in the evening is a reposing and rather nostalgic experience.
The cottage.
The River Lugg at the bottom of the garden.
The welcoming committee in the next field.
History, though. The area has history. It’s part of the Welsh Marches, that border territory between Wales and England that was fought and skirmished over pretty constantly from the time of the Romans, by Angles, Saxons, Normans and countless ancient tribes, right up to the time of the Tudors. Offa’s Dyke, that 8th century earthwork which largely defined the Welsh border for centuries can still be seen not too far from here. This was frontier territory, crammed with motte-and-bailey castles, and garrison towns such as Hereford and Shrewsbury. An area of gently undulating hills, deep and wooded secret valleys, it’s a territory that must have lent itself to scraps, battles and long-drawn-out tit-for-tat fighting between the area’s war lords.
It’s hard to imagine now. Those hills and valleys are patchworked with fields where cattle and sheep browse the meadow grass, and where crops are maturing, ready for the summer harvest. The woods are still there though, and there are trees so old that they may have seen some of those ancient conflicts. There’s an interesting story surrounding the gnarled and twisted sweet chestnuts and oaks in the parkland of Croft Castle, just down the road from where we were staying. It’s said the sweet chestnuts trees were planted in 1588, in the formation of the Spanish Armada.
A Spanish sweet chestnut shows its age.
Oaks represented the English navy. Though some trees are even older. This oak tree is thought to be 1000 years old.
The 1000 year old Quarry Oak at Croft Castle.
Carry on walking though, and you’ll climb upwards and find yourself on the site of an Iron Age hill fort. Recent excavations there have found evidence too of Romano-British fire ceremonies, animal sacrifice and feasting. Nowadays, it’s enough to marvel at the views across to England one way, Wales the other. It’s said you can see 14 counties on a clear day. We couldn’t, but that may say as much about our command of the local geography as anything else.
Commanding views of several counties, in England….. and Wales.
We had a wonderfully satisfying break: peaceful, lovely countryside to explore, with the added bonus of parkland, gardens, ancient churches. And while Herefordshire remains rather difficult to get at from just about anywhere else in England, it’ll probably go on being one of the country’s best kept secrets.
From Pyrenees to Pennines 
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