Wednesday 22 June 2005. Another trip for work and this time the car hire firm have dropped off a Nissan X-Trail. Not that work were so extravagant with their travel funding, but I was using hire cars such a lot that if the firm had customers for all of their smaller cars they would pick their regular customers to upgrade at no extra cost.
I was heading to Newtown in mid Wales and my route took me through Oswestry, so I stopped for a look at the old hill fort.
Whilst it had the usual rings of earthworks there were a few surprises for any would-be assailants in the form of pits and banks perpendicular to the circumference. They would have been much deeper 1500 years ago than they appear now and I reckon the authorities have probably made the owners of the site remove any rusty sword blades and sharpened stakes that might await anyone luckless enough to fall down the side of one of these pits!
Old Oswestry (Hen Ddinas in Welsh) was built around 800 BCE and occupied, according to most sources including English Heritage under whose care it is and Wikipedia, up until 43 CE. 43 CE is a curiously precise date, so I'm not sure how it was derived.
There is a legend that King Arthur's Guinevere was born here and that would have been some 360-400 years later if, indeed, he ever actually existed. So either that's just a legend also or we have to believe that her mother, on the brink of giving birth, decided to climb up the steep slopes of the hillfort, that rises almost 27 metres (90 ft), whilst avoiding falling into the pits in order to give birth...
I was meeting a colleague, Alan, and we were staying here at a country hotel called the Maesmawr Hotel just south of Newtown. Alan had further to travel than myself, living just outside Edinburgh and I picked him up at Newtown Station before going to book in at the hotel.
We found the hotel fairly easily. The Maesmawr was a wonderful black and white timbered building, dating from 1565 a mile from a place called Caersws - as impossible to guess at the pronunciation as Maesmawr was...
Over a period of several months I worked closely with a team at the University of Glamorgan and my main contact there told me once that if you want to learn Welsh you should start by ignoring from an English viewpoint how words are spelt... After a dozen years of regularly visiting Wales, my grasp of the Welsh language is limited to simple phrases like "Good morning" and (because road traffic signs are written in both languages) words like "Stop", "Slow", "Welcome to...", and the one I used the most: "humpback bridge"...
This was the view from my bedroom window.
The hotel was very close to the River Severn. Most surviving buildings of this age are close to rivers come to think of it. They would have provided water for drinking, washing, and cleaning and also perhaps (hopefully a little downstream) for getting rid of waste.
The menu for our evening meal included Welsh lamb. "Ah well..." said Alan, whose slender frame belied his capacity for food, "I think we deserve it!"
The hotel entrance. A strong woody smell came from the orchids in the entrance hall. On the wall... no... it can't be... It was. Bambi's mum!
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