The Giant Childe of Hale

In March of 1985 I was freelancing photos to magazines and was particularly successful with those of things that had a story attached. In the trade they were called curiosity photos.

This is the cottage of a certain John Childe. He was born in 1578 and lived in this cottage in Hale in what is now Merseyside. He was a giant of a man. He grew to an incredible nine feet and three inches tall (2.82 metres).

When he was inside the cottage he could only stand up in the very centre of it with his head up in the eaves.

He was taken to Court to see King James I where he fought and broke the thumb of the King's Champion. James wasn't too pleased at that, but gave him half a crown and sent him home!

In later years his height was thought to have been exaggerated but, when his grave was opened, the bones proved the height of nine feet three inches. The local pub is named The Childe of Hale in his honour.

Hale also has this row of thatched cottages opposite the village green and a lighthouse on the shore.

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Bibury Showpiece Village

Wednesday 29 May 1998. We awake in Cirencester to a cloudy but bright day with the sun threatening to come out.

We are heading up throughs the Cotswolds and my map told me that Bibury was a "Showpiece Village", so we made it our first stop of the morning. It is indeed a lovely place and the sun ices the cake by making an appearance.

Bibury is a delightful village, with a trout farm and a row of cottages and some well kept gardens to enjoy.

If it wasn't for the yellow lines down the edge of the main street you could imagine yourself back in time here. The trout farm was either losing fish at a great rate or was a bit redundant, because the little stream that bubbled its way down the street, passing under several little bridges was teeming with them.

This is Arlington Row. A row of old cottages that makes as many appearances on postcards and chocolate boxes as the bridge at Castle Combe that we saw a few days ago.

In fact on that day (and visible to the left of the photo) a photo shoot was going on with a model walking a dog up and down the row whilst the small team of photographer, stylist and make-up artist made the most of the sunshine.

Here, away from those tell-tale yellow lines, it really is possible to imagine you are in a different century. In this photo only the road covering and the yellow H sign strikes a more modern note.

You see these small yellow markers all over the place in the UK and Ireland. They mark the position of the nearest fire hydrant which are all hidden in the ground rather than being street furniture. It does mean that cars don't run into them which TV and movies would have us believe happens all the time in America, sending great geysers of water shooting into the air. In the UK the water companies use leaks instead to waste water... My grandma had a car game where the first to see a yellow H had to shout "Fire Plug!". It keeps kids amused for ages and drives adults bananas!

Who wouldn't want to live in such an idyllic place? Yet town dwellers who move to the country can't seem to accept that it has its own way of working and existing and that sometimes it does smell when fields need fertilising, that there are slow tractors on the road, that going to the cinema involves a long drive, that animals make a noise when dawn breaks...

In the next entry we go in search of more hills of the dead and at one of them I have to enter by worming in on my belly. I hope you realise the lengths I go to for these articles!

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Stow-On-The-Wold

It's 3 June 1994 and the trip starts, as any self-respecting trip to the Cotswolds starts, at Stow-On-The-Wold.

Lots of villages in the Cotswolds have a string of hyphenated words as a name. Apart from Stow-On-The-Wold, there's Moreton-On-The-Marsh, Foot-In-The-Cowplat, Nettle-Sting-Behind-The-Knee and of course, Bourton-On-The-Water. At least one of those actually exists and we'll end up there later because Stow-On-The-Wold has no Guest-Houses-With-Vacancies...

So, the Cotswolds then... An area of outstanding beauty and lots of quaint little villages whose buildings are almost all unique rather than a collection of the same design. Lots of them have given firms of modellers and ceramics like Lilliput Lane a rich source for their catalogue and Miss Franny has at least half of the Cotswolds, modelled in miniature, taking up 53 display cabinets, friends' lofts and stuck upside down on the ceiling as we got ever more desperate for space to put them!

However, back then in 1994 she didn't have any and holidays and shopping trips were spent trying to drag her away from shop window displays, bottom lip stuck out and an accusatory finger pointing at the examples in the shop with the words "Want to start collecting them!" ringing in my ears. Yes dear, of course... wouldn't you rather have another guitar? No? Why not try one to make sure?

Ah thank you lads - see I knew if I waited long enough you'd get fed up of making V-signs... The market cross was minus its cross from the top of the post that weekend. Must have been being cleaned or something...

For some reason or other, both Miss Franny and daughter Gill were reluctant to enter into the spirit of things by trying out the stocks properly...

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A Cottage Industry

Thursday 22 February 1996

Corfe Castle. Somewhere I'd always wanted to go to having seen so many beautiful photographs, but when we got there the weather had decided to do the nasty on us and we had to wander around in the rain. Still, without a doubt it was a lovely place to visit.

Not only the castle was of architectural interest. Almost every building was unique and we found the smallest Town Hall in England, a village pump encased in a blue-painted wooden casing and a gorgeous view of the ruined castle on its high mound, towering over the main street.

Fran was interested in finding the inspiration behind one of her Lilliput Lane cottages, Purbeck Stores.

We decided that the shop shown above was the closest contender.

February is probably not the best time to see England, though it gives a different perspective to some of the picture postcard views that you see on chocolate boxes, jigsaws and cards.

We vowed to return in better weather. All we've actually managed to do since then is visit in summer... which is not quite the same thing!

Large Versions of the Photos: Corfe Castle shop, Purbeck Stores model

Sandwich Weaving

A hand-coloured postcard showing a decidedly ancient lorry is my offering for today. The caption reads "Strand Street and The Weavers, Sandwich".

Which probably means the shops and cottages were originally weavers' cottages from the times when cottage industry was the main source of income for many of England's population.

A sign painted over the window at the near end of the row says "Sandwich Weavers" and that sent my (admittedly weird) sense of humour off on a tangent!

I've only been to Sandwich once. It was during a holiday in 1999 when we stayed for a week in Hastings and toured around the Cinque Ports and the south eastern corner of Britain.

There's a lot of England's history to be found in that part of the country and some lovely countryside too. One of my websites is devoted to that holiday if you want to see what we got up to.

This is one of the few photos of Sandwich that I took and it gives a totally different view and impression of the place. I took it from an old toll bridge that was a controlled way into the town. The gatehouse still exists with a list of tolls for various forms of conveyance.