Drive a Hire Car to Banbury Cross

Monday 8 December 2003. I was on my way down to Maidenhead and driving down the M40 saw a sign for Banbury around 5:00pm in the evening.

So, as I'm feeling peckish, why not stop off to see if there's anywhere to have a meal and have a look at the famous Banbury Cross of nursery rhyme fame?

In the end I didn't find anywhere to eat. 5:00pm is a funny time - high street cafes are closed or closing and many pubs are not serving food until 6:00pm or later. And it was a cold night - far too cold to be knocking about for what could be a couple of hours.

I almost got excited here but they were cleaning up inside before bringing in the tables and chairs from outside! Roughly halfway between Birmingham and London, Banbury sits on the River Cherwell on a crossing of two ancient tracks. The Salt Way, now a bridle path to the south and west of the town was used for - three guesses - transporting salt. Banbury Lane, starts close to Northampton and is still used as a modern road. It passes along Banbury's High Street then carries on towards the Roman Fosse Way at Stow-on-the-Wold. Banbury was mentioned in the Domesday Book and had obviously been there a while even at that time as remains of round houses have been discovered dating back to the Iron Age around 200 BCE.

The town hall. Built in 1854, it was the first town hall on the present site but the fourth that Banbury had had in total. The first dated from c1590, the second, a timber construction from 1633 and finally a brick hall of 1790. This still exists as it was dismantled and moved to Lower Cherwell Street where it still stands, although open arches used for markets have been bricked up and it is now a residential building.

Here is what I had come to see. Banbury Cross. Not particularly old and certainly far from ancient, it was erected to celebrate the wedding between Queen Victoria's first-born daughter (also Victoria) to Prince Frederick of Prussia in 1859. Previously the town had several older crosses that those historical self-righteous spoilsports, the Puritans, demolished in 1600.

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Whalley St Mary and All Saints

Back in the 1980s I was writing regularly for a Lancashire-based magazine and had a series of articles called "John Burke's Curious Lancashire" that featured half a dozen or so images from around the county with a bit of text covering the sort of antiquities and rarities that most people would pass by without a thought.

This is the church of St Mary and All Saints at Whalley in the Ribble Valley. Already mentioned for its abbey ruins on these pages, Whalley also has an interesting church, built on the site of or as an enlargement of a Norman church of the 11th century which itself was built on the site of an even earlier Anglo-Saxon church mentioned in the Domesday Book. Remnants of both earlier churches stand in its churchyard and fragments that are built into its walls.

This is one of three Saxon crosses to be found in the sunshine close by the church door. You can also find them in rain, snow and fog (not as easily in fog...) but they do look better in sunshine and I was lucky on this visit!

Equally so on an earlier visit, this photograph dating from 1983 and one of several taken for the magazine work. It was rare for magazines to use colour photos in those days apart from on the cover. The Saxon crosses have lost the actual arms of the cross, but the surviving shafts have carvings placed there by stonemasons in the 10th or 11th century.

The current church was built mostly in the 13th century, the tower added in the 15th century and the south porch in 1844. Subsequent restorations and additions took place in the 1860s and in 1909. Inside, the stalls were carved in 1430 and came from the Abbey after the Dissolution. They have the name of the carver, Mr Eatough.

The octagonal chunky font of gritstone dates from the 15th century and has marks suggesting that a lock was fitted in the 16th century, quite possibly to stop the local witches from trying to steal the Holy Water. We are in Pendle country here...

Coming back out of the church I found this old stone coffin.

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A Line of Curiosities

I'm soon going to have to move onto something else. The black and white negatives I took in 1981 are almost inexhaustible! I'm into October now (but have been for a while) and whilst there's some good memories to be had there, I need to start seeing things in colour again for a bit!

Taken 21 October 1981 - but all still there for the taking in colour - in the Lancashire town of Poulton-le-Fylde, near Blackpool, there is an extraordinary line of old and curious things all with stories to tell of bygone ways of life. The stocks were a cheap method of punishment where miscreants and law breakers were pinioned by the legs on market days where they could be pelted with rotten vegetables (or rocks, depending on how vindictive you were feeling). At least in the stocks you could defend your face with your arms. The pillory, which pinioned arms and head was a much harsher punishment, not in itself but in the damage caused by missiles! The market cross behind the stocks is set on a Jacobean pillar mounted upon steps. The stone table affair behind the market cross is the "fish-stones", where bartering for goods took place.

Behind those is a whipping post where people were publicly flogged. We talk of poverty these days forgetting that people throughout history in this country knew that if a harvest failed then they were likely to starve to death. Stealing food was a serious crime in such times. People were as likely to be deported to Australia or hanged as they were to be flogged for stealing a loaf of bread. Deportation meant being chained in a crowded ship's hold for months on end, sitting, sleeping in your own and everyone else's filth and amongst those who had died on the way. Happy times... Luckily for the crims, Human Rights ensures that these days it's only the innocent who have to suffer...

In 1981 the village centre was still open to traffic. This road was later returned to a cobbled surface and pedestrianised. Once we get some sunshine again I will go and retake these in colour!

John Burke's Heysham

The title of the entry was the title of a web page that I had at one time. My web pages were originally with Freeserve and survived through the takeover by Wanadoo. They finally disappeared when I moved from Orange, who took over Wanadoo to my present ISP. The page was immensely popular and so the text is reproduced here almost word for word. The photographs are, however, new and were taken especially for this reproduction of the web page.

Heysham is a tiny village on the edge of Morecambe Bay, North West England. A nuclear power station and ferry port are two modern points of interest but the village has so many old and interesting things to look at that, for a village of this size, it really is almost unfair! This is the parish church of St Peter, first consecrated in the year 976 and therefore over 1000 years old. Most of what can be seen here is younger than that, the belfry added in the 1600s, the South doorway which replaces the original Saxon doorway - still visible in the West wall. It is also obvious that the church has been expanded a few times with the nave extended and side chapels added.

There are several interesting items in the churchyard of which this sundial of 1696 is one of the youngest. However, whilst the sundial may be relatively young the material of its base is older as this was originally a Saxon cross shaft of over 1000 years ago. It must have contained carved images and the marks of the 17th Century hammers wielded by the Puritans can be clearly seen, low down on the shaft. They took to extreme the theme of not allowing worship of graven images.

Given the above it is perhaps surprising then that this Saxon cross shaft - which may be a different part of the same - was allowed to remain. The deep scrollwork and carving was done probably when the church was new. On the reverse side is a depiction of the raising of Lazarus and the three figures in the windows of the building above a swathed body in the doorway visible here are thought to depict the three Mary's visiting the tomb of Jesus.

Many visitors pass by this stone container, thinking it merely a horse trough or similar. It is however a stone coffin, thought to be that of the Norman cleric responsible for restoring a church that was old even by the time of the Conquest.

In the Southern side chapel inside the church is yet another treasure. This is a Viking "hogback" tomb cover from the 10th Century. With bears clasping each end of the stone, the carvings represent scenes from Norse sagas. It is easy to pick out this deer hunt. This is no ordinary tomb cover. This was for a chieftain or king. It is the finest example ever found in Britain.

St Peter's church was built to replace the chapel seen here which stands just above it on the hillside. By the time the Vikings raided Heysham in the 900s this chapel was already around 300 years old. They left it without a roof and the villagers, presumably too numerous anyway for this tiny chapel, decided to build the new church. The chapel was dedicated to St Patrick, who was rumoured to have been shipwrecked here in the 5th Century, on his way to Scotland after fleeing from his Roman captors in Ireland.

Close by the chapel is a row of six graves, dug with primitive tools out of the solid rock of the headland on the very edge of the cliff. Thought to date from the first half of the 11th Century, they would have been reserved for local notables. Sockets for cross shafts can be seen at the head of some of the graves.

Two more graves are uncovered at the other end of the chapel. One is obviously that of a child. The graves originally had covers over them and two are seen above in the foreground of the photo of St Patrick's chapel.

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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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