Old Sarum

Monday 27 May 1998. Old Sarum - if you know what it is you're looking at - always looks magnificent as you approach it. The ancient hillfort was chosen for its strategic position and commands a view of the surrounding countryside for many miles.

It was a public holiday and we found that there was a visit by the Roman Army who were drilling and displaying. This had two advantages for us: one, we were able to see some of the display and two, when we took time out to explore the site, everyone else was watching the display!

We have a look at the Romans on the next page. Above, we are already standing within the site of the city and looking across to the inner sanctum, the site of the Norman castle.

To get this far there has been a steep climb and we have negotiated (by means of a modern road) the defensive ditches seen above. Imagine running up and down a couple of these, wearing a helmet and carrying sword, shield etc whilst the locals are pelting you with rocks, slingshot, boiling water or oil and nasty pointy things! Before you get to the top you have been hurt and some of your friends are dead. By the time you've got through that ditch the locals have all gone into the inner sanctum, destroying or removing the bridge, and notching a fresh supply of arrows to their bows. If you slip the likelihood is that you will fall onto one of many sharpened stakes and will not be very happy. If you manage to avoid them you will be struck by an idea for putting cubes of cheese on cocktail sticks...

Then you reach the inner sanctum. Ditches fill up with time. This is still deep and treacherous enough to require fencing! At the bottom of the ditch will be sharpened wooden stakes. If you fall going down the side you will be caught on one and have to leave the fun of battle to your mates. On the top of this green bank is a high wooden wall or palisade that must be climbed or broken through once the grassy bank has been climbed. The palisade is lined with unfriendly people. You are starting to invent the term "Bugger this for a game of soldiers..."

Here we see the remains of the royal palace inside the inner sanctum. Immensely strong thick walls of dressed stone over rough rubble and mortar. The ground floor rooms have been packed with earth to ceiling level to make the walls even more impregnable. Knocking a few stones off is not going to make the castle fall down.

The tops of the walls and the narrow windows are full of people shooting the remainder of their arrows and pouring out the heated contents of their plumbing. Over each doorway are death holes. These lead vertically down from rooms above the entrance and down the hole heavy objects or boiling liquid can be dropped onto whoever is trying to batter the door down.

If you get this far you are extremely brassed off... Your commander looks for the castle's sewage system and commands you to crawl through it so you can open the gates from inside... Bear in mind that the opening to the sewerage system is likely to be on at least the first storey so you will need a way of climbing the wall to get into it. It will open directly to the seat above so you have to hope no-one has felt the need.

Sounds fairly horrible doesn't it? Yet most castle seiges either ended because of treachery from within, because the food (or more likely water) ran out in the castle, or because someone had to worm through the sewage outlet into the castle. Once inside, they had to think of a way to either fight off all the guards at the gate or capture a hostage important enough to secure the obediance of the guards.

Happily, they let us in simply through buying a ticket...

Sarum was abandoned in the 13th Century and the nearby city of Salisbury was developed in its stead. The once fine buildings were left to decay in the hilltop fortress, but some walls remain, enabling us to form an accurate picture of how the fortress might have looked in its heyday.

In only one or two places are facing stones left. Elsewhere the walls are the rough undressed stone and mortar, giving a somewhat false picture of how the buildings would have looked.

Looking from the inner sanctum to the wider area of the city, the foundations of Sarum's cathedral can be seen. It is extremely rare (if not unknown) for any monument, castle or ruin to be restored in England. Policy seems to dictate that decay is arrested or retarded and any ground is grassed, regardless of whether the appearance of the structure is known or whether the ground was originally paved. I remember as a child wondering how the grass could have grown inside a cathedral, and I remain unconvinced that the present policy is the correct one.

The sound of a horn being blown announces the arrivals of a Roman Legion. We nip off to have a look and will share this with you in the next entry.

Return to Wiltshire, Cotswolds and Avon 1998 Index

Cherhill and Avebury

Sunday 26 May 1998. We were heading for Avebury's massive prehistoric earthworks.

The road I chose took us past the white horse at Cherhill. There are several of these horses in the area. They date from prehistory to this century and are "drawn" by scraping the turf from the underlying chalk and repeated weedings known as scourings. In the photo if you follow the horizon above the horse to the right you will see two small bumps. They are the earthworks of an Iron Age hillfort.

Avebury never ceases to fascinate me. I think after Glastonbury it is the most magical place in England. Forget Stonehenge, if it's atmosphere you want then come to Avebury. The huge earthworks and the remains of the stone circle entirely surround the village.

The whole of this is then surrounded with a ditch and outer rampart. And what a ditch! Bear in mind that it will have filled up with a fair bit of dust and debris over the last couple of thousand years...

Inside the immense henge of Avebury are the remains of smaller stone circles. Some of these stones were destroyed a few hundred years ago when the villagers sought to use the stone for building. Large fires were started around stones which were then cooled rapidly by dousing them with water. The expansion due to the heat followed by rapid contraction caused the stones to split apart. Reportedly the practice stopped after a man was blinded by a flying chip of stone causing superstitious minds to race into overdrive! Small concrete obelisks have been set where stones have been destroyed.

Also note how few people walk inside this stone circle and how the ones that do stay close to the perimeter. On our first visit our daughter Gillian who was about 6 at the time, refused point blank to walk inside the circle saying that it "felt funny".

Many ley lines cross here. In the village itself is The Henge Shop selling souvenirs and books about the village and Wiltshire and stone circles in general. A shame about the dull weather. We have a couple more stops during the day and then the sun will come out later so we will return to see Avebury at its most spectacular best.

Return to Wiltshire, Cotswolds and Avon 1998 Index

Cornwall, Here We ... Came!

The old slides are still going through the scanner at Burke Towers. A 1989 holiday in Newquay is currently being done. I've mentioned Porth and Trevelgue Island before, but every time we go there I take photos that are variations on a theme! I'll try to cover places I didn't cover before though - or at least show photos from a different angle! It doesn't help that I'm working backwards through time...

Anyway, the day in question for this article is Saturday 5 August 1989. We were camping on Porth Beach Camping Site. There were much the same teams of combatants - Miss Frannny, myself and daughter Gill, Mum, Dad, brother Frank and his son John. We were in two rather battered old Fords. Mine is the quite nice looking Cortina, but the new paint job it had been given was covering a multitude of sins... Mum and Dad, Frank and "Young" John (what does that make me???) were in Dad's Granada that had just had a new (used) bonnet fitted to replace the sheet of rust that previously tried its best to keep rain off the engine. It had yet to be sprayed to match the rest of the car!

It was fairly early on in our camping days and we hadn't yet bought the large 3-bedroomed tent we were to eventually buy so the three of us were making do in this small tent on loan from Fran's brother, Bob. (Thank you Bob!)

It was a stonker of a day, gloriously sunny and very hot - were we really in England? We couldn't help noticing a slight whiff of petrol... No... wait... there was a horrible stench of petrol! I had filled the car up just before we got there. The garage had it stored well underground - perhaps in a refridgeration plant - and since being squirted into the car it was warming up nicely, expanding, and forcing its way out of the petrol cap in a potentially disastrous torrent. "I'm going to have to go for a drive to use enough petrol to stop it leaking!" So, as Miss Franny was unpacking stuff into the tent and not wanting to go for a ride in a waiting time bomb, off I went on my own.

I found an old Iron Age fort on the map and headed to Castle-an-Dinas to have a look. The car had to be left at the bottom of the hill and I walked up to the fort. There was a bungalow halfway up belonging to an English Heritage chap. A huge alsation and a goose both came at me, the goose being far more aggressive than the dog and I was pleased to get up to the top leaving the wildlife behind.

At some point I had to come down again... Having heard the commotion for a second time, a nice chap came out as the dog and goose went into furious overload and he grabbed hold of the dog, saying, "It's ok he doesn't bite..." whilst the goose broke both my legs with its wings and took a chunk of what I like to think of as my most precious part in its beak... Thank you! I called in high falsetto, hobbling down the hill as fast as I could, until the goose eventually gave up and stopped dangling from between my legs to drop to the ground and stalk back up the hill with a parting hiss that I took to mean "Let that be a lesson to you!"

Back at Porth I discover the rest of the family and families from the tents near us lying around unconscious from petrol fumes and wake the family to go for a coffee at a small cafe along the path towards Newquay. Here we are looking across to Trevelgue Island, which we have always called Porth Island, not knowing any better.

As always for our first evening in Newquay we'll be off to explore Trevelgue Island. Only an island at high tide it has earthwork defences that denote an Iron Age past and, well you know me... I love anything like that.

The sides of the island are not particularly high, but they are cliffs none-the-less and access onto the island is via a wooden bridge. At high tide the water flows energetically from one side to the other underneath and it gives the walk onto the island a little bit of added wonder and satisfaction. At either side of the bridge are earthwork banks, still impressively large. In fact on the island side the defensive wall has been cut to take a stepped path and you walk through with the top of the wall above your head. I never fail to be excited by it, whilst the rest of the family wait impatiently saying things like "It's just a hill!"

Anyway this holiday will include a few more stone circles and weird stuff! (Hooray!) And I'll finish this first article with another view of Porth Beach which is a long beach with a shallow fall off to the sea which makes for easy bathing although you should bear in mind always that this is the Atlantic and some large waves can come in. The flags on the beach show where it is safe to go into the sea.

Return to Cornwall 1989 Index Page

Ancient Newquay

Sunday 4 August 1996. I don't suppose many of Newquay's visitors go to soak up its prehistoric antiquities but there are some if you know where to look.

King Arthur's Round Table

Strange that only a week ago I mentioned King Arthur as yesterday I had an email from Switzerland, where there is to be an exhibition called King Arthur and his Knights from April through to October 2008. The exhibition is to be a joint venture between Schweizerisches Institut für Kinder- und Jugendmedien (the Swiss Institute for Children's and Youth Media) SIKJM and Museum Aargau and will be shown simultaneously in two venues: Castle Lenzburg and Castle Hallwyl in Kanton Argau, Switzerland.

The organisers wrote to me, asking to use the photograph shown here of the henge earthworks known as King Arthur's Round Table at Eamont Bridge near Penrith in Cumbria. It appears on my Stone Circles web page (using web space no longer available). I took the photograph on slide film in 1985 and over the 22 years of its existence I'm afraid it has attracted a great deal of dust and grime. Anyway I cleaned it up as best I could and sent the largest scan I could and for good measure sent some more recent photos taken in better weather which were a bit sharper.

We think of King Arthur and his knights as riding around in medieval armour, because the main stories about him were written (and the majority made up) some 600 or so years after he would have lived and they were a bit - how should I say - modernised by Geoffrey of Monmouth, to extol the virtues of 12th aristocracy. He introduced most of the characters that we associate with Arthur, including Merlin, Uther and Ygerne and even the associations with Tintagel and Avalon. A bit like historians of the future taking the film Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves as the basis for their understanding of 13th Century England...