Corfe Castle in the Rain

Thursday 22 February 1996. Thursday was as rainy as Wednesday had been sunny. But never mind, we make the most of it and visit Corfe Castle, somewhere we haven't been before.

Even in the weather the castle is an imposing sight. The earthwork belongs to a castle from centuries before the Norman stone castle. This was the scene, in 978, of a royal murder as Edward, the boy King was stabbed in the back by an assassin in the pay of his step-mother who wanted her own son, Æthelred II (The Unready), to be king. "Unready" in this case has a different meaning to the modern use of the word. Made up of shortened forms of two Anglo Saxon words Æthel - noble - and red (ræd) - advised - the epithet originally meant "ill-advised". However he wasn't called that until around 1180 and as he died in 1016 it may be true but it may not be how his contemporaries thought of him.

Apart from the castle we wanted to find the shop that was the inspiration for one of Miss Franny's Liliput Lane cottages, Purbeck Stores, seen above and below.

She started with a couple of cottages and then it grew into a hamlet, then a village, then a town and at time of writing (2023) we now have a collection resembling Birmingham...

The Bankes Arms in the village commemorates Sir John Bankes, a lawyer and politician in the House of Commons from 1624 as MP for Woolton Bassett and later for Morpeth until 1629 when King Charles I decided to rule without a parliament. He did however become Attorney General and Chief Justice to the King during the Civil War. He bought Corfe Castle in 1635 and was serving in combat in London and Oxford when Corfe became besieged by a Parliamentary force for three years 1643-1645. His wife put up a strong defence and was only defeated by the betrayal of one of her officers opening a sally door to let in the enemy. She became known as Brave Dame Mary and was allowed to retain the keys to her castle which was, however, slighted (knocked down so much as to render it undefendable) following the end of the siege.

The castle dominates the village main street from its impressive mound overlooking the village. There are post holes on the mound, the only remnants of the Saxon hall where King Edward the Martyr may have been murdered in 978 CE. William I the Conqueror ordered the stone castle to be built soon after the Conquest in 1066. It would only be partially built in stone. There would still be a lot of earth and wood employed. Subsequently future Kings added to it, Henry I began building the stone keep. During the Civil War between King Stephen and the Empress Maud, the king laid siege to it in 1139. Kings John and Henry III spent fortunes on building work and the latter ordered the keep of both this and the Tower of London to be whitewashed - which is why the London stronghold is known as The White Tower. It remained in royal hands until Elizabeth I sold it in 1572.

There are at least two other curiosities in the village. In a small square we found the old village water pump hiding within a blue wooden jacket. Unusually after all this time it retains its handle, though we didn't try pumping it - there was enough water falling from the sky...

Corfe Castle also has the smallest town hall in the country, just a short distance from the village pump.

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Of Witches and Slaves, Lovers and Ghosts

Monday 16 February 2015 and we are starting out on the only paid excursion of the week, a trip to two of Jamaica's slave plantation great houses. After an album of Bob Marley and the Wailers on the coach sound system, we arrive at Rose Hall Great House.

Whilst our guide is sorting out our entry we have a quick look at the flora. There's a lot of it about...

This is where your palm oil comes from. Palm oil from the right makes you go and palm oil from the left...

The pond on the front lawn of the house is fed from above and behind the house via a series of cascades. Our guide turns up with our tickets and leads us off towards the house.

The house has been nicely restored - at one point it had got to be a bit of a mess... We will come out of the archway at the top of the stairs but for now we climb up the side and into the entrance on what seems to be the first floor - due to the slope of the hill it is actually the ground floor at the back of the house.

Rose Hall was owned by John Palmer, who took as his wife the diminutive Annie Patterson, an Anglo-Irish girl who had been orphaned in Haiti and brought up by her Voodoo priestess nanny. Well-versed in Voodoo, she became known as the cruel and sadistic White Witch of Rose Hall.

Tiring of her husband, she took to taking slaves as lovers, murdering them after three months or so and then moving onto another. Perhaps her husband caught her out, or perhaps the murders were becoming easier to her, for he suffered their fate, being poisoned by arsenic.

Another two wealthy husbands suffered the same fate, one being stabbed and the other strangled. She had them quickly buried on the estate in unmarked graves by gangs of slaves, who were themselves waylaid and killed on their way back from the burials to prevent them ever giving evidence as to where the graves were. Thus she hid her crimes from the authorities. In the hot climate it was natural for corpses to be buried quickly.

Each husband was murdered in a different room from this upper floor landing. Perhaps she didn't want their ghosts to warn their successors what was in store...!

Her current slave lover, a Voodoo priest called Takoo, learned that she wanted to marry another wealthy husband - one that was courting Takoo's granddaughter. He recognised that Annie had cursed her with a Voodoo spell and once the girl had withered and died, he took his revenge.

He killed Annie as she lay in this very bed. It has been claimed that several photos have shown her ghostly form, lying on it. She must have gone out this day though...

The slaves had the unenviable job of carrying the chamber pots away to empty them well away from the house. Bad enough in any climate but in a hot one, the task of carrying someone else's daily toilet contents would not be pleasant. And it had to be carried a long away from the house before being buried so that Annie did not have to suffer the smell on hot days. Annie had a strict, indeed a sadistic, manner towards her slaves. Slave children were trained from the age of six to carry water in a bucket weighing 10lbs when empty. If they spilt any they were whipped. By the age of ten they were strong enough to work on the plantation.

From this balcony vantage point Annie would issue her orders for each day and watch the slaves being punished - this being her form of entertainment. She had dungeons created in the cellars of the house where slaves were taken for more elaborate torture than mere whipping. She was not what you might call anyone's favourite auntie...

From the rear of the house a narrow series of steps leads into the ground and to the cellars and dungeons of the house. The dungeons are now toilets - well I suppose they were before as well, but you don't have to live in them any more...

From this room we entered another room where there was a bar and a cheerful old lad playing guitar and singing a medley of calypso tunes, about three quarters of which rang bells or sounded familiar. We had a drink and exited through the archway at the front of the house that we saw earlier.

We were led around the house to this tomb, the tomb of the murdered Annie. A voodoo ceremony was held over it at her burial, intended to trap her spirit within the tomb. Perhaps the Voodoo priest Takoo was distracted at having murdered his mistress and lover. The ceremony was not wholly successful as the ghost of the White Witch of Rose Hall has been seen floating round the house, lying in her bed and riding wildly on a galloping horse in the grounds...

We took our leave of Rose Hall Great House and headed off in the coach towards the second of the two plantation houses we were to see. A few Bob Marley songs later we arrive at a small tourist market. I saw a bright blue, yellow and red shirt (subtle it wasn't!) but she didn't have my size.

"You can try it on in there" she said hopefully, pointing into the two-foot recess of her hut.

I wagged my finger in front of her face. "No peeking!" I said, which elicited a huge cackle of laughter and made a show of trying the shirt on without attempting to button it, which would have required the intervention of one of Annie's Voodoo spells... I bought it anyway for $15, she was a nice old lady and was obviously very grateful at making a sale.

Next - we have an appointment at the Jamaican home of the Barretts of Wimpole Street.

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The Haunted Hall of Wycoller

I said in a previous entry that Wycoller still had something to show us.

Wycoller Hall is a ruinous shell that only hints at the building it once was. But it has a romantic aspect, seen over the ford across the beck and it has a literary connection, a mystery, and a ghost story.

The view over the ford is better seen than described, so we'll start with that.

The ford - if not the cobbled surface that now leads into and out of it - is Wycoller Beck's oldest crossing. There are others of venerable age that you can find by clicking the link above.

Did I mention a ghost story? There are several actually. But one involves a West Indian woman who is sometimes seen standing by the ford. The story goes that a master of the hall visited the West Indies and married there, but on returning, regretted his haste and threw the unfortunate wife overboard on the way home. The spirit apparently swam all the way to England and upriver...

The hall was built by the Hartley family in the late 1500s. It was extended 200 years later incurring much debt. It is said that Squire Henry Cunliffe was hoping to attract a wealthy wife with the larger hall, but he was to be disappointed and left this world without heir or money but with the satisfaction of a man with debt and no close family to have to take it on!

Our second ghost story involves a phantom coach that draws up outside the hall. No one seems to know who it contains or what the purpose for the journey is.

Inside the hall is this splendid fireplace, with a seat running around the inside of the chimney so that guests can site all the way around the fire. A stairway entered to the left of the fireplace leads up around the back of the chimney to a room above and in front of the fireplace.

Up these steps runs our third spectre, a horseman - who courteously dismounts before running up the stairs - but who then commits a dastardly deed by murdering some unfortunate woman: a wife? a servant? an early exponent of girl-power? Sadly there is no historical evidence for any such murder at the hall, so either the ghost has lost his way and murders someone in frustration, or it's all a figment of someone's imagination...

To the right of the fireplace is our mystery. A keyhole-shaped opening in the wall with a space behind it. It could have been merely a wood store for the fire, but then why make it such an unusual shape? Or it has been suggested it could be a space for powdering wigs - the wig and powder being applied at arm's length and the narrowness of the opening lower down preventing too much powder from floating into the room covering everyone with a white dust...which could be another reason for the murder upstairs... "My best frock coat - ruined!!!"

The literary connection is of course that of Charlotte Brontë. She spent time here and didn't particularly enjoy it so we are told. The description of Ferndean Manor in Jane Eyre would certainly match that of the hall, approached through woods of densely packed trees...

Brontë lovers flock here in pilgrimage and to nearby Haworth across the Yorkshire border. The land rises steeply behind the hall and is said to have inspired Wuthering Heights.

The hall is well worth a visit, being romantic, atmoshpheric and intruiging all at the same time.

Large versions of the photos: hall and ford, interior, fireplace detail