The Legend of the Dun Cow's Rib

In Whittingham near Preston is an old farmhouse with a rather strange object over the door.

It is the decaying remains of a cow's rib bone. The legend that goes with it states that in the 17th century there was a great drought. So that neighbours would not die from lack of water, a farmer sent his great dun cow to roam about so that villagers could milk her at will. However the local witch milked her into a sieve, which never filled up and so the cow was milked to death. It's likely isn't it? You can see just how it must have happened...! Anyway, the cow's rib was taken and mounted over the door of the farm and if ever owners were tempted to throw it away, they were plagued by poltergeist activity until the rib was reinstated over the doorway.

Here's a photo from 1982, there was a bit more rib still in existence then, but still far less than the brackets were made for! Strangely the legend doesn't name the witch. The famous witch around the villages in this part of Lancashire was Meg Shelton, whose grave can be seen to this day, covered by an enormous stone to stop her rising from the grave. That... will be for another day!

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Another Random Offering...

The slides are still going through the scanner slowly but surely. But still as mixed up as ever! So today's offering is a mixed one again!

Starting off with a visit to Blackpool Tower Circus sometime around 1979/1980. I'm not quite sure of the year. The photo is of an acrobatic troup who had the spot right at the end of the performance after the circus ring has sunk down to allow sea water to flood in.

It was always a spectacular end to the seasonal circus show but this troupe were quite spectacular themselves - semi-naked and coated in oil and glitter, they were almost as erotic as they were acrobatic - though you get some idea of the balance and strength required for their act in this photo... Try that with the missus, later tonight!

The next photo couldn't be much more different! St Chad's church, the Parish church of Rochdale, my birth town, taken again in 1979, several years after we had moved to Blackpool. Rochdale is an old town - mentioned in the Domesday Book and, of course, the place where Alan A'Dale comes from in the Robin Hood legends.

St Chads has a strange legend that it was to have been built at the foot of the high hilltop that it occupies, but that the collected building materials were moved each night to the top of the hill by supernatural means!

The next shot is from 1990 and one of Fleetwood's Tram Sunday events. These events invariably involve far more cars and buses than they do trams - in fact these days more than ever, due to Health & Safety rules keeping the trams from trundling slowly down Lord Street whilst visitors are wandering all over the road.

Back in 1990 we just used to push the crushed and dead bodies to the kerb with the side of a foot whilst we took our photos of the parked cars.

Like this 1950s Ford Popular. This was the last Ford "sit-up-and-beg" model before more modern styling gave them a flat boot that stuck out behind and a flatter shape to the bonnet that curved gently into the wings. Dad had one of these - his first car and I remember the great excitement when he came home with it. I must have been 5 or 6 at the time. I remember he spent as much time lying under it with a spanner in his hand as we did riding inside it...

And to finish with - a disdainful opening sentence with the word "and" at the front... and a shot of a 1940s London Routemaster bus on Blackpool's Golden Mile in (I think) 1985.

It was the start of the Routemasters disappearing from London streets and it was to the advantage of Blackpool as the Routemaster made a fabulous sight in its old Blackpool livery.

Knaresborough and Mother Shipton

30 June 2000.

A family outing to Yorkshire. With Mum and Dad we call off first at Knaresborough, an extremely pretty town on the River Nidd.

An afternoon on the River Nidd is a very popular pasttime in summer. Rowboats, punts and canoes are available for hire and there is plenty of scenery to be enjoyed.

The building shown here is the entrance to the home of Mother Shipton. She was a foreteller of the future - England's Nostradamus.

She lived in the 1600s and left a legacy of prophecies including cars, telephones and World War II. She probably wasn't as pretty as Nostradamus though... A hunchbacked hideous crone, she would have been burned at the stake anywhere else, perhaps proving that the people of Knaresborough were more enlightened than those of places with similarly disfigured women who were promptly ducked in the river - "Look, she's not drowned! Burn her!" or "Oh... that's a bit of a bugger... she's drowned... must have been innocent then... ah well, mistakes happen..."

On the other hand it could be an indicator that the people of Knaresborough were scared out of their wits by her. "Try to duck me, you buggers and I'll call up all the demons of the Underworld to nibble on your privates!"
"Is that bad, Dad?"
"Aye, Sarah lass, it means... er... well you just concentrate on your tatting..."

In any case, just to add to her air of mystique, (if a hunchbacked, warty-faced, wrinkled old crone needed to add to her mystique) instead of living in an unspeakable hovel like anyone else, she lived in a cave.

Caves were known to be entrances to either Fairyland or the Underworld and it was a brave and somewhat reckless chap in the 1600s who decided on a spot of adventure caving for an afternoon's diversion. Besides, the cave that Mother Shipton scattered her few belongings around had a somewhat strange property. It still has.

A cascade of water falling from a rock face and known as The Dropping Well contains so much mineral content, coming out of a spring fed by an underground lake, that anything it falls on, as long as it stays still for long enough, acquires a coating of minerals that over a few months - 5 to 6 months for porous items such as soft toys, clothes etc., "turn it to stone".

It is England's oldest tourist attraction, being opened to the public in 1630.

Absence of large versions of the photos: From 1999 to 2001 I'd started to go digital but the quality of photos was such that I only saved them at small sizes.

Laying The Boggart

On the corner of a lane in a tiny place called Dilworth in Lancashire lies a huge slab of stone in the bank.

On the stone are carved the words: Ravffe:Radcliffe:laid:this:stone:to:lye:for:ever:A:D:1633: By legend Ravffe, or Ralph, used the stone to imprison a boggart, an evil spirit that haunted the lane after dark.

It is said that at some time in the following centuries the farmer at the nearby farm thought the stone could be better used in his buttery and took it from the hedge. He was plagued though by such ferocious poltergeist activity, that he changed his mind and replaced the stone in the bank where it had come from. The poltergeist activity stopped. The strange thing is... six horses were required to drag the stone downhill to the farm. Yet only one was needed to take the stone back uphill to its resting place...

The first two photographs were taken in 1990. The last time I went to look at the Written Stone, as it is known, was in 2000 Millenium year and the stone had been made into a seat - the bank of earth must have been moving and now requires a wall to keep it up, so the stone has been incorporated into it as a bench. Fancy your chances sitting on it?

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