What my Parish Church means to me?

Since the church referred to in this article sits in the beautiful country beneath the Cats Back, the ridge which is the location of our part of the Offa's Dyke Path, and is in sight of Black Hill, we thought this was a more than fitting place to reproduce this article which was originally written for the Hereford Diocesan Newspaper.

A 'sense of place' is a phrase which I suspect does not feature in many people's vocabulary in this ever changing world. The only constant seems to be our ancient buildings and the continuous spawning of new supermarkets at the expense of old fashioned things like local shops. I think this article captures what I understand to be 'a sense of place' which many of us experience when visiting 'special places'. In all honesty however I must confess to knowing the author very well so I am not an objective critic in this matter.

Dacier

I love our parish church of St.Margarets. It sits in the landscape as it has always done surrounded by trees and fields. I am surprised when visitors say how beautiful it is. Every interested visitor makes me look anew at the ancient building.
With so many medieval churches, the temptation is to speak of the glories of the architecture. In our case the Rood Screen, Texts and the East Window are our main treasures. Wonderful though these features are, it is the people, past and present who have given meaning to the wood and stone which form the building.

Others will say, ‘My village church is always there, it’s my constant in life through all my ups and downs. It is somewhere to go home to’. Particularly important to those who can no longer live and work in one place, the ‘journeymen Christians’, who become members of successive congregations, but who always have the constant affection for their spiritual home. Like the belief that sustains them, having a constant in their life means so much.

When I sit in the church on Sunday I look around at the people with me and remember those who used to be there. The green man on the rood screen still leers at the vicar in the same old way, and the light still shines through the coloured glass window with Saint Margaret holding our church in her arms, but I am also picturing my parents sitting in a pew on an old bit of carpet. The carpet has gone now but it was noticeable that if we were late someone else would be sitting there grateful for the warmth this unsightly article provided. I remember the largest family in the parish with all the boys dressed in their red jumpers at Christmas, teenagers then, but grey-haired now.

But to the present. Happily, although most of our congregation are of pensionable age, we still have a toddler who mostly dozes through the service but occasionally wails when deserted by a parent who has gone to read a lesson.

There is a groove worn in the grass from our organist’s house to the church where she walks to unlock the medieval door every morning and to lock it again at dusk. You would think it was a cat’s path but I know better. She says the church is a life-line and a refuge for her. And of course that is what many people need in their lives.

When entering a church you are suddenly no longer alone. One visitor described our church as being soaked in the prayers of centuries. No fooling that visitor with the wrapping. It is a special place and I am pleased to say that it is not just me who has that feeling.

Jane

Stop Press: latest Newsletter

STOP PRESS: AGAIN!

Dear Supporters,

If you have recovered from the last Newsletter, here is a bit more news. FolkWorkshops is intended as a community based group, which, as our twitter account clearly states, is a place where ‘We get together to sing folk songs & play instruments in a tolerant & relaxed atmosphere of mutual encouragement and support’. We are based in the hills above the Golden Valley in Herefordshire in the Welsh Marches.

With so much going on it is not surprising that we have several dilemmas as to what support can be given to the many events going on. Susie’s Song School has regular support, and the sing around at the Black Swan is also a big draw, especially as they ask us to have a go. So that’s Wednesdays and Thursdays covered, and some of us also have church choir on Thursdays.Thursday evening also clashes with the Night Jar Folk Club at the Courtyard. (Even nationally, Thursday night is Folk Night!) We also want to continue to support Newton Church Room. By way of contrast we have already had offers to sing in 2 local pubs should we want to. We want to keep it as local as possible.

So, you can imagine our delight and increased ‘dilemmaring’ when Alan McCardle reported that the new landlord of the Bridge Inn, at Michaelchurch, had offered the dining room as a location for a practice sing along! We therefore had a dilemma to solve at pretty short notice as for various reasons the first opportunity would be Wednesday 23^rd Feb. Rather than lose the momentum Alan, John Biggs, and Jane and I thought we ought to go ahead. As the session at the Griggs is already set up this coming Monday 21^st we thought we would do that as well just to add a bit more choice for those who might not have enough dilemmas to solve.

The reason for this hasty decision lies in the fact that many people in the community would like to help the Bridge thrive as a successful local pub, which, like so many country pubs in these difficult times, needs local support. Nationally we have been losing village pubs at an alarming weekly rate ( 9 at one point) so this would be our small opportunity to do something. If you can get to the Bridge Inn on Wednesday you will be supporting the new landlord who is also the proprietor of the Golden Valley Brewery based in Peterchurch. What day of the week and how often future sessions might be held remains to be agreed. In the meantime we think we have a win, win , win situation so tell your friends and support your local pub and its new landlord. This is in no way intended as a performance so please invite anyone who might like to join in or just listen while having a real ale or a lemonade! Please forward this e-mail to others or pass the word on to those you know who are not on e-mail. Your local pub needs you!

Hoping you can get to both sessions.

PS Don’t forget the Gig for Norma concert in May: http://www.villagequire.org.uk/

Why not follow us on twitter. We now have 24 followers, most of whom are not on our mailing list, so keep up to date with events in between these Newsletters. ( of which there are too many)

@FolkWorkshops

FolkWorkshops Newsletter February 2011

LATEST: FOLK WORKSHOP on MONDAY 21st February at 7.30.

It’s time we started getting our repertoire together, whether for the various singing occasions which seem to be coming our way, or just for the fun of it. With the Hall being booked for our preferred night on the 26th and various other happenings John and Bridget have invited us to their home. New listeners, musicians and singers just as welcome here as at our usual venue. Please pass the word as this has not been put in the parish Newsletter. It really is true what we claim about our ethos, 'mutual support and encouragement' and a lot of good company.

Any queries please e-mail or telephone as usual leave a comment here. Or for twitter followers by DM on either @FolkWorkshops or @DacierOutten.

As you will have seen from the ‘stop press’ e-mails, quite a lot has been happening. We have had several additions to the e-mailing list, the articles on the blog, and a website is under discussion. You can follow on twitter @FolkWorkshops.

Please forward this Newsletter to people who you think would be interested. By clicking on the folkworkships link below it will take you to Newsletters and various folkworkshops blogs.

You will see that there are several family events taking place in summer camps this summer so who knows there might be a family out there who would like a change from the usual trip to Tenby!

The Wassail at Preston on Wye was a very enjoyable evening with enough of us turning out to give another public performance and make new friends. The article on this blog has had a record number of readers.

Some of us made our first visit to the Black Swan in Much Dew Church the other week to see what the sing around there is like. It has been going for 14 years with a group of singers and musicians who go under the name of Compost Heap. A great variety of songs and instrumental accompaniments made it a brilliant evening and none of us knew that it had been there all these years. On top of all this a very useful contact was made with someone who is organising some of the events in the list below.

Susie’s Song School. Susie is the female tenor from the Village Quire who has a wide collection of folk songs we can try out. The meetings are being held weekly at Cymbach Chapel starting at 7.30 and cost £4 a session. Depending on who is going each week a car share may be available so ask among the group. The first session covered 10 songs, some very old, with some familiar regulars from the folk clubs.

Events

Saturday 26th March: Our very own Ceilidh at Escleyside Hall complete with snacks and a licensed bar. Children go free, so why not make it a family night out.

If we can make a modest profit on this event we will be able to invite more groups and singers to local events as well as paying for the occasional master class or singing workshop from well established names on the folk scene. In the meantime we are building up a list of experienced people who might be able to give their services free of charge. If the Ceilidh goes well....who knows?

1st May: Arthurs Stone: See the sun rise with Fox Whelp Morris (To be confirmed)

Friday 6th May: at the Lion Ballroom in Leominster. Pete Coe supported by Hop Pickers Feast and a few 'old boys'. (In aid of a Cambodian charity)

Saturday 18th June: at the Court Yard Theatre, we have a Ceilidh with vintage 'Porridge' with young 13 year old Cohen Kilcoyne'Boy Wizard' on all instruments!!! (In aid of a Cambodian charity)

News from the Village Quire: www.villagequire.org.uk/ There are lots of events planned for 2011, not only workshops & concerts with the Village Quire, but also a vocal workshop & concert with folk musician John Kirkpatrick (from the BBC series Victorian Farm) later in the year. For details of this and all our concerts an eye on the website above.
28th September and 1st October: The Village Quire at St John’s Church Newton for Workshop and at St.Margaret's Church for concert.

'High Days and Holidays in the Welsh Border Marches'. More details soon but put these dates in your diary
28th Sept Workshop at Newton Church, 7.30 pm - 9.30 pm
30th Sept Rehearsal at St. Margarets Church 7.30 pm - 8.00 pm
1st Oct Concert at St. Margaret’s Church 7.30 pm, (joined by workshop)

Cas’s gig list updated February 2nd 2010: for those of you who don’t mind a bit of a journey across the border into Wales to see an artist you really like you may find this guide useful. It is supplied by the lady who runs the Pontardawe Folk Club. Also, check out @folkorbit on twitter who follows @FolkWorkshops

News from Susie Stockton

Polly Bolton is starting a monthly Friday Night folk choir starting on April 15th, then May 20th and 17th June. At the Women's Centre in Ludlow , from 7pm till 8.30. She'll be teaching her own harmony arrangements of traditional British songs.

The Oak Barn singing camp will be running for the 12th year from July 29th to 31st and they will be having the same facilitators as last year; Polly Bolton, Sue Harris, Gitka Partington and Mark Thomas. The cost this year will be £120 for the whole weekend if you are staying at the centre or £40 for a whole day if you are dropping in. Details will be on her website soon or contact her. info@oak-barn.co.uk OAK BARN CENTRE, CLEE ST MARGARET,CRAVEN ARMS,SHROPSHIRE,SY7 9DT,01584 823609

Also from Roxane Smith: are on www.harmonyjunky.co.uk/ will be running a new camp, with some good friends, on the weekend of June 10th-12th, near Leominster, www.herefordharmony.org.uk/

And finally, forget Glastonbury, and all the others. Why not support your local Folk Festival at Garway. Find full details on: www.learningobjectivity.com/garwayfolkweekend
This is probably enough to be going on with.

A Herefordshire Wassail Experience: Old Twelfth Night, 17th January 2011, at the Yew Tree Inn, Preston on Wye, Herefordshire.

I have often thought that with the one life we have there is not enough time. For most of us it is a struggle to keep up with the demands of the modern work place, its conveyor belt routine and the frustrations it brings, often making the daily commute a depressing time. So it is a great privilege and joy to have escaped the restrictions of the workplace, albeit as pensioners, at a time when our generation may well be the last of the modestly superannuated classes.

As a result Sian and I found ourselves with both the opportunity and energy to attend our first Wassail. Instead of working late into the night to meet the next deadline as we used to, we were now spending the evening with a hundred or so other people encircling an old apple tree.

A great deal of hard work goes into producing a good harvest of any kind, and of course, more specifically, the apples and pears which make good Cider and Perry. In Herefordshire it is not the culinary apple which is at the centre of attention, although the county produces some of the best desert apples such a Garden of Eden deserves. No, it is the cider apple, with its bitter and sweet flavours, its tannin and its golden and quickly oxidized juice.

Good husbandry, careful processing and a large measure of good fortune go into producing these most sustainable beverages. As April and May approach the fear of late frosts threatening the newly formed buds is the first anxiety. Once that is over the next concern is the right combination of rain, warmth and sunshine during the summer and finally the hope that early autumn gales do not strip the trees of the immature fruit.Is it any wonder that our forebears hedged their bets by appealing to both the old and new religions?

Having gathered our strength in the pub we joined the crowd which had gathered in the car park armed with flaming torches. Led by the Foxwhelp Morris musicians, who were suitably protected from the rain by an umbrella and plastic sheets, we set off into the darkness to the sound of trumpet, fiddle and accordion. Somewhere among the throng were two men carrying shotguns still in their cases.

Looking back at the procession from the van of the parade was an unexpected shock. With no street lighting to lessen the impact, the sight of this snake of flickering light making its way in the darkness sent a shiver down the spine. We could have been in any century since the people of these islands depended for their survival on a meagre harvest produced by their own communal labour.

The traditional ceremony involved the wassailers forming a large circle round an old tree. We stood outside a circle of small unlit fires constructed of wood and straw while the Morris team took up position under the tree itself. There was much talk and song of the spirit of the tree, its guardian Old Meg and the general wish for plenty after a hard winter. At some point the fires were lit and the scene was transformed into one of a swirling confusion of smoke and flames with figures looming and fading as the wind changed. At another point, the end of a wassail song or recitation was met by a great noise of shouting, ringing bells and the reports of the two shotguns being used to fire blanks into the night air.

All of this would have been, and still is for some, intended to frighten off any evil spirits which might be lurking in the orchards. For others the evil is now represented by the intensification of production aided and abetted by the agro-chemical industry and the uniformity demanded by the profit obsessed supermarkets. In spite of cider apple prices being quite good last year, there is a sense that a more general malevolent spirit of rural betrayal is stalking our country lanes.
As we stood outside the circle of fires, each representing a month of the year and being warmed by these and the tree’s very own fire invoking Old Meg, our thoughts were of the New Year to come, not the past.

However, with the tree having been offered toast and been given a liberal dousing of cider, the crowd started to move off back down the lane. But one further act remained to be performed, almost without any witnesses and with no ceremony. One, and only one, of the encircling fires was trampled into extinction, leaving the others shining into the darkness. Of the twelve, this fire represented Judas and his betrayal, while the other ‘Apostles’ were left to bring the light of a new day. Strong stuff indeed, but it prompted in us the thought that although electric light has long since come to these rural communities, enlightenment as to modern rural affairs on the part of distant others, is yet to be gained.

We were now among the very last to leave the orchard and so we slowly made our way back through the rain and the gloom. The dark thoughts of a few minutes earlier were soon dispelled by the light, warmth, and good company of a well run public house, and, once the singing started, as an old miner friend of ours would have said across the other side of the Black Hill from here, ‘... well, boys bach, we ‘ad a triffic time’.

FolkWorkshops Christmas Newsletter

We all deserve a big thank you from ourselves to ourselves! Without FolkWorkshoppers we wouldn’t be getting together to sing at regular intervals and to eat some rather splendid cakes. We are all at different stages of our musical journeys, but I think you will agree it’s great to be on the move together.

We are not really just a Folk Club or just a choir. We are ourselves, and long may our relaxed and mutually supportive ethos continue.

In addition we wouldn’t have been around for the following:
i) A summer solstice barbecue courtesy of John and Bridget
ii) John and Bridget’s fund raiser Ceilidh for a school in Nepal
iii) Singing at a fundraiser for Longtown Village Hall and School
iv) the Village Quire Workshop Concert fundraiser for St. Margaret’s and Newton Churches
v) The Workshops in Newton Church Room which also contribute to the hall’s running costs
vi) Car sharing to the many events in our area such as Harp Songs at the Harp Inn Glasbury
vii) Meeting people like the Village Quire who value our group and want to encourage us
viii) Starting to improve our musical skills, both through rehearsals for carol singing and the occasional ‘strum- ins’ to swap tips for playing the banjo or guitar
ix) Being asked by the Vicar to sing carols at the Crown on the 17th December
x) Making plans for a Burns Night on Wednesday 26th January in Newton Church Room
xi) Making plans for a ceilidh on Saturday 12th March in Escleyside Hall. (Hall booking to be confirmed)

John Biggs and Allison Price asked us whether we had any idea that so much would have happened in FolkWorkshop’s first 12 months and I suppose the honest answer is probably that we always try to travel hopefully and that arriving somewhere enjoyable is always a bonus. FolkWorkshops has an expanding mailing list and can now be found on twitter as @FolkWorkshops, link http://www.twitter.com/FolkWorkshops . There are various folk music contributors being followed and we already have 9 followers from the folk music world. This might prove to be a useful notice board and a collector of useful information.

This Newsletter will eventually appear on www.blackhilltales.blogspot.com and the link http://t.co/nk1AlFV will take you directly to any articles involving folk music, thus avoiding the various other polemics/articles on this blog site. This could be a purely temporary arrangement while someone sets up our own FolkWorkshops blog site. Any volunteers? You could start by seeing if Wordpress would be a suitable medium.

Other interesting bits. The Cecil Sharp Library is a source of lots of material from 5 collectors and visiting the Cecil Sharp House home page might give you an idea for something to do if you are in London. If you sign up you will get their national newsletter e-mail sent to you each month.

Stop Press: Village Quire at the Globe, Hay. 23rd December. Christmas program with Parti Mari Lwyd ,from Llantrisant Folk Club. (Check out the Mari Lwyd on Google)

As usual I am going on a bit too much. Many thanks to all who have provided cakes, sheet music, suggestions, hospitality and very good company.

Happy Christmas from your very own,
FolkWorkshops and from John and Jane Baxter

The Big Apple in the villages around Marcle Ridge: October 11th and 12th

The Big Apple is a great little festival in the middle of an important fruit growing area. Every year the seven parishes of the Marcle Ridge country south of Ledbury in Herefordshire celebrate their heritage of apples and cider, and pears and perry.

For the avoidance of doubt both cider and perry are made by crushing and then pressing the fruit and the reason that most people don’t really know of perry is because the output of perry pears is usually consumed by the local demand. Perry was big in the fifties in the form of Babycham but real perry, whether still or fizzy, is a fuller bodied drink. Purists like us are annoyed by the appearance of products under the name of Pear Cider which is a contradiction in terms but it is presumably intended to create a new drink for people taken to be incapable of understanding the difference. Drinking either can of course make you incapable of anything especially with some hand crafted farm versions going to 8% ABV or above. If the drink is made from 100% pears then it is perry but if pear juice has been added to cider we would claim is a pear flavoured cider. Many mass produced products will fall back on imported concentrate when supplies are tight but not the genuine products you can find at this event.

A few years ago there was a lot of concern with all the orchards being grubbed up around Herefordshire but we can report that the cider business is growing and on the way to Much Marcle the sight of lots of orchards being re-established added to the glorious views of the Malvern Hills, Marcle Ridge itself and beyond to the Black Mountains. Such is the growth of cider that despite a hugely reduced acreage we are drinking record volumes of the stuff. This productivity has been achieved by growing traditional varieties as dwarf trees with high yields easier harvesting.

The big name producer in Much Marcle, the centre of the festival, is the family run firm of Weston’s Cider. Their works are well worth a visit especially if you take the tour of their modern cider mill/factory. We would claim that their Stowford Press Ciders and their traditional perry are right at the top of the mass produced roll of honour. Their traditional fizzy perry makes a sound substitute for many white wines at a fraction of the cost so a trip to their shop is both a bargain and an education all in one.

Some photos from the festival are here.

At the other end of the scale is Greggs Pit which is found at the end of a farm track and situated in a cottagers plot with its small orchard of traditional fruit trees. The production process is what we would call ‘artisan’ with the result that award winning perry and cider is produced here. A custom built barn for the vats with an open front for the crusher and apple press never fails to prompt dreams of creating such a unit on our own hillside plot. The old cottage orchard has cider trees as well as cooking apples, damsons and other fruits. Not all is used for cider and perry but we are happy to report that redwings and other birds don’t let anything go to waste. Apples and pears are also bought in from nearby farms so that single variety brews can be created. If you have never tried top quality ‘champagne method’ ciders and perrys this is the sort of place you need to track down. At Lyne Down Cider you can try your palette at more traditional brews as well as fresh apple juice straight from the press.

On the Sunday at Hellens, the local ’big house’, they get their old crushing mill going with visitors helping to push the crushing wheel round in its trough; a task usually carried out by a horse! Hellen’s Perry is made from pears collected on the Saturday and as with all of the events you can usually by a bottle or two. The house itself is well worth a visit and is one of those places that always seems to have been connected with many of the great events down the centuries but it, and its residents, seem to have survived by good judgement and luck. A return visit to this house on a quiet summer afternoon makes a great outing. During the festival the adjoining barns are devoted to the sale of fruit (Flight Organics) and the study of apples and pears (Marcher Network) and there are helpful experts who will try and identify the mystery apple tree in your garden. The variety of local food is usually well displayed at this event. Added to all this bustle was the appearance of the Leominster Morris dancers who drew a large crowd.

An essential visit during the afternoon is to the Memorial Hall where you will usually find an art exhibition as well as ‘a cup of tea and a slice of cake’ as Wurzel Gummage would describe his favourite refreshment. One year we were in front of a novice ‘Big Appler’ who asked whether they had any apple cake? Yes, came the reply, about fifteen different choices! We bought about five different types and sampled pieces from each. We have our own popular recipe which was found in a book on Yorkshire cooking where it is described as ‘Somerset Apple Cake’. Althought not a local recipe, we do not find this hard to live with as we all have a fondness for counties where apples are a specialist crop and so whether it comes from the land of the Wurzels’, Gloucestershire, Devon, Kent or Cornwall, or our own dear Herefordshire, if it’s good, we’ll have it. Especially with cream, in moderation of course, as with cider and perry.

A short distance from the Memorial Hall is St Bartholomew’s Church where local produce and crafts were on sale in aid of church funds. A brief rest beneath the 1,500 year old yew tree might just restore the energies sufficiently for a visit to Awnell’s Farm.

Awnell's Farm is run by the Countryside Restoration Trust, this conservation charity aims to protect and restore Britain’s countryside with wildlife-friendly and commercially viable agriculture. The trust is committed to promoting the importance of a living and working countryside through education, demonstration and community involvement.

It has another farm just down from us at Turnastone Court where the National Hedge Laying Championships will be held this coming 24th October, hopefully ‘with a caterer in attendance’. This usually means a beer tent at the very least. Taking farming back to sustainable practices by working with nature is a welcome contrast to some of the industrial farming that can be found in Herefordshire such as the ever present expansion of growing fruit under plastic and the efforts the Potato Barons which sometimes results in our precious pink soils being washed away in heavy downpours.

Most years the event has attracted large parties of cyclists. This is an encouraging feature although we sometimes thought that their awareness of pedestrians could have been better. Was it perry they had stowed in their drinking flasks we asked? Now in its twentieth year the number of visitors cars can be a problem but it is not yet on a scale which needs major management, and a parking space is usually available somewhere. Bringing a bike to tour the various events is a good idea and means that the car can be left at some distance. I think we will try it next year, although a good set of panniers will be needed for our liquid purchases.

For a community run event the Big Apple just shows what can be done. This lengthy article is not just the perry talking but it comes from people who know how important it is for everyone to reconnect with nature, our traditional sustainable local produce and the communities who still have the skills and vision to bring it all from farm and orchard to your table.

Dacier Outten and Mary Horesh

Tokenism and the Bus Pass

In an earlier blog, Popular Policies are Doomed, I was making the claim that whenever something becomes popular in the UK it has to be curtailed. The Bus Pass is one of the recent victims of its own success. In the12 months I have held a senior persons bus pass I have yet to use it in Herefordshire. The reason for this is that it is a 3 mile walk to the nearest bus stop with a useful service, although I cant expect to get a bus back after 6pm.

Our other services don’t operate out of school terms and only run one in the morning and one back in the evening. The two market day buses give little time before they return from Hereford and Abergavenny respectively. I have used the pass in Birmingham a few times and once on a park and ride in Kent. I could go to Cardiff and back for nothing, but without a toilet break I don’t think the two hour trip would be much of an outing. It does of course involve a five mile drive to pick the bus up in the first place. Consequently, for me, it doesn’t add up to a hill of discarded tickets, but for others it is a liberating opportunity.

It’s these ‘others’ who are therefore causing the Association of Local Authorities to winge. Local authorities have to fork out the cost of reimbursing the bus operators. This would not be a problem but the promised reimbursement from central government has been falling short of the actual cost. The local authorities are now saying that people who have a car should not be entitled to a free bus pass especially when they could afford to pay proper fares anyway. The Government, having made the gesture are now quite happy, or so it seems, to see the idea of free bus travel for the older citizen to gradually fade away while the local authorities can be blamed. The scheme has already been withdrawn from limited stop services, park and ride and city sightseeing tours. This latter category, it could be argued, is hardly travel anyway, but these are just the start..

What the local authorities don’t seem to realise is that they should be encouraging people to get onto public transport and they probably wouldn’t disagree with this, until they have to pay for it. The same can be said of central government if they are reneging on the undertaking to reimburse local authorities. The withdrawal of park and ride from the scheme really shows how seriously this claimed encouragement to get us out of our cars and onto public transport is taken. Not much.

Having been scarred by commuting for 13 years by the poisonous combination of Great Western and Thames Trains I am reluctant to risk my valuable leisure time by travelling by train, usually at great expense. By buying a train ticket you have decided to forgo the expense already incurred by keeping and running a car. Your tax and depreciation costs are still being incurred while your car stands idle. No recognition of this is given. Instead you have to take on the double whammy of paying a high train fare as well, and in my experience, a huge gamble as to whether you will have a pleasant journey due to poor management of the system and a total failure to understand the phrase, ‘customer care’. In any case, subsidised travel should be extended to everyone if there is a genuine determination to reduce car journeys. The other poisonous combination of John Major’s Thomas the Tank Engine privatisation and Tony Blair’s failure to think a joined up thought on the topic has meant that the public transport system outside the big cities is very patchy and practically non-existent for evening travel. If I stop using my car I give up the only reliable transport I know at the moment. This of course suits all the token environmentalists in government well, because I not only pay the full costs, the taxes I pay for the privilege leaves some cash free to spend on all kinds of other daft token schemes which are supposed to make us think that New Labour is environmentally sound. The current thinking is about as joined up as a transatlantic bus service.

Dacier

Where paths of History Cross (pt 2).

One summer weekend about ten years ago my wife’s cousin visited. Our family reunion was interrupted by a telephone call from our neighbour who wondered what he should about a piece of ordinance he had found hidden up on the top of a wall plate in an out house. It was about 6 inches long and about ¾ of an inch thick, with a pointed end. My wife’s cousin happened to be an Artillery man so we all trotted down the lane to inspect the object. Observed from a distance the expert opinion was soon being voiced that it was clearly live, lethal and could by now, be unstable. With such things it is always better to fear the worst and do the best, in this case calling bomb disposal. Things moved quickly, even on a sleepy hot afternoon. A truck arrived and the dangerous object removed.

By contrast, Christmas Day 1944 was foggy and most families were sitting round the wireless listening to the Kings Christmas message. In one farm house two girls were playing upstairs and granny was downstairs in the kitchen. A loud thump suddenly broke the quiet of the farm, and one or two other farms in the area. ‘Will you two girls behave yourselves, and stop jumping off that bed. You’ll have the plaster down!’

Even these two fit country girls could not have made such a crash, for crash it was. A bombing mission over Germany had ended on our common a few yards from another occupied farmhouse. The farmer had been called in from tending his cows to hear the Kings Message and the cows he would have been tending were killed when an American Liberator Bomber came to earth. The crew had bailed out in two stages. The flight deck first as the plane was on fire. They landed in Germany, but due to a break in communications, the fire now out, the rest of the crew remained on board. A brief inspection had shown the flight deck empty, the plane on automatic but all the dials on danger. They jumped over France. Bold Venture lived up to its name and flew on, ran out of fuel and its unsupervised glide path passed over RAF Madley to its crash site. The policeman who had arrived first asked the village boys to take a quick look to see whether there were any crew on board, as they were more agile and smaller. As a result various souvenirs were brought home before a round the clock guard was mounted and the wreckage cleared. You guessed it; some shells went home with the boys. Their reward was a good walloping by their concerned dad. It would seem that someone had hidden one shell before the rest were returned to the wreckage.

And the other path of history that crossed that glide path? It was into the same airspace from RAF Madley that Deputy Fuhrer Rudolf Hess took off in October 1946, to face trial in Nuremberg before serving a Spandau Prison. He died on 17th August 1987 only to leave this world with yet another puzzle at the end of a puzzling life. Did he hang himself or was he strangled?

Dacier

(With acknowledgements to The Hereford Times 22/12/2004 where a full account of the crash can be found)

Where Paths of History Cross (Pt.1)

When the commission charged with deciding which towns should be granted city status reported some years ago my home town was rejected on the basis that nothing had ever happened there. Apart from a bit of hurt pride the annoying things about this conclusion was its untruth. To say this about any place in these islands is shallow to an infuriating degree. It also misses the point about communities. Living peacefully and productively is apparently not enough to earn ‘citizenship’. Stick a pin into any map and start doing some research and I guarantee something, often significant, will have happened there or nearby.

This brings me back to the hillside. In the days of large local breweries they would send theirs sales reps ( outriders) out on horseback to take orders from their tenanted public houses. One such traveller was Mr Alfred Watkins who would ponder the landscape as he rode off to find a remote pub in the hills and he got to wondering how ancient people found their way round the dangerous forested land they inhabited. The product of this thinking was the ‘Old Straight Track’ (1925) and the notion of the ley line so beloved of the ‘new age’. The idea came to him while he rode over the hills near Bredwadine, no doubt eventually passing the track to the Church, where the reverend Francis Kilvert (of Kilvert’s Diaries) was once the vicar, and where Sir John Betjeman later visited on his researches of Herefordshire churches and Kilvert’s life.

Delve back into photographic history and you will find that the same man was the inventor of the Watkin’s Exposure Meter. His path probably passed our gate as he made his way to one of the many public houses which were then scattered among these hamlets of the Golden Valley. So get that pin out and I guarantee, if you have a copy of his book to hand, that you will spend hours looking for the ley lines in your area, which in turn will lead to ancient sites where churches now stand, to the watch towers of warring times, and the ancient route centres where, according to some, nothing has ever happened.

Dacier