Another local book found, Alan Garner’s The Old Man of Mow. It’s a story woven around a set of photos of two boys having random adventures and exploring in and around Mow Cop.

The cover picture shows them at the foot of the giant column of rock known as The Old Man of Mow, on the summit of Mow Cop.

The photos were obviously not staged with the story in mind, as the story seems rather loose and shoe-horned in afterwards. Such things can work, and the British photo-comics of the 1970s made them work in b&w for an audience in middle-childhood. But in this instance one imagines that not many children were impressed on reading the book. Most of the photos are in mid-1960s black-and-white, in that dour Bill Brandt sort of style that was then fashionable among agitprop photographers of the inner-city. It doesn’t suit the rural setting or the tale.

Still, the storyteller was Alan Garner and some of the colour pictures are fine , so it’s of some interest. In 2020 one might even ask permission to revisit the book with an ink pen and watercolours, to make a new and lighter version by drawing over the photos.

Garner’s Red Shift would revisit the site a few years later…

In my readings on Tolkien I’ve been pleased to discover another supernatural lyric narrative poem from the Midlands, which in time and spirit seems to sit alongside Gawain and the Green Knight on which I recently wrote a book. The “Man in the Moon” lyric is from the Harley MS. 2253, also known as “The Harley Lyrics”. The best authorities say this performative verse is from “a single scribe working in Ludlow, south Shropshire” (now in Shropshire) and must have been written by a scribe who was active c. 1314 to c. 1349. Which puts it about a generation before Gawain, and in a similarly liminal border-place in the Western Midlands. A touch of Welsh, apparently detectable in a few words, also pins it to the English fringe of the Welsh Marches. It thus has the same difficulty of language and translation that Gawain has, but is just as lively. It has the Man in The Moon coming down to earth, and behaving in a strange ‘alien from the stars’ manner, and thus in a way it’s sort of weird ‘proto science-fiction’. I’ve made a free translation of it that some may enjoy.

This post is now superseded by the new fuller version The Man in the Moon 3.0

I’ve just discovered this, put on YouTube a year ago. Robbi Unwin’s “Walter”, about his soldier ancestor from North Staffordshire…

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92DoHv4l9Bs?start=4&w=560&h=315]

A Wolstanton children’s game-song, collected circa the early 1890s by Miss Alice Annie Keary, folklore-collector of Stoke-on-Trent, and published in The Traditional Games of England.

Possibly related to pick-pockets coming through a crowd, then a common occurrence. Incidentally, she grew up at “The Hollies”, Trent Vale and she later gives her location as very nearby Oakhill (aka Oak Hill, on the edge of Trent Vale). This is not to be confused with the Oakhill just beyond the south-east edge of Stoke, which online map services will misleadingly take you to if you search for “Oakhill”.

A parish newsletter, placed online, mentions than an old lady remembered that “The Hollies” was demolished but was located quite near to where the Tesco store is today…

“Revd Pat Dunn has been a resident in Trent Vale since 1948 and shared her memories of growing up in a village … As we watch building on a plot of land near to Tesco, Pat told me that the large house recently demolished, was called ‘The Hollies’.”

My 2014 post on T. E. Hulme has been updated, adding a list of books.

Found, another bit of evidence for ancient Roman cats in the British Isles. A paw print in damp clay, discovered during the recent Lincoln Eastern Bypass dig.

The feature-film of Sir Gawain and The Green Knight is set for release on 29th May 2020. As readers of my recent book will know, the famous supernatural tale is mostly set in North Staffordshire. As such it’ll be interesting to see if recognisable places are evoked in this indie film adaptation.

New on Archive.org, Phil Drabble’s book My wilderness in bloom (1986), which tells the story of how in 1963 the famous naturalist took a derelict farm near Abbot’s Bromley in mid Staffordshire, and transformed it into an oasis for nature — and it became what is now the Goat Lodge SSSI nature reserve. That was back the great days of the TV naturalists, when men such as Drabble and David Bellamy were household names.

The above is a pre-Drabble picture of Goat Lodge.

One can also get the book My wilderness in bloom very cheap, used, from Amazon UK. It seems to me that it’s a prime subject for a new documentary film, with current footage of the site interwoven with Ken Burns’ style pan-and-scan and some interview clips.

C.F. Keary’s substantial novel The Mount (1909) is now online for free at Archive.org. Only as one of the poor-quality Public Library of India scans, but the text is quite readable. The scan is from the 1911 German edition, printed in English, presumably destined for the overseas market in India and the colonies.

Keary’s fiction, including a volume of acclaimed weird tales, is not online and Hathi totally locks down their copy of The Mount. This situation is strange, given he’s now in the public domain. Anyway, it’s good that readers can enjoy this acclaimed novel once again.

The novel’s fictional setting of “Hartlebury” is a large town of both clay and breweries, seemingly a lightly-disguised amalgam of the Potteries and Burton-upon-Trent. Ha-nley and Bu-rton giving “Hartlebury”, with an possible further nod to Hartshill in Stoke. But despite such topographic twirls the industrial Potteries is the obvious inspiration, complete with the Etruria-like blast furnace which causes the sky to light up at night…

… when not in black rain Hartlebury lives in black mist; and of all the arrangements of which the town can boast that of its gas [lighting] seems the most stricken with paralysis. About six o’clock or half-past the streets of Hartlebury are usually thronged. Most of the manufactories [factories] disgorge their hands: then many miners from the day shift must come back to clean themselves. Or maybe they have done so already, and now issue forth, some with their wives, the most part without, to enjoy the evening. Women bustle through the throng to make their purchases: a queue has already formed at the door of the Palace Theatre of Varieties: the publics [the pubs] turn up their gas [lights] to look as gay as possible. Only a few of the folk in the streets are really in a hurry: the most part are ready to pass the time of day with an acquaintance.

Amid the throng wandered interested, yet detached, a girl not more than six-and-twenty years of age: looking much less. It was indeed to a first view a peculiarly innocent and childlike face; but not lacking either knowledge or power to an observant eye. […] For the present let her remain anonymous to us, as she was to the crowd: and distinct from it, apart from its hopes and fears […] this girl felt no discomfort of the smoky atmosphere, the muddy streets. All she saw seemed interesting, and what she heard; but as she was an artist, it was the sights rather than the sounds which gave her pleasure. The dimness of the streets was lit up now and again by the glare of a smelting fire [iron works] from one of the hills round about Hartlebury, and then the shadows of the passers-by would be thrown upon a blank wall as it were an exhibition of ombres chinoises [Chinese shadows, shadow plays]. This was to our onlooker particularly interesting, because she was making some experiments in designing after this fashion. She would not have felt that interest in all she heard and all she saw, if she had not had within her a source of constant content: not a positive source of pleasure, but a negative source of content. She felt that she had struck out a line for herself, or had it thrust upon her — she could hardly have said which — such as very few indeed of British girls do strike out or follow. And she realised how much of solid contentment, of physical well-being mostlike, had been the result.

Around her talked workmen and their wives in that peculiar accent of the Western Midlands…

The book was first identified here in my February 2014 post The Mount (1909) by C. F. Keary, as being both of local interest and high quality.