This may interest Tolkien people. A c. 1900s lantern slide of the ford and bridge-end at Great Haywood. Photographed from the village side, as Tolkien would have known it perhaps 10 or so years later. The ramp goes up onto the bridge. The colorising is on the original.

Comparing it to more or less the same view as seen in a wider and winter form in British Isles, depicted by pen and camera (1904), and judging by comparing the growth of the small tree, the date here is perhaps summer 1904 or 1905. Most likely the latter, and possibly even 1906.

The “Score” label presumably means that, when viewing in a sequence, its appearance would have been accompanied by music.

Now open after much work is Tamworth Castle in mid Staffordshire, with its major new attraction the…

“£768,000 ‘Battle and Tribute’ exhibition, including mead hall, immersive combat film experience and touch-table strategy game, bring the area’s Anglo-Saxon history to life, including the role of our famous warrior queen, Aethelflaed. It also explores the Staffordshire Hoard, including themes of battle, kingship and the warrior culture in Anglo-Saxon Mercia.”

The castle grounds are now set for a £350,000 makeover.

A snapshot of Eccentric Britain, at the Luce Bell Gallery in the UK until the end of June 2021.

The big blockbuster Alice in Wonderland exhibition at the V&A in London is also on now.

Nice. The Cerne Abbas Giant was probably first constructed in the late Anglo-Saxon period, according to…

“a new state-of-the-art sediment analysis by National Trust archaeologists”.

They’ve concluded the giant can have been made no earlier than 700 A.D. Given that it’s obviously not Christian in the modern sense, it’s therefore presumably a genuine if rather late pagan survival from the liminal conversion period.

Cerne Abbas Giant, by Eric Ravilous.

Similar work on the famous White Horse put that hill-figure at around 1,000 B.C.

Some Staffordshire sections from Tobias Churton’s book The Magus of Freemasonry: the mysterious life of Elias Ashmole, scientist, alchemist, and founder of the Royal Society…

Following the Royalist defeat at Worcester in July 1646, Parliamentary officers ordered Elias Ashmole to keep out of London […] he returned to the area of Shallowford in Staffordshire, near the Bishop of Lichfield’s palace at Eccleshall, about twenty miles northwest of [his home place of] Lichfield.

Ashmole was a friend of Izaak Walton [who was of like mind, and had retreated to the same area …] They were certainly friends by the time of the 1676 edition of Walton’s world-famous The Compleat Angler … To those who are familiar with his references, Walton’s work, apparently devoted to the harmless pastime of angling, reads like a covert message to depressed Royalists and dispossessed Anglican clergymen throughout the country. […] The book’s message can be read as “Be calm, contemplate the waters;
receive inspiration therefrom: all troubles will pass.” Or, as Walton himself recommended, “Study to be quiet.”

The “troubles” referred to by Walton derived from the puritanical, repressive, anti-ecclesiastical, and generally hot-headed manifestations of Cromwell’s [Puritan] government. […] In his letter to Barlow, Walton notes that he is himself “not suspected,” to the extent that he can even attend a “fanaticall meeting” of Puritanical activists […] The violence [of the Puritans] extended beyond stones, lead roofs, and church bells. [This point refers to the fact that the puritans were busy destroying Lichfield cathedral with its three magnificent spires]. On August 2, 1652, Ashmole went “to heare the Witches tryed, and tooke Mr Tradescant with me.” […] In the event, six witches were hanged […]

[Returning from the trials] On August 19, 1652, Ashmole “entered Lichfield about sunset.” Against the reddish skyline he would have seen the silhouettes of two spires, the third truncated at its base, having crashed through the roof. According to local historian Howard Clayton’s Loyal and Ancient City, after the Parliamentarian destruction of 1646, “Centuries of religious custom disappeared and the Cathedral Close became for 14 years a place of ruin, inhabited by squatters and haunted by owls at night.”

On September, Ashmole “took a Journey into the Peake [Peak District], in search of Plants and other Curiosities.” Ashmole’s “Noates”* of his journey contain short entries of peculiar words, sayings, rhymes, miners’ language and customs, cookery recipes, people, inscriptions, and sights. For example, a Staffordshire oatcake was called a “Bannock” consisting of oatmeal and barley, baked on a griddle. “A Spider is called an Aldercrop.” [a folk preservation of the Old English word at(t)orcoppa and the Middle English attercop]

He mentions a man called “Wagge” from the moorland village of Wetton who “is Staffordshire Astrologus,” a fellow astrologer. At Dove Bridge (near Uttoxeter), Ashmole actually participated in a magical “Call,” or invocation of spirits. “I came to Mr: Jo: Tompson, who dwells neare Dove Bridge. He used a Call, and had responses in a soft voyce.” Ashmole inquired of the spirit concerning the health of his friend Dr. Thomas Wharton, who was poorly. “He told me Dr: Wharton was recovering from his sickness, and so it proved.”

Incidentally, at nearby Great Haywood, Tolkien later caught a similar spirit-of-place. As he stood on the long bridge there, listing to the “wistful murmuring” of possibly-spirits beneath it (Lost Tales II).

* – “Noates in my Peake Journey“, printed in the five volume Elias Ashmole, 1617-92, aka Elias Ashmole: His Autobiographical and Historical Notes. Vol. 2 seems to be the target that contains the “Noates in my Peake Journey“. Archive.org has another volume, but Vol. 2 is not there or on Hathi. The hardback set only has one library copy for the whole of the UK university system.

There are three “Noates” of interest according to The Antiquary via Google Books. None has been digitized and placed online by the Bodleian.

Ashmole MS 1137 is said to be a copy by an engraver, the original being lost.

Wormwoodiana blog browses through an old copy of Mysterious Cheshire from the Earth Mysteries era of the late 1970s and early 1980s and finds a Welsh Marches author…

the ‘Philip Rickman’ who wrote or co-wrote these booklets went on to write, as Phil Rickman, many highly-regarded supernatural fiction novels, including the Merrily Watkins series about a Church of England exorcist and psychic sleuth in the Welsh Border country around Hay-on-Wye.

It’s suggested there was a possible connection between the timing of an antiquarian paper on the ‘Biddlemoor’ population on Biddulph Moor, and Arthur Machen who at that time was musing on relic populations of the Little People. Although such things had been ‘in the air’ for several years before that, re: the establishment of a serious fairy research society and suchlike.

Update: Mysterious Cheshire is now on Archive.org.

Interesting news on the ‘airborne particulates’ front, which I’ve blogged about here before in historical context.

Cars and their supposedly ‘eco-friendly’ diesel fuel (unleashed by Gordon Brown, under Labour in 2002) are not the only culprit, we now find. New research shows that a key culprit in the UK is now, ironically, the trendy wood-stoves of eco-worriers…

“domestic burning is the single largest contributor to the UK’s harmful particulate matter emissions. PM2.5 emissions from domestic burning accounted for 43% of total PM2.5 emissions in 2019.”

Who knew? But they pump out nearly half of the UK’s tiny PM2.5 airborne particulates, which are the ones said to have the worst impacts on human health. These days “domestic burning” overwhelmingly means wood-fired stoves and heating, with lesser seasonal contributions by garden bonfires (mostly in the early autumn), and barbeques (mostly in high summer). Eurostat estimate such trendy stoves cause some £14 billion a year in health-related problems in the UK and EU, albeit basing their figures on a 2013 WHO estimate.

The newer UK research was done in 2019, so the particle percentages were not skewed by the reduction in car travel during the lockdown. And so few people now have coal delivered for home fires, and most of those use clean coke, that one can’t sensibly blame coal either.

The news comes along with the banning of sales of “wet wood” (from 1st May 2021, it’s reported). You’ll no longer get wet bags from any-old-where, and will have to get supplies properly pre-dried from a wood fuel merchant. That’s could be a bit hard on the owners of small woods, as they’re presumably now denied the immediate public sale of the thinnings and fellings, other than to a registered wood dealer. But I guess that may already have been the way of doing such things.

Also to be banned from being installed in homes are the smokiest types of home wood-stove, though only from 2022. Presumably that’s to allow dealers time to sell off their old stock. Beware of what you’re buying then, as you could find that the use of the old type will also banned sometime in the 2030s — when you’ve only had a few years of use from it.

Presumably canal-boaters will still be allowed to burn dropped wood that they’ve dried, after being found free in the hedgerows etc.

Update: Country Life reports a backstep by the government. Council Inspectors will now not actually be ripping out the older stoves from your home, come 1st January 2022. The Stove Industry Alliance, who presumably know about such things, tells the magazine that… “there will be no requirement to remove” existing open fireplaces and older stoves.