Good news for the Trent and Mersey canal in Stoke-on-Trent. The three-miles of canal towpath which run south from the city’s train station is to get a hack-and-chop of the vegetation and some bump-flattening…

“The work will include cutting back overgrown hedges and trees in order open up and improve visibility of the towpaths. [plus] repairs to the towpath where tree roots have cracked or lifted the cobbles [with the work to be] completed by the end of June”.

It seems to be funded by the last dribble of the Levelling Up funds, though no costing for this particular bit of work is given. No mention of renewing seating, though I recall from about 18 months ago that several seats along the way are badly in need of repairs. Though the semi-circle of steel benches on the towpath opposite the Civic Centre should probably be left in their destroyed state, or they’ll once again become a junkie gathering place. That’s the sort of “vibrant space” that the city doesn’t need.

Still, at least the funding is to be spent on practical things and not on more political wall-murals or vanity signage. Hopefully there will also be a bumper litter-pick this spring, on the stretch.

Update: the local Stoke Nub News adds a very important detail, which the BBC missed… “new top dressing will be applied to the whole length” of this three mile stretch. Sounds good, though possibly rather disruptive for bicycle commuters this springtime. Ah yes, here we go, I just found the official notice for Towpath stoppage from Lock 38 at Cliffe Vale to Bridge 106, the Hem Heath Bridge, mainly “for installation of new tar spray and chip surfacing”. No further details on closed sections or precise section-dates. The stoppage notice reveals (apparently) that the resurfacing works will also go north way past the train station, up to Lock 38 (presumably for the cyclist connection-point there across to Newcastle-under-Lyme). That bit’s not reported by either the BBC or Nub News. In fact, if one looks at the stoppage map, the resurfacing may even go on as far north as Festival Park.

The main southern stretch to be tackled runs from the train station down to the Stoke City F.C. football stadium and then the workers will down tools at Hem Heath. After which the canal towpath gets remarkably dull, if memory serves me. If walking south from Hem Heath, from there it’s better to cut across country through the Hem Heath woods and around the back of Wedgwood (note there’s a cafe at the Visitor Centre, or was last time I looked) to reach Barlaston. From there over the Downs Banks (National Trust), through some lanes, and then across the Common Plot and down into the town of Stone (to get the train back to Stoke). Not as flat as the canal-towpath, and definitely not something for cyclists to try, but far more varied and interesting.

As the ice melts here in the UK, and we enter the first wombling-about of the litter-picking season, here’s a handy tip for cyclists who want to pick small amounts of litter while still seated. A standard litter-picking stick can be fitted to a bicycle with a £5 roll of the 12mm self-adhesive magnetic tape made by 3M. This can be easily had from eBay.

Aluminium bike frame and aluminium picker-stick? Neither are magnetic, but that’s no problem once you have the tape. Assuming you have a bike with a cross-bar, not a step-through, that is. Once there’s a 15 inch strip of the tape stuck to the side of the crossbar of the bike frame and also along the picker, and they’re able to firmly touch all the way, then they will firmly lock magnetically with a ‘snap’. The strength is sufficient for a standard 32″ Helping Hand stick not to fall off as you go over bumps. Yet the picker can also be easily separated by a simple ‘reach-down and upward pull’ while the rider is seated on the bike. And then easily re-clipped once the litter is bagged. The bag is hanging on one of the handlebars, or some people may have a pannier-basket.

Be sure to let the bike turn without the movement of the front brake-cables pulling the stick off the magnetic grip. Try sliding the stick’s handle / trigger-pull round the seat-post, and having the pincers sticking out just beyond the handle-bar post (but not far enough to entangle the brake-cables).

On days when the stick is not needed, the grey-black magnetic strip on the bike is not too conspicuous. Since it follows the lines of the bike and is only on one side. The alternative solution, for those just going long-distance to a litter-picking spot and then getting off the bike, is to fasten the stick in the same position — but to use velcro straps instead.

Obviously you don’t pick at busy times on a bicycle-path, since you might catch someone with the stick as they go past.

Not quite as cool as the Samurai litter pickers of Japan, but it’ll do for Stoke-on-Trent.

I thought it was about time for a short survey of some of the academic findings that have emerged, or been found, after my book Strange Country: Sir Gawain in the moorlands of North Staffordshire.

1. I’ve since found that Ordelle G. Hill’s now-unobtainable book Looking Westward: Poetry, Landscape, and Politics in Sir Gawain (2009) opens by examining the similarities with… “the two most significant Welsh poets … Iolo Goch (1325-98) and Dafydd ap Gwilym (1320-80)”, wandering Welsh bards “well known throughout Wales”. Their dates certain align exactly with my timeline, since my candidate has the dates 1326-1383. And also note the major minstrel court meeting at Tutbury in Staffordshire from 1372 onward, supported by lavish patronage. Just the sort of thing to lure the best poets out of Wales. And with Tutbury being just 13 miles SE of my Gawain candidate (then 46 years old).

2. I read that in 2012, a lecture by Joel Fredell made a good argument that the Cotton Nero ms. (containing the surviving copy of Gawain) was scribed in York in the early fifteenth century. Quite possible, given that my candidate had strong connections to York as well as to Alton in Staffordshire. However, Fredell’s additional claim that this new… “evidence refutes many assumptions about the Gawain-poet’s connections” to Cheshire etc seems rather a dramatic over-reach. The man simply had, on my evidence, homes in North Staffordshire and York and moved between them as was common in the period.

3. In 2020, I spotted a new M.A. dissertation which considered “The Gawain-poet as Monastic Author”. I read this and found the case unconvincing, but the author usefully highlighted the work of Philip F. O’Mara (1992). O’Mara had proposed that one Robert Holcot could have been a possible tutor for the young Gawain-poet. I found the dates matched well, since the timeline for my candidate would have had a 16-18 year-old available to lodge with Holcot for a year. Perhaps so as to ‘polish him up a bit’, in terms of education and also spirituality, perhaps even after previously lodging at somewhere like Swythamley near Alton. The polishing would thus have been when Holcot was assigned, c. 1343, to serve with a Dominican religious house in Northampton. So the dates fit. But… it could just be that the Gawain-poet came to know Holcot’s writings later and a literary and philosophical influence came that way.

4. I was unaware of Helen Cooper’s 2021 Gollancz lecture (not online), which is reported to have suggested the patron could have been Richard Scrope. He became Bishop of Lichfield in Staffordshire, from 1387 onward. This connection with Staffordshire is too late in time, by my timeline. And there seems to be no prior connection of Scrope to Staffordshire. But it’s not impossible there was an interest in such works. One should note that Walsingham wrote of Scrope’s “incomparable knowledge of literature”, and that in 1378 Scrope became chancellor of Cambridge University. It is not therefore impossible that in 1378 or next year this friend of literature read a copy of the new Gawain-poem, originally written (as I reckon it) in time for a possible visitation at Alton Castle in Christmas 1377. Scrope was a northerner from Bolton, so may have been able to read the Midlands dialect.

Later, Scrope was the new Archbishop of York from 1398. Scrope would thus have been located in a city that still had strong family connections with my candidate, some 15+ years after the man’s death.

5. In 2022 there was another try at the claim for Sir John Stanley (1350-1414). I blogged about this journal article here. But by my reckoning, Stanley was too late in time by a good 20+ years. Further, it seems to me unlikely that such an ugly and murderous character would also have been one of our finest and most sensitive poets.

I’d further note re: the claims for Cheshire, the telling point in Bowers, An Introduction to the Gawain poet (2012), that (summarising Bennett, 1979)… “The Poll Tax returns of 1379 found that Cheshire and South Lancashire had only four university graduates who could have appreciated, never mind written, an intellectually challenging poem like Pearl”. I further note that I’ve also since heard a podcast with Tom Shippey, who pours very cold water on the idea that the Gawain-poet hailed from Cheshire.

6. In 2024 I noted Leo Carruthers new book Pearl / Perle: suivi de “Tolkien et Perle”, in paperback in French. The introduction apparently proposes… “a new theory about the poem’s patron … one of the most famous English princes of his time, son and father of kings”. I have not yet seen the book, or a review. However, a Google Books snippet in another French book of 2024 usefully informed me that (I translate)…

“Carruthers advances a series of arguments suggesting that Perle was composed for the family of John of Gaunt in memory of Blanche”.

Not strictly “new”, I think. Since I recall I’ve heard Gaunt named as a possible patron before. But possible in terms of dates, if a bit early by my reckoning. Not his wife who died 1368, at age 23. Rather his granddaughter Blanche of Portugal (1388-1389), who died as a babe. Rather late, I’d say, and if he were that close to John of Gaunt then surely we would know more about the author?

I’ve also found a Country Life magazine feature of 1960 on Alton Castle, that would have made many aware that the castle was built atop a mediaeval castle. Country Life having an immense readership at that time. Thus it’s all the more puzzling that Gawain academics have completely overlooked a mediaeval castle that is a near-perfect ‘fit’ both in terms of location and architecture.

Up for sale on eBay (not by me), four Chief Engineer documents detailing the reclamation of important sites in Stoke-on-Trent, such as Central Forest Park, Festival Park etc.

An interesting snippet from a review of Ordelle G. Hill’s now-unobtainable Looking Westward: Poetry, Landscape, and Politics in Sir Gawain (2009).

Apparently in tracing Gawain’s journey, Hill had Gawain reaching Blackshaw Moor near the North Staffordshire town of Leek. In my own book on the topic Strange Country I also get Gawain to the vicinity of the same Moor, but… then I have him following the ‘Earlsway’. Thus Gawain hooks south along a long ridgeway path and is then headed straight for Alton Castle, which matches the poet’s description very well indeed — and yet curiously no other scholar seems even to have noticed this castle.

Instead, Hill’s book has Gawain heading north from Blackshaw Moor, toward the town of Buxton and away from the dialect area. Hill then identifies “the Green Chapel with Deepdale Cave near Buxton”, according to the review I read. The cave is also known in the local antiquarian literature as the ‘Thirst Hole’.

Deepdale Cave looks physically very unlikely to me, though, judging by postcard images of the cave. More like an aircraft-hangar entrance, though I guess it may be been enlarged since the 1370s?

Still, Hill offers a closer suggestion than a recent unsupported claim from another author that Gawain’s journey has him journeying ultimately “into southern Yorkshire”, or the unsupportable notion among dogged Cheshire/Stanley advocates that he must have remained in the Wirral.

Incidentally, there’s another snippet of evidence that Gawain’s likely route had dramatic rock formations…

“Blackshaw Moor, where you are greeted by a dramatic panorama of intimidating rock formations. They rise up suddenly, looking like a row of ancient fortresses.” (Staffordshire Folk Tales, 2011)

The latest issue of Midland History journal is a ‘Haunted Midlands’ special. Appears to be open-access, for now.

* Towards the Haunted Midlands

* Edgehill, Naseby, and the Ghosts of the Civil Wars

* Recapturing History: Newstead Abbey and Romantic-Gothic Interpretation

* Mercian Charms: From The Lair of the White Worm to Penda’s Fen

* Weird Waterways: Blue Humanities and Eerie Canals in the Midlands

* Queering the Postindustrial Landscape in Joel Lane’s Short Fictions

* Wave Goodbye to the Future: Haunting, Music, and Cultural Stasis in the Regional Novels of Catherine O’Flynn and Joel Lane

* The National Literacy Trust Haunted Birmingham Campaign: How Might ‘Scary stories’ Connect People to Place, Heritage and Literacy?

‘Beating the bounds’ at Wetley Rocks. The parish boundary running right over the local pub the Plough Inn (presumably built across it to benefit from the division in some way), thus the men in the annual ‘beating the bounds’ ceremony-walk would have to go over the top. The building is still there, but now serves as a private house.

Currently up for auction in the latest Bonhams catalogue, some Burslem letters from John Lockwood Kipling [father of the famous Kipling]…

iii) Some eighteen letters from Kipling and other family members, including a love letter from his father to his mother, the rest dating from the early years of his career, with mention of his time at Pinder Bourne & Co. and night classes at The Potteries Art School, with a small juvenile sketchbook bearing ownership inscription “John Kipling. 1849”, c.56 pages, 4to and smaller, [sent from] Burslem and elsewhere, 1829 and later

One wonders if the sketches might be of Burslem?

Oh dear… Labour is closing the Office for Place (OfP) before it has even begun its work. It was to have been located here in Stoke-on-Trent, and a few people were already working from a temporary office in the Civic Centre in Stoke town. It would have helped ensured good quality and design in new-build homes, and a liveable sense-of-place for new estates and even whole ‘new towns’, and would have done so from outside the Yes Minister confines of Whitehall. The abolition presumably clears the way for the Labour plans to throw up 300,000 cheap new houses per year.

What’s popping out of copyright on 1st January 2025? In the UK, authors who died in 1954. Among scintillating titles such as Clog Dancing Made Easy and Shell Collector’s Handbook, I spotted a few local items. The book Birth Of A Spitfire: The Story of Beaverbrook’s Ministry and its First £10,000,000 (1941) was an accessible but detailed hymn to popular national…

mass production, in which the product, the Spitfire, is “the people’s plane”, owned by the nation who paid for it through personal subscriptions [… the author] frames the narrative of industrial production with the human [angle …] one pilot remarks “we’ve got a plane paid for by girls in shops”

Who knew the Spitfire was crowd-funded? Not me. You learn something new every day. Sounds like there’s potential for a graphic novel adaptation of this well-written popular book, I’d suggest. Perhaps mixing in a little of the biography of the Stoke-on-Trent man who made it, and some memories from local lads who flew it in combat.

I also spotted the historian and artist Louis Mellard (1873-1954), whose 1920s books included the intriguingly titled Lost Romances Of The Midlands (I assume this would be mediaeval romances, rather than Mills & Boon ‘mooning and swooning’), Tramp Artist In Derbyshire, and others.

He was born in 1873, and thus would have come of age at the height of the Empire in the early 1890s. Evidently he was a Nottingham man, as a letter in Boy’s Champion Paper for March 1887 has him at 24 Curzon Street, Nottingham. A later Notes & Queries letter of November 1893 shows he was still living in Nottingham at that time.

By the mid 1920’s he was at 9 Watcombe Circus, Carrington, Nottinghamshire. At that time he produced Historic Nottingham (1925) for the city’s Museum & Art Gallery, plus a pamphlet on Nottingham in the days of Dick Turpin. He wrote articles on local history for the Nottingham Evening Post. It therefore seems safe to say he was an East Midlands man, of Nottingham.

Still, he also knew Derbyshire. Both the landscape and the history — as well as Tramp Artist In Derbyshire (1923) he also wrote An Historical Survey Of Derbyshire (1925) and contributed some illustrations to another county history.

Along with Lost Romances Of The Midlands (1921), I’m guessing there might also be a smidgen of North Staffordshire interest in his Sporting Stories Of The Midlands (1926). In the 1890s he had written on dog-racing circles, for Collier’s magazine, so evidently he was familiar with the popular sporting scene and its characters circa the 1890s-1920s. Tramp Artist In Derbyshire (1923) might also be of interest if it was illustrated with pen drawings and he had also strayed down into the Staffordshire Moorlands? Again, just a guess. Sadly, his books and articles appear to have vanished without trace.

Almost without a trace. Nottingham Special Collections has one packet of his papers, which includes the possibly unpublished essay “Some lost dramas and romances of medieval Nottingham”. Which suggests his Lost Romances Of The Midlands (1921) was indeed about mediaeval tales and folk-plays, but I’d guess that it was tilted towards his own East Midlands.

The Potteries Museum and Art Gallery has a new show of Maurice Wade‘s Stoke paintings. I previously featured his paintings here on Spyders, and identified some of the locations in Middleport and Longport. The new show is a large one, with 90 pictures. The show runs until 26th January 2025. Note though that it’s paid, at a hefty £6 for a ticket plus your bus-fare and a bun in the cafe.

Hopefully this time the Museum has managed to avoid all the ‘glaring lights and highly reflective glass’ which marred my last visit to an exhibition there, something which made the pictures very difficult to see properly. The dense black on his canvases would be especially unsuited to such treatment. There is however…

“a fully illustrated book edited by Petr Hajek, with contributions by David Powell”

This is the catalogue for the show, and it seems to be different from the smaller book Maurice Wade: Silent Landscapes – The Andy McCluskey Collection (2022).

Good news for Stoke canals, £1.1 million from the last dribble of the Levelling Up funds. To be spent on…

“Targeted improvements to canals and green corridors, aimed at enhancing their accessibility. The Canal and River Trust will lead this project.”

Great, well… levelling down the “tree-root bumps” on the towpaths is certainly something that needs to be done in certain places. And which would boost accessibility re: wheelchairs and pushchairs. Let’s hope the cash is not all just going on snazzy signage and more political wall-murals.

The money has to be spent by March 2026.