Impasse at Fiddleford Manor

It has a roof.

A very fine roof, since no-one's looking.

I don't know why, but we have a major family fall out here, perhaps caused by the fact our excursion is over and we all are bound home, or possibly because she has elbows, or maybe the five-hour journey and the way the rain is tipping down, then the Great Expectations story disk ended with three hours to go, or perhaps because I unwisely tell everyone our next stop is Hungerford when the mass slaughter changed British firearms law in the 1980s. I distinctly remember it because I coincidentally drove to Hungerford that very week to interview a marketing manager at a software company.

At everyone's sullen and miserable face I regret it all, because no-one at this moment needs to know about these damaged bits of our humanities; we need to know what ancient, settled places remarkably exist in these areas of outstanding natural beauty, still here, still standing, because we all care. If only we could see it through the drizzle.

And I have no idea what caused the argument in the first place except she has elbows, but only I really looked at the roof.

We travel miles for this

We pilgrim to Apsley, land of Dickinson stationery*, to say Happy Birthday to Denis, the company's very own Fire Engine, 75 years old this year. 

He now has his own Fire Fighting Museum at Frogmore Paper Mill. Let's all celebrate, English-style, with a cup of tea and a fine collection of hoses, masks, and nozzles. 

I know some of you celebrate big time with hoses, masks, and nozzles. I sometimes click through the keyword search. I need only scatter a few punctuation marks about, break the lines for an elegiac pause, and I am rewarded with a bewildering, awkward, but strangely touching poetry, like this morning's early gathering:

Passive aggressive sex
with my vacuum cleaner.
Thank you for the invitation
but, unfortunate.

And then we journey on to Dickinson's triumph, Frogmore Paper Mill! (Same building.) Here they make lovely recycled paper on an old machine.

(Not so very different from yourself, hungry searcher, I also have ulterior motives**.)

* I didn't know Dickinson pioneered the window envelope in 1929, did you?
** Not sex with machines/paper/window envelopes, but inclusion of recycled paper made on historic machinery into lovely, lovely, notebooks.

Battle of Bosworth

Back to the Bosworth Battlefield for the latest on Richard III.

Personally speaking, my vote's with Leicester. They should get the bones. York already has enough excitement. It has the Minster, proper walking walls, Clifford's Tower (where you can recreate the slaughter of York's Jews by audio), and it has the Railways Museum which (before they dismantled it) had the manager's office from Wolverton Railway Works plus a reconstructed Stephenson's Rocket.

If that wasn't enough of a celebration of English culture, York also has piles of historic houses, the Shambles, an uncontrollable river, a defunct chocolate-making heritage, and the amazing Jorvik Centre.

At Jorvik, you sit in a trolley like one of those spinning tea cups and trundle past Viking dummies doing what Vikings do, i.e. sell fish, shout at each other, and go to the toilet. Admittedly our last visit was with Shark, Squirrel and Tiger in um, 2006? (Before Blog), but I bet things haven't changed. Squirrel won a tee-shirt in their story writing competition about Eric the Red. Her story was, frankly, crap, like Eric the Red sails away and falls off the world. The end.

Which proves my other point. Not only does York possess fine period pieces in the great commerce of history, they are also very good at promoting it nationally and internationally. They sold their town quite successfully to our Squirrel aged 6, who recalls the tee-shirt fondly. See my point? Do they need a Richard III?

Leicester? Not doing such a great job with their assets (whatever they are). So, if we gave them our dead monarch - and he comes complete with a ready-made global reputation - then surely they can only benefit, no?

Right, as one of the millions of relatives to Richard III, I got my vote in.

Here, have a reenactment of 1485.

The punch up stays the same across the years

Huzzah! The English Heritage multiperiod history weekend!

I fully appreciate it's not just about leaving the accountancy office on a Friday to spend the weekend dressed up as a Roman soldier.

I bet that's only part of the attraction. I know serious research emerges from this crossover world of reenactment societies, amateur historians, and specialists in European footwear 1519-1599 (military styles only). I fully appreciate their endeavours (speaking as an enthusiastic amateur inquirer after bookbinding materials 1068-1485).

But there's always one thing which is fun to watch, whatever the motive for coming along to the English Heritage weekend in Northamptonshire. The punch up of blokes in a field.

But we cannot linger! We dash off at the end sharpish. I have tickets to see the punch up at the deconsecrated church in Manchester via the National Theatre Live Screening of Macbeth. We can't miss this significant event, not even for a Tudor punch up. But I remain deeply glad that we made it this year to the FoH. 2013 wouldn't have been properly conducted without it. Thank you, English Heritage!

The final mapping

Honestly, I can't recommend this course highly enough.

Mapping the World with Art was perfectly suited to our home ed style - autonomy, anarchy, and a fretful mother mashed in similar quantities - an educational mix which I guess is not unique to la famille Grit.

From my point of view this course was like a fortnightly cuddle. For the last umpteen Mondays, we have began the day by doing something; the kids created other than a mess, and I found they were learning stuff about the world without meaning to. The course is brilliantly open-ended, so we found ourselves wandering off into economics, history, ship building, geopolitics and technology. To name but a few.

We put together a great co-op group, too. A brilliant combination of home ed mamas offering complementary talents of turning up, reading stuff, pitching in, and unwrapping the biscuits. Everyone chipped in with ideas, suggestions, and activities other than watching the video, and we all enjoyed some great moments of home eddery. When it was all over, there were tears. That's how good it was.

Or it could have been my announcement that this fortnightly slot now formally morphs into the IGCSE Geography curriculum (again). Look forward to it, come September.

Photoblog battle tour of Cropredy Bridge

Not a three-way sibling match between Shark, Squirrel and Tiger in a charming picture-postcard village in Oxfordshire! But a battle of the English Civil Wars, fought between the Parliamentarian army under Sir William Waller, and the Royalist army of King Charles, on 29 June 1644.

Yes, we're doing the battlefields walk!

Part of my agenda to be a nuisance even when I am dead. I want my junior grits to care enough about these fields, the history they hold, and the blood that was shed over them, to create a stink in 30 years time when a Chinese-backed development consortium wants to pour two tons of concrete over the site to create a multi-storey car park (next to the industrial estate, next to the M245 motorway).

Here, first take your view from the bridge at Copredy.

But don't think this is the end of it! The battlefield walk is not that straightforward, obviously. It takes only two minutes to walk from the pub to the bridge. Are you ready? Right, we're going over there.

Into that field. Except when the bulls are in it first. They can turn nasty. 

 Turn left.

 Across that crop field.

Through the wood.

And another field. Are you getting the lie of the land yet? The parliamentarians are down here and the royalists on the ridge.

Hill.

If you stood at this point on 29 June 1644, you'd be trampled by Parliamentarians. (Time for extensive conversation about clay and dust.)

Now towards that ash tree.

The battle is decided here.

(And the ash tree is very beautiful.)

Off we go again!

Stop complaining it's the hottest day of the year and you're sure mama has hidden your sunhat. Remember, you're not covered in sweat and blood and wearing woollen trousers.

By that hedge.

(Detour: the Lady's Walk, a banked path created in Tudor times so the ladies could attend Church without their skirts becoming wet.)

Yay! You made it! Three hours later, back to Copredy. To the boundary stone, possibly 15thC.

Congratulations! But the next bit is easy! Know your bit of field history, and visit the Battlefields Trust.

Photoblog Winslow

I am driven to be kind. Saving you petrol money and probably a plane journey to come and see Winslow, Buckinghamshire.

Here it is.

But William was born somewhere here. 

William Lowndes, son of Robert and Elizabeth, who travelled to London to seek his fortune.

 He became secretary to the Treasury, whipped the Bank of England into shape, 

and helped bring in the National Debt in order to pay for wars with France.

George Osborne can blame him for the mess we're in. It's all the fault of William Lowndes of Winslow. 

Winslow is the sort of small market town in England where, if we are honest, not much has happened.

In fact, the most exciting event could be King Offa handing over the entire lands of a couple of peasants and a pig, to the monastery in St Albans in 792.

Then there was the opening of a shop on the main road selling witch stuff. She sells pentangles and fairy dust.

And the Church! St Laurence Church. 

Apparently Laurence was tied to an iron grill over a fire and slowly roasted to death; 

a fate dealt to him after giving the Prefect of Rome a bit of lip in 258.

Oh yes! Winslow also boasts one of the hidden buildings of England. Properly it belongs in a curiosity book on the secret places squirreled along England's ancient highways and byways; places you would never find in any normal guide book. The keys are held at the estate agents, so don't forget to return them.

Keach's Meeting House. Seventeenth century Baptist chapel, and secret place for dissenters, the illegals of the time. 

Keach became a baptist preacher at Winslow, but he was bigger than the town (which in 1688 was not two peasants and a pig), 

so the church gave him Southwark instead. But they built and named this chapel after him. Nice.

The church, by the way, holds cloth from the coronation of George VI, 1936. I bet I am making a cloth historian happy now.

What else? Hmmm. There's the Lowndes manor house, which is private and we can't tour. Not apparently, like the good old days. With unnerving ability to home in on historic locations of England, I park the bashed up Grit mobile in front of it by accident.

We find pub history here too; pillory lane; wooden posts from the medieval market square; and bricks. Lots of bricks. The size of which matters at various times in England thanks to the brick tax of 1784.

Sadly, we can't blame Lowndes for that. He brought in the window tax instead.

That could be it for Winslow, although I should just mention the day truly belongs to our Blue Badger, a lady our home ed group regularly hires to tell us secrets about our own localities. She is wonderfully unruffled by everything home ed. Including the lovely Fizz, who arrives barefoot and painted in red soil.

Winslow. I can happily recommend it, if you are passing through. But probably not requiring a plane journey or an urgent drive along the M1.