Pootler

Country cottages. Warped ships' timbers, honeysuckle, pixie-cut thatched roof,  a misshapen chimney, the aroma of baking and  Vaughan Williams 'Pastoral' drifting out of the small paned window. Very twee.  Do you ever wonder whether they are really ancient or just more recent fakes?  This post is about the oldest, visible, surviving rural housing used by the common people and in particular, how much you can see from the road. It is impractical to include much detail in a post aimed at mobile phone readers, so  I have added notes and links in a postscript i n case you want to peek behind the floral curtains and take a closer look.  It isn't easy. Timber was the common building material and it lasts well, but the main survivors from medieval times are the stone buildings, like churches and mansions, which I am not concerned with here. There are few details, let alone complete houses, that have survived e xtensions, reconfigurations and improvements; and no c...

  Brass Point nr. Beachy Head I introduced the Chalk in my previous post.  Rolling hills  of pure white stone  surround London and the Thames Valley. T he Chilterns and Downs are  'ancient' country, the 'bleached clean bones of old England' and  Tolkien's Barrow Downs.   Wonderful stuff.  There aren’t many places in the world where pure chalk rises to the surface, and most of them are in England.  If you are walking, it is usually dry and springy underfoot and on a bike the slopes are merciful. Cretaceous Earth Its origins are described in the first two posts in my 'Deep Past' series; Links: ' From Hell to High Water '  and ' Coming Up For Air '.  A short reprise. The chalk was formed at the bottom of an ancient sea at  around the same latitude where you now find North Africa. Sharks swam in it, crabs scuttled along the bed, and coiled carnivorous cephalopods called ammonites floated about.  Then as now, at the bottom of t...

  Link to GPX File of Route   The High Weald This  is a 43 mile route through the High Weald ‘Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty’ from Crawley to the outskirts of Eastbourne, which might appeal to anyone who wants an off road trail that doesn’t involve the very rough tracks beloved of the mountain bikers.  It follows National Cycle Route 21, so mapping it involved very little effort on my part,. I have eschewed waypoints simply because I am ignorant of any compelling things to look out for on the route. The attraction is simply the generously wooded countryside; ‘Weald’ comes from the old German word ‘Wald’ and means ‘Wooded’.  But the ‘High’ in the name isn’t a misnomer and there are a few climbs between miles 21 and 31 as you head south, before a gentle cruise down from the Weald towards the coast on the ‘Cuckoo Trail’ towards Polegate Station. This is one of the many trails built on railway lines cut by Beeching in the 1960's and I believe it ran from P...

Hillforts pepper our hills, maybe around four thousand across the country. At least we  have called them hillforts. But are they? It seems that they not always on hills and probably not usually forts. The label was pinned on them by Sir Mortimer Wheeler, one of the most revered pre-history pundits of the 20th century and a former Brigadier in the Army so he might just have seen what he was programmed to see!  Sir Mortimer Wheeler Gandalf in the City?   In my own search for a sound basis for generalisation, I drew on lots of visits, slogged my way through a fat tome on hillforts generally, waded through archaeology papers in the British Library, scaled a mound of local landscape history books and tiptoed into the prehistory nerd websites. After all that, they remained inscrutable.  Some do seem to have seen conflicts. We are confident that Cadbury in Dorset saw battles with the Romans.  Others were clearly built with defence in mind, for instance by adding a...