#explaining ourselves posts

[baptonbooks]

Explaining ourselves: Mr Wemyss: Come friendly bombs

As ever, I suggest you read the introductory post to this series, for background.

And, as always, as Chris Ramsey notes, Never, Ever Read the Comments on any links. People Are Barking Mad. Utter Psychotics.

To paraphrase Flanders & Swann, I now come to what I consider ‘the rottenest bits of these islands of ours’: the South East, and, indeed, in the Ninth Circle, the Home Counties and sodding London.

Oh, parts of it can be lovely,

as we see with Alec Clifton-Taylor at

Sandwich,

Saffron Walden,

and Lewes;

and as Dame Penelope attests.

And yet...

well, just you consider Lunnon by baht. Look beyond the jolly bits, and reflect.

I shall allow Professor Hoskins

to have the last word.

And next week, we’ll build on what we’ve learnt.

[baptonbooks]

Explaining ourselves: Mr Wemyss: The blue bonnets o’er the Border

As ever, I suggest you read the introductory post to this series, for background.

And, as always, as Chris Ramsey notes, Never, Ever Read the Comments on any links. People Are Barking Mad. Utter Psychotics.

We are approaching the end of the (ashlared or rusticated, according to taste) foundation blocks.

This week, we gaze into another sort of mirror, in hopes of seeing ourselves anew and what features persist under any guise.

Thus, with our steel bonnets on and an eye out for reivers, to

Berwick, with ACT

and thence, in surprising peace, with Dame Penelope, to

Aberdeenshire

and to

Argyll & Bute.

Aye: Alba. (Come awa’ ben: ye’ll ha’ had yer tay.) And let’s take a look forrads to the why and how of Scotland’s transformation and integration,

with John Sergeant, on the Caledonian Canal.

That’s a hint. Until next week, then....

[baptonbooks]

Explaining ourselves: Mr Wemyss: Marches madness (frontiers, marches, and the prizes fought for)

As ever, I suggest you read the introductory post to this series, for background.

And, as always, as Chris Ramsey notes, Never, Ever Read the Comments on any links. People Are Barking Mad. Utter Psychotics.

Another not-so-distant mirror this week. One of the primary ways in which a people defines itself is by distinction and opposition. From, and to whom? That other lot down the road.

And yet commonalities persist. Sometimes, the dragon in the mist is a Brocken spectre, one’s own shadow in the fog; and, sometimes, one comes to seize upon the misty and mystic dragon as a part of one’s own shadowed and foggy past.

Wherefore …

By way of separation, Michael Wood takes us in search of Offa;

By way of integration and appropriation, he takes us haring off after Arthur.

We visit Ludlow with Alec Clifton-Taylor;

North Wales and the Marches with Dame Penelope;

and

Pembrokeshire, with Dame Penelope and with Professor Aubrey Manning.

Hwyl am nawr. Nos da!

[baptonbooks]

Explaining ourselves: Mr Wemyss: A distant mirror

As ever, I suggest you read the introductory post to this series, for background.

And, as always, as Chris Ramsey notes, Never, Ever Read the Comments on any links. People Are Barking Mad. Utter Psychotics.

We return this week to the North: indeed, to the Marches o’ the Borders: for its is often at the edge that we can look back and see most clearly. Not least in the Rabbie Burns sense:

O wad some Power the giftie gie us To see oursels as ithers see us! It wad frae mony a blunder free us, An' foolish notion....

So it should do.

And so, with the admirable ACT, to

Durham

and to

Berwick. (No, not one of the ones in South West Wilts.)

I limit myself, much against inclination, to these two programmes this week for a reason: there is much meat in them. Communications, railways, the sea, the coasting trade, readaptation, and defence: these are things which have shaped us, and the merit undistracted consideration.

Now, off to your dinners, and I shall see you next Friday.

[baptonbooks]

Explaining ourselves: Mr Wemyss: ‘Squat and full of guile’

[Posted for Mr Wemyss, a bit late, by Mr Pyle. No, no cause for panic.]

As ever, I suggest you read the introductory post to this series, for background.

And, as always, as Chris Ramsey notes, Never, Ever Read the Comments on any links. People Are Barking Mad. Utter Psychotics.

This week find us in East Anglia, all fens and flat land (and successive waves of invaders, from Saxons to Danes).

Oh, it’s peaceful enough now....

But living there is hard graft.

Partly, that’s owing to the landscape itself.

Partly, it’s to do with the pre-industrial difficulties of inland – and if the Vikings are about, coastwise – transport. Trains help, as Betch knew.

A countryside which is agriculturally rich but not always readily defensible can be hard to hold – even against the dissenting natives.

These factors, as the Great ACT shows us, have shaped the people, the land, and the built environment, at BSE and at Saffron Walden as elsewhere.

… And continue to do so, continuity being our theme: not least ecclesiastically. Parish churches, and their villages and civil parishes (as Dame Penelope reminds us), persist, and preserve the old ways and memories.

Next week, we return to the North Country.

[baptonbooks]

Explaining ourselves: Mr Wemyss: A good walk, unspoilt

As ever, I suggest you read the introductory post to this series, for background.

And, as always, as Chris Ramsey notes, Never, Ever Read the Comments on any links. People Are Barking Mad. Utter Psychotics.

I apologise for the delay. (I hate funerals.) I shall accordingly post this now for the week, rather than at the customary tea-time tomorrow.

This week, the North.

We begin with three approaches – literally – in the elegant and erudite and eminently civilised company of Alec Clifton-Taylor:

In Richmond;

In Beverley;

and in Whitby.

The sense of locality; the continuities of community and history....

These being our themes, a walk, a ground-level survey of what makes the North, the North, is indicated. And that, of course, means Alfred Wainwright: the great AW: here, in four parts, with Eric Robson, doing the Coast to Coast.

We begin at S Bee’s Head.

Then, onwards, from Shap Abbey.

Thence, from Gunnerside, ever Eastwards.

And so at last to Robin Hood’s Bay, near to Whitby.

Thus the land the folk have shaped, and which has shaped the people.

Next week … well, that would be telling.

[baptonbooks]

This weeks’ Friday post...

... in the Explaining Ourselves series, is delayed by, er, Events, Dear Boy, Events.

[baptonbooks]

Explaining ourselves: Mr Wemyss: Wool and war; skylarks ascending and flying nightingales

As ever, I suggest you read the introductory post to this series, for background.

And, as always, as Chris Ramsey notes, Never, Ever Read the Comments on any links. People Are Barking Mad. Utter Psychotics.

When I was young, fathers and uncles had mostly been in Malaya, or Korea, or Aden. Older fathers and uncles yet, and grandfathers and great-uncles, had beaten Hitler. And there were a few old men and women about who had put paid to the Kaiser and his lot of Those Same Damned Germans.

Haunts of ancient peace want defending, at times, and the most idyllic places and the most unlikely folk may have seen and done the most extraordinary things. And because, upon and in a small island from which one can see the Continent, these had been national hours of peril and glory for all, in a way in which Americans cannot understand, these things were unexpectedly nearer, sometimes, in place, as they were surprisingly near in time.

So it has ever been: one of the great British continuities. The price of the persistence of pastoral is always paid in blood. And the foundations of peace are in trade and agriculture.

There is something archetypal, a sort of Platonic ideal, to the Cotswolds: RVW’s native region, all cider-with-Rosie and Laurie Lee, beloved and peaceable, rurally idyllic....

Well. We shall see.

We begin in what I for one yet call, as, ‘Sissiter’:

The great ACT in Cirencester.

Next,

Dame Penelope admires the Cotswolds beyond;

and finds, even here, the echoes of war. The nightingales defended RVW’s larks ascending:

The Flying Nightingales.

But, then, as Alec Clifton-Taylor reminds us, the region has always been

… keen as Tewkesbury mustard.

Next week, we take a wee walk in the North Countree. For certain values of ‘wee’.