Category: Historic Sites

You’ve Gotta Pick a Pocket or Two

We first heard about one of Norwich’s secrets in the local rag and decided to give it a whirl courtesy of The Shoebox Experiences. It just so happens that under their community hub on Norwich’s Castle Meadow lies a tantalising fragment of a bygone street dating back to the 15th century. What lies beneath is Castle Ditches, once a narrow warren of medieval lanes and alleys skirting Norwich Castle mound, a place where jobbing weavers and their broods were born, lived, worked and died – with their looms and their livestock.

As we descended to the old street level, our charming guide, Ollie, took us back through time with his captivating and comical tales of yesteryear. In the medieval era, the rag trade made Norwich rich, and the area boomed. But by the time of the steam age, traditional weaving had been killed off by the industrial mills of the North and the city had reinvented itself with a brand-new trade – making money, lots of it. Castle Ditches became a pig-stinking slum where no respectable Victorian lady would venture; so the fine and upstanding burghers of the city decided to cover it over with a new road – out of sight and out of mind, so to speak. Castle Meadow was born, turning Castle Ditches on its head – top floors became ground floors, ground floors became cellars.

That wasn’t quite the end. The Ditches lived on for a while longer as the city’s crime-riddled red-light district – think Nancy turning tricks for the drunks after closing and the Artful Dodger picking a pocket or two.

All but one of these images of the sunken street are courtesy of The Shoebox Experiences. My own photographic attempts were a little bit rubbish.

Coincidentally, as I was writing about our time down under, this old painting of Castle Ditches popped up on Faceache. It was found in a shop in Norwich. Amazing!

The Shoebox Experiences run a number of city tours. All profits go to their social enterprise which has a mission to create supportive environments for people to connect. Their Tipsy Tavern Tour sounds right up our alley.

Bloody-Minded Brits

I’ve always had a fu*k ’em attitude to authority, particularly the do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do hypocrites. You know the kind of thing: politicians preaching ‘family values’ while knocking off their secretaries on the side or hellfire priests touching up the altar boys in the vestry. I’m glad to say that sheer bloody-mindedness is a glorious national trait. And one that goes back centuries, judging by the bawdy carving high in the rafters of Hereford’s medieval All Saints Church. Hidden for centuries, it only came to light when a new gallery was added for a café. The gentlemen reclining in anticipation is now in full view of the chattering flat-white coffeeholics below. Well, it’s certainly something to talk about over the Victoria sponge.

Obviously, as a ‘family values’ site, our randy man’s family jewels have been pixilated. But, be honest, you want more, don’t you? Check out the naughty bits here. Sadly, we’ll never know what pissed off the carpenter. And as it’s Norwich Pride today, I rather hope it’s…

“We’re here, we’re queer, so fu*k you!”

The Only Way is Essex

Essex, the home county to the east of London, has the reputation of being, well, a bit chavvy. But there’s more to Essex than big hair, gaudy bling, fake tans, assisted tits and impossibly white tombstone teeth – and that’s just the men.

Beyond the faceless towns of the commuter belt, Essex is a green and pleasant land, and its county town, Colchester, has ancient roots. Although not officially awarded city status until 2022, Colchester can reasonably claim to be Britain’s first proper city, sitting as it does on top of Camulodunum, the first major settlement of Roman Britannia and the province’s first capital.

Even before the unstoppable Romans slashed and burned their way through village, forest and field, the settlement was already a centre of power for the locals, including King Cunobelin – Shakespeare’s Cymbeline. When the Romans displaced the tribal huts with their first legionary fortress, it was like saying ‘we’re top dogs now’.

Following the Boudican revolt of AD60, when the seriously pissed-off Queen of the Iceni slaughtered everyone and burned everything in her path, a defensive wall was thrown around the town in an after-the-horse-has-bolted kinda way. Not long after, Camulodunum lost its status as provincial capital to the better-placed Londinium but continued to thrive as a garrison town, something which continues to this day.

We’ve passed through Colchester many times – it’s on the mainline from Londinium to Norwich – but we’d never stepped off the train for a gander. So, we thought, let’s give it a go, and we stayed overnight. The main event for us was Colchester Castle, which sits in a pretty park populated by picnickers and grey squirrels. The park also contains remains of that post-Boudica Roman city wall – the earliest ever constructed.

The castle keep is eleventh-century Norman, built on the foundations of the massive classical temple of Claudius the Divine; Roman emperors just loved to be worshipped. The castle is now a rather splendid museum dedicated to the long history of the city. Roman-era relics are what really draw in the punters. We were lucky enough to avoid the modern-day legions of over-excited schoolkids in hi-vis jackets screaming their way through the exhibits.

Museum’d out, we took a slow stroll around the ruins of St Botolph’s Priory, where Liam caught forty winks; then we withdrew to a local tavern for a bottle and a bite.

Our bed for the night was at the historic George Hotel, along the High Street. We chose well. Behind the hotel’s Georgian façade lies a timber-framed building said to date back to the fourteenth century, although the hotel’s extensive cellars may be older and feature the ruins of a Roman gravel pavement. A few years back, the hotel underwent extensive renovation and refurbishment. We fell for the lavish and distinctly quirky style.

I posted this image on Faceache of little ol’ me in a funky, over-the-top, oversized wing-back chair. It prompted this response from an old mucker of mine…

PUT THAT CHAIR IN YOUR HANDBAG AND STEAL IT FOR ME *NOW* PLEASE! 

If only I had a handbag big enough.

A Right Royal Do

My dad took the King’s shilling in the late forties and made a career out of soldiering for the next twenty-something years. Despite swearing allegiance to the monarch, Dad was a soft leftie, voting Labour all his life. He liked and respected the Queen but he didn’t think much of the motley crew of incidental royals – the  ‘hangers on’ as he called them. My mother, on the other hand, was a devoted royalist and had a picture of Her Maj hanging on her bedroom wall.

In my adult years, I’ve always been conflicted about the entire notion of a hereditary head of state. My head questions its relevance in our modern, more egalitarian world but my heart tells me different. I was genuinely saddened by the Queen’s death. I can’t explain why. Maybe it’s my age. And when I look around the world at the assortment of elected nobodies, ne’er-do-wells and nasties, particularly those who would sell their children to the Devil to cling to power, I think, well, if it ain’t broke…

Today, we have the right royal do of the Coronation with Charles and Camilla riding the golden Cinderella coach to their ball at Westminster Abbey, the venue for such rituals for nearly a thousand years. The Crown Jewels will be dusted down, oaths will be sworn, heads will be anointed. And yes, we will be joining the locals at our local for a glass of bubbly to watch the fairy tale on the big screen.

Across our twin villages, the streets are decked out in fluttering flags and bunting of red, white and blue, and shops have gone all out to put on the best stately display. Here’s a taste…

And tomorrow, our villages are throwing their very own right royal do with a big Coronation party. We’ll be joining the festivities because let’s face it, we could all do with a party right now.

Fifteen-Year Itch

For our fifteenth wedding anniversary we were itching for a big city scratch with a difference. Despite my heathen leanings, I do like an impressive church, and few are more impressive than London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral, Christopher Wren’s tour de force topped with its heavenly dome. The earlier Gothic pile was torched along with much of the old medieval city in the Great Fire of 1666. It’s reckoned the blaze started in a bakery in the appropriately named Pudding Lane, bringing a whole new meaning to the hallowed phrase ‘give us our daily bread’.

Meandering around the flashy Baroque splendour brought back happy memories of my first pilgrimage – back in my spotty teens when I accompanied my grandmother, who was over from Ireland.

According to the annals, there’s been a church on the same spot since 604 AD, and possibly as far back as the late Roman period, as suggested by a plaque listing the pre-Norman bishops with their glorious tongue-twister names.

In stark contrast to the lavish decor above, the crypt is simply appointed and stuffed with the tombs of kill and cure notables from days long past, from Florence Nightingale and Alexander Fleming – who discovered penicillin quite by chance – to the victors of Trafalgar and Waterloo, Nelson and Wellington. Napoleon must be spinning in his monumental Parisian grave. Wren is there too, of course.

After piety came avarice, with indulgent afternoon tea and bubbles in The Swan at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre followed by mother’s ruin at Halfway to Heaven, the homo watering hole near Nelson’s massive column, where Liam and I first met. They knew we were coming judging by the ultimate gay megamix playing on the jukebox – Pet Shop Boys, Erasure, Marc Almond, The Communards, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Dead or Alive, Gloria Gaynor and Hazel Dean – with Liza Minnelli’s ‘Love Pains’ bringing up the rear. Liam’s shoulders shimmied to the beat. Perfect.

What’s Your Poison?

Every month without fail, Chet Contact drops on the mat. Produced by the Chet Valley Churches, the community magazine is packed with handy information about local community groups and services for believers and non-believers alike. There’s a lot going on round these parts. From bells to balls, bats to bowls, cakes to quizzes, pumping iron to eyeing up the birds, from stage to the silver screen, arts and crafts, knitting to nattering, foraging to growing your own, and much more besides – all country life is here.

I like the regular history piece in the mag. I knew Loddon has old roots – the earliest written reference to the village was around 1042 – but I was surprised to read that there’s been a pharmacy in Loddon on the same site for over 180 years. It’s now a branch of Boots. Long gone are all those jars full of potions laced with opium and mercury from the apothecary’s handbook of old wives’ tales. Maybe that’s why, back then, life expectancy was only about 57.

Back to Turkey

We were struck down with the dreaded lurgy over the festive period and it just went on and on. What’s a boy to do when he’s at his lowest ebb, snot-wise, and he needs to perk up the pansies? Book a holiday of course. And the holiday we booked is to Dalyan in southwest Turkey. We plan a week of R&R with a bit of sightseeing and beach-bumming thrown into the mix.

We all know about last month’s catastrophic earthquakes, which flattened large swathes of Turkey and Syria, killing tens of thousands. It’s truly heartbreaking. We got a small taste of it when we lived in Bodrum. It was just a minor tremor, no damage done, but it still sent us fleeing into the courtyard.

The recent disaster will put some people off visiting Turkey but I hope not too many. The last thing the country needs right now is yet another blow to the economy. As most tourist businesses are family-owned, it’s the ordinary folk who suffer the most.

The situation is desperate and will remain so for a long time to come. If you’d like to help, please give what you can. It all makes a difference. There are plenty of appeals out there to choose from. Here’s one in the UK:

Disasters Emergency Committee

On a lighter note, Dalyan is a long way from the disaster zone. This is how I described it in Postcards from the Ege, a tongue in cheek guide book I wrote many moons ago:

“Back in the day, Dalyan was a quaint and sleepy village on the banks of the Dalyan River. The town first hit the headlines in the mid-eighties when an international campaign successfully defeated a plan to develop the nearby Iztuzu Beach where endangered loggerhead turtles famously lay their eggs. Turtles and tourism now co-exist (just). The soft, white sand is well worth a visit but take a packed lunch, slap on total sunblock and don’t step on the eggs. You don’t want to be responsible for wiping out an entire species.”

And the nearby ruins of Kaunos:

“Stuck in the bog of the Dalyan river delta with a chronology dating back to the 9th century BC is Kaunos, a city lost in the vegetation for over 300 years. Originally a Carian settlement and now a UNESCO World Heritage site, the ruins are a jumble from different periods – Greek, Roman and Byzantine. Kaunos was a regional seaport of some note. However, like Ephesus, the silting of the harbour left the city high and dry and sealed its fate. The site is best reached by small boat from nearby Dalyan. You’ll gently put-put through the crystal-clear river past majestic reed beds belly dancing in the breeze. Today, the city is appreciated as much for the prolific wildlife as it is for the scattered stones. Also, as with Miletos, the surrounding swamp is particularly popular with holidaying mosquitoes. The city was finally abandoned in the 15th century following a malaria epidemic. You’ve been warned.”

The last time I was in Dalyan was over 25 years ago. I can’t wait to dip my toes in the warm waters of the Aegean again. I might even persuade Liam to take in a mud bath with me in a vain attempt to regain our long lost youth. Yes, this was me back in 1997. It didn’t work then either.

Inevitably, the resort will have changed but I hope not too much. I’ll keep you posted.

Where is St Edmund Buried?

In Bury St Edmunds, obviously – or is he? The cute Suffolk market town might be the final resting place of St Edmund, ninth-century Christian king of East Anglia. Allegedly, he was cut down by a wild bunch of pillaging Danes doing what the Danes did back then.

Eventually those pillaging Danes saw the error of their wicked heathen ways, dropped to their knees, converted to the ‘One True Faith’ and hung up their horny helmets.

For his sins, Eddie the Martyr was canonised and an abbey founded in his honour by that great Dane, King Canute – he of holding-back-the-tide fame. Edmund even became England’s patron saint for a few hundred years until he was rudely upstaged and replaced by George in or around the fourteenth century. And Georgie boy wasn’t even English. But then, who can compete with a dragon slayer?

In Medieval times, a gravy train of pilgrims rolled in from all over Europe to visit Eddie’s shrine. It was a good little earner and the Abbey of St Edmund became one of the richest, largest and most powerful Benedictine monasteries in all of England. Then in 1539 that old letch Henry the Eighth popped along and ‘dissolved’ the abbey (i.e. pillaged like those Danes of old) and that was the end of that.

A sunny day took us across county lines for a gander around the old holy pile. Apart from two impressive medieval gatehouses, little remains of the abbey itself, though next door is Bury St Edmunds Cathedral called – wait for it – St Edmundsbury. The Abbey’s pretty grounds are lovingly tendered by the local council and a dedicated army of volunteers; many of them could well be the descendants of those pillaging Danes who cut down the saintly king. ’Tis their penance.

All is forgiven. Nowadays, we really like the Danes.

Among the roses and the ruins, there’s a World War Two memorial to the US Airforce (or the US Army Airforce as it was known back then). The USAF was, and still is, big round these parts as East Anglia is famously flat and just a short bombing raid to the continent.

But … the current whereabouts of Edmund’s sainted bones is anyone’s guess.

Postcard from Bulgaria

We got the hot gossip washed down with Bulgarian plonk we were hoping for. But that didn’t mean our entire trip was a non-stop booze-fest. In between top-ups, we did manage to drink in a bit of culture too, with a gander round ancient Nessebar, a pretty little town tumbling over a small Black Sea island joined to the mainland by a causeway. It’s full of old Orthodox churches and sprinkled with bars, cafés and places to browse for tourist tat and local handicrafts. The assault course of rough cobbled streets is charming but ladies and drag queens should leave the heels at home. Even the flat-shoed risk a snapped ankle.

Founded in the second millennium BC and originally a Thracian settlement called Mesembria, the town passed down the line to the ancient Greeks, Romans, Byzantines and Bulgars before eventually falling to the Ottomans in 1453. Our guidebook called this ‘the time of the Turkish enslavement’ – memories run very deep in the Balkans. Finally, Nessebar was incorporated into the new Bulgarian state in 1885.

Nessebar has a small but impressive museum exhibiting artefacts from down the many ages. Fallen Catholic Liam loves a religious icon and started to hyperventilate when we stumbled across a room full of ’em.

Thank you to our lovely landladies for putting us up and putting up with us – you know who you are!

Go West, Young Man

We have old friends in Torquay, a palm tree-lined seaside resort in Devon. We hadn’t seen them in ages because of the pandemic, so a catch-up was well overdue. All roads lead to London, and we didn’t fancy the hassle of crossing the sprawling metropolis only to come out the other side, so we flew from Norwich International airstrip to Exeter International airstrip on a little jet – like Z-listers without the paps.

Old Exeter – Roman Isca Dumnoniorum, Saxon Execeaster – has been around a while, though at first glance you’d never know it. The Luftwaffe did a great job flattening the city in the Second World War, so you have to look closely to find ancient treasures.

Mercifully, the magnificent cathedral, founded in 1050, was spared the hellfire that destroyed pretty much everything else – a little odd considering it sticks out like a bullseye at the heart of the city. Although I’m not religious in the slightest, I do so love a gander round a holy pile.

Most of what the visitor sees is thirteenth century, and what impresses first is the awe-inspiring ceiling that soars towards the heavens. At 96 metres, it’s the longest continuous medieval stone vault in the world. It surely convinced the hovel-dwelling, unwashed illiterati of old that it was made with divine intervention – and so helped keep them on their knees.

And then there are all the elaborate tombs – mostly containing the old bones of long-dead bishops.

And the stained glass windows aren’t bad either.

While Norwich hosted T-Rexes and steppe mammoths for the summer, Exeter went for giant cutesy street dogs.

Woof, woof!

After Exeter, we spent the next couple of days hitting the sherry and chewing the cud with our old muckers at their palatial digs in Torquay. And fantastic it was too. Our hosts are a little camera shy so, instead, here’s an elegant bust of Agatha Christie, the queen of the whodunnit and the best-selling fiction writer of all time, who was born in the town.