Trackside dreams: The Vale and model railways

The Priory and Godfreys – Vale Scene - © Tony Wright

The landscapes and buildings of the Vale have been captured in many different ways. Not surprisingly, there is a long tradition of painting and photographing its views. But in this post I want to look at a more unusual way in which people have tried to represent the area – model railways.

The best known example of this is the Vale Scene at Pendon Museum in Long Wittenham . This is centred on a fictional Vale village ‘Pendon Parva’ and attempts to represent an idealised version of the landscape as it was in the 1930s. As an archaeologist, I have a great fondness for the loving rendered hillfort. Although, it is at heart a railway layout, as much thought has been put into representing the landscape and, in particular, the historic buildings of the Vale, as the railway itself. Nearly all the buildings shown are based on actual building that stood or stand in the area.

Letcombe Cottage – Vale Scene © Stephen Williams

The model itself has a fascinating history – it has its origins with the modelling work of Roye England, who arrived in England from Australia in the 1920s. Already deeply involved in railway modelling, he spent time living in Swindon, close to the western end of the Vale, and he soon fell in love with the landscape and buildings. His first attempts at modelling the buildings began in the 1930s, and after a pause due to the war, he set up in Long Wittenham  and established what became the Pendon Modern Railway Museum in the 1950s. He expanded into new premises in the 1970s and work began on what eventually became the Vale Scene – although he died in 1995, work on the scene continues.

It’s a beautiful and committed piece of work- it’s steeped in a love for a pre-lapsarian landscape and for the railways. I love the way in which it’s still, and likely always will be, a work in progress. There is something profoundly meditative about model buildings. This kind of small-scale act of creation is something I have only tinkered round the edges with, but I can see how it draws people in. There is an intriguing mix of an insistence on accuracy when it comes to the rolling stock and architectural detailing, but it is all set in a fictional condensed countryside setting, which aims to represent all facets of the Vale, from the Downs with their hillforts and strip lynchets to the pasture and arable of the vale itself. Of course, it is set in late summer, with the crops ripe unto harvest and the chalk tracks at their dustiest. In its own way, the model is part of that distinctly English topographic recording tradition, which has its roots in the chorographic writing of the 17^th and 18^th century, and in the 1930s and 1940s, when the idea of the Vale Scene was germinating, materialised in the form of the Recording Britain Project and the National Buildings Record. Indeed, the Vale Scene was initially intended to capture a landscape and way of life that was seen by Roye England to be under threat ; his first model was the pub, the Calley Arms in Wanborough, which was being renovated and updated.

Kingston Lisle - Corfe Castle Line- Ormesby Hall

In its own right, the Vale Scene, indeed the entire Pendon Museum, is wonderful and worthy of a blog entry. You can imagine my surprise though when I stumbled across a second public model railway layout which contained model buildings based on real structures in the Vale. I chanced upon it when I was visiting Ormesby Hall, a National Trust property in Middlesborough. I’d taken the family to visit because it was home of the Pennyman family, who I had an interest in due to their work on social relief schemes in the 1930s, so I wasn’t remotely thinking about the Vale or model railways. However, at the end of the usual tramp round drawing rooms and halls, it was a pleasant surprise to come upon a series of model railway layouts run by Ormesby Hall Model Railway Group. One (Pilmoor Junction) was based on the East Coast mainline (bah, I’ve never liked the LNER…), the other was clearly a southern landscape and was in fact based broadly on the branch line from Wareham to Swanage. However, when looking at it more closely, I realised that some of the buildings were from elsewhere. Indeed, it turns out that although the man who created the model, Mr Ron Rising, has set it in Dorset, it also contained model buildings based on real examples across the south of England, including the Vale. For example, there is lovely set of cottages based on a group in Kingston Lisle (see picture).

There cannot be many parts of the country which have been captured in this form, not once, but twice. There may even be other examples of Vale landscapes and building lurking in lofts and clubhouses elsewhere in the country. Why the Vale should have caught the imagination in this way I am not certain. The originators of the two models, Roye England and Ron Rising, had different relationships between the Vale, one a local, one not so. In both cases though, there is this fascinating juxtaposition of incredible levels of detail (in the Corfe Castle layout all the roof tiles on all the buildings were individually cut out) with a creative mixing and reorganising of these perfect miniatures within semi-fictional landscapes. I find this approach to fascinating as, in some way, it mirrors my own perception and attitude to writing about and exploring the Vale of the White Horse. I want to focus in on little vignettes, case studies and keyhole views of the region’s history,  yet despite my fascination with the detail, I can’t help but set them in a landscape that is probably more my own imagining than reality. The buildings provide the ballast, but the tracks take us somewhere else.

All images of the railway layouts taken from the websites of the relevant organisations - Pendon Museum and Ormesby Hall Model Railway Group

Watercress beds - Letcombe Bassett

Nice piece of rural industrial archaeology here- the watercress beds at Letcombe Bassett. Fallen out of use now, but the concrete blocks forming the beds and leats are still visible on the Letcombe Brook between Letcombe Bassett and Letcombe Regis. Watercress (Nasturtium officinale) is a native herb and grows in on cold, running water. In the 19^th century there was quite a trade in it, with many growers in the south of England sending it up to Covent Garden where it was sold. Elsewhere in Oxfordshire, there were important beds at Ewelme – there were also beds on the down edge at Ramsbury in Wiltshire  The chalk stream at Letcombe was also used for growing cress. I can’t find out much about the chronology of the watercress growing in the village- the beds seem to be shown on the 1^st Edition OS map, but are not marked as such. The beds are clearly labelled though from the 1870s. The use of concrete for bunds and channels which can still be seen presumably indicates a phase of 20^th century investment. It was still active into the 1970s and several newspaper reports from the time write about the threat posed by the drought of 1976, and I think the beds were still being worked until the 1980s? 

Notes from the field: Letcombe Bassett

Over Christmas I got a chance to go out for a short walk with my wife and the nippers up at Letcombe Bassett, a village I’d not been to before. It has got a lovely little church and some good solid box-frame late medieval box-frame houses (which I'm planning to blog about another time).  However, what caught my eye as we headed up the hill following a footpath past the church was a series of earthworks to the south of the church. The trusty OS 1:10 000 map did not show the actual features and it wasn't clear whether the ‘Old Quarry’ label referred to that area or other adjacent lumps and bumps.

Later on I chased up the earlier OS maps, and nothing is shown even on the 19^th century First Edition map, although it was clear that the church and the earthwork sat together in a larger roughly rectangular enclosure defined by field boundaries and the edge of the churchyard. Pleasingly, with the recent freely available access to Lidar data I was able to get a better sense of the shape of the earthworks I saw. The lidar plot showed a roughly square embanked enclosure approximately the same width as the churchyard.

Stupidly it was only at this point that I thought of checking the Historic Environment Record (doh!), which indeed flagged up these earthworks describing them as an enclosure and house platforms of probable medieval date. I’d suggest that we can go a little further than that- the distinct smaller embanked enclosure and its juxtaposition immediately next to the church at the top of the village make it more likely that we are looking at the site of the manor.  The manor of Letcombe Bassett went through various hands in the medieval period, and ended up in the hands of Queen’s College (Oxford University) in the mid-16^th century. I've not had a chance to do much research, but there is a College Farm in the village. I'm guessing that as an absentee landlord, the College no longer required a manor house, and the Letcombe estates were farmed from College Farm. This would give the 16^th century as a possible point at which the putative manorial enclosure fell out of use. 

Downs and Vale: Landscape archaeology and boundaries

Lidar image of Segsbury hillfort 

Whilst rifling through the piles of British Archaeological Reports in the library the other day I came across Paula Levick's recent Later Prehistoric and Roman Landscapes on the Berkshire Downs (2015). I had to have a peek as I've long flirted with the archaeology of the Downs. When I did my Masters many moons ago I did a long essay on Iron Age/Roman field systems on the Berkshire Downs, and my first ever conference paper (Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference – Reading -1995) was a critique of Vince Gaffney and Martin Tingle's Maddle Farm Survey (the realisation that Vince was sitting in the front row did nothing for my first night nerves...). I'd spent time digging with Oxford Archaeology on the Neolithic/Bronze Age site at Tower Hill and been tangentially involved with a project at Beedon as well.

However, I hadn't really kept up to date with scholarship on the area since then late 1990s - and there has been a lot, particularly with Gary Lock's Hillforts of the Ridgeway project. The discovery of Levick's volume gave me a serendipitous opportunity to catch up. This blog entry though isn't so much about the work itself, rather an opportunity to ponder more generally about how this kind of big landscape archaeology is framed, with particular reference to the neighbouring Vale of the White Horse.

The report is based on Levick's PhD carried out in the Dept. of Continuing Education at Oxford, and is a good, thorough analysis of the Iron Age and Roman landscapes of an area of the central Downs, which includes the substantial univallate hillfort at Segsbury. She uses the immensely detailed cropmark dataset generated by English Heritage's Lambourn Down Mapping Project, which she supplements with Lidar data, geophysical survey, the traditional historic mapping resources (tithe maps/enclosure maps etc), as well as some interesting work integrating the results of metal detecting surveys carried out with the support and oversight of the Portable Antiquities Scheme. The results are a thoughtful reanalysis of the conventional LBA-RB chronology of the area, suggesting that some areas were not as empty in the BA as previously thought.

However, reading it, as someone who now situates themselves as medievalist rather than a Romanist, and someone with an interest in Vale I became increasingly aware of the incredible influence of chronological and geographic boundaries on the way these kind of landscape studies are carried out.

My first qualm is with physical edges. This work and the Maddle Farm survey both focus on the chalk uplands with very little engagement with the neighbouring Vale. There are perfectly good reasons for this- the research agenda of the MVS was to look at the hinterland of a Roman villa situated within the Downs. In the case of Levick, the key dataset was the cropmark survey – cropmarks are far better defined on the chalk downs than they are on the greensands at the Vale-Downs interface. This inevitably means that the focus of this kind of landscape study is on the area with the greatest data, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. PhD theses have to be pragmatic about defining their datasets and study regions.

Yet, the one thing we know about the use of the Downs in the medieval and post-medieval period is that administrative units and agricultural regimes crossed the topographic boundaries between Downland and Vale (between chalk and cheese). The parish boundaries of the villages along the northern scarp all extend from the greensands up to the top of the Downs – and had complex patterns of arable and pasture, with the ploughing up of much of the downland only happening relatively recently. I don't think there is any a priori reason to assume that these kinds of relationships did not exist in deeper antiquity. But by focussing in on specific topographic regions (however understandable) we miss the chance to draw out this crucial relationship. Inevitably, the different topography has meant that the archaeological record itself varies significantly, both due to differences in land-use and agriculture in the past, different geologies and environmental processes (e.g. colluvium build up etc), as well as the different impact of medieval/post-medieval post-depositional processes. To some extent, the Vale of the White Horse survey, Martin Tingle's follow-up to the Maddle Farm Survey attempted to address this issue, but there was no real integration of the two data sets.

A second implicit boundary in so much landscape work is that formed by the Romans. For many archaeologists (and I include some work I've done myself), the 1^st to 4^th century is a conceptual 'fold' in the landscape palimpsest. Many studies run from the Neolithic through to the Roman period, and others take the early medieval period as their point of departure. Although there are honourable exceptions (e.g. Peter Fowler's West Overton work and Chris Gerrard and Mick Aston's Shapwick project spring to mind, as well as Steve Rippon's Fields of Britain project) there are all too few attempts to take the longue durée approach and follow through the long-term narrative presented by the landscape. There is seemingly an underlying assumption that the arrival of the open-field systems of the central province in the later Anglo-Saxon period creates a profound point of rupture, with an erasure of earlier field systems so thorough that there is a de facto blank slate. This is a pretty major assumption (as the Fields of Britain project has outlined), but even if it was true, it begs the question, what field systems and settlement patterns were being used in the early to mid-Anglo-Saxon period? If there is continuity and development from IA to RB, why should there not be similar continuity from RB-AS? And crucially, can we recognise this in the field archaeology? Of course, there are methodological problems; as with topographic boundaries, the archaeological footprint varies- most noticeably in the massive decline in datable pottery, the chronological marker most used for analysing field walking survey and excavation work. But with the growth of OSL techniques, we should (in theory at least) be able to move beyond this limitation. There are also other data sources available, most strikingly AS charter boundaries (of which there are some good examples from this part of Berkshire). As Paula Levick has also shown there is also some potential from drawing on PAS data.

There is surely the potential for a more integrated approach to looking at the landscape of the Down and the Vale, one that tries to cross these chronological and topographic boundaries. It would be a challenge bringing together the diverse data sets, but that is half of the fun of archaeology.

More on mumming plays

I've blogged previously on mumming plays - both on this blog (see here) and on another blog I run (see here and here). This entry is following up on this and building on some wider work I'm doing on the distribution of mumming plays. The image below shows a map of the sites of recorded mumming plays within the Vale of the White Horse and its immediate hinterland. Data taken from English Ritual Drama (1967) Cawte, Helm and Peacock

Walls

Wantage Tar Barrels

There are quite a few places in England which have traditions of parading lit tar barrels around the town/village, as part of the celebrations of New Year (e.g. Allendale) or Guy Fawkes Night (Ottery St Mary; Hatherleigh). In the past this practice seems to have been quite wide spread, but has largely disappeared. It turns out that Wantage also had this tradition in the 19^th century.  According to Kathleen Philip’s splendid little book Victorian Wantage in the weeks before Guy Fawkes night, the local youth acquired big barrels from the old gasworks, rammed them full of anything that would burn and then on the night itself, lit them and rolled them around town – one group started in Newbury Street, another in Mill Street and they all met in the Square. She refers to the barrels and effigies being hurled around the statue of Alfred – this was erected in 1877, which give some chronological peg to hook this on to. Philip says that she found no written record of this tradition, but heard about solely via local informants – presumably in the 1960s. The 1822 Wantage Improvement Act explicitly forbade making  ‘any bonfire or burn any effigy or throw or let off any cracket, squib, rocket, fireball or any other firework’, which suggests that similar practices were known far earlier in the 19^th century.

It’s worth having a look at the section on Ottery St Mary in Steve Roud’s excellent book The English Year for more on the background of this wider tradition.

NB: the image is not of Wantage - it's from the Ottery St Mary celebrations

Wayland's Smithy

Hoping to be a little more on top of the blog this year so here goes with the first post of 2014. We return to the scarp slope of the Downs again, this time for a quick look at some recent blog postings by other people, about Wayland’s Smithy, the splendid Severn Cotswold long barrow that stands a couple of miles east along the Ridgeway from the White House. Unlike so many Neolithic barrows in the south, it stands more or less complete (or at least more or less completely restored), with easy access into the burial chambers. However, unlike West Kennet long barrow near Avebury, which commands clear views in all directions, Wayland’s Smithy is tucked up by a shelter belt of trees, limiting views from the barrow in most directions (although I remember once twilight visit in the middle of winter when the icy lights of Swindon could be seen glittering down in the vale). The trees also hide the barrow from the surrounding landscape, and it’s not really possible to see the barrow until the last minute if one approaches from the Ridgeway. Either way, the trees give the site a deceptively secluded feeling that belies its hilltop location. Although the 1st Edition OS map shows that the barrow itself was covered in trees in the mid – 19th century, the present shelter belt appears to have been planted at some point after 1910. Photos of the Smithy taken in 1916 by William Taunt and available on the EH Viewfinder website, show the site as it was before this tree planting and the 1960s excavation and subsequent conservation by RJC Atkinson and Vale native Stuart Piggott.

Pleasingly, Wayland’s Smithy has been featured in a number of recent blog posts. Digital Digging provides a good, basic overview of the site and its archaeology (), whilst the Landscapism Blog provides a more impressionistic perspective of the Smithy and the nearby White Horse. Finally, Dan Hicks has provided a short post on a model of Wayland’s Smithy made in the 1860s.

" A room, a room, I do presume" Mumming in the Vale

Today I went to the mumming play put on outside The Bear at Wantage. This particular production is a revival dating back to 1973, however, the text is based on one from nearby Steventon. There are a number of records of mumming plays from the Vale. The Historical Database of Folk Play Scripts lists one from Stanford-in-the –Vale and one from Childrey. The Stanford-in-the-Vale play was rather pleasingly published by the archaeologist Stuart Piggott, whose grandfather was a school master in Childrey, and first recorded by his father (Piggott 1929). He noted that the costume consisted of rags / ribbons, but not blacking up. The Childrey fragment is far shorter and has little additional information (ibid). The Steventon play which the current Wantage production is based on is not listed in the Historical Database as coming from Steventon, but rather is noted in a more general form as a “Mid-Berkshire” play. However, the on-line version of the Thomas Fairman Ordish manuscripts available via the wonderful EFDSS Full English archive make it clear that this was recorded in Steventon by Lieutenant-Colonel Barzillai Lowsley (RE) in 1888. It notes that in the Steventon play, the character usually known as Saint George is called the ‘Africky King’ – as it typical with mumming plays, the Wantage version renames this character and calls him King Alfred (reflecting local Wantage connections with Alfred).


Lowsley, B. 1888. A Glossary of Berkshire Words and Phrases English Dialect Society, London, Trubner, 1888, pp.17-22

Piggott, S. 1929. ‘Collectanea. Mummers' Plays from Berkshire, Derbyshire, Cumberland, and Isle of Man’ Folk-Lore, 40-3, 262-44

Voices from the Vale

There was recently an article in the Daily Fail about an archive of sound recordings held in the British Library made by German researchers of British POWs whilst they were in captivity in prisoner of war camps.


Pleasingly it has one recording
of a man from the Vale of the White Horse - it is of a Charles Hall from Shrivenham (Born 1882) and recorded on the 5th September 1916. He is reading the Parable of the Prodigal Son (taken from Luke chapter XV, verse 11-32). We can assume he could read and he is probably using his best 'reading' voice and day-to-day he would have spoken less formally- but there are lovely moments when he colloquialises (is that a word?) the text- I particularly like the point at 0:16s in when he says 'young'un' and then corrects himself.

Hopefully if I can find the time, I'd like to find out what happened to Mr Hall after the war was over (assuming he survived the camp).

Uffington

Uffington

Tonight we feel the muffled peal
Hang on the village like a pall;
It overwhelms the towering elms -
That death-reminding dying fall
The very sky no longer high
Comes down with the reach of all.
Imprisoned in a cage of sound
Even the trivial seems profound

John Betjeman

Fieldnames

Fieldnames from East Challow and Letcombe Regis

The Reevey;
The Harbour;
Thatcher’s Ground;
Green End;
Nineteen Acres;
Great Meadow;
Lower Fatting Ground;
Barn Corner;
Pease Close;
Great Eblands;
Brick kiln Ground;
Warman’s Close;
Giddlebarn;
Upper Bottom;
Black pits;
Hanging Hill;

Source: East Challow and Letcombe Regis enclosure map 1801 from the excellent New Landscapes: Enclosure in Berkshire site, an absolute must for all landscape fetishists and map geeks

Picture: Copyright Andrew Smith and licensed for reuse under a Creative Commons Licence.

Collecting in the Vale

I caught In Our Time yesterday with Dan Hicks and Richard Bradley talking about Victorian archaeologist, anthropologist and collector Augustus Pitt-Rivers which reminded me of the recent publication of a volume on the world archaeology collections in the Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford. Whilst focussing primarily on the overseas ethnographic collections, it also reviews the local collections. I was intrigued how relatively little from the region ended up in the museum, with the Vale being represented only by a few minor objects from Uffington and Sparsholt. I suspect though that the majority of archaeological material from Oxfordshire ended up in the Ashmolean- I’m not entirely clear how far the collections policy of the two institutions were harmonised, particularly in the later 19th and earlier 20th centuries. One of the things I need to do at some point is explore the Pitt-Rivers Museums excellent "The Other Within" proejct which reviewed their English ethnographic (as opposed to archaeological) holdings, with a view to getting my head round the material from the Vale. However, it got me thinking more widely about the history of collecting ethnographic material from the Vale. There are obviously a number of museums in the Vale, such as the Vale and Downland Museum in Wantage, the Champs Chapel Museum at East Hendred and the Tom Brown School House museum in Uffington- though I know very little about their history and the development of their collections. One collection that I do know more about is the Lavinia Smith collection which is now in the wonderful Museum of English Rural Life in Reading. Lavinia Smith was American by birth but spent much of the first half of the 20th century living in East Hendred where she built up a collection of over 400 items connected to rural life in the village. There is a nice blog posting from MERL about it here. The picture is from the Lavinia Smith collection of images still held in East Hendred - reminds me of the shop window at the beginning of Bagpuss.

Time Team arrive!

Today's episode of Time Team follows on really nicely from my last post. The site they explored is only about 3km due north of the Didcot Great Western site I mentioned in my previous posting. However, the Time Team site is located down on the sands and gravels of the Thames terraces just to the south of Abingdon. In this case there are fantastic cropmarks of the site itself and its immediate hinterland. This image shows the site in its context- it's easy to pick out the RB cropmarks shown on TT as well as prehistoric and AS features to the south-east; the whole area is also braided with palaeochannels. I do like TT but it is not always very good on context- I *think* they were saying that the site was not near (m)any other villas, which is odd as it's just down the road from Barton Court Farm- also close to a decent town at Dorchester-on-Thames and only about 3 1/2 miles from the big complex at Marcham/Frilford. They also got a bit bogged down in the whole "what is a villa?" debate- making a good stab of exploring the complexities and then getting a bit caught up in a discussion about whether it was a high-status residence OR a centre for agrarian production. Louise Revell commented in passing that the villas were the homes of the members of the urban council (curia) - is that really what we think? I know it's likely that some owners were members of the curia, but surely not all. To be fair to her, the way this kind of tv interview gets edited, the original message doesn't always come out clearly. The other issue that came to mind watching this was a reminder of how incredibly dense the known RB landscapes (or indeed the landscapes of any early period) are in this part of the Middle/Upper Thames valley. I've always rather taken it for granted having grown up relatively locally- but the more time I spend away the more I realise how unusual the surviving resource is; probably more prehistoric/RB/AS sites in a 10km x 10km block centred on Sutton Courtenay than in all of County Durham... NB; just noticed that for some reason the North Star in Steventon was thanked in the credits - despite there being no obvious on-screen carousing!

Archaeology at Didcot

Some nice news reports (here and here) of the extensive range of archaeologiacl features found at Didcot by OA as part of development-control work. There is an interesting range of prehistoric and IA/RB material as well as a little AS evidence. The site seems to lie on the slightly elevated Gault and greensand that skirt the southern edge of the Vale, and is, I think, one of the first extensive open-plan interventions on that kind of landscape. As such, it compliments rather nicely the far more extensively recorded prehistoric, IA/RB, AS landscapes that survive (primarily as cropmarks) on the gravels of the Thames around Abingdon and Dorchester.

Disc brooch

Today's little treasure is a rather splendid 7th century garnet inlaid composite disc brooch found by a metal detectorist in West Hanney (PAS description here). This is one of three similar brooches from the Vale, including one found at Milton and one at Abingdon. The example from Milton (now in the V&A) is in much better nick and gives a better impression of what the West Hanney one would have looked like. These things are always flagged up as Kentish, but given the sheer quantity of garnet inlaid material being reported through the PAS, I'm not sure we can sustain the automatic assumption that anything containing garnet is from Kent.

Broad Gauge

Photo of a fence post at Steventon - this is one a number along this field boundary that re-use stretches of broad-gauge rail. The village was of some importance in the early years of the GWR. It was the main station for Oxford until 1844 when a line from Didcot was built. It was also briefly the location of the headquarters of the GWR (between July 1842 and January 1843). The GWR replaced their broad guage tracks in 1892 when over 170 miles of mainline were converted to narrow gauge in just over two days!

Montis Albequini Conspectus

A nice view of White Horse Hill (or Monti Albequini if we want to be all Latinate about it)dating to c1738. This is an image from Francis Wise's Francis Wise's 'A letter to Dr Mead concerning some antiquities in Berkshire', published by Thomas Wood in Oxford, in which he argued that the horse was created to commemorate the victory of Alfred over the Vikings at the Battle of Edington. You can find the full text here as a Google Book- which pleasingly appears to have scanned Stuart Piggott's personal copy - Piggott has strong Vale links as his grandfather was a schoolmaster in Childrey and he retired to West Challow

Abingdon Morris

Thought I’d kick this off with Abingdon Morris, who I saw dancing out in Steventon on New Year’s day. The Vale is in the heart of traditional Morris country. Although the 20th century saw a massive revival (or even reinvention) of the Morris tradition, there are only four sides that have a more or less genuine claim to be inheritors of an unbroken local tradition, of which three (Abingdon; Bampton; Headington Quarry) are in the immediate vicinity of the Vale. In Abingdon’s case, the first records go back to at least the 18th century. They were recorded by Mary Neal, a key figure in the early Morris revival (and pleasingly for me, involved in the wonderfully odd Kibbo Kift Kindred). There is a letter recording her requesting some dancers from Abingdon to go to London to teach the dance to eager learners. The Abingdon Traditional Morris have some idiosyncracies- they don’t do stick dances unlike other sides in the Cotswold tradition. They are also always accompanied by a set of regalia- including the Horns, the Mayor’s sash and cup or chalice. These are mainly connected with the tradition of the election Mayor of Ock Street, which I’ll blog about at some point. The horns in the photos are the ones they dance out with- the originals are probably of 18th century date and have their origin in a town game (Seemingly akin to the surviving Haxey Hood) and part of a wider tradition of mock mayors. I’m getting increasingly interested in the survival of this kind of regalia in folk traditions- might be nice to pull together a project looking at it at some point in the future. I’ll blog more about the Mayor of Ock Street in the future as I’m hoping to get to this years ceremony. For about this have a look at the Roud, S. 2006. The English Year, Penguin (pp.215-17) and Chandler, K. 1993. ‘The Abingdon Morris and the Election of the Mayor of Ock Street’ in Buckland, T. and Wood, J. (eds) 1993, Aspects of British Calendar Customs Sheffield, pp. 119-36

Vale of the White Horse

Another day, another blog. Unlike my other blog, Outlandish Knight, which is an opportunity for me to randomly witter about everything under the sun (although it mainly seems to be about morris dancing and archaeology), the idea of this blog is a chance for me to focus on one particular area. I want to focus on a small area of countryside in central southern England, the Vale of the White Horse and its hinterland (the Berkshire Downs to the south and a limestone to the north, which seperates it from the Upper Thames Valley). Essentially, I’m looking at the valley and watershed of the Ock, a small river that joins the Thames at Abingdon. Historically this area constituted the northern marches of Berkshire, it has for most of my lifetime, been part of Oxfordshire. I’ve briefly explored the personal resonances this area has for me previously, so it is perhaps not surprising that I want to revisit it more extensively. My first inclination was, as a university lecturer, to develop some kind of structured academic research project that encompassed the Vale. However, on reflection I’ve shied away from this approach. This is for a number of reasons. Putting aside the inevitable pressures on my time, I struggled to frame a project that encompassed all the facets of the area I was interested in (including but not limited to prehistoric landscapes; Eric Ravilious and Paul Nash; early medieval Wessex; Goosey, Baulking and Denchworth; medieval churches, the 19th century industrialisation of agriculture; Morris dancing and mumming; place-names; Didcot power station; John Betjeman; lardy cake; bun throwing and the venerable pastime of Aunt Sally). Secondly, I wanted to avoid the strictures of constructing and presenting the material in a traditional format. Instead, I wanted to pull together something that was more impressionistic, more fluid and more deliberately ‘bitty’. In some senses, this chimes quite nicely with current conceptual developments in historical, geographical and landscape writing – I’m particularly thinking of the chorographic turn and the rise of psychogeography. Or to view it in a slightly more reactionary way, sometimes I just want to be an antiquarian rather than archaeologist. So, what can we expect on this blog? I’m not entirely sure yet; hopefully a rough-and-ready collage cum commonplace book focussing on the Vale with words, photos and probably some sounds (if I can work out the technical implications). There are some things I already know I want to write about, but I am also open to serendipity. Needless to say, there will be Morris dancing (you have been warned).

“… From this wide vale, where all our married lives We two have lived, we now are whirled away Momently clinging to the things we knew— Friends, footpaths, hedges, house and animals— Till, borne along like twigs and bits of straw, We sink below the sliding stream of time.” On Leaving Wantage – John Betjeman (1972)