On Saturday 21 June, some of us were in St Albans for the Alban Pilgrimage. In its contemporary manifestation, this involves a festive procession through the city centre accompanied by troops of children dressed as Romans and roses. As the pilgrims process, the drama of Alban’s martyrdom is enacted by a host of giant puppets. Characters in the pageant include the renegade priest Amphibalus, his self-sacrificing convert Alban, a merciless judge, a pair of Roman soldiers, and some historically dodgy lions. In other years, the appearance of a miraculous spring to quench the Saint’s thirst at the place of execution has been re-enacted with the help of the Fire Department; this year, though, the FBU were on strike.

The pilgrimage seems to grow in scale and popularity from year to year. But how old is the tradition? When were the puppets introduced? When did it become an event for tourists and the St Alban’s populace, as well as self-designated pilgrims? What explicit and implicit negotiations between cathedral and city lie behind the current event, which serves as a celebration of both? And who thought up the bit with the eyeballs?

At the start of the procession, Alban is arrested by two Roman soldiers.

Lions were scarce in third-century Verulamium, but they are a beloved feature of the modern pilgrimage.

At the Cathedral entrance, Alban prepares to meet a fate worse than Grimthorpe

As the Saint falls, the eyeballs of the executioner plunge into view….

Ursula Le Guin’s novels, most notably the Earthsea Trilogy, have millions of admirers. Less well-known is her slim volume of verses, Walking in Cornwall (1976). There are just three fairly short poems in the pamphlet, including one on Chûn hill fort and another on “Castle an Dinas and Chysauster Village”. Here’s an excerpt from the latter.

. . .

It doesn’t seem to me to defeat the point or the poignancy of the poem to note that Roger’s Tower, pictured above, is not in fact a vestige of the “Middle Ages,” but a late-eighteenth-century folly.

Ann Radcliffe  (1764-1823) is best known for her Gothic novels, including The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian. Her poetry is less familiar, and little attention seems ever to have been paid to the “Metrical Tale” published after her death, St Albans Abbey (1826). The poem deals mainly with the War of the Roses and the Battle of St Albans; but the impressive first Canto is devoted to the Abbey itself, its history and its present state. Among other things, it sheds an intriguing light on the nineteenth-century Abbey before it achieved cathedral status, and before the restorations of Grimthorpe. Here are some extended excerpts.

CANTO I.

THE ABBEY.

I.
Know ye that pale and ancient choir,
Whose Norman tower lifts its pinnacled spire?
Where the long Abbey-aisle extends
And battled roof o’er roof ascends;
Cornered with buttresses, shapely and small,
That sheltered the Saint in canopied stall;
And, lightened with hanging turrets fair,
That so proudly their dental coronals wear,
They blend with a holy, a warlike air;
While they guard the Martyr’s tomb beneath,
And patient warriors, laid in death?

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This one might best be left to the specialists and the masochists. Edmund Spenser’s The Ruines of Time (1591) is no light read (even by Spenser’s standards), but at points it achieves an almost sublime weirdness. Here we find the poet walking in pensive mood along the Thames when he encounters the wailing ghost of old Verulamium (“Verlame”). She recounts her long and painful history — from Roman foundation to Boudicca’s onslaught and the depredations of the Saxons, to the present day when nothing remains to be seen but “weeds and wasteful grass”. Not a whisper about St Alban or his shrine here (unless in that ill-fated “Image, all of massie Gold”), but much about the Earl of Leicester, and an interesting nod to William Camden. Enjoy.

It chaunced me one day beside the Shore
Of silver streaming Thamesis to be,
Nigh where the goodly Verlame stood of yore,
Of which there now remains no Memory,
Nor any little Monument to see;
By which the Traveller, that fares that way,
This once was she, may warned be to say.

There, on the other side, I did behold
A Woman sitting sorrowfully wailing,
Rending her yellow Locks, like wiry Gold,
About her Shoulders carelesly down trailing,
And Streams of Tears from her fair Eyes forth railing:
In her right Hand a broken Rod she held,
Which towards Haven she seem’d on high to weld.

Continue reading →

As part of the Past-Place project, I visited Canterbury last week, with an interest in post-war planning.

Like many cities that had been bombed during the Second World War (e.g. Exeter and Coventry), an all-encompassing post-war plan was put forward for Canterbury. Like many such schemes, Holden and Enderby’s (1945) Canterbury Town Planning Report proposed a more efficient road network – including a broad new main shopping street and inner ring road, and a fitting range of public buildings and transport hubs. In short, it contained an over-riding sense of reaching out to the ‘city of the future’; a modernist dream of metropolitan efficiency and mobility. While German bombers had inadvertently done a lot of ground work for this dream of the future, a lot of old buildings still needed to be cleared; many narrow streets needed to be widened and public spaces required systematic re-organisation, with the clean lines, efficiency and lightness of re-enforced concrete.

While these schemes are sometimes held up as a Philistine attempt to destroy the material heritage of the past, a reflection of the thoughts of post-war planners such as Charles Holden suggests a slightly different view. In 1957, Holden said that “I don’t seek for a style, either ancient or modern … I want an architecture which is through and through a good building; a building planned for specific purpose, constructed in the method and use of materials, old or new, most appropriate to the purpose the building has to serve”. His Plan for Canterbury did not go down very well with the locals, but many of Holden’s buildings around the country came to be strongly supported by preservation lobbyists and practitioners alike. For instance, many of his London Underground stations are now protected under heritage law, as is Charles Holden’s most famous building, the University of London’s Senate House. As his writings make clear, Holden did not seek to ‘destroy the past’. Rather, his attitude towards ‘heritage’ was more focussed on use and meaning than on tangible constructions. This is a heritage of function rather than one of built form. The considerable public debate and conflict over the post-war plan for Canterbury, therefore, was not simply about the ‘preservation’ and ‘destruction’ of heritage, but was rather focussed on what heritage was; how the past is presenced in the built landscape of the city; a heritage of function, and the function (or purpose) of heritage; and of the ‘future heritage’ that people in post-war Canterbury desired to pass on.

Within the public realm, the debate over the Canterbury plan raged on during the Summer of 1945 through a series of public meetings and within the letters pages and editorials of local newspapers (especially the Kentish Gazette). The local elections of November 1945 saw a clean sweep of victories for candidates of the ‘Canterbury Citizens Defence Association’ (CCDA), who had led the opposition to the sweeping plans of Charles Holden (et al).; the Canterbury Plan seemed to be dead – or was it? Despite some of the rhetoric of their proclamations, the CCDA were actually quite supportive of some of the ‘sweeping aside’ of old buildings and routeways. It was the amount of land under orders of compulsory purchase and, most of all, the apparent practices of central planners riding rough-shod over local rights of Freehold that seemed to raise the hackles of the CCDA. The CCDA put forward their own plan – there is still a ring road and a lot of development around the centre of Canterbury, but the re-development largely follows lines of pre-existing freehold patterns. The Plan that was finally settled upon was the Wilson Plan of 1949, which moved the ring road inside the old city walls and included a large roundabout in the very centre, just off the High Street (around Jewry Lane/White Horse Lane). The Wilson Plan was never fully implemented, leaving Canterbury as it is found today: a hybrid of partially implemented ‘comprehensive plans’, the changing visions of what Canterbury should look like, and the unplanned-for eventualities of finance, investment and happenstance.

The vestiges of this heritage of future heritage can be seen today in the buildings and streetscapes of the city. Along Northgate, for instance, the ‘ghost’ of a planned-for wide boulevard can still be seen next to St John’s Hospital, where a Veterinary practice and a William Hill Bookmakers were built during the 1950s(?) to sit along the side of a widened street that was never built (see photos below). Had this street been built, then the St John’s Hospital would have been demolished – indeed, the older buildings actually overlap very slightly with the footprint of 1950s re-build.

It is within these hybrid streetscapes that the heritage of heritage planning can be seen – the prospective heritage of the past.

[This is a re-blog from David Harvey’s ‘Geographies of Heritage’ site]

I have previously posted a few items on issues of national heritage, and of how heritage becomes a potent weapon in proverbial battles within the Atlantic archipelago – with relations between Ireland and the UK, or the experience of a sense of Scottish nationhood within the polity of the United Kingdom. Indeed, mirroring the Queen’s heritage-heavy visit to Ireland in 2011, the Irish President this week has been visiting London with both ‘sides’ keen to construct and support a singular heritage narrative that emphasises a cordial partnership between a diversity of flavours, amid a broader sense of common inheritance. With more dissonant overtones, this summer will also see the commemoration of the Battle of Bannockburn as a centre-point of claims to a Scottish heritage that is distinct from and perhaps antagonistic to a sense of Britishness. But this is a ‘heritage battle’ in which no shots will be fired, and no-one will get hurt.

In Eastern Europe, meanwhile, recent weeks have witnessed an altogether more serious and troubling confrontation over issues of heritage; between Russia and Ukraine. These recent experiences can be related to heritage issues on two levels. Firstly, these events have displayed the very real contemporary power of purposefully conjured and deployed heritage images: from the calculated use of notions of the Peoples’ will and democratic mandates for political circumstance, to the conscious use of terms regarding fascists, and revolutionaries. Heritage provides a deep rhetorical resource that has tremendous affective power. Secondly, however, the Post-Soviet heritage experience has long provided fertile ground for such metaphorical and increasingly real conflicts.

One of the key elements of Post-Soviet experience over the last 25 years has been the rise of seemingly cut-and-dried senses of nationhood. Indeed, a sense of national identity has long been one of the key axes through which change in the 1980s and 1990s was prompted and occurred – arguably, it was a crucial element in the break-up of the old system and the expansion of social freedoms. But this also left a residue in the form of heritage being seen as easily categorise-able into supposedly stable and homogenous national units. In trying to account for and manage the numerous elements of Second World War and Soviet-era sites and artefacts that litter the region, many heritage resources in the Baltic States and Eastern Europe have been categorised – implicitly or explicitly – as heritage that is not ours: German cemeteries, Cold War era bunkers, Soviet buildings and institutions. Whether military installations or collective farm buildings, this has become a category that is specifically not of the nation state in which they are located, be it Estonia, Moldova or in the Crimea.

Such a narrative places the nation at the heart of all heritages and as the key axis of identity that all citizens should recognise as their primary loyalty. On the face of it, the question of what we should do with these items of Soviet heritage – a heritage that is not ours – seems fair: another group of people left it here and we don’t want it. But there are pitfalls. Should Scotland deny its Norse heritage on the basis that it represents a group of raiders that we would rather forget? Should Britain deny its Neolithic heritage on the basis that the builders of Stonehenge would not have known the words to the national anthem? The temporal proximity, specific power relations and rawness of feeling of the events in Eastern Europe gives a different quality to the issue in comparison with the Neolithic in Britain, but there is still a lesson to be learnt, in terms of how heritage is categorised and claimed – or specifically not claimed.

The process of delineating a category of heritage that ‘is not ours’ seems to invoke heritage as something to be rejected. One could argue, however, that the act of rejecting the heritage as specifically ‘not ours’ is actually a powerful means through which to claim it as being most definitely ours: ours to interpret and present in a certain manner – through a process of rejection. And of course, the act of rejecting heritage tacitly invites another group to claim ownership. Indeed, the act of rejection – whether of physical artefacts and buildings, or languages, practices and customs – arguably paves the ground that legitimises a set of practical ‘rescue’ procedures by whoever is making this claim of ownership. They perhaps may even send in a gang of hooded militia-men to undertake this rescue operation.

It has taken the best part of a century for the Irish and UK Governments to agree on a common ‘heritage message’, and many thousands of people have died in the process. As the Irish President Michael D Higgins put it, during a speech in Westminster on the 8th April 2014: “[A]s both our islands enter periods of important centenaries we …. must reflect on the ethical importance of respecting different but deeply interwoven narratives. Such reflection will offer us an opportunity to craft a bright future on the …. common ground we share and where we differ … to have respectful empathy for each other”. President Higgins was referring to the on-going and up-coming Centenaries of the First World War and the Dublin Easter Uprising, both of which have often been used to cement the building of boundaries in the intervening 100 years. Rather than laying the foundations for yet more walls and boundaries, let us hope that heritage might be used in a more creative and peaceful means for the sake of people in Eastern Europe.

Inaugurating a new tradition on the “Past in its Place” blog: Poem of the Week. Check back each week for a piece of immortal (or, sometimes, all too mortal) verse treating one of our Sites of Memory.

To begin with, here’s the Romantic poet Anna Seward’s “Llangollen Vale,” composed in 1795 following the Romantic poet’s visit to the celebrated Ladies of Plas Newydd,  Sarah Ponsonby and Lady Eleanor Butler. The Ladies and their “Fairy Palace” make their appearance a little more than midway through this 168-line poem, following a stirring if oddly inconclusive account of Glyndwr’s rebellion. The weepy, superstitious monks of Valle Crucis get a look-in toward the end. But, Seward wonders, did any young monastic lip ever wear “gay Eleanora’s smile”?

LLANGOLLEN VALE 

Luxuriant Vale, thy country’s early boast,
What time great GLENDOUR gave thy scenes to Fame;
Taught the proud numbers of the English Host,
How vain their vaunted force, when Freedom’s flame
Fir’d him to brave the Myriads he abhorr’d,
Wing’d his unerring shaft, and edg’d his victor sword.

Here first those orbs unclosing drank the light,
Cambria’s bright stars, the meteors of her Foes;
What dread and dubious omens mark’d the night,
That lour’d ere yet his natal morn arose!
The Steeds paternal, on their cavern’d floor,
Foaming, and horror-struck, “fret fetlock-deep in gore.”

PLAGUE, in her livid hand, o’er all the Isle,
Shook her dark flag, impure with fetid stains;
While “DEATH, on his pale Horse,” with baleful smile,
Smote with its blasting hoof the frighted plains.
Soon thro’ the grass-grown streets, in silence led,
Slow moves the midnight Cart, heapt with the naked Dead.

Yet in the festal dawn of Richard’s reign,
Thy gallant GLENDOUR’S sunny prime arose;
Virtuous, tho’ gay, in that Circean fane,
Bright Science twin’d her circlet round his brows;
Nor cou’d the youthful, rash, luxurious King
Dissolve the Hero’s worth on his Icarian wing.

Sudden it drops on its meridian flight!—
Ah! hapless Richard! never didst thou aim
To crush primeval Britons with thy might,
And their brave Glendour’s tears embalm thy name.
Back from thy victor-Rival’s vaunting Throng,
Sorrowing, and stern, he sinks LLANGOLLEN’S shades among.

Soon, in imperious Henry’s dazzled eyes,
The guardian bounds of just Dominion melt;
His scarce-hop’d crown imperfect bliss supplies,
Till Cambria’s vassalage be deeply felt.
Now up her craggy steeps, in long array,
Swarm his exulting Bands, impatient for the fray.

Lo! thro’ the gloomy night, with angry blaze,
Trails the fierce Comet, and alarms the Stars;
Each waning Orb withdraws its glancing rays,
Save the red Planet, that delights in wars.
Then, with broad eyes upturn’d, and starting hair,
Gaze the astonish’d Crowd upon its vengeful glare.

Gleams the wan Morn, and thro’ LLANGOLLEN’S Vale
Sees the proud Armies streaming o’er her meads.
Her frighted Echos warning sounds assail,
Loud, in the rattling cars, the neighing steeds;
The doubling drums, the trumpet’s piercing breath,
And all the ensigns dread of havoc, wounds, and death.

High on a hill as shrinking CAMBRIA stood,
And watch’d the onset of th’ unequal fray,
She saw her Deva, stain’d with warrior-blood,
Lave the pale rocks, and wind its fateful way
Thro’ meads, and glens, and wild woods, echoing far
The din of clashing arms, and furious shout of war.

From rock to rock, with loud acclaim, she sprung,
While from her CHIEF the routed Legions fled;
Saw Deva roll their slaughter’d heaps among,
The check’d waves eddying round the ghastly dead;
Saw, in that hour, her own LLANGOLLEN claim
Thermopylae’s bright wreath, and aye-enduring fame.

Thus, consecrate to GLORY. — Then arose
A milder lustre in its blooming maze;
Thro’ the green glens, where lucid Deva flows,
Rapt Cambria listens with enthusiast gaze,
While more enchanting sounds her ear assail,
Than thrill’d on Sorga’s bank, the Love-devoted Vale.

‘Mid the gay towers on steep Din’s Branna’s cone,
Her HOEL’S breast the fair MIFANWY fires.—
O! Harp of Cambria, never hast thou known
Notes more mellifluent floating o’er the wires,
Than when thy Bard this brighter Laura sung,
And with his ill-starr’d love LLANGOLLEN’S echoes rung.

Tho’ Genius, Love, and Truth inspire the strains,
Thro’ Hoel’s veins tho’ blood illustrious flows,
Hard as th’ Eglwyseg rocks her heart remains,
Her smile a sun-beam playing on their snows;
And nought avails the Poet’s warbled claim,
But, by his well-sung woes, to purchase deathless fame.

Thus consecrate to LOVE, in ages flown,—
Long ages fled Din’s-Branna’s ruins show,
Bleak as they stand upon their steepy cone,
The crown and contrast of the VALE below,
That, screen’d by mural rocks, with pride displays
Beauty’s romantic pomp in every sylvan maze.

Now with a vestal lustre glows the VALE,
Thine, sacred FRIENDSHIP, permanent as pure;
In vain the stern Authorities assail,
In vain Persuasion spreads her silken lure,
High-born, and high-endow’d, the peerless Twain,
Pant for coy Nature’s charms ‘mid silent dale, and plain.

Thro’ ELEANORA, and her ZARA’S mind,
Early tho’genius, taste, and fancy flow’d,
Tho’ all the graceful Arts their powers combin’d,
And her last polish brilliant Life bestow’d,
The lavish Promiser, in Youth’s soft morn,
Pride, Pomp, and Love, her friends, the sweet Enthusiasts scorn.

Then rose the Fairy Palace of the Vale,
Then bloom’d around it the Arcadian bowers;
Screen’d from the storms of Winter, cold and pale,
Screen’d from the fervours of the sultry hours,
Circling the lawny crescent, soon they rose,
To letter’d ease devote, and Friendship’s blest repose.

Smiling they rose beneath the plastic hand
Of Energy, and Taste; — nor only they,
Obedient Science hears the mild command,
Brings every gift that speeds the tardy day,
Whate’er the pencil sheds in vivid hues,
Th’ historic tome reveals, or sings the raptured Muse.

How sweet to enter, at the twilight grey,
The dear, minute Lyceum of the Dome,
When, thro’ the colour’d crystal, glares the ray,
Sanguine and solemn ‘mid the gathering gloom,
While glow-worm lamps diffuse a pale, green light,
Such as in mossy lanes illume the starless night.

Then the coy Scene, by deep’ning veils o’erdrawn,
In shadowy elegance seems lovelier still;
Tall shrubs, that skirt the semi-lunar lawn,
Dark woods, that curtain the opposing hill;
While o’er their brows the bare cliff faintly gleams,
And, from its paly edge, the evening-diamond streams.

What strains Aeolian thrill the dusk expanse,
As rising gales with gentle murmurs play,
Wake the loud chords, or every sense intrance,
While in subsiding winds they sink away!
Like distant choirs, “when pealing organs blow,”
And melting voices blend, majestically slow.

“But ah! what hand can touch the strings so fine,
Who up the lofty diapason roll
Such sweet, such sad, such solemn airs divine,
Then let them down again into the soul!”
The prouder sex as soon, with virtue calm,
Might win from this bright Pair pure Friendship’s spotless palm.

What boasts Tradition, what th’ historic Theme,
Stands it in all their chronicles confest
Where the soul’s glory shines with clearer beam,
Than in our sea-zon’d bulwark of the West,
When, in this Cambrian Valley, Virtue shows
Where, in her own soft sex, its steadiest lustre glows?

Say, ivied VALLE CRUCIS, time-decay’d,
Dim on the brink of Deva’s wandering floods,
Your riv’d arch glimmering thro’ the tangled glade,
Your grey hills towering o’er your night of woods,
Deep in the Vale’s recesses as you stand,
And, desolately great, the rising sigh command,

Say, lonely, ruin’d Pile, when former years
Saw your pale Train at midnight altars bow;
Saw SUPERSTITION frown upon the tears
That mourn’d the rash irrevocable vow,
Wore one young lip gay ELEANORA’S smile?
Did ZARA’S look serene one tedious hour beguile?

For your sad Sons, nor Science wak’d her powers;
Nor e’er did Art her lively spells display;
But the grim IDOL vainly lash’d the hours
That dragg’d the mute, and melancholy day;
Dropt her dark cowl on each devoted head,
That o’er the breathing Corse a pall eternal spread.

This gentle Pair no glooms of thought infest,
Nor Bigotry, nor Envy’s sullen gleam
Shed withering influence on the effort blest,
Which most should win the other’s dear esteem,
By added knowledge, by endowment high,
By Charity’s warm boon, and Pity’s soothing sigh.

Then how should Summer-day or Winter-night,
Seem long to them who thus can wing their hours!
O! ne’er may Pain, or Sorrow’s cruel blight,
Breathe the dark mildew thro’ these lovely bowers,
But lengthen’d Life subside in soft decay,
Illum’d by rising Hope, and Faith’s pervading ray.

May one kind ice-bolt, from the mortal stores,
Arrest each vital current as it flows,
That no sad course of desolated hours
Here vainly nurse the unsubsiding woes!
While all who honour Virtue, gently mourn
LLANGOLLEN’S VANISHED PAIR, and wreath their sacred urn.

Reading Howard’s refelctions of his Dartmoor visit last weekend reminded me of my recent field trip with some of my final year undergraduates last October: The weather forecast was atrocious, with bands of heavy rain sweeping across the south west, getting heavier in the afternoon. As it turned out, things started off grey and cloudy, but cleared up after lunch with the sunshine helping to take the edge off the keen SSE winds. We headed off from Bennett’s Cross, leaving the coach behind to go over Birch Tor, and on to Hookney Tor.

We came across a very docile group of ‘Highland’ Cattle, acting as key ‘countryside curators’, managing the land to maintain a desired look and feel of this National landscape. After a stop at Grimspound and Headland Warren, we walked back towards the coach through the old industrial areas of Golden Dagger, Vitifer and Birch Tor mines – and could make out (vaguely) some of the shapes of the Devil’s Playing Cards – and it struck me that the it was almost exactly 375 years to the day since (legend has it) these ‘Devilish enclosures’ got their name….

Sunday 21st October 1638 was stormy day, with heavy rain and strong winds. While some locals were gathered at the Tavistock Inn at Poundsgate, the Devil came in for a swift half – they knew it was the Devil, since he had cloven hooves, and he paid for his pint using ‘solid gold coins’ that turned to dry leaves as soon as he left! Other locals sheltered from the storm in the church in Widecombe-in-the-Moor – these included Jan Richards, a well-known local gambler who was playing cards at the back of the church. All of a sudden, the Devil struck – he smashed through the roof of the church and plucked Jan Richards from his pew. Poor old Jan was carried over the hills, never to be seen again – except that he dropped his playing cards: 4 aces that he’d hidden up his sleeve. These 4 aces landed on the hillside between Challacombe and the Warren House Inn, and can still be seen to this day – as 4 small enclosures that are (very roughly) in the shape of the 4 suits of a pack of cards.

This is a nice story – various versions of which can be found, repeated in several ‘folk tale’ books and websites about Dartmoor. Of course, it isn’t ‘true’ – the 4 enclosures might be physical present, but they cannot be the remnants of a pack of cards. And of course the story of the Devil, smashing his way in to Widecombe Church is just a fairy tale – right?

Sunday 21st October 1638 was stormy day, with heavy rain and strong winds. Many locals sheltered from the storm in the church in Widecombe-in-the-Moor. All of a sudden, the church roof comes crashing down, as a pinnacle from one of the towers topples and smashes through the ancient roof of the nave. The falling debris kills 4 people, including the head warrener from the rabbit farms close to Warren House Inn. This is all recorded in the church records, and is one of the earliest archival records of what is thought to be ball lightening – as a very real ‘thunder bolt’ strikes one of the pinnacles of Widecombe church, sending it crashing through the roof onto the parishioners below.

Here we see a nice example of how ‘real memory’ and ‘folk memory’ can come together through an invocation of landscape; oral histories used to account for the physical artefacts of landscape enclosures – 4 small distinct enclosures acting as a totem through which an important event of folk memory can be prompted, instilled and legitimated: folk memories of extraordinary events, working alongside an everyday requirement to make sense of the landscape, as a commonplace and non-elite space. At very least there seems to be ‘some truth’ in the folk tales of the Devil wreaking havoc at Widecombe church. By giving more credence to the “extra-ordinary” possibilities and experiences of how ordinary people engage with the world around them, however, maybe it is possible to see the story of the Devil’s Playing Cards as providing an authentic means through which to understand how heritage works? Indeed, when placed within the context of the religious upheavals of the mid-seventeenth century, the ‘real’ possibility of devilish intervention in peoples’ lives, and of the possibility of direct experience of ‘evil’, then it could be argued that the story of the Devil paying a visit to Widecombe represents the ‘whole truth’ of the matter.

Calmly negotiating the inclement weather that we have had recently, the Research Team for the Past in its Place project (http://pastplace.exeter.ac.uk/) visited Norwich a few weeks ago. My own ‘memories’ of Norwich revolve around a post-A-Level boat trip with nine friends and 20 crates of Newcastle Brown Ale (2 each) on the Norfolk Broads. This was not exactly a glorious memory to be proud of, so I was very keen to return to Norwich partly in order to apologise to anyone who might have remembered my last visit.

My memory of Norfolk was that it was topographically quite flat – I guess this is the impression that many people have of East Anglia more broadly. With this in mind, therefore, something that struck me as odd when I was doing some preparatory reading for the trip was a reference to the city being poorly fortified, partly due to it being overlooked by a prominent hill: “Norwich is like a great volume with a bad cover, having at best but parchment walls about it. Nor can it with much cost and time be effectually fortified, under the frowning brow of Mousehold-hill, hanging over it”. The passage is from Francis Blomefield’s (1806) Topographical History of the County of Norfolk, volume 3: History of the City and County of Norwich, part 1, (pages 220-265). According to Blomefield, who draws heavily from Alexander Neville’s Norfolkes Furies (published in 1575) the prominence of this hill, which provided a commanding prospect over the City, played a key role in Kett’s Rebellion of 1549.

Kett’s Rebellion (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kett%27s_Rebellion for a general history), is commemorated through several features of the present cityscape of Norwich: Kett’s Hill Bakery and Kett’s Tavern are both situated on Kett’s Hill (the B1140), leading north from the city centre towards Mousehold Heath. And, despite being less than 50m above sea level, the relative topography of the hill certainly does provide a commanding prospect of the city, witnessed by an official Ordnance Survey ‘viewpoint’ on the 1:25,000 scale Explorer Map (OL40).

On the south side of Kett’s Hill Road, is an overgrown park overlooking the gas works. Originally donated to the city council by an anonymous benefactor in 1970, the park was called Jubilee Heights until 1985 when it was renamed Ketts Heights, and was cleared and ‘restored’ for the enjoyment of all the residents of Norwich.

On the north side of Kett’s Hill, however, the land is cleared of trees and undergrowth, and from the Ordnance Survey’s viewpoint, one can see across the city centre, over the ‘parchment walls’ towards Bishopsgate and other streets named by Neville and Blomefield as being the scenes where some of the fiercest hostilities took place in 1549.

Reading Neville’s and Blomefield’s descriptions of Kett’s Rebellion, the topography of the city, and the seeming porousness of its walls appears to be a significant factor in the events as they unfolded. Skirmishes took place along streets that could be clearly seen; confrontations occurred in the dense urban quarters that could be surveyed from on high; while artillery manoeuvres were observed from the safety of the hill. Sitting on this prominent height more than 450 years later, it is the actual view, and the experience of a sort-of-aerial survey of the landscape, possible from this southern edge of Mousehold Heath, which is one of the key aspects of the Rebellion’s heritage.

Graffiti on Norwich Castle (2014)