I left a cliff-hanger behind me last time… Months of stress and effort getting the house spruce enough to sell, trying to find somewhere else, and then… we lost our buyer. So what happened next?

Well, before I delve into the uncomfortable memories of my recent past, first of all - writing news! The Resistance Book Club, a brand new Ellie Curzon saga, was published two weeks ago, and it’s already earned itself a bestseller flag. Ellie is actually me and my friend Catherine Curzon, and we write WW2 sagas with plenty of intrigue, courage, and heart-breaking scenes which will have you reaching for your handkerchief.

ANYWAY! Let’s go back to January, earlier this year. There’s rain, rain, and more rain, and The Resistance Book Club was still just a manuscript (albeit one covered in track changes). We sent it to the editor in the middle of the month, and I was confident that I’d be moving in February or March, so deadlines were moved around and all was well, until…. We lost the buyer.

Anyone trying to move house will know what a heart-stopping, gut-clenching, rage-inducing moment that is. But like all worst-case scenarios coming to pass, it was followed by an odd sense of relief. The one thing we’d feared the most had come true, so we didn’t need to worry about the prospect of it anymore. We just now needed to sort everything out. And hope that our vendor wouldn’t get impatient and put their house back on the market….

So, once more, we cleaned and tidied the house from top to bottom. How does my cat generate so much fur? Where do all these shoes come from? What’s that terrible smell? We’d packed up so many things, thinking that our move was imminent, that there were now piles of boxes everywhere - those pink ones with a happy lady smiling and waving from inside a removal van. Reader, I was not smiling. The estate agents assured us that prospective buyers would see the boxes as a good sign - “these people are keen to move!” Well, yes, I am, because we’ve been trapped inside this weird limbo where I don’t even know who I am anymore for MONTHS! I’m fed up of it! I want to move! I’ll even move into the shed if I have to! Of course, the downside of looking keen is that someone could go in with a cheeky low offer, hoping to exploit our desperation.

I was feeling confident because the first time round, we found two potential buyers on the first and only day of viewing, so when the estate agent breathlessly messaged me to say that we had loads of viewers for our open house, I allowed myself to grin, just a tiny bit. The day came, and my partner and I shuffled off to a Vietnamese café for a delicious breakfast, where we tried to ignore our Ring doorbell going off every ten minutes as viewers came and went.

But alas! Despite all those strangers walking across our freshly-vac’d carpets to stare judgmentally at our bathroom, not one offer did we receive. OH GOD. My small grin vanished and I swear my fine lines got deeper.

This wasn’t going to be a doddle after all.

Estate agents prefer the house to be empty of people when they show viewers round, so prospective buyers can ask honest questions. As I work from home, there were several rainy afternoons where I decamped to the peaceful art deco public library at the end of our road.

I was rapidly giving up hope, but tried very hard to be chipper, and just dive into work stuff and writing stuff, trying to distract myself from how miserable the entire process was. Few, if any, houses look their best in torrential rain, and I’d started looking at Rightmove again, seeing if there were any back-up options in case our vendor pulled out. Things did not look positive in that direction - in fact, it’s safe to say, that our vendor was, understandably, absolutely hopping mad - so as the viewings dragged on and on, with no one biting, and the sky continued heavy and grey, our vendor’s estate agent decided to step in a list the house as well. So I booked the afternoon off work (feeling resentful and wishing I could use my leave to do something fun for a change) and a very young man turned up and took photos which somehow also read the dimensions of the rooms.

Another viewing was coming up and my partner and I went to Mount Fuji. No, we didn’t jet off to Japan, but we did go for lunch at our favourite Japanese restaurant. It just so happened that they were serving up ehomaki - lucky direction sushi rolls. We each had one, turning to face this year’s lucky direction as we chewed, just as the Ring app told us the viewers had arrived back at our house.

AND THEN…. just before the second estate agent listed the house, we got two offers on the same day. The lucky direction sushi rolls worked - maybe!

I cannot express how relieved I was. Nor can I express how relieved our vendor was. Perhaps they were even more relieved than us. Everyone was relieved. Big sighs, and smiles. Well, sort of, like when a baby smiles and no one’s sure if they’re happy or if it’s just wind.

The buyer agreed to move in at the end of March or in early April, so things were going well again. But… oh, it must’ve been wind, after all. Because, once again, everything dragged on - one surveyor came, then another, and we were threatened with even more…. Events unfolding thousands of miles away managed to impact on our lives - thanks to a certain orange man deciding to attack Iran, mortgage rates shot up.1 We’d got a very nice deal back when rates were low early in the year, but as time ticked on, it was getting closer and closer to expiring. There were novel edits to get done, and I was having to commit to dates without knowing if I’d be buried in boxes while trying to hit deadlines. I had to put off starting medication, and really felt I would’ve been handling things a lot better if my brain wasn’t alternately whizzing around at hundred miles hour or shutting down - but how could I be sure if the meds were working when I was caught up in such a stressful situation? I’d wanted to go away for a few days at Easter as, by this point, I was worn to a frazzle and desperately needed a break, but couldn’t go anywhere in case the move happened at the last minute. We got so far as booking a removal lorry, only for that to fall on its bum as we waited for someone’s funds to clear, and it cost me my £500 removals deposit.

Then, with only days to spare and with tension marginally worse than a driving test, suddenly everything came good. Funds were ready, our mortgage had miraculously been extended, the removal lorry was booked, and all was well. Apart from the terrible backache I’d got from picking up a heavy box. And the tennis elbow. And the appointment for shockwave treatment for my painful feet, which should’ve started on the very day we were due to move house! Everything hurt, and I barely slept for a week, but I didn’t care anymore. I just wanted to move and get the next stage of our lives under way.2

Moving day went by in a hectic blur. After months on end of everything going wrong, I was floored when we managed to get space outside our house for the removal van to park. Yes, the removal men made comments like, “that’s a lot of stuff,” and “Do you really want to bring all these plants from the garden?” but it got done in the end. Five Billy bookcases were carefully inched out of a first-floor window into our front garden, and after they moved the fridge, I found a fork that had been missing for years. Yes, I did have a tiny bit of a meltdown when I discovered that my emergency moving-in box, containing the kettle, tea, mugs, biscuits, Flash wipes, loo roll, and other vital British standbys, had been packed in the lorry and I wouldn’t see it until late the next day. It was done. We had moved out.

My partner and I did an epic clean. I thought I’d feel sad to say goodbye to the home we’d lived in for sixteen and a half years, but, after deciding to move out over a year before, bit by bit, square foot-by-square foot, it’d ceased to be ours. Once all our stuff had gone, apart from a last few balls of fluff on the stairs (which we hoovered up, I promise), the rooms echoed, and it was now just a shell. A nice shell, with two massive bedrooms, a very long garden where our cats had loved to sunbathe, and memories of parties with friends who are long gone, but it wasn’t ours anymore. Another house, three miles away, almost in the countryside, awaited us. Our new home.

Moving thoughts

I’ll be honest, the process was an utter nightmare, and I have views on this:

• In the West Midlands, but apparently not in many other parts of the UK, they like to have open house viewings, where everyone piles in and they get as many people through the door as they can in an hour or two. A good idea, but then the upshot of this is that estate agents then expect a yes or no the following day. And that’s the case even if you go for a viewing and you’re the only person seeing it then. I assume this is to speed things up and not have loads of hanging about - plus it means vendors are impressed with how fast everything’s going. But if people can’t view several houses over the space of a few weeks, then sit down with a cuppa and mull over everything they’ve seen and then decide, surely this runs the risk of people making rash decisions, then dropping out quite far into the process because they’ve got cold feet?

• Some estate agents are great big fibbers! When we saw the 1930s house with the massive kitchen, I was unable to hide my enthusiasm. Perhaps I should’ve done, although surely it helps if you show you’re interested? I was told to get my offer in first thing on the next working day, and… <estate agent looks at his watch… sucks in a breath like a mechanic when he sees the state of your brake pads…> “Welllllll…. we’ve got another viewing in about ten minutes… it’s a popular house. You’ve got to get that offer in as early as you can on Monday!” We’d parked a little way down the road and sat in our car after the viewing talking about the house. We decided to do a bit of spying and sit and wait to see who we were up against, like coppers on a stakeout. Instead of seeing any viewers, we saw the estate agent leaving the house, crossing the road to his car… and driving off! Smoke followed him up the road from his pants that were clearly on fire!3

• Packing up lots of stuff early in the process helped us to declutter, and also meant that we didn’t have an exhausting, hectic time packing hundreds of things in a matter of days. But the downside was that all our Christmas decs were in a storage unit when they should’ve been making our house festive.

• Putting the cat in a cattery for a few of nights over the move meant we didn’t accidentally pack him into a box, and we had time to unpack a bit before we brought him into his new abode. Settling him in is a whole other story, of course.

• Find out well in advance how long it’ll take to get your hands on your deposit. You might need to give notice of a week or more, and if everything’s left to the last minute, the entire chain could collapse because your hard-earned money is held up by someone in Canary Wharf. And contact your bank in advance about transferring any cash on the day, so you know if there’s any daily limits, and also, how to contact them to do it.

• Ultimately, everyone involved wants the move to be a success. The estate agents don’t get their commission, the removal firm don’t get paid, and the mortgage advisor doesn’t get their dosh if it all falls on its sorry bum. The solicitors still get paid, of course, but then they have to field very grumpy clients, so they don’t want it to all go wrong either.

• Try to factor in time to relax and have some sort of holiday. Even if it’s only spending one night away somewhere, do it. It’s horrendously stressful and you don’t want to be the person crying like a toddler (erm… like I did) because their chocolate digestives are buried somewhere in the back of a lorry.

• Eat an ehomaki sushi roll!

Out now!

Visit a little bookshop down a cobbled street in a Normandy village and uncover the secrets from its past.

The Resistance Book Club is the bestselling, first instalment of our brand new WW2 saga series! Written by me and Catherine Curzon, under our joint pen-name, Ellie Curzon. Available in ebook, paperback, audiobook, and in Kindle Unlimited. Buy your copy now!

About me

I co-write WW2 saga fiction with my friend Catherine Curzon under our joint pen name, Ellie Curzon.

I’ve written two books on Victorian crime and forensics, and articles for Fortean Times and Family Tree magazine. I’ve appeared on BBC1’s Murder, Mystery and My Family, and BBC Radio 4’s Punt PI. I live in the West Midlands with a cat who looks like a Viking.

You can subscribe to this newsletter for free, or if you love what you’ve read and can find some spare coins down the back of the sofa, you can upgrade to a paid subscription.

Roads to the Past is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

And if you just want to chuck a couple of coins my way, you can give me a one-off tip!

Buy me a cuppa at Ko-Fi!

And hey, why not share the newsletter with like-minded chums?

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I started my newsletter last year with good intentions. “At last, I’ve found a place to share pics and intriguing info about random places I visit!” But not long after I started it, we decided to move house.

The Sunday trips to interesting places turned into Sunday trips to Access self-storage and the local municipal tip. And the spare time I had (between the day job and my writing job) to pen my newsletter evaporated as I rounded up stuff for said storage and tip trips, and spent hours… days??? weeks??? months???! scrolling on Rightmove and visiting houses. The creative part of my brain shrivelled - partly with stress, and partly because each time I saw a house, whether on Rightmove or in person, I needed my imagination to project what life would be like in the place. What I would be like in the place. So I couldn’t even come up with ideas for newsletters, because I needed to preserve what creative space I had left after that for writing novels that pay the bills.

I wondered at first if I should do posts about Amusing Houses We Have Visited, but that wouldn’t be very kind, so… no. And I didn’t have flippin’ time to write about it anyway. There were solicitor emails — SO. MANY. SOLICITOR. EMAILS. There were surveys. There were mortgage advisors. There were insurance advisors. And estate agents. Oh, blimey, estate agents. And there were sellers and buyers and viewers and Google Streetview (“that bloody Amazon van is parked right in front — I can’t see if that gutter’s sagging!”), and photos taken at flattering angles with fish-eye lenses that bear little relation to reality. There were phone calls which I had to take on my computer so I could use captions because of that whole “hey, actually, I’m deaf” business. And there was stress. So much stress!

And there was my foot, which I damaged in May last year, and I ended up hobbling around in pain on a walking stick to visit houses.

So let’s go back to July last year and sell a house!

Who will buy my sweet terraced house?

Former industrial powerhouses like Birmingham and the Black Country erupted at the same time that red brick terraced houses were all the rage (if you’re in the US, they’re like your “row houses”). Huge swathes of the area are covered with them. They’re cheap (mostly) bijou (if you retain original features and not go too mad with uPVC), and usually convenient for bus or even tram and train routes. Excellent! They’re popular with landlords and first-time buyers as well. Marvellous.

After spending three or four months decluttering — hence all those trips to the tip and the storage unit — and trips to B&Q, we were ready to put the house on the market. The estate agent was enthusiastic. “It needs a little bit of work, but houses like this are really popular.” We had two viewers on the first viewing, and both put in offers. What a brilliant start! This whole house-buying-and-selling malarkey is easy! Offer accepted, and off we go!

That first viewing day was also our first viewing day. We’d gone to the area around the gorgeous Haden Hill Park (which is tied to the sad tale of “Bella” and the wych elm), which has a train station and a quite a few steep roads. But no houses that we wanted to live in. One of them had a lot of issues, especially considering how much they were asking for, and had benefitted from carefully-angled photos. There were polystyrene tiles on the bedroom ceiling, and double glazing that was busted so that there was two or three inches of water in the bottom. It had loads of decking, which looked quite nice — until I stepped on it and it nearly snapped underneath me. Another house we saw that day was actually quite nice although a little bit pokey upstairs, and a bit too far away from everything.

I really felt pressured at this point to go all-out and just find SOMEWHERE as soon as we could — and this, you will be unsurprised to learn, is a terrible idea. We were looking for three-bed semis, because after all those Victorian terraces, three-bed semis seem to be the next most-prolific house. After much depressing scrolling on Rightmove, we found one in an area of south Birmingham that we quite liked. Not too bad for buses or trains. It didn’t have a driveway, but the double garage made up for it, and it was nicely done up as well. We went to view it — West Midlands estate agents like to get everyone through in an hour on the same day for some reason — and there were loads of people. And I was worrying. I put in an offer — my “best and final offer” — and… we didn’t get the house. Even though our offer was the highest, they went with a cash buyer. Oh, to have a bank account bulging with that much cash!

The surveyor came to our house, and I was so stressed, the hairs on my head stood up so rigidly that my scalp hurt. What if the buyer pulls out? Will anyone else want this place? But the buyer seemed happy with the survey and things trundled on.

We needed to find somewhere else, quickly. But everything was bonkers.

There was the house just on the edge of a busy road, complete with a shed/outhouse/garden room that the vendor wanted to keep so that they could live in it once a year (I don’t know why either!). There was the house with the really grumpy vendor (who kept getting offers that weren’t high enough for him, even though the house really needed some work) who the estate agent warned us was sitting in the lounge scowling at his telly — I misheard and said very loudly “There’s a VANDAL in the lounge?”. So loudly that vendor heard me…. There was a three-bed semi, but we had reservations (mould, old roof), but it wasn’t terrible, and the kitchen was larger than a lot of 1930s semis as they’d extended it a bit. We took a tradesman we know with us for a second look… and promptly backed away.

The clock was ticking. It was August by this point. We’d had no holiday since going to see family at Easter but there wasn’t time as every spare moment was devoted to house-stuff: more decluttering, faffing around on Rightmove, viewing houses… and I spent my days bouncing between every emotion possible — stressed, optimistic, worried, excited, and very, very narky. I mean, I do anyway, but this was me and my rollercoaster emotions turned up to the max.

We found another 1930s semi, which had been done-up fairly recently. It smelt a bit musty, but then, it was an ex-rental and had been sitting empty for months. The kitchen was extended across the back and was huge — it had skylights and a kitchen island. Oh, for a kitchen island! The driveway was a bit annoying as there was a tree directly in front of it that you have to reverse around (thank goodness for parking sensors and a rear camera!), but it looked good to us. We viewed it on a Saturday, and the estate agent wanted us to make a decision on Monday. We drove off to Hay-on-Wye/Y Gelli Gandryll straight from the viewing for a one-night holiday, feeling very pleased with ourselves as we’d found a house at last. And we had a lovely time, which you can read all about!

I put the offer in on the Monday morning, and had another viewing that afternoon. It was a newer house, about a half a mile from the other one, and it’d been done up fairly recently as well. I really liked it, and wished I hadn’t had to put the offer in for the other house that morning. But at least, if our offer was turned down, we had other options.

But the offer was accepted. I was dreaming of supping sauvignon blanc from a wine fridge tucked under the kitchen island. But then the survey came back. And it wasn’t good. That musty smell I’d noticed wasn’t from the house being empty, but from a mysterious and deeply worrying damp patch. Things I’d been a bit uncertain about, like the fact I’d have to drag my wheelie bins across the neighbour’s driveway as the route from the side gate was diverted across it was flagged up as a serious issue (imagine if the neighbour moved out and was replaced by someone who refused to let you cross their driveway?). I’d wondered why the house only had one downpipe, which seemed a bit odd, and the surveyor confirmed It Isn’t A Good Thing. The surveyor couldn’t even look in the loft.

I really didn’t want to back out — I felt I’d wasted everyone’s time (not to mention £450 on the survey plus a few hundred in solicitors’ fees). But… it felt better to back out at that point and lose under a grand, rather than a buy a house that had issues that would cost thousands to resolve.

Fortunately, the newer house I’d seen was still on the market. And, to cut a long story short, our offer was accepted! Hurrah!

I thought things would move fast now. The survey didn’t flag up anything too worrying. There were more solicitor emails, more mortgage advisor emails. I put our Christmas decorations into storage, and my partner put away his winter clothes as well. But… but… our buyer was dragging his feet. Nothing was moving, and in the depths of December, with no Christmas decs and no idea when we’d move, plus writing deadlines that I couldn’t bend around a non-existent move date, I felt absolutely despairing. I went through a patch of depression, which was made worse (ironically) when I found out that my previous bouts of depression were making mortgage insurance extra expensive.

And in January… we lost our buyer.

BLOODY HELL NOOOOO!!!!!!

Stay tuned for what happened next on this long-winded, white-knuckle rollercoaster ride — taken from flattering angles using a fish-eye lens, of course!

Book news!

Visit a little bookshop down a cobbled street in a Normandy village and uncover the secrets from its past.

The Resistance Book Club is the first instalment of our brand new WW2 saga series! Written by me and my friend Catherine Curzon, under our joint pen-name, Ellie Curzon. Available in ebook, paperback, audiobook, and in Kindle Unlimited. Pre-order your copy now!

About me

I co-write WW2 saga fiction with my friend Catherine Curzon under our joint pen name, Ellie Curzon.

I’ve written two books on Victorian crime and forensics, and articles for Fortean Times and Family Tree magazine. I’ve appeared on BBC1’s Murder, Mystery and My Family, and BBC Radio 4’s Punt PI. I live in the West Midlands with a cat who looks like a Viking.

You can subscribe to this newsletter for free, or if you love what you’ve read and can find some spare coins down the back of the sofa, you can upgrade to a paid subscription.

Roads to the Past is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

And if you just want to chuck a couple of coins my way, you can give me a one-off tip!

Buy me a cuppa at Ko-Fi!

And hey, why not share the newsletter with like-minded chums?

Share

Thanks for reading Roads to the Past! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Share

But I didn’t learn until I was over twice the age of most people with L plates. Plus I’m deaf, and we were in a pandemic. Any one of those elements would make it more difficult, but I had three of them to contend with. And add a fourth with ADHD that was only diagnosed last year….

I should’ve learnt to drive when I was 17, like any sensible person would in Britain.1 I even had perfect hearing back then,2 and we didn’t have pandemics in the 90s, either. But at that age, everything I needed I could get to by walking or via public transport. I was worried about how much driving lessons would cost, and I wanted to concentrate on my A-levels as well.

So I learnt the guitar instead and wrote a fanzine (what was that about concentrating on A-levels), because of course one day, once I’d been on Top of the Pops and had become famous, I’d be chauffeured around in a limo and wouldn’t need to drive anyway.

Yes, I really was that deluded.

The older I got, the more I wished I could drive. And not just because Top of the Pops went off air and I didn’t become a guitar legend. There were interesting places that I’d struggle to get to on buses and trains, and it got more and more time-consuming getting from my suburb to the city centre to catch a train anyway. There’s a joke that never goes away about Birmingham: “It’ll be nice when it’s finished.” It might take less than 90 minutes to get to London Euston on the train, but it was taking me nearly an hour just to get to New Street because of all the diversions around the cement mixers and cranes.

My parents aren’t getting any younger, and it’s not fair to expect them to pick me up in their car from the station. Then, we went to Texas to see my partner’s family, back in 2014, and we really struggled. Neither of us could drive, apart from my partner having a motorbike licence (and you won’t be surprised to learn that they don’t readily hire out ones with side-cars). We got laughed at by the locals when we went for walks around town.

But then again, this was a town with drive-thru ATMs, which made me laugh.

By the time we got to the pandemic, I was going for walks every day, up and down the same terraced streets. Out of boredom, once I’d finished admiring the small front gardens, I started to pay attention to the cars parked along the roads. I decided that I really liked the look of Fiat 500s. I mean, they’re just so cute. And I started to think… it’d be pretty cool to have a car.

By summer 2020, I’d had a bad bout of Covid. They eased restrictions enough for people to travel about again, so I could’ve got a train to visit friends and family, but I didn’t; I was scared of catching a second dose. If we’d had a car, we could’ve travelled without worrying.

Going deaf, I’m very aware of all the things I’ve lost from my life. It drives me mad if I dwell on it, but here’s a list anyway: I can’t play the guitar or be in a band anymore (or be on Top of the Pops), I can’t record podcasts (or listen to them without automatic captions, and we all know how rubbish they are), I can’t DJ, I can’t go to the cinema without checking first to see when they show films with captions (but it’s a limited list and they only seem to show them on Wednesday mornings, as if it’s impossible to be deaf and have a nine-to-five job. I haven’t been to the cinema since 2019), I can’t go to gigs, I can’t listen to the radio, I can’t listen to my collection of records, I can’t check out the new album everyone’s going on about, I can’t go to the theatre or the comedy stand up, I can’t hear in-person meetings, I can’t go to conferences, I can’t go to writing workshops, I panic whenever a random person comes up to talk to me in the street, I’ve given up socialising because I can’t follow conversations so I feel horribly lonely…. I mean, that’s a long list and that’s not even all of it.

If I focus on things which I can’t do anymore, it’s disabling. But why not consider the things that I can do? Deaf people can drive!3

Time was ticking. My hearing was (and is, sadly) getting worse. Although you can have driving lessons and tests in sign language, that would only work if I was fluent and at that point, I hadn’t even started learning to sign. If I was going to learn to drive, I needed to get on with it, otherwise I’d soon reach a point where I’d be too deaf to hear the instructor.

So I got started; I sorted out my provisional licence, bought the theory test book and the Highway Code, and bought myself some driving lessons.

You won’t be surprised to learn that it was very, very difficult. I just hadn’t been in cars much, so I had no idea what all the different bells and whistles did, nor why you’d want them to do… whatever it is they do. Covid restrictions meant that my driving instructor had to wear a mask, and - just as I did with everyone wearing a mask - I really struggled to hear him and kept making mistakes. Clutch control was a mystery to me; I struggled to hear the engine because my hearing aids think they’re helpful by blocking out “unnecessary” background noise. It was very frustrating and I felt like I was flinging money about for nothing, just to squander my Saturday mornings in a white Toyota Yaris in a suburban side street full of other learners in white Toyota Yarises.

Then another lockdown came and lessons were cancelled.

I spent time watching driving instructor videos on YouTube, especially the brilliant Richard Fanders of Conquer Driving. My instructor had actually told me off when I excitedly told him I’d been watching the videos, because apparently, “I will tell you everything you need to know.” I dunno… I mean, I’m in my 40s. I’m too old to be told off, unless it’s by the police. And I know my learning style. I don’t want to just learn in two hours a week behind a wheel. Let me watch my videos! And nowadays, I like to watch Big Jobber’s insurance claim crash videos… keeps the old hazard perception up to scratch.

When the restrictions lifted, I found another instructor, but I only had one lesson with him. I’d gone from a car that made me feel like I was training to drive an Uber to a Volkswagen that was kitted out like a NASA spacecraft.

The Volkswagen confused me no end. It wanted to do everything for me, short of changing gears. It would even suggest which gear to change to, so I didn’t even need to think for myself, and I didn’t need to learn when to put the lights on, because the car would automatically do it. The handbrake wasn’t a post but looked like a horizontal car door handle, so I had no idea what to do with it. I’d initially been taught to put my hands at the ten-to-two position, but this new instructor wanted me to drive with my hands at a quarter-to-three; it felt weird, and he told me off each time my hands crept back. I was so confused, on top of struggling to hear, and I didn’t feel like I was learning anything. What would I do if I couldn’t buy myself that exact car? I wouldn’t even know how to turn the flipping lights on! So I tried another instructor. That lasted only a few lessons. He was a patient man who, by the time of my last lesson, when I stalled at the lights and got hooted at for the thousandth time, finally lost his patience.

“Just, please, have some lessons in an automatic,” he said in a long-suffering tone, sounding not unlike my dad when I was a teen and he pleaded with me not to walk around the house with my guitar, twangling away (badly) at “House of the Rising Sun”.

I felt stupid. How could all these other people go around driving manuals - teens who were old enough to be my kids, for heaven’s sake - without any problems? I felt like I wasn’t a “proper driver” and that I’d be judged for “cheating”. As if all those people in the US, who think nothing of driving hundreds of miles interstate in their automatics, aren’t proper drivers?

But I had to be kind to myself.

First of all, because I can’t hear the engine well enough to change gears, I tried to feel the vibrations of the engine through my foot against the clutch. But, as you can guess, that’s not fool proof. And learning anything when you’re older is harder anyway. Plus I was learning to drive during a pandemic: sometimes I couldn’t hear the instructor at all through their mask, and lockdowns kept returning on and off, so my learning was constantly interrupted.

And I was doing all of that without realising I had ADHD. There were so many things going on at once that every driving lesson felt like I was a juggler, balancing on a ball, in the lion’s enclosure. And doing of all that while being surrounded by impatient people who, as soon as they see L plates, simply must hoot, rev their engines, wave their arms about, drive so close they’re half way up my exhaust pipe, then do dangerous overtakes, as if there was never a time in their lives when they weren’t Lewis Hamilton. On a Saturday morning.

Reader, you will not be surprised to discover that… my first lesson in an automatic was amazing!

I wish I’d made the change earlier. And my instructor was willing to talk loudly. “I’m shouting!” he’d say, and I’d reply, “That’s great!” He was a lot more fun than the other instructors, too, and I never finished a lesson close to tears, feeling like a useless berk again - instead, even if my driving had been utter bobbins, I’d come home feeling like I’d achieved something, even if it had only been a very small something. And that, my friends, is a sign of a good teacher.

And I should mention, too, that throughout the process - it took nearly two years from my first lesson to passing my test - my family and friends were really supportive. They talked to me about things that threw me, and were great at keeping me motivated when I felt daunted. There were times during the manual phase where I was close to giving up completely, but they all rallied round and encouraged me to keep going. So I did.

I sailed through the theory test, laughing at the wrong answers:

“If you are driving on the motorway and realise you are heading in the wrong direction, do you… a. do a U-turn, b. put on your hazard lights and reverse to the previous sliproad, c. carry on to the next junction.”

Hmm… I wonder what the answer could be? I developed lightning fast reactions on the hazard perception test as well. “The jogger is slowing down and looked over his shoulder - HAZARD! That van approaching the junction is going like the clappers and I can’t imagine they’ll brake in time - HAZARD!”

And then…. I failed my driving test.

I knew I wasn’t ready, but the backlog for tests was insane thanks to the pandemic.4 I nearly drove into a car within seconds of leaving the test centre, but it didn’t help that I was struggling to hear the examiner.5 Instead of focusing 100% on the road, I was having to use a lot of brainpower trying to unpick what he was saying.6 And because I was struggling, I had to guess what he wanted me to do, which, oddly enough, is a really terrible way to approach a driving test. The examiner had to jam on the dual control breaks; annoyingly, my foot was on my brake less than half a second behind him. The examiner didn’t tell me I’d failed, although I knew I must’ve done. I straight out asked him if I had (I’m a big girl, ffs, just tell me), but he didn’t reply and just directed me right, right, right, and right again, until we arrived back at the test centre five minutes after we left. Usually, if you fail, you don’t know until the end of the test, but thanks to bloody Covid, anyone who failed had to go straight back to the test centre. I assume it was to minimise exposure to potential germ-ridden learners, but it meant that I lost 40-odd minutes of test practice as well as somewhere around £60!

I rebooked, and had to wait a few months. And I passed on test #2. What. A. Relief.

But it was such a horrible experience. Driving tests are pressured anyway, but factor in the massive months-long wait if you fail, plus me worrying if I’d be able to hear the examiner, and the pressure was heaped on you even more. I was so stressed that my legs turned to jelly; I nearly fell over on the way from the car to the test centre, and my peripheral vision started to black out. Fortunately my full sight quickly returned but because I could barely feel my legs, I was a touch too heavy on the pedals during the test.

Weird as it sounds, I’m actually glad I failed my first test: I wasn’t ready. And, because I had all those extra lessons (cue Rocky-style montage sequence of me driving around Wednesbury), I was a much better driver in the end. I had two more lessons after I passed and took a white-knuckle ride with my driving instructor along the part of the M6 that goes across the north of Birmingham, up towards Wolverhampton.7 I have never seen so many lorries in my life. But I did it! And then when I got to drive on the motorway by myself, I didn’t rigidly grip the wheel in terror, and instead enjoyed a Sunday tootle down the M5 to the Malvern Hills.

And that was the first of many trips to interesting places in our car. All those tears, all those frustrations are long behind me.

Well, until I have to parallel park….

This one’s a bit different as it’s a personal journey, rather than a trip to somewhere old and interesting. Do let me know in the comments if you’d like more of this kind of thing!

Out now!

The Lifeboat Orphans, the second book in The Runaway Evacuees series, is out now. Based on a true story, it’s written by me and my friend Catherine Curzon, under our joint pen-name, Ellie Curzon. The Lifeboat Orphans will be available in ebook, paperback, audiobook, and in Kindle Unlimited.

About me

I co-write WW2 saga fiction with Catherine Curzon under our joint pen name, Ellie Curzon.

I’ve written two books on Victorian crime and forensics, and articles for Fortean Times and Family Tree magazine. I’ve appeared on BBC1’s Murder, Mystery and My Family, and BBC Radio 4’s Punt PI. I live in the West Midlands with a cat who looks like a Viking.

Roads to the Past is a free publication, but if you love what you’ve read and can find some spare coins down the back of the sofa, you can upgrade to a paid subscription.

Subscribe now

And if you just want to chuck a couple of coins my way, you can give me a one-off tip!

Buy me a cuppa at Ko-Fi!

And hey - why not share the newsletter with like-minded chums?

Share

Up in the Clent Hills, just outside Birmingham, you can visit several follies built by Lord Lyttelton, including his stone circle. But it’s quite modest compared to the one I’m taking you to today, which is a reconstruction of Stonehenge, the most famous stone circle of them all.

In the 1790s, Major West married Maria Myddelton, who was one of the three heiresses of Chirk Castle in north Wales. Maria lost out on the castle, but she and her husband lived in Quinta Hall, a gentleman’s country pile just outside Weston Rhyn in Shropshire, which was part of Chirk’s estate.

Rather like Lord Lyttleton, the Wests decided to pep up their grounds. They could’ve added a random tower, a bridge over a picturesque stream, or a grotto complete with a man hired to live there as a hermit.

But no. Perhaps inspired by the stones at Clent or perhaps not, at some point between 1840 and 1850, they decided to recreate Stonehenge. As you do. Their circle is built on a rise; on the other side of the trees is a sloping field full of sheep. The stone circle was positioned so that the Wests could marvel at the site of their very own Stonehenge as they rode up the drive in their carriages. It became known as The Temple.

Most people settle for some perennials in pots or a classical-style stone statue, or even just a gnome, but imagine having the space and the money to decide, “D’you know what we need? We need our VERY OWN Stonehenge to admire from the driveway!”

From a distance, the stone circle does look pretty impressive. But up close, it gives very strong and rather campy Hammer Horror prop vibes. Can’t you just see a candle-lit Christopher Lee in the middle of that circle, muttering strange incantations, as Peter Cushing creeps through the flickering shadows towards him?

Or maybe it reminds you of that scene in Spinal Tap, where they want to have a Stonehenge as part of their stage set, only to get the measurements confused.

But look what happens when the sun peers through one of the arches. You forget the fact that you can see the joins; the holes here and there where they drilled, and even the rusted iron bolts which hold the whole thing together. It’s impossible to be cynical about it.

If you decide to visit, then you not only get a temple, but you also get tunnels. After crossing the rather muddy field full of sheep, we reached Temple Woods, and followed a path. It took us to a stile, and after climbing that, we were met with a tunnel. It’s made of stone with an arch leading into the darkness, and it’s only wide enough for one person. Coming out the other end, we found ourselves in the field with the stone circle. We didn’t manage to find the other tunnel. I don’t know why the tunnels are there, although it seems as if they were built at the same time as the stone circle, providing a mysterious journey for anyone heading there.

In the 1850s, Quinta and its stone circle and mysterious tunnels in the woods were bought by a man called Thomas Barnes. He knocked down the house that the Major and his wife had lived in, replacing it with a suitably Gothic pile, which, to continue the British horror film theme, looks rather a lot like the house in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Oakley Court in Berkshire; they do an excellent afternoon tea, by the way). Barnes built a Congregational chapel at Quinta, but despite his clearly Christian principles, didn’t demolish the clearly pagan stone circle on his grounds. The property passed through a few hands before it ended up being a Barnardo’s home (I love the idea of those children playing at the stone circle) before finally, in the 1980s, becoming an Evangelical conference centre.

An Evangelical conference centre with its very own Stonehenge….

Visiting

There’s no visitor centre or car park, unfortunately. We tried driving down Trehowell Lane, but there was nowhere to stop and The Temple looked very far away. So we tried again, driving through Weston Rhyn. There’s a residential street called Parkfields, and we found a place to park there on the road, before heading north up the road on foot. As soon as you get past the houses, you’ll see The Temple to the left, and very impressive it looks to on its rise, peering through the trees. Navigate the sheep and the mud, observing the Countryside Code as you do so (please don’t leave rubbish, dog-doings or human sacrifices), then you’ll find yourself in the Temple Woods. Go through the tunnel, and step out into the stone circle. Quinta Hall is just to the west, with a fruit farm in between.

More stone circles this way…

Apologies

This my first newsletter of 2026. We’re trying to move house at the moment, and have been trapped for months in an endless purgatory, never knowing when we’ll move or where we’ll be moving to. It’s very sapping and I just couldn’t write my newsletter. But I have been writing a novel, with my writing partner as ever, so more news on that when I have it!

Coming soon, when I have space in my head: learning to drive when you’re going deaf, plus more odd and unusual places to visit, and even an historical discovery…

Out now!

The Lifeboat Orphans, the second book in The Runaway Evacuees series, is out now. Based on a true story, it’s written by me and my friend Catherine Curzon, under our joint pen-name, Ellie Curzon. The Lifeboat Orphans will be available in ebook, paperback, audiobook, and in Kindle Unlimited.

About me

I co-write WW2 saga fiction with Catherine Curzon under our joint pen name, Ellie Curzon.

I’ve written two books on Victorian crime and forensics, and articles for Fortean Times and Family Tree magazine. I’ve appeared on BBC1’s Murder, Mystery and My Family, and BBC Radio 4’s Punt PI. I live in the West Midlands with a cat who looks like a Viking.

Roads to the Past is a free publication, but if you love what you’ve read and can find some spare coins down the back of the sofa, you can upgrade to a paid subscription.

Subscribe now

And if you just want to chuck a couple of coins my way, you can give me a one-off tip!

Buy me a cuppa at Ko-Fi!

And hey - why not share the newsletter with like-minded chums?

Share

But it’s nearly Christmas, so here I am with a sort-of Christmas special. Well, there’s some Christmas trees in my photos, so that counts.

As I’ve mentioned in earlier newsletters, I love going up hills. I think it partly comes from growing up somewhere which doesn’t have very many; in case you’re wondering, Essex. It’s not quite as flat as parts of nearby Suffolk, Norfolk, and Cambridgeshire, but what I thought of as big hills when I was a child growing up in Essex really look like tiddlers when I go back to visit now.

We’ve seen Broadway Tower many times as we’ve driven around around the Cotswolds, standing proud as it gazes across a patchwork of fields and meadows, and the villages cut from honey-coloured stone. So one day in November, we decided to actually visit it.

As with most of these towers — built high up with astonishing views — it has no roots in the Mediaeval past. It’s a folly, built by the 6th Earl of Coventry (a city you can apparently see very far away in the distance) in the late 1790s for his wife. I mean, I was quite impressed when my partner put together a flat-pack shed for me, so I imagine Barbara was extremely pleased with a humungous tower that’s so high up, you can see over a dozen counties from the roof. Capability Brown, who I’m sure you’ve heard of (famous garden designer if you haven’t, rather fond of a folly or two) came up with the idea, and it was designed by an architect called James Wyatt.

There’s something rather fairy tale about the tower, but the hill it stands on has a sinister secret. Back in 1661, it was the site of a triple execution. A 70-year-old man called William Harrison vanished from his home in Chipping Camden in Gloucestershire, and his bloodied and torn belongings were found a few days later - but not his body. His manservant, John Perry, claimed that Harrison had been murdered, and claimed that his own mother and brother had committed the crime and hidden the body. Perry, his mother and brother were tried and found guilty, and hanged; his mother was hanged first in case she was a witch who had put a spell on her sons which had meant they couldn’t confess. Then, in a plot twist to end all plot twists, who should come wandering back a year later but William Harrison himself?

And that’s not the only tragedy to have happened here. On a summer afternoon in 1942, an RAF Armstrong Whitworth Whitley bomber crashed into the hill, close to the tower, during a training flight. All five men on board were killed.1 A memorial to the young men stands very near the tower, and a huge poppy has been painted on the grass nearby. My love of hills is always, unfortunately, tempered by the fact that so many lives were lost during the Second World War when planes crashed into them — the same can be said for the Clee Hills in Shropshire.

As the hill commands such a view, and can be seen from so far around, it was used as a beacon hill, where fires were lit. The Coventrys’ home, Croome Court, is about 15 miles away from the tower, and there’s a story that the tower was built so that a signal could be sent to the servants at home when the Coventrys were making their way back.

The tower didn’t host grand parties for long, though. Just over twenty years after it was first built, it housed a printing press of all things (I cannot imagine how tough it must’ve been to drag it up to the top of the hill, then up the winding tower staircases). The printing press belonged to Sir Thomas Phillipps, who was an antiquary and a book collector. He occupied the tower until the early 1860s, and then it was rented by a friend of the Pre-Raphaelites (which explains the notebooks in the gift shop on the ground floor of the tower, covered in intricate William Morris designs). Several of them came to Broadway Tower, and I really can’t say I’m surprised. If you’re obsessed with Mediaevalism, then I suspect you’d love to visit a stone tower on a massive hill.

And if visits from William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones (born in Birmingham, which you can see from the tower), and Dante Gabriel Rossetti weren’t enough history for this high hill and its majestic tower, well… in the 1950s, the Royal Observer Corps built an underground Cold War monitoring post nearby. It was decommissioned in 1991.2 You can actually visit it, but it was closed when we dropped by. So, unfortunately, we will have to go back!

The drive up to Broadway was brilliant. It sits at the top of a commanding hill, with a steep road that has some excellent hairpin bends; the kind of hill you can imagine Tour de France cyclists hurtling down. Every view as you go higher and higher is astonishing, which made me very excited for what the views would be like once we reached the top.

Reader, I was not disappointed! Even as I glanced over my shoulder while I locked the car, I spotted Bredon Hill. Then I squinted into the mist and identified the Malverns behind it. We paid our entry fee in the visitor centre — which had a shop full of lovely Christmas things, and a busy café — then followed the path to the tower. We had to pass through a thicket, which apparently is full of birds, although not in November. We saw deer running through a field, then we stopped and looked down from the hill at the very Cotswold-y village of Broadway below. We’ve visited it before. although August Bank Holiday Monday wasn’t the best day as our little Picanto battled for a parking space with giant Range Rovers.

We followed the path, which is part of the Cotswolds Way, up to the tower. It’s an extraordinarily tidy-looking tower, with a windowless ground floor, a first floor with round-topped windows, a second floor with grander windows that open onto stone balconies, and then a low-ceiling floor at the top with round windows that stare owlishly across the counties. The tower is apparently “Saxon-style”, which seems a bit of reach to me — did they build huge towers in stone? Wasn’t that the Normans? Anyway. The first, second, and third floors have been done out as they might’ve looked in the 1800s and, because ‘tis the season and all that, they were decked out for Christmas.

It was a rather windy day when we went to Broadway Tower and we were nearly blown off the roof. But it was definitely worth it just to see the views. If you don’t know your English counties, then this list won’t make any sense and will probably sound like something from The Hobbit, but from up on the roof you can see: Worcestershire (which is fairly obvious, seeing as it’s where the tower is), Herefordshire (past the Malverns), Shropshire (because Broadway is so high up, you can see the Wrekin — another massive hill), Gloucestershire, the West Midlands, Birmingham (really, you can identify several buildings, even though the city is thirty miles away), Staffordshire, Warwickshire (including Coventry, although I’m not sure I could see it - just mentioning this for ! Maybe you’d be able to spot it), Oxfordshire… you can see counties in Wales (thanks to their very big hills and mountains peeping over the brink of the horizon), and even Buckinghamshire.

This was all extremely exciting, as you can imagine for someone who comes from somewhere very flat. So, in order to calm down after all that, we went to the restaurant and enjoyed a wonderful slap-up Christmas dinner. I had the best mulled wine I’ve ever had, a delicious heap of parsnips and sprouts and turkey, and for pudding an apple and zesty orange turnover with boozy custard which was so good, I will remember how it tasted until the day I forget my own name.

Visiting a place you’ve seen many times always runs the risk of disappointment, as it builds up a story in your mind which the reality might not be able to withstand. And yet, Broadway Tower didn’t disappoint at all. I absolutely loved it; I’m so glad we finally visited it, and I’m really looking forward to our return trip. I’ll hopefully be reporting back from the Cold War listening post at some point in 2026, so stay tuned!

Wartime Wishes for the Land Girls

Fancy a festive wartime read? Meet an orphan, a downed airman, and the Land Girls of Bramble Heath this Christmas in Ellie Curzon’s Wartime Wishes for the Land Girls.

About me

I co-write WW2 saga fiction with Catherine Curzon under our joint pen name, Ellie Curzon.

I’ve written two books on Victorian crime and forensics, and articles for Fortean Times and Family Tree magazine. I’ve appeared on BBC1’s Murder, Mystery and My Family, and BBC Radio 4’s Punt PI. I live in the West Midlands with a cat who looks like a Viking.

Roads to the Past is a free publication, but if you love what you’ve read and can find some spare coins down the back of the sofa, you can upgrade to a paid subscription.

Subscribe now

And if you just want to chuck a couple of coins my way, you can give me a one-off tip!

Buy me a cuppa at Ko-Fi!

And hey - why not share the newsletter with like-minded chums?

Share

Placed about as perfectly in the middle of the country as it can be, the National Memorial Arboretum is a huge wooded park in Staffordshire, England, where sculptures stand on the winding paths in memory of military and civilians alike.

It’s an extraordinary place, where art meets memory and the way we commemorate those we have lost. And today of all days seems the best one to take you on a trip there.

One of the first memorials we saw was to the residents of a village in France, who died in the days after D-Day, and further along the path is a huge memorial to Polish forces as well, including a Polish airman from the Battle of Britain, so in a way, it’s an International Memorial Arboretum.

What’s presumably the biggest memorial on the site is to members of the British armed forces who’ve been killed following the end of the Second World War. It’s a large stone ring with every name of those lost carved on it, listed under the heading of each service. A slit runs through the ring, designed so that sunlight will shine through it at 11am on the eleventh day of the eleventh month, and there are some very powerful cast metal statues at the ring’s centre, which really hammer home the cost of war.

Regiments have their own individual memorials, and I was immediately struck by how differently they represented themselves. The 49th West Riding regiment has an enormous polar bear - the first memorial on the site - representing their nickname, which they got after being stationed under the snow in Iceland. Meanwhile, the memorial for one of my brother’s old regiments which stood not too far away had gone more minimal with a black marble slab.

We wandered along a wooded path and every few steps found another memorial. There was one for the police, ones for nurses, and a really poignant one, surrounded by shady trees, of a crouched figure for people who’ve lost their lives to PTSD (if you know a British veteran who is struggling, please let them know about the charity Combat Stress). Among the trees are small, metal memorials placed by individuals for members of their families or the unknown people who’ve helped them. Anyone in Britain can have a memorial put here, and there were several to anonymous organ donors who’ve left perhaps the most precious gift they could leave behind them - a chance for a complete stranger to live.

One of the Arboretum’s most famous memorials is called “Shot at Dawn”. It’s placed at the far eastern corner of the park which is the first place to be lit by the sun as it rises each day; the same time when young men were, let’s be honest here, murdered by their own side during the First World War. It’s incredibly moving, showing a young man, blindfolded with his hands behind his back, afraid and alone. The white stone suggests innocence to me. Behind him are stakes, with the name, age and homeland of every man executed during that war for “cowardice”.

It’s a memorial that made me sad and angry at the same time - young men from all over the UK, and all over the empire, too, who met that awful end. Imagine coming all the way from New Zealand, or a country in West Africa to fight in a hopeless, muddy trench, only to be tied to a stake, and…. And their bereaved families had to live with the stigma, too. Of course, we know now that many of these men were suffering from “shell shock” and ran away from their posts in fear. They needed care, not a court martial. Some of them even got confused with orders and thought they had permission to leave their post - when they realised they hadn’t, it was too late. The memorial came about after descendants of these young men campaigned. The figure is based on 17-year-old Private Herbert Burden, who lied about his age to enlist, then was shot for desertion. My own great-grandfather, born in 1901, lied about his age and was in the trenches from 1915, and I couldn’t help but wonder what his experience had been like. How close did he come, just a teenage boy, to deserting his post too?

All parts of the armed forces are represented at the Arboretum - the Royal Army Veterinary Corps has a black marble memorial inscribed with images of a First World War vet tending to a horse and a modern-day vet in combat fatigues with a dog. Then we have the Royal Army Medical Corps, with this extraordinary representation of a man carrying a soldier from a battle field. The effort and exhaustion on his face, and the helplessness of the man he’s carrying, is incredibly powerful.

But then, some memorials just go all-out on the heroism. The paratroopers go for Bellophron riding Pegasus. They’re afraid of absolutely nobody, not when you’ve got a very sharp javelin and a flying horse. I’ve worked with former paratroopers and I can safely say that they still had the same attitude even as civies….

As you can see from the paratrooper memorial, the clouds were rolling in and the blue sky was vanishing. We were following the course of the river that runs along the edge of the site because I was trying to find the RNLI (Royal National Lifeboat Institution) memorial. By the time I found it, the clouds had torn open and the rain was pouring down. It was suitably wet weather for me to finally find the lifeboat man as he emerges from hewn rock like the force of nature they are. I love this statue - it conveys so much about the bravery of men and women who volunteer - yes, volunteer! only the coxswain is paid - to go out in calm seas or appalling gales to rescue stricken ships, or kids on lilos, or anyone who’s got into a pickle in a rubber dinghy. The statue has been deliberately placed right on the river bank, because we can’t have our brave lifeboatman pining for the sea.

All the statues are larger-than-life, forcing us to look up. And yet, one memorial, which I have to say makes me feel quite teary just thinking about it, goes the other way. Its figures are deliberately smaller than life, almost like dolls, because it represents children: the evacuees of the Second World War.

They are so tiny, so lost, so scared, and their small size only emphasises how bewildering and frightening - while also exciting - it was for all the millions (yes, millions) of children who were scooped up from Britain’s towns and cities and moved into the countryside. My stepgran was evacuated no less than eight times, coming back to Dagenham because she missed her mum, or her mum missed her, or because she was mistreated. At one billet, Sheila was hardly fed, the host family using her ration book to increase food for themselves, while the son of the family pinched her to make her cry so she’d get told off. It’s interesting to hear Michael Caine speak about his time as an evacuee - it left him with a lifelong love of gardens, which he’d never really seen before he was evacuated from Bermondsey. The memorial is a vital reminder of the impact war has on everyone in society, even the last people who should be affected: children.

I should also add that I can’t help but think of the children in the Ellie Curzon books that I write with my friend Catherine. The little boy, second on the right, has to be Ned. And maybe that’s Connie, second from the left. And on the far left, I’m sure that’s Jack (did I mention that The Lifeboat Orphans, the next instalment in the Runaway Evacuees series, is published tomorrow? Well, I have now).

Another group of civilians honoured at the Arboretum are Land Girls - or members of the Women’s Land Army, as they were properly called. Many of them left towns and cities to work on farms, never having worked the land before. But each one of them took up a job that a male farm labourer had left behind him in order to join up, and these young women helped to keep the nation fed (yes, Land Girls do pop up in the Ellie Curzon novels - try out The Wartime Vet and Wartime Wishes for the Land Girls). The memorial has a farm-worker on the right and on the left, one of the “Lumberjills” who worked in forestry, and have largely been forgotten.

The torrential rain stopped just as I reached the ladies. My friend’s grandma and great-aunt were Land Girls together, working in a village next door to the one they’d grown up in. Just as much as these young women were selfless, moving miles from home to do their bit, the job was very dangerous. One day, Barbara and Joan were working in a field when an enormous, stricken American bomber fell out of the sky and came straight towards them. They threw themselves into a ditch as the plane crashed into the field, and they lived to tell the tale.

A thoroughly poignant memorial is the one for submarine crew. I cannot imagine the utter lack of fear required to willingly get into a submarine (or, like my partner’s father, spend SIX MONTHS in a submarine without surfacing!). The closest I’ve got is that old ride at Disney World (if you know, you know). The memorial shows a man standing between two huge sheets of metal, and it’s so large that it invites you to go in there with him - and experience the darkness and claustrophobia.

The RAF roundel memorial is quite famous, because it’s best seen from the air (I see what you did there, chaps). It’s simple but effective, and again, invites visitors to enter it. These aren’t, after all, memorials in city centres, hoisted aloft, untouchable on plinths. These are memorials you can go into and touch.

All the memorials are made from metal or stone, although there is one exception, and it’s extraordinary - even with the sky overcast and the rain coming down. The naval service memorial is made from glass, seven or eight feet high panes in different colours. It made me think of the sea, and the different colours it changes to, and stained glass in church windows. While it must be beautiful on a bright day with sunlight pouring through it, on a wet day, we got to see the memorial twice, as the coloured glass was reflected in the shiny stone.

We walked on and saw a memorial to the Bevan Boys who took to mining during WW2, and there’s another for the young men who were conscripted into National Service after the war - I thought of my stepgranddad Colin, and my uncle, too. It’s strange to think that there are boys represented by the evacuee memorial who are remembered in the National Service memorial too, packing their bags and heading away from home as young men once the guns had fallen silent.

The National Memorial Arboretum is a stunning place, and well worth making the journey to even if you don’t live near Staffordshire. It’s fascinating just from an artistic point of view, to see the many different ways that we can commemorate and remember: the literal figures, the abstract, and all set among nature with so many trees lining your path. If you’re there to remember, there are crosses mounted with poppies in the visitor centre which you can place around the site, and there are lots of other faiths represented with poppies mounted on stars, crescents, and more.

It’s a day out where you will feel moved: I guarantee there’s at least one memorial there which will reach inside and clasp your heart.

Find out more about the National Memorial Arboretum.

Out tomorrow!

The Lifeboat Orphans, the second book in The Runaway Evacuees series, is out on 12th November. Pre-order your copy now! Based on a true story, it’s written by me and my friend Catherine Curzon, under our joint pen-name, Ellie Curzon. The Lifeboat Orphans will be available in ebook, paperback, audiobook, and in Kindle Unlimited.

About me

I co-write WW2 saga fiction with Catherine Curzon under our joint pen name, Ellie Curzon.

I’ve written two books on Victorian crime and forensics, and articles for Fortean Times and Family Tree magazine. I’ve appeared on BBC1’s Murder, Mystery and My Family, and BBC Radio 4’s Punt PI. I live in the West Midlands with a cat who looks like a Viking.

Roads to the Past is a free publication, but if you love what you’ve read and can find some spare coins down the back of the sofa, you can upgrade to a paid subscription.

Subscribe now

And if you just want to chuck a couple of coins my way, you can give me a one-off tip!

Buy me a cuppa at Ko-Fi!

And hey - why not share the newsletter with like-minded chums?

Share

But have you ever, in all your days, heard of… a haunted sports centre?

Welcome to the Hallowe’en Special of Roads to the Past! This time, it’s a story that didn’t involve me driving anywhere, because the haunted sports centre in question is just at the bottom of my road. And it’s a true story… I really did see something. Although what, or who, remains a mystery.

Back in about 2008, I joined the gym. It was in our (now-closed) local sports centre in Bearwood, a suburb of mainly Victorian-built terraced houses. It sits just north of Hagley Road, one of the main roads into Birmingham. If you keep going east from Bearwood along Hagley Road, you’ll see a modern office block bearing a blue plaque, marking the site of one of JRR Tolkien’s childhood homes. Bearwood’s most famous daughter is Julie Walters, and one of Bearwood’s sons was Lieutenant Den Brotheridge, the first recorded allied causality of D-Day. The suburb is, technically, in the Black Country, and people who flocked to the terraces when they were first built would’ve been working in the factories.

Bearwood is a place of borders. It touches the edge of Birmingham, but isn’t actually in it. At one point, the suburb was in three different counties: Staffordshire, Worcestershire, and Shropshire, and the point where their borders met was marked by an ancient oak. The tree - with the most Tolkein-esque name of The Three Shires Oak - no longer stands, but there’s a crossroads there instead. Head north from the crossroads on Thimblemill Road, which once ran along the county border, and you’ll soon find yourself face to face with Smethwick Baths.

The sports centre consisted of a grade II-listed 1930s swimming pool, originally called Thimblemill Baths. When the opening salvo of the Second World War was fired, the pool was drained for the duration, and was used for gardening demonstrations. Sometimes, they planked the pool over for dances. The basement became an air-raid shelter. A later extension was stuck onto the side, where I experienced an aerobics lesson that was even more terrifying than anything a ghost could do.

The reception area of the baths still had the original decor; beautiful shades of green with squares of gold leaf, which gave it the Egyptian look that was a key element of art deco design. The doors were original with long, narrow panes of glass. I kept expecting to see Poirot walk in, a towel rolled neatly and fussily under one arm.

The gym was mainly on the first floor, with all the usual exercise machines which look (and feel) like Mediaeval instruments of torture. Running machines, cross-trainers, rowing machines, that insane piece of kit which mimics walking up a flight of stairs while simultaneously shredding your knees. Sometimes, condensed sweat would drip off the ceiling onto my face as I ground away to the tune of whatever my iPod Shuffle had decided to pick for me.

There was another gym room downstairs, and it was where I usually went as it was, generally, quiet. The room was long and narrow, running down one side of the pool, and I kept close to the door to the reception, to avoid the glowering lads who sat on the weights machines for ages, smelling of Lynx, and never apparently lifting any weights at all.

And this is where it happened. In the thoroughly not-creepy and nothing like a haunted castle/mansion/pub gym. This is where I saw… well… I don’t know how else to describe it… but a ghost.

I was on the cross-trainer, my thoughts wandering as I listened (because back then, I still had my hearing) to Pixies or Suede or The Cramps. Back and forth went the poles I was clinging to, back and forth went my feet. I was probably thinking about what I was going to have for dinner, and feeling as though I’d definitely earned it.

And then I saw a little girl run past me.

It was as if she’d run from the other end of the room, down where the lads hung out with the weights. Except I hadn’t seen her come in. And as I turned my head to watch her run out of the door to the reception, I thought, “For God’s sake, who’s letting their kids run around the bloody gym?”

And then I realised that she was wearing 1940s clothes and was somewhat transparent.

Oh. I’ve just seen a ghost.

The only person I told at the time was my partner. I didn’t really know who else to tell. I mean, it’s not like there’s a ghost-reporting hotline. And for some reason, I didn’t get round to writing into Fortean Times to tell them. I just thought, “I saw 1940s ghost. Down the gym. How odd,” and got on with my life.

But it bothered me. I didn’t like the fact that I’d seen a child, because didn’t that mean she’d never grown up? And didn’t that mean she’d spent over 60 years at that point running around a sports centre? We heard things from other locals about the Baths. Not about the girl, no, but about airmen from the war who’d been seen there. Why on earth were airmen in the sports centre? Had they been to a dance there? And yet, there’s no airbases anywhere near Bearwood. Someone claimed to have seen a boy in the basement covered in white powder, so a rumour went round that the Baths had been built on top of a plague pit, so of course the place is haunted. That story, at least, we can disprove - there definitely wasn’t a plague pit there (for one thing, hardly anyone lived in Bearwood in the 1600s, so there wasn’t anyone to bury there).

A few years ago, we uncovered a piece of local history, the sort of forgotten story which suddenly makes a suburb just outside Birmingham quite important in world events. A street called Reginald Road leads off to the east from Thimblemill Road, along the northern edge of the Baths. On Reginald Road, there’s a single-story brick-built industrial unit, peeking out from a gap in a wall of dark conifers.

It really doesn’t look like very much, and yet… go back to 1942, when the USA joined WW2, and brought their planes with them. USAAF had airbases up and down the country, and their planes needed radios. Every radio in every plane that USAAF flew from the UK was, on arriving after a perilous journey across the U-boat strewn Atlantic, stored in this very building. Even the radio on Memphis Belle would’ve hung out in Bearwood for while. The Americans who staffed the depot stayed in hotels on Hagley Road, and they were buddied up with local families to keep up morale by reminding them of family life. Inevitably, there were weddings, and several local girls headed to America once the war was won.

And that is why people have seen airmen at Thimblemill Baths. One of the stories goes that a maintenance man - a very down-to-earth sort of bloke - was tinkering with the boiler in the basement, when he looked up and saw a man in uniform. A man who shouldn’t be, and wasn’t really, there.

WW2 airbase ghosts are well-known, and perhaps the most tragic of battlefield ghosts: young men in their flight gear, heading to their planes, never to return. It seems rather unfair for an airmen to have to haunt a swimming pool’s basement, but presumably they would’ve sheltered there along with the locals when the air-raid sirens sounded. The Baths were never hit (and neither, fortunately, was the warehouse), so I wonder if the USAAF men were moved on from the warehouse and ended up back on the planes, only to be killed?

A few years ago, I heard about a ghost hunt taking place at the Baths. I must admit that I’m rather dubious about ghost hunts and paranormal investigators. The lights go off, the night-vision cameras go on, and everyone’s suddenly channelling Yvette Fielding in Most Haunted. *bump* “What was THAT? OH. MY. GOD. Arrghhh!” etc. I’m dubious for many reasons, partly because… I have actually seen ghosts. Or have had experiences that could be described as “seeing a ghost”. I’ve chosen to write about the haunted sports centre this time, but if I’m still here by next Hallowe’en, then I promise to tell you another one. Every experience I’ve had has been in broad daylight, and hasn’t involved table-tipping, ouija boards, or EMF meters.

And yet… I still thought about the girl I’d seen, and now I knew why there would’ve been airmen in the basement, I didn’t want to give up my chance to visit the place one last time. It was about to close - the Commonwealth Games Aquatics Centre, built for Birmingham 2022, is a mile or two up the road, and the local council couldn’t afford to run that and keep our haunted art deco sports centre running as well.

So, about a week before Hallowe’en 2022, we walked through the cold and the dark down the road to the Baths. There were about thirty people there, including several people from the ghost hunting group, and a member of sports centre staff. We all stood in a circle and someone was trying to channel a ghost or something like that… not quite sure what was going on because I was too deaf to follow, then we returned to our seats. I decided to just tell them what I’d seen. Heads turned. And the man who worked at the sports centre told me something very interesting.

He said he wasn’t surprised by my story, because I’m not the only person to have seen the girl.

Remember I said that I saw her running out towards the reception? He told me that on several occasions, people have been in the reception, and have seen a little girl running about. They’ve thought what I did - why is she running around by herself? And then they’ve realised she’s wearing 1940s clothes.

I really hoped the girl would somehow “come through”, but of course, she didn’t, because ghosts don’t perform on cue. And everything was done in the dark, which got on my nerves because it’s deliberately disorientating and unnecessary. There was table-tipping, planchette writing, etc etc, all of which I joined in with, just to see what it was like, while maintaining a level of scepticism. There was also a lot of deliberately goading the ghosts. “Come on! Do something! Show us you’re here!” *completely predictable creak of old building* “IT’S A GHOST! ARRRGHHHH!”

A medium exactly described my grandad to me, which was funny because I couldn’t hear him and my partner had to relay what he was saying. Cold reading a deaf person must be pretty challenging, so I don’t think that explains it… my grandad loved ghost stories, was a fan of Borley Rectory, and told me and my brother some pretty hair-raising and creepy tales about sleeping in old barns in France during the war. Would he pass up the opportunity to come on a ghost hunt, even though he’s now a ghost himself? Nope. Not my grandad.

Eventually, we went down to the basement. I’d never set foot down there before, and it was fascinating, although I do wish the lights could’ve been on to see it better. This is where people - local people, maybe the people who lived in my house - came to shelter when the air-raid sirens wailed. And some people have seen children running around down there.

And the kids who were down there left something behind them: graffiti. On some of the concrete beams, the kids kept themselves occupied with a pencil. They drew an outline of a couple kissing, a strange figure like an action hero, a man in jodhpurs (a Mounty?), a plane, a bomb, musical notes, for some reason a saw, and what looks like dials and pipes from the swimming pool’s workings which they would’ve seen down there every night.

There’s something really eerie about children drawing a plane as they sat in the basement hearing enemy planes growling overhead, and maybe even bombs falling. I know of at least two places where they fell in Bearwood, one of them not all that far from the Baths. I do wonder, though, if one of the USAAF guys drew the plane for them, telling the kids all about the radios they looked after and the flights they’d been on.

The Baths closed, and the council barricaded the site. Vandals still got in, smashing windows and causing a mess. I hope they couldn’t find the graffiti. There was talk at one point of reopening it as a community centre, maybe with a cinema, or a stage, but no one could scrape the funds together. This summer, the site was sold and it’ll be turned into a healthcare centre and GP practice. The extension, where I had that horrible aerobics class, will be torn down, but the original part of the building will undergo a “sympathetic conversion”.

Is the building haunted by people who were killed in the war, or does it just remember, every so often projecting the same reels from a time of fear and uncertainty? Does being on an old border make it easier for the ghosts or the memories to stay? I wonder how long it’ll be before someone wonders why a man in uniform is in the basement, or will tut because a little girl is running around on the ground floor, only for an icy finger to run down their spine as they realise she’s from the 1940s?

And if you want more from WW2…

The Lifeboat Orphans, the second book in The Runaway Evacuees series, is out on 12th November. Pre-order your copy now! Based on a true story, it’s written by me and my friend Catherine Curzon, under our joint pen-name, Ellie Curzon. The Lifeboat Orphans will be available in ebook, paperback, audiobook, and in Kindle Unlimited.

About me

I co-write WW2 saga fiction with Catherine Curzon under our joint pen name, Ellie Curzon.

I’ve written two books on Victorian crime and forensics, and articles for Fortean Times and Family Tree magazine. I’ve appeared on BBC1’s Murder, Mystery and My Family, and BBC Radio 4’s Punt PI. I live in the West Midlands with a cat who looks like a Viking.

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Palmer, for instance. His wife and brother and mother-in-law and various illegitimate children, all peacefully put away - till he made the mistake of polishing Cook off in that spectacular manner.

Dorothy L Sayers, “Unnatural Death”.

A couple of newsletters ago, I took you on a trip around Essex, to meet the poisoners from my book Poison Panic. While I was writing that book, I kept encountering Alfred Swaine Taylor at inquests and trials, giving his expert evidence about suspected poisonings. Whenever he made an appearance in a newspaper, he’d be described as an eminent professor, and I wanted to know more about him. I looked up his biography, only to discover that no one had ever written a full-length book about him. As I came to the end of writing Poison Panic, I knew what my next book would be: and so Fatal Evidence, the first book-length biography of “the father of forensic science”, came to be.

Goodness knows how many cases Taylor worked on. His evidence fascinated me: he could explain complicated scientific points in straight forward language which the jurymen of his day - who hadn’t necessarily ever seen a test-tube in person before - could understand. This ability made him a popular lecturer at Guy’s Hospital in London, where he worked, and taught medical students, for many years. He wrote textbooks and articles, and in fact, Taylor’s Principles and Practice of Medical Jurisprudence went into many editions (two volumes of which could be found on Lord Peter Wimsey’s bookshelves), the thirteenth and final being published in 1984 - just over a century after Taylor’s death. In his non-Sherlock work, The Stark Monro Letters, Sir Alfred Conan Doyle has his eccentric doctor diagnose a patient with tea-poisoning, and swear on Taylor’s work that they won’t have a cuppa for the next fourteen days!

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And yet, Taylor earned himself enemies as he was unrelenting: he felt that poisons were far too easy to buy, and he felt that the mechanisms for investigating suspicious deaths at the time weren’t sufficient. He was incensed that arsenic wallpaper dye wasn’t banned, despite evidence he’d gathered to prove it was dangerous, but was faced with a society that believed caution got in the way of commerce. No Health and Safety in the 1800s… And Taylor felt that expert medical witnesses weren’t paid enough, especially given the professional risk they faced in the witness box. This has earnt him a reputation in some quarters as a man who was out for all the money he could get, and who needlessly whipped people up into a panic. It’s true that he occasionally made mistakes (the Thomas Smethurst trial is painful to read) but they were the mistakes of a man on the edge of a newly-evolving science.

Sometimes, his expertise has been torn to shreds by people who didn’t really understand it. Take, for example Rupert Graves’s book on the William Palmer trial, They Hanged My Sainted Billy. Graves was so enchanted by Palmer, who he seemed to view merely as a roguish scamp, the victim of an unfair trial, that he wrote Taylor off. Rubbishing an expert witness and undermining their credibility is, of course, the best way to refute their incriminating evidence. Graves consulted Principles and Practice and, discovering that Taylor compiled cases and research from other scientists, declared, “None of this is the product of his own research - the Professor’s light shines with borrowed rays, like the deceptive Moon.” But that is to misunderstand Taylor’s work, and ignore the fact that his books did contain the results of his own research. And Graves’s book contains errors anyway - he claims that in 1855, the poisons register was checked to see if Palmer had bought prussic acid, when at that date, it was only arsenic that was recorded. And he persisted in referring to his ‘hero’ as Dr Palmer, even though, as a surgeon and not an MD, he was, in fact a mister. And yet, despite what Graves might’ve thought, crime writers like Dorothy L Sayers - who described Taylor’s books on medical forensics as “the backdoors to death” - and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle respected his enormous knowledge and experience. Conan Doyle even refers to Palmer in The Adventure of the Speckled Band.

Part of the reason why Taylor’s reputation suffered as the years went by is that two out of the vast number of cases he worked on were available in the Notable British Trials series. The series covers trials such as those of Mary Queen of Scots, Burke and Hare, and Oscar Wilde; there is a run of them in the university library store where I used to work. And among the red volumes are Palmer and Smethurst.

Both were incredibly difficult trials, putting qualified medical doctors in the dock; men who had learned how to identify poisons and poisonings as part of their training, and so knew how to disguise it, making it very difficult for Alfred Swaine Taylor. Imagine if your professional reputation was based on the most difficult work you’d ever faced?

I’ll take you on a trip to visit Taylor’s haunts another time, but now, we’re off to Rugeley in Staffordshire, once home to William Palmer, “The Rugeley Poisoner”. It’s a tale of horse racing, failed fortunes, life insurance scams, and a man who Charles Dickens thought was “the greatest villain that ever stood in the Old Bailey”, despite looking so frighteningly ordinary.

It was the first big trial to take place after the end of the Crimean War. The tax on newspapers had been abolished: even if people couldn’t write, they could read, and even if you couldn’t read, there were people in pubs who could, and would read out the latest news, like a Victorian live-action BBC News 24 scrolling away in the background. Just as Dickens’s Mr Sleary says “People must be amuthed,” the newspapers had to have something in them. And once the guns fell silent, a juicy trial was the order of the day.

William Palmer’s childhood home still stands in Rugeley; a red-brick Georgian gentleman’s house, opposite Rugeley’s large, brand-new church (at least, it was brand new when Palmer was born). In fact, next door to the Palmer’s home was the town’s small, Mediaeval church. From the windows on the side of the house, it would’ve been possible for the young Palmer to see an extraordinary box tomb with figures in burial shrouds carved into its lid, tied at top and bottom like boiled sweets.

Palmer’s father made his money from the mines, and collieries ran in the area for decades, up until the 1980s; in fact, one of Rugeley’s roundabouts is adorned with statues of miners. His father died suddenly when Palmer was only a child, but the family were left well-off. His brothers went off into the professions, as did Palmer, although it didn’t go very well. He started off as a chemist’s apprentice, but was soon dismissed for embezzling funds, having already started to develop a gambling habit. He was then apprenticed to a surgeon,1 but this didn’t last long either; there are stories that he was carrying on with a local girl, and made false entries in his master’s books for visits to patients that never happened. He fell out with one of the surgeon’s assistants, who discovered, mysteriously, that his brand new boots had been slashed with a penknife. The surgeon by now had had enough of Palmer, and he had to look for his training elsewhere, as a “walking pupil” at Stafford Infirmary. This meant following the medical staff around the wards on their rounds. And once again, Palmer had to leave: a man died, drinking himself to death, after a student prank went wrong. Given what was to later happen, one wonders if there was something in the drink…. For reasons best known only to themselves, St Bart’s Hospital in London took Palmer on as a pupil. He was far behind in his studies, yet still wasted time on women and racetracks.

By 1846, he’d returned to Staffordshire. Now a qualified surgeon, he married Annie Brookes, who just so happened to have a fortune. Palmer and Annie would have five children, but only the first, a son, would survive infancy. It has of course been suggested that the other four children were murdered by their own father, but given how horrendous infant mortality rates were at the time, this might be one accusation too far.

Annie died in September 1854, at which point Palmer - who was in debt - conveniently received a staggering £13,000 from the life assurances he’d recently placed on her. His brother Walter was in debt, too, and was also an alcoholic, abandoned by his wife. In the summer of 1855, Palmer approached several life assurance companies to insure Walter’s life, but not all of them would accept him due to his poor health. When Walter died not long afterwards, and was buried with haste by his brother, Palmer tried to claim on the assurances, but there was suspicion. A surgeon called Cornelius Waddell had been asked to assess Walter, and he told the insurance company: “His life has been rejected by two offices. I am told he drinks. His brother insured his wife’s life for many thousands, and after the first payment she died. Be cautious.” Scenting a scam, the insurance companies sent a detective, Inspector Field, formerly in the London Metropolitan Police; he was the model for Inspector Bucket in Dickens’s Bleak House. Field found out that Palmer had even tried to insure the life of one of his grooms, claiming that his fustian-clad groom was in fact a silk top hatted-gentleman.

By this time, Palmer had a stable of seventeen racehorses, and wasn’t actively working as a surgeon anymore - he paid an assistant to see his patients. He was by now in debt to the tune of £25,000, and was being blackmailed for having written compromising letters. In November 1855, the races were held at Shrewsbury. Palmer was hoping for a win, but alas, his horse, The Chicken, came in fourth.

But his friend John Parsons Cook, a 28-year-old racehorse-owner, had much better luck. His horse, Polestar, won a race at Shrewsbury, and suddenly found his pocketbook full of money. He was a kind-hearted young man with a large circle of friends and celebrated Polestar’s win: “he gave a dinner at the Raven, at Shrewsbury, and treated his guests to foaming beakers of provincial champagne.”

When Palmer returned to Rugeley after the races, Cook went with him, a decision that would prove fatal.

Cook stayed at the Talbot, a pub that was opposite the house where Palmer now lived on Market Street, and is now next door to a Poundland. The pub is still there, although I don’t think it’s been open for a very long time. When we visited Rugeley back in 2016, the site of Palmer’s house was occupied by a pet shop and a weight loss salon.

Cook fell suddenly and seriously ill. In fact, he had felt unwell while he was at Shrewsbury and had entrusted his winnings to a racing friend before leaving for Rugeley, because he thought there was something in his brandy. Quite why he still went to Rugeley despite suspecting Palmer is unknown. Cook had something that Palmer wanted: after Cook’s death, Palmer was seen frantically rummaging through Cook’s pockets.

John Parsons Cook’s last sufferings were described in detail at the inquest and Palmer’s trial, because his symptoms told clearly that he died of tetanic spasms, the agonising muscle cramps which make the body bend backwards like a bow. With arsenic purchases logged in a register, while strychnine was could be bought with little trace, it wasn’t surprising that a medically-trained man like Palmer, who wanted to get away with murder, would’ve decided to use such a nasty poison.

Suspicion fell quickly on Palmer, who did what anyone in his position would do, and behaved as suspiciously as possible. Some of Cook’s insides were removed and bottled up, to be sent to Alfred Swaine Taylor. So Palmer bribed the carter who drove the bottles to the station to jog his load about. When the jar arrived in London, the insides were in a mess, making it very hard for Taylor and his colleague George Rees to make their examination, an outcome Palmer had intended. Taylor sent his report to the solicitor in Rugeley, who had been taken on by Cook’s uncle to look into his nephew’s sudden death. And Palmer bribed Rugeley’s post master to open the letter and tell him what the eminent professor had to say. The inquest opened, chaired by a coroner who happened to be one of Palmer’s friends, and he bribed him as well.

All these efforts by Palmer were to little effect: even though the coroner summed up saying that Palmer couldn’t have poisoned Cook, the jury decided otherwise, and the erstwhile surgeon was arrested. Rumours in Rugeley about other deaths (you can see how many he was suspected of from Sayers) led to inquests opening into Annie’s and Walter’s passings as well. While Taylor had suspected, based on his symptoms, that Cook had died of strychnine poisoning, he found antimony in Annie’s remains, and suspected that Walter had died of cyanide poisoning. He hadn’t found any, but he knew it’d be easy to hide in brandy, as the strong smell would disguise the poison’s scent of bitter almonds. Once again, the coroner advised the jury that there wasn’t any evidence to incriminate his friend Palmer, and once again, the jury decided otherwise.

By this point, the public had gone wild. The illustration of Market Street (above) shows visitors to Rugeley, who wanted to see where everything had happened. It’s been suggested that a lurid description of the town, which appeared in one of the newspapers, was penned by none other that Wilkie Collins; his Sensation novels are the ancestors of crime fiction. And it’s even been suggested that he borrowed the name of Palmer’s wife, Annie, for Ann Catherick in The Woman in White, and even Annie Palmer’s white dress: just before her last illness, she’d been out in Liverpool in a white dress and had caught a chill.

The Illustrated Times produced engravings showing eager readers the sights of Rugeley, and the major players in the tale. The images were collected together and rushed out in a book-length report on the trial. Some of them were altered: the depiction of Walter Palmer’s inquest was labelled as the inquest into John Parsons Cook’s death (above), with an important character from Walter’s inquest sliced off. Then people appearing in the image were rejigged into separate portraits - this is very clear in the Illustrated Times’s spread, where the inquest illustration sits on the same page as the individual portraits, as if they were hoping their readers would notice the source of the images. But the book separates the illustrations across several pages, so the context was lost.

People claim even now that Taylor was so egotistical that he and Rees posed for an artist in their laboratory. And some people even go further and say, “He was a terrible chemist because what even is that test he’s doing?” The illustration has become quite famous and is rolled out whenever anyone wants to show Victorian scientists in action. But… compare this image to the illustration of the inquest above, and you’ll notice that Taylor and Rees are in exactly the same poses, only flipped on the vertical, with some random chemistry equipment thrown in by the artist. It’s the same as the image of William Palmer at the racecourse - the artist didn’t get him to pose at Shrewsbury races, he merely imagined him there.

Palmer should’ve been tried in Stafford, but he argued that he couldn’t possibly get a fair trial as everyone in Staffordshire was convinced he was guilty, so the trial was moved to the Old Bailey. This had never been done before, so it required an act of parliament. His defence brought together their own team of experts to challenge the prosecution’s scientific evidence, so Taylor assembled his own. Team Taylor included Robert Christison, the Edinburgh forensic expert who worked on the Burke and Hare trial, and was an inspiration for some aspects of Sherlock Holmes.2 Following the trial, there would be great debate about the role of expert witnesses in the courtroom, a debate which grew louder following the Smethurst trial.

The trial lasted nearly a fortnight, which was highly unusual at this period, when most murder trials could be over in a matter of hours. When proceedings began, Serjeant Wilkins,3 who had been leading the defence, was nowhere to be seen. In ironic echoes of Palmer’s own financial strife, the barrister had run off to France to escape his creditors. He was replaced by another barrister, Serjeant Shee, who Taylor had met in courtrooms before. Someone built a scale model of the part of Market Street where the Talbot and Palmer’s house were to be found, and brought it into the Old Bailey. A key piece of evidence was how quickly Palmer had got to Cook’s room - so fast, in fact, that one of the witnesses suspected that Palmer had been waiting up, fully clothed, for Cook to die.

Despite moving the trial to London, and despite the many medical and chemical gentlemen in cravats who argued back and forth, William Palmer was found guilty of the murder of John Parsons Cook. He was taken back to Staffordshire, and was hanged in front of a crowd of thousands, who ghoulishly treated it as a fun day out, rather than the lesson in moral instruction that public execution was thought to be.

Meanwhile, John Parsons Cook laid in the churchyard in Rugeley, where visitors still came to see his grave. He’d never really known his father, who’d died when Cook was very young. An uncle had involved him in a Chancery dispute, versus his own mother, who had passed away not long afterwards, when Cook was still a child. I went to the National Archives in Kew to see the documents, which had to be brought up from the salt mine store in Cheshire. It was rolled into a canvas sack with many other sheets of parchment, and felt rather forgotten.

Even though Cook’s uncle had gone to Rugeley after his death to find out what had happened to his nephew, he wasn’t taken home to be buried with his family. Cook only really had his friends, to whom he was affectionate and generous - to a fault, as it turns out. Perhaps, knowing that Cook’s family were rather distant, Palmer had decided that he was a safe target. None of his family laid a stone over Cook’s resting place. That took Rugeley’s local vicar, who decided that the visitors attracted to the grave should learn an important lesson. Most of the inscriptions have worn away, but on one side of the tomb, you can still see two lines from the Old Testament Book of Proverbs:

You can read all about the life and trial of William Palmer, the Rugeley Poisoner, in Fatal Evidence, my biography of Alfred Swaine Taylor. It’s available in hardback and ebook, and it’s on special offer at the moment, if you buy it direct from my publisher.

Buy direct from the publisher

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It’s also on the shelves of several libraries.

Pre-order now!

The Lifeboat Orphans, the second book in The Runaway Evacuees series is on pre-order now! Based on a true story, it’s written by me and my friend Catherine Curzon, under our joint pen-name, Ellie Curzon. The Lifeboat Orphans will be available in ebook, paperback, audiobook, and in Kindle Unlimited.

About me

I co-write WW2 saga fiction with Catherine Curzon under our joint pen name, Ellie Curzon.

I’ve written two books on Victorian crime and forensics, and articles for Fortean Times and Family Tree magazine. I’ve appeared on BBC1’s Murder, Mystery and My Family, and BBC Radio 4’s Punt PI. I live in the West Midlands with a cat who looks like a Viking.

Roads to the Past is a free publication, but if you love what you’ve read and can find some spare coins down the back of the sofa, you can upgrade to a paid subscription.

Subscribe now

And if you just want to chuck a couple of coins my way, you can give me a one-off tip!

Buy me a cuppa at Ko-Fi!

And hey - why not share the newsletter with like-minded chums?

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Do you remember what Twitter was like in 2009? My memories from back then (how old do I sound, for heaven’s sake?) are of a friendly place, without vast numbers of angry people. The app wasn’t installed by default on new smart phones (I don’t think I even had a smart phone in 2009) and large businesses hadn’t yet started to use it for promotions or customer service.

One day on my feed there was a tweet from a friend. She was sharing a post from her friend Sarah (not her real name) - a photo of a scraggly-looking ginger-ish cat, who came with a really sad story.

While it was nice on Twitter in 2009, it wasn’t nice at all in the wider world. The credit crunch had bitten hard and people were losing their homes and livelihoods overnight. Pets were being offloaded onto shelters, to the point of over-crowding, and many shelters instituted a two-week rule. If an animal couldn’t be rehomed in that time, well... I won’t elaborate on that, because it’s awful.

The scraggly ginger-ish cat was about three years old and had lived next door to Sarah’s mum. She loved cats but couldn’t have any at home because she was allergic to them. She’d watch the cat come and go, and one day, in the snow, saw the cat crying as he pawed at her neighbour’s back door because they wouldn’t let him in. For nine months, they forced their cat to live outside. They put food out for the cat, on the roof of the shed where the cat had decided to live, but that was the extent of their “care”.

One day, Sarah’s mum noticed that her neighbours had moved out, abandoning their ginger-ish cat in the back garden. He was eating the supermarket kibble that she left out for the local feral cats. And this was when Sarah tweeted her photos of the cat, and, through the magic of social media, I found them.

We’d only just moved house ourselves with our grumpy tuxedo cat, Juanito (not his real name). I really couldn’t take on another cat, and I worried about how Juanito would react. He hadn’t enjoyed moving but a Feliway plug-in soon soothed him. But this other cat… I was haunted by the little ginger-ish face, which seemed to be smiling for the camera, even though he had nothing to smile about. Maybe it’d be unlikely for him to go unadopted in a shelter, because he was adorable, and yet the over-crowding and desperate measures at shelters were awful, so there was no guarantee. It wasn’t the cat’s fault that he’d been treated so appallingly. And - as hard as it was - I tried not to let my anger loose on his previous owners. I have no idea what situation they were in, when so many people were struggling, and it would’ve been unkind of me to judge.

So I convinced my partner that we really did need another cat, and said, “okay, we’ll take the ginger-ish cat!”

We didn’t have a car then, and Sarah’s mum was on the other side of the city. Her husband was a policeman, and he was incredibly frustrated that the law didn’t allow for any comeback for the abandoned cat. So, on his day off, he picked us up (in his own car, not in a Battenburg, although if he had, I’d have asked him to put the lights on) and drove us to pick up the cat.

And the cat was HUGE.

Even though he was bony from neglect. He was sitting on Sarah’s mum’s round kitchen table and took up the entire table. His long, slightly ginger, slightly yellow fur, was matted. He looked a bit nervous when we came over to see him, but he also just looked so worn out that he didn’t have the energy to run off. I fussed him, and he didn’t seem to mind. Then I put him in our cat carrier, which I now realised was too small for him, but there wasn’t anything else to hand. He had to sit hunched up inside it with his whiskers poking out through the bars, because the priority was getting him home, courtesy of the off-duty copper.

Once home, he got on the sofa. Given that his coat was in such a state, that might not’ve been great for the sofa, but I urgently wanted to make this poor, bedraggled cat feel wanted and cared for. He was desperately rubbing his face against our legs and had the loudest purr I’d ever heard. This was already going brilliantly, and I was congratulating ourselves on a job well done. Abandoned cat now has a home. Happy ending - hurray!

And then he managed to get outside.

And he would not come in. We had warmth, we had food, but he’d lived outside for so long, it must’ve been terrifying to find himself indoors again, and in a strange house which already had a feline resident, and one that was none-too-friendly. Juanito was not impressed that we’d arrived home with another cat, which had enthusiastically made inroads into his kibble.1

Sven had taken up residence in the narrow but extremely long garden behind our Victorian terraced house. He was living under the hedge, right at the back of the garden, and would run off into the undergrowth every time I tried to grab him.

I realised that, while we’d decided to give him a home, he needed to decide to choose us.

It took a week. I put food out for him, under whichever hedge he’d chosen to live under that day. Before work and after work, I’d find where he was lurking, and stand there in the November cold talking to him. That was if I could find him - on one occasion, he wasn’t there at all and I was worried he’d run away. He’d watch me warily as I told him all about how nice and warm and dry it was inside the house, and how we had some delicious kibble, and that Juanito would be his friend,2 which obviously just sounded like the adults talking in Snoopy to him. At any sign of me reaching towards him, he bolted. But, each time I came out to see him, he’d moved a little further down the garden, inching closer to the house. It seemed that I was slowly gaining his trust.

While all this was going on, my friends were giving me tips. Kate, who volunteered with the Cats’ Protection League, helping with their trap, neuter and release scheme, recommended pilchards in tomato sauce, which she baited her traps with. Cat cannot resist pilchards in tomato sauce, apparently.

So, one very cold evening with ice in the air, I was shivering while cooking the dinner with the back door open. I went back and forth between the cooker and the door, to speak to the cat. He’d moved all the way down the garden to the house by now, watching me from his perch on the fence by the back door. I put a bowl of pilchards just inside the back door, and he stared at. His nose twitched. And finally, he warily jumped down and approached. He came inside, started to wolf down (could we say cat down?) the pilchards, and once I was sure he was completely focused on the fish, I closed the door. He was, at last, inside, and it was by his own choice.

We kept him inside for a couple of weeks after that, and took him to the vet’s where he had an FIV test. He’d been living with feral cats and I didn’t want to take any chances, as it was a risk for Juanito. Sven was fine, it turned out. He was also shaved by the vet to remove enormous clumps of matted hair, having not been groomed for months. In fact, it wasn’t until he’d been shaved that we knew for certain that Sven was a boy, because the matting was that bad, like something off Animal Cops.3

A few months went by. Sven went from a sack of bones to a 6 kg lion, weighing twice as much as Juanito. And Juanito learned to live with his big, ginger-ish friend, and not slap him across the face every time he found Sven sitting on the sofa. Maybe how those two finally got on is a story for another time?

I became enchanted by Sven. Why was he so huge? Why did he leave tufts of pale, toffee-colour wool on the fences like a sheep?4 Why did he have hairy paws like pom-poms which meant he skidded when he ran across our wood vinyl floors? Where did he get those lynx-like points to his ears? Why was he ginger-ish - not a true ginger, but more yellow than ginger? Why did he have a tail like a feather duster, and a huge ruff that made him look like a lion - to the point that our neighbour’s toddler really did think there was a lion in their garden every time Sven went outside? What about that big, square chin? Why did he seem to have the personality of a friendly dog? Why were his eyes rounder than the typical cat’s eye shape, like Puss in Boots from Shrek? And why, despite being so enormous, did he have a bizarre miaow which never sounded like “miaow” but a high-pitched “pip-pip-pip” or an “ow-ow”?

I was flipping through my atlas of cats one day when I found the answer. All of the features I’d identified were ones found in Norwegian Forest Cats. I’d never heard of the breed before. They’re descended from Norwegian farm cats, so they’re a big, tough breed designed to cope with cold weather. In Scandinavia, they’re known as the Norse Skogkatt - a fairy or troll cat with a bit of magic about them, and in Norse legends, their strong claws and muscular shoulders mean that they can scale cliff faces (having seen Sven scale a fence, this seems entirely plausible). They appear in Viking art, although to be honest, some of Louis Wain’s cats look like Norwegians. They’re thought to be the ancestors of the Maine Coon, but they only started coming to the UK in the 1980s.

Was Sven a pedigree? I found a local breeder who had a male who looked like Sven’s double, with the not-exactly-ginger-more-yellow coat. But it was mad. A Norwegian Forest Cat kitten cost about £500 then. Why would someone spend that amount of money on a cat, then make it live outside, before abandoning it when they moved house? Some years later, I chatted to someone who used to show Norwegians and she said that some owners make them live outside because it makes their coats fluffier! But I wonder if Sven was an accident - the breeder’s male could’ve got outside, met a non-pedigree domestic cat, and produced a litter of irresistibly cute little ginger-ish fluffballs. This is the part of his origin story that we’ll never know, but it’s nice to think that he’s got fluffy siblings out there somewhere pip-pip-pipping away.

In April, the year after we met Sven, I had an operation on my stomach. I came home with stitches across my chest and felt so sore that I slumped onto the sofa and couldn’t move. Sven came in and looked up at me with what seemed to be concern,5 and I was worried that he had abandonment issues and thought I’d left him as I’d stayed in the hospital overnight. He jumped up onto the sofa and started his motorbike purr, enthusiastically rubbing his head against my chest, over the stitches. I nearly pushed him away, but then I realised he was trying to look after me. It was such an emotional moment; this huge cat, purring ferociously6 and rubbing his head against those sore stitches, and yet I had a feeling that he was saying thank you to me.

That I’d looked after him, when he’d been abandoned, and now that I was in pain, it was his turn to look after me.

The years went by. Sven charmed our neighbours. He tried to slap a Guide Dog. He leapt over a wall at the guy delivering our Chinese takeaway, who thought he was about to be assaulted by an enormous fox. Sven was told off for putting on weight (well, wouldn’t you have over-eating issues if you’d been abandoned in a back garden?). Poor Juanito developed renal disease and passed away, leaving us with a one-cat household. Sven was doing really well - up until 2023.

It was the summer, and he was doing his usual thing of mostly living outside - partly to do with his abandonment, I think, but also partly because it’s another Norwegian “thing”; they do just really like being outdoors cats.7 He was losing weight, but I didn’t think much of it, as older cats do get a bit thin, and, with him being outside so much, he wasn’t lurking around his food bowl. But then we noticed that when he did come into eat, he’d yowl for food, in a way he never had before. He’d scoff himself silly, eating so much, so quickly, that he’d bring it back up again. And yowl angrily to be fed again. If I tried to go up to him outside, he’d run away, looking furious. I just didn’t know what was wrong as he wasn’t being himself at all.

My partner noticed that Sven’s cheek was bleeding, and when he tried to wipe it clean, noticed that there was a hole in the side of his face. It was the weekend, so we jumped into the car and took him to the emergency vet. The vet diagnosed a burst abscess, so Sven had to be kept inside with a huge plastic cone around his neck. He’d lie across the end of the bed, staring sadly out across the garden. We took him to his usual vet for a follow up, and that’s when they realised Sven had yet another problem - he had an over-active thyroid.

All I know about the condition then was that a schoolfriend’s dad had hyperthyroidism and ended up needing radiation treatment. The vet told us that cats can have radio-iodine treatment as well, but poor Sven was so on edge, so thin and so much unlike himself that I just didn’t think it was fair to put him through something so gruelling, especially as it meant a long stay at a vet’s practice which he would never had been to before. So we decided to give him medication, which was easy enough to give as we just put it on his food.

Sven recovered, and the thyroid seemed to be under control. But towards the end of 2024, the yowling started again. Back he went for more blood tests and we were told to increase his meds. But he was now on twice his original dose. So the vet suggested radio-iodine treatment again. And this time, we decided to go for it.

To the Cotswolds!

Sven didn’t have any other health problems, which was impressive for a cat of his age, so he was a good candidate for it. As extreme as the treatment might seem, I kept thinking of him purring against my surgery stitches, trying to heal me, and I couldn’t in good conscience say no. Fortunately, his medical insurance covered radio-iodine treatment, with an excess fee. Unfortunately, it’s such specialist treatment that the only vets who provide it in England are in Chipping Norton, Leeds, London, and somewhere in Hampshire.

Chipping Norton, a bloody lovely town in the Cotswolds, was nearest. In fact, it’s very near Dr Who’s stone circle and the Whispering Knights, which I’ve taken you to before.

Sven was distressed, as the thyroid makes him anxious, so he had to give him sedatives before we could travel. And yes, that was as fun as it sounds… So, several bites and scratches later, we were taking our ginger-ish lion for a drive to the Cotswolds.

I sat in the back, next to him in his carrier - a padded one designed for dogs. He spent most of the journey - down the M5, across the M42, then turning off at Stratford-upon-Avon - doing his “ow, ow” and staring at me furiously. I felt awful, because he must’ve been so confused and frightened, but I knew we had to get through this for his sake.

To be honest, the motorways weren’t too bad, but once we got on the smaller roads down to Chipping Norton, we met one too many mini-roundabouts. My stomach wasn’t too happy; Sven’s definitely wasn’t. We arrived in the beautiful Cotswold town with a cat carrier full of sick. Lovely.

But the vet was unphased; he’s seen far worse. And he’s definitely a cat person. As he examined Sven’s thyroid, he was fussing him and cat-whispering. Despite Sven arriving as a sick-covered ball of stress, the vet calmed him down and I knew that our cat was in safe hands.

We collected Sven just over a week later. He was a bit groggy, and we had to follow radiation protocol for a while: he couldn’t sit on our laps or rub his face against us for a while, and we kept his litter in a separate bin with a radiation warning label on it. I’m sad to report that he didn’t glow in the dark, which would’ve been quite fun. But the improvement was pretty much instant, and he was back to his fluffy, lazily content old self again. If I have to deal with a hyperthyroid cat again, honestly - I would go with the radio-iodine as soon as they’ve stabilised on the meds, and not leave it.

Since then, he’s been diagnosed with kidney disease, which is what we helped Juanito through - we had him on a drip at home at one point, and I’m wondering when or if that’ll have to happen with Sven. It almost seems like a given, really, that any cat who reaches fifteen will have to deal with dodgy kidneys. I’m just relieved we sorted out Sven’s thyroid first, though, because trying to juggle thyroid and kidneys at the same time would’ve been incredibly difficult. He’s gone deaf as well, but seeing as I’ve gone deaf too, we get along okay, and I’ve worked out some sign language for him, based on BSL. Food/bowl, fish, you, me, no, in/out. He just stares at me with his big, round eyes as if he’s wondering why the heck I’m flapping my hands about.

When he comes to sit next to me and rubs his face against me, and I can feel that motorbike purr which I can no longer hear, I know we did the right thing all those years ago when I first saw that smiling ginger-ish face on Twitter. We look after each other, Sven and I. And I love him.

About me

I co-write WW2 saga fiction with my friend Catherine Curzon under our joint pen name, Ellie Curzon. Our next novel, The Lifeboat Orphans, is on pre-order now!

I’ve written two books on Victorian crime and forensics, and articles for Fortean Times and Family Tree magazine. I’ve appeared on BBC1’s Murder, Mystery and My Family, and BBC Radio 4’s Punt PI. I live in the West Midlands with a cat who looks like a Viking.

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My research for Poison Panic and Fatal Evidence didn’t just involve rummaging for newspaper reports of inquests and trials, leafing through old medical journals, and hunting down hand-written documents at The National Archives. For me, research included travelling to some of the places I was writing about. The world has changed enormously since the mid-1800s, but in some places, it hasn’t changed very much at all; the churches and churchyards are still standing, and some of the pubs where inquests were held (really!) are still open.

In this newsletter, I’ll be taking you around Essex on a Poison Panic tour, to visit the homes of women who were accused of arsenic poisonings in the late 1840s; a scandal which led to an act of parliament and the start of chemists using a poisons register (something you’ll have heard of if you’re a fan of Golden Age crime fiction). There are videos too! And in later newsletters, we’ll be visiting London, Kent, and Staffordshire in the footsteps of “the father of forensic science”, Alfred Swaine Taylor - one of the inspirations for Sherlock Holmes, and Dorothy L Sayers’ go-to source when concocting her mysteries.

So don your top hat or tie on your bonnet, and whatever you do, don’t go near that suspicious-looking bowl of sugar!

A bit of background

Back in the 1840s, arsenic was easy to buy for anyone who wanted to deal with an infestation of mice or rats. Famously, it was used in dyes as well, particularly green dye. It still shocks me that it was even used in green food colouring - let’s eat arsenic! Great idea! What could possibly go wrong? But it’s not only green dresses and wallpaper we need to be wary of, because it was used in lots of other colours of dye as well. And, yes, unsurprisingly, all this arsenic swimming about caused lots of accidental deaths. When you start to read about life in the past, you’ll never complain about health and safety regulations ever again.

And because arsenic was so easy to get hold of, anyone who wanted to bump someone off had easy access to lethal poison; a poison which looked like an innocent white powder. Not only that, but arsenic’s symptoms closely resemble a very bad stomach bug. All this meant that the unscrupulous could get away with murder - unless the local gossips started to whisper that all was not as it seemed.

There were poisoning cases up and down the country resulting in various flaps, but the panic which was stirred up in Essex in the mid-late 1840s, with women standing accused, led to a change in the law. Unless you’re Irish and so very aware of the horrific potato famine at that time, we forget how tumultuous that period was - there was an enormous recession, failed harvests, attempted revolutions across mainland Europe, and a cholera epidemic that killed huge numbers of people. The Brontë sisters’ novels were first published at this time, too, and criticisms of their work often took aim at their unconventional spirit, because it seemed like yet another threat in an already desperately unsettled period. So is it any wonder that a cluster of poison deaths set off a panic?

A writer in a duffel coat

Being from Essex, and also being an Agatha Christie fan, I couldn’t resist finding out more, and, long story short, I went from finding a note in a burial register about an arsenic poisoning to signing a contract for my first book.

I wrote the book before I could drive, so one Easter I went down to Essex to visit my mum, and cheekily asked her to drive me around. Strangely, our trips turned into lovely family days out, and my brother wandered into shot and accidentally ended up in one of the photos which appears in the book. The aim was to see the villages, take photos and make some short videos. My publisher, Pen and Sword, expected a minimum number of maps, photos and drawings in the book, so taking some of my own helped to bump up the numbers. And I managed to sources images from archives: the Essex Police Museum furnished me with a splendid photo of a mid-1800s copper wearing a steel-reinforced top hat, while the Cadbury Research Library at the University of Birmingham helped me out with a pretty eye-watering image of a murder from a broadside ballad.

I had grand ideas that my videos would help shift books, but I’m not sure that they did. I do hope, though, that people who’ve stumbled over them on YouTube during the last decade have enjoyed them. I’d bought a digital camcorder (I have no idea where on earth it is these days) and all I needed was a tripod and a willing cameraman (my partner) to film. The videos had an unintended effect on my writing. I wanted to film just a few minutes at each location, with me talking to camera about what happened there. I had reams and reams of material (enough for a book, strangely enough!), and having to distil it down to just the key pieces of information actually helped to focus my writing. I wrote down bulletpoints, and memorised them (much walking around my mum’s back garden talking to myself took place), so that all the to-camera bits are coming straight out of my memory, rather than being read from flashcards. And that helped with the writing, too, because it was all filed away in my brain.

There’s six location videos, showing me looking cold in a duffel coat in the Tendring Hundred, and slightly warmer in a cardigan under Stansted airport’s flightpath. Check the videos out on YouTube!

Clavering

The village, once the home of woman called Sarah Chesham, is so far over to the west of Essex that on our drive there, we had to go through part of Hertfordshire to reach it. Everyone thinks that East Anglia is flat, and a great deal of it is, but there are hills, and Clavering catches the eastern end of the Chilterns. There’s two pubs in the village, and one of them, The Cricketers, was owned by the parents of celebrity chef, Jamie Oliver.

But we were heading to The Fox and Hounds. It’s a very Essex-looking place, with clapboard walls, and like many a village pub, it’s centuries old with low ceilings and wooden beams. As everyone else ate their pub lunch, I wandered about, picturing what it would’ve looked like back in the 1840s. Even if you’re writing non-fiction, your imagination still needs to come into play. You need to feel the past, not just report it, but without making stuff up, of course.

Going back in time, pubs were the centre of village life, when people weren’t up at the church. Auctions were held in pubs, and so were inquests. If you’ve ever seen Death Comes to Pemberley, PD James’s sequel (fanfic?) to Pride and Prejudice, then you might remember the rowdy inquest scene held at the pub. The verbatim newspaper reports of inquests, which were so useful for my research, also demonstrate how holding a solemn, serious investigation into an untimely death in a building full of people boozing it up isn’t a good idea. One inquest I read about led to the accused - after they were cleared of suspicion by the coroner - being thrown into the horse trough!

Sarah Chesham was accused of poisoning two of her sons, and the baby of a local girl. There was forensic evidence, courtesy of Professor Taylor, to prove that her sons had died of arsenic poisoning, but she was cleared at her trial. It was impossible to prove how the boys had consumed the poison, and in the case of the baby, it wasn’t even proven the child had been poisoned. Sarah almost went back to a quiet life. But when her husband died only a few years later, the finger of suspicion swung back to point at her and she stood trial again….

A stream runs by, outside the pub and through the village. Just before Sarah was accused of her husband’s death, a huge storm tore through Clavering, and a newspaper reported that water had risen into people’s homes and carried their furniture out through their front doors. Seeing the stream up close, and almost falling into it, made me realise just how devastating the storm must’ve been, even though I hadn’t been there to witness it nearly 170 years before.

Like many parish churches in Essex, Clavering’s is ancient and made partly from stone, and faced with flint. We filmed in the churchyard by the western door, but the whole time we did, I had the weirdest feeling that we were being watched. And by someone who wasn’t very happy that we were there!

I returned to Clavering a couple of years later with a proper camera crew when I was on the BBC’s Murder, Mystery and My Family. It was an interesting experience, and I fulfilled my ambition to be filmed in a churchyard while looking windswept in a tailcoat. I think I’ve read Wuthering Heights once too often….

The Tendring Hundred

Another day, another part of Essex. And this time, with Jasper the dog. We dodged our way up the A12 past the combine harvesters, skirted the edge of Colchester - Britain’s oldest recorded town, which has come off the worst against both Boudicca and 1970s town planners - and found ourselves in The Witchfinder General’s old patch. This is an area that’s not a stranger to panics.

Wix was once the home of Mary May, at the same time as some of my ancestors. My great-several-times-grandfather, John Mills Nicholls, was born in Wix in 1810, and was killed in nearby Weeley in 1844, thanks to an incident involving a threshing machine. Poor man: he lived in a dangerous world.

Mary May was accused of poisoning her half-brother, William Constable (perhaps a distance relative of the painter, you never know), who was also known as Spratty Watts. I popped into the local pub, which is still open, and where the inquest took place (is it any wonder that so many people claim that their local, ancient pub is haunted?).

The landlord knew all about it - it’s amazing how these stories have been passed down by word of mouth through the generations and still linger. We visited the village’s tiny church, which used to be the chapel for a priory. The three arches along the north wall of the church, dating back to the twelfth century, are all that survives of it. There are some very old box tombs in the churchyard, with trees trying to grow out of them. And somewhere in this churchyard, Spratty Watts had been buried… then dug up again.

Behind the church is Wix Abbey, a gorgeous red-brick Elizabethan house. Jasper the dog was having a brilliant time sniffing around the churchyard (I don’t want to spend too long wondering what he could smell there), until the canine residents of the Abbey took objection to him and everyone started to bark. We had to beat a hasty retreat….

Mary May was dealt with very quickly: she entered her brother in a burial club in May 1848, he died on 11 June, the inquest began on 30 June, Mary was tried at the assizes in July, and in August she was sent to the gallows.

Only ten days after Mary May’s execution, another body was raised from the ground. This was Thomas Ham’s, who’d been buried in the nearby village of Tendring (where even more people from my family once lived…). His wife had darted back up the altar pretty quickly after her husband’s death, and the locals were suspicious. They had good reason to be, as Professor Taylor announced at the inquest that he had died of arsenic poisoning. Hannah was sent away to Colchester Gaol. Back in the 1600s, this would’ve been at Colchester Castle, where The Witchfinder General sent his “witches”, but by the mid-1840s, it’d moved to a new building where, of all things, a Waitrose2 now stands.

Luckily for Hannah, her new husband was a well-heeled farmer, who could afford to support her in prison and pay for a very good barrister when it came for her trial at Chelmsford’s Shire Hall

And of course, we went to see the Shire Hall, although it’s now closed. As well as hosting assizes and petty sessions, it once hosted a corn exchange and had a ballroom. The original fittings had been pulled out during a 1930s refurb, but the imposing Georgian building still stands firm at the top of the High Street. Filming there was far tougher than in quiet churchyards; I had to battle with Bank Holiday bikers merrily revving their engines and a huge, rattling delivery of bottles to one of the shops.

While Hannah Southgate waited, yet another body was exhumed, this time of Nathaniel Button, who’d died in Ramsey. This is the point where the panic reaches its peak. Locals suspected Button had been murdered for reasons such as “he died quickly” and “Mary May used to live in Ramsey”. You can hear the coroner’s frustration in the inquest report - Professor Taylor found no evidence of poisoning, and yet the inquest jury still wanted to press ahead with a trial anyway, because… because… because they had been whipped into a frenzy. But it came to nothing.

We filmed at the church in Ramsey, with a fearsome cold north-easterly wind blowing in across the Stour from the North Sea. Then we went off to have some lunch at The Castle Inn, where the landlord told me something I hadn’t expected. Because, while I had been busy researching what had taken place around the Tendring Hundred in the 1840s, I of course hadn’t been paying attention to what’d happened in later years. The Castle might not’ve been an inquest venue during the Essex poison panic, but in 1979 it was the epicentre of a siege.

A teenage gunman was wanted by the police in Chelmsford and drove north-east at high speeds. He arrived in Ramsey and took a local man hostage in The Castle Inn. Police marksmen waited outside. The hostage chatted with the gun-toting teenager, calmly trying to make him give himself up. But the next morning, the siege ended in bloodshed as the teenager ran outside with his gun and was shot dead. It was all over the papers, and a punk band released a song about it. There’s a wall of The Castle devoted to the siege, and they even have the 7” single.

No one, as far as I know, has released any records about the Essex poison panic, although surely it’s only a matter of time until Damon Albarn turns it into a musical. You never know.

There was another poisoning case which contributed to the panic, just over the border in Suffolk. Seventeen-year-old Catherine Forster was accused of putting arsenic in the dumplings in order to kill her husband. What brought her crime to light was that she’d thrown the crumbs outside and the neighbours’ chickens had succumbed after eating them (should point out here that, yes, the neighbours are my relatives…). Her case is in Poison Panic, but we didn’t get round to visiting Acton. One day, maybe; the church contains the vast marble tomb of William Jennens, “The Miser of Acton”. He had been very wealthy and died intestate, and the Chancery suits that followed were one of the inspirations for Dickens’ Bleak House.

If zipping about Essex wasn’t enough, I recorded a book trailer at the amazing Black Country Living Museum. I’m really not sure that the trailer shifted any books, but it was enormous fun to film. The museum has served as a backdrop for several TV series and films - from Peaky Blinders to Stan & Ollie, and even a Swedish metal band’s promo video was filmed there. The final shot of my book trailer is in a room that was used as the Peaky Blinders’ office. Unfortunately, Cillian Murphy had just nipped out.

Poison Panic is available in paperback and ebook. It’s also in quite a few libraries as well.

Pre-order now!

The Lifeboat Orphans, the second book in The Runaway Evacuees series is on pre-order now! Based on a true story, it’s written by me and my friend Catherine Curzon, under our joint pen-name, Ellie Curzon. The Lifeboat Orphans will be available in ebook, paperback, audiobook, and in Kindle Unlimited.

About me

I co-write WW2 saga fiction with my friend Catherine Curzon under our joint pen name, Ellie Curzon.

I’ve written two books on Victorian crime and forensics, and articles for Fortean Times and Family Tree magazine. I’ve appeared on BBC1’s Murder, Mystery and My Family, and BBC Radio 4’s Punt PI. I live in the West Midlands with a cat who looks like a Viking.

Roads to the Past is a free publication, but if you love what you’ve read and can find some spare coins down the back of the sofa, you can upgrade to a paid subscription.

Subscribe now

And if you just want to chuck a couple of coins my way, you can give me a one-off tip!

Buy me a cuppa at Ko-Fi!

And hey - why not share the newsletter with like-minded chums?

Share

You wouldn’t expect rural Herefordshire to look like Italy, and yet one small corner of it does. The small village of Hoarwithy stands on the banks of the sinuous River Wye (yes, the same river which goes through Hay-on-Wye, the World’s First Book Town, which we visited last time). It’s scattered up the hills which rise from the banks of the river, and at the top, you’ll find Hoarwithy’s thoroughly unusual church. It looks nothing like you would expect to find in the Church of England. William Poole, the vicar who arrived in the mid-1800s, decided to “beautify” the existing chapel of St Catherine’s and he went full-throttle Italian on it.

Really.

We headed up a steep path to reach the church, which gives you even more time to admire it, and - on a warm, cloudless day - to wonder if the church gate is secretly a portal which has magicked you away to Tuscany.

An arcade runs under the church tower and along the south wall of the church. When we arrived, a couple were sitting on one of the benches, admiring the view across the village and the hills as they tucked into their sandwiches.

The tops of the columns are intricately carved, inspired by Mediaeval Herefordshire church art, and the arcade is floored with a mosaic that has a holy trinity-inspired design. It’s in very good condition, even though it’s been walked over by many pairs of feet.

Rev Poole had been appointed vicar of Hentland parish in the mid-1850s, and Hoarwithy was a chapelry within it. Its chapel was a small brick building which Poole didn’t like at all, calling it “An ugly brick building with no pretensions to any style of architecture.” In its defence, perhaps someone pointed out, “But, Rev Poole, it’s a chapel that serves a small community, and maybe they’re quite happy with it, and no one can afford to build and maintain something flashy?” But Rev Poole had other ideas. Fortunately, as he was independently wealthy, and was friends with an architect, he had the means to completely transform the “ugly brick building”. So he called on his chum John Pollard Seddon, an architect who designed buildings at University College Wales, and who created many Gothic Revival edifices in the late 1800s. But as you can see, there’s nothing Gothic about St Catherine’s, and I would imagine it was Rev Poole’s dream to preside over a gorgeous Romanesque church; a dream he realised and then some.

The arcade, with its columns and mosaic, is impressive enough, and if I’d found out that the church was locked, I wouldn’t have felt that it’d been a wasted journey at all. But we were in luck… the heavy door creaked open and we headed inside.

The church takes inspiration from all over the place - parts of it are based on the cathedral at Le Puy in France, while the lamps are copies of ones at St Mark’s in Venice. The pulpit riffs on one in a cathedral near Florence, and, as a local reference point, some of the stained glass windows up by the altar are based on ones in Hereford Cathedral. The altar is made from marble and precious lapis lazuli. For all that it could’ve turned out as a hodge-podge, it hasn’t at all - somehow, it all fits together into a one beautiful whole.

Apparently - and let’s be honest, unsurprisingly - Rev Poole hired artisans from Italy to work on his vision, and they created the astonishing Byzantine-style golden mosaic above the altar. The lamps came from Italy as well.

I mean, how many English parish churches have something as stunning as this on their ceiling? And just look at the detail of the carving on that column just to the left. It really is nothing short of spectacular, and I like to imagine Rev Poole standing under that mosaic feeling very pleased with himself; a man of the cloth surrounded by his stunning devotional backdrop.

One of the stained glass windows was designed by Brummie pre-Raphaelite Edward Burne-Jones, whose work you can also see in Birmingham’s Anglican cathedral. Burne-Jones’ window is even more of a hidden gem than the church itself, as it’s right at the top of a cluster of windows on the west wall, and - kicking myself here - there’s so much going on that I didn’t spot it! But I did spot the very British-looking carved choir stalls, which are adorned with figures of local saints, and looks like it’s just escaped from MR James’ “The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral” (although I didn’t see a carved cat among the figures…).

As Hoarwithy isn’t that far from the Welsh border, the local saints include St Tydfil, who, according to legend, lived at the head of the valleys in south-east Wales and was martyred for her faith. Thus, she gave her name to Merthyr Tydfil - Welsh “merthyr” translates as the English “martyr”. Although, strangely, one of the carved figures has been called Merthyr, as if the town was named after two different women, not just one.

Then, above the font, there’s an appropriately-placed painting of the Madonna and Child in a beautiful frame. I don’t know who painted it, or where it came from, but it really is a gorgeous thing, looking down on the local babies. The font was rescued from the original chapel which Rev Poole had taken such an objection to, although I do wonder if the columns it stands on were added in order to make it blend in with its Romanesque surroundings.

We went for a wander in the churchyard, which is further up the hill. It’s worth a visit even if you’re not interested in coming to say hello to former residents as it has an extraordinary view across the Wye valley. There are several graves of young men who died during the First World War; even this remote place was touched by that awful conflict.

Then we headed back down the steep path to find somewhere for lunch. We went to the New Harp Inn and sat in its beer garden, which as a little brook running through it that sounded as if it’d escaped a children’s story: Wiggle Brook. After being transported to Italy through the church on the hill, it was funny being in a pub which is so British that not only do people bring their dogs to it, but their horses, too.

If you enjoyed our traipse through Hoarwithy, don’t forget to leave a like! Or even leave a comment:

Leave a comment

Pre-order now!

The Lifeboat Orphans, the second book in The Runaway Evacuees series is on pre-order now! Based on a true story, it’s written by me and my friend Catherine Curzon, under our joint pen-name, Ellie Curzon. The Lifeboat Orphans will be available in ebook, paperback, audiobook, and in Kindle Unlimited.

We were chuffed to bits to see The Lost Orphans reviewed in the latest issue of People’s Friend magazine!

About me

I co-write WW2 saga fiction with my friend Catherine Curzon under our joint pen name, Ellie Curzon.

I’ve written two books on Victorian crime and forensics, and articles for Fortean Times and Family Tree magazine. I’ve appeared on BBC1’s Murder, Mystery and My Family, and BBC Radio 4’s Punt PI. I live in the West Midlands with a cat who looks like a Viking.

Roads to the Past is a free publication, but if you love what you’ve read and can find some spare coins down the back of the sofa, you can upgrade to a paid subscription.

Subscribe now

And if you just want to chuck a couple of coins my way, you can give me a one-off tip!

Buy me a cuppa at Ko-Fi!

And hey - why not share the newsletter with like-minded chums?

Share

So a couple of weekends ago, we fired up the Picanto, viewed a house, then drove to “The World’s First Book Town”, Hay-on-Wye! (or Y Gelli Gandryll, if you’re Welsh). Do you love books? Yes? Then read on!

This is the first newsletter I’ve written about somewhere in Wales, although I’ve come close to it: you can see Wales from some of the tall hills I’ve driven up and, while the World’s First Book Town might be in Wales, Britain’s Most Motivated Village 1991 is just over the border in England - about two metres away from Wales across a river.

Hay is incredibly old. Its small streets of brightly-coloured buildings radiate out from a castle - and even that has a literary connection. Barbara Erskine’s enormous doorstep of a novel, Lady of Hay, paved the way for timeslip historicals and centres around real-life Norman aristocrat Matilda de Braose. According to legend, she built Hay Castle in just one night, which would be an impressive feat because, to be honest, I’d struggle to build a castle out of Lego in one night.

Over time, the castle fell into disrepair, and the small market town of Hay saw its fortunes decline. That was until the middle of the twentieth century when Richard Booth, one of its sons, had a stroke of inspiration - what if he made his home town a book town? At the time, libraries were closing in the US, so off he went to the States, returning with enough books to furnish his first bookshops. Second-hand bookshops began to pop up all over Hay and the tourists (erm… like me) turned up. One April Fool’s Day, Booth even proclaimed himself the King of Hay, and his homemade crown, orb, and sceptre (made from the innards of a toilet cistern) are on display in the castle’s small museum. It put Hay on the map.

And a town full of books is surely the perfect place for an arts festival. The Hay Festival (or Gŵyl Y Gelli if you’re Welsh) began in a pub garden in 1988, but now it occupies a tent village on the edge of the town, and attracts famous authors and musicians from across the world.

Wherever you go in Hay, you’re guaranteed to trip over bookshops. We turned into a street and found ourselves treated to not one but two crime bookshops right next door to each other: Murder and Mayhem and Christie and Doyle.

Spot the iconic green and cream Penguin crime novels! Murder and Mayhem specialises in horror, crime fiction and non-fiction, and Christie & Doyle stocks cosy crime. As soon as I stepped inside Christie & Doyle, I saw the biggest collection of Agatha Christies I’ve ever seen in my life - and even spotted the edition of After the Funeral which I bought in a charity shop when I was thirteen!

These two shops are off-shoots of Addyman’s, a bookshop which sits across the narrow road and has a general collection of second-hand and new books. This is just one of Addyman’s gorgeous book displays:

Then a few doors down, there’s Gay on Wye, demonstrating some excellent punning!

And just a few doors along from there is Richard Booth’s bookshop. He owned around half a dozen in Hay at one time, then amalgamated them all into this one building. It’s thought to be the largest second-hand bookshop in Europe, and it’s airy and welcoming, with polished wood floors. What’s noticeable about these bookshops is that none of them (at least none that I visited) had cafés, unlike Waterstones which seems to me to prioritise cafés and greetings cards over books. But then, if you’re the sort of person going into a bookshop in Hay, you’re the sort of person who’s there for the books, and you don’t need to be lured in with overpriced coffee. I bought a book from 1821, designed to teach students how to read Mediaeval and Tudor court hand. Yes, I’ve spent months trying to declutter my home in order to move, and the book is niche to a ridiculous degree, but… how could I possibly walk away and leave a book like that behind me on the shelf?

And there’s even more bookshops in Hay than just these - second-hand books are for sale in the castle grounds, and I spied a poetry bookshop, and some other second-hand shops which I didn’t have time to go into. I did, though, have time to go to the antiques market, where I found another paperweight for my collection.

Even with its bookshops and its arts festival, Hay is still a country town. There was an agricultural show on in the nearby village of Llanigon, and their tractor ride-out coincided with us sitting in the beer garden behind The Three Tuns pub. I can’t say it was easy having a conversation as a stream of tractors chugged past, but I’m not in the business of complaining about tractors in the countryside. And, satisfying my inner nerd/Alan Partridge, there was even a steam-powered traction engine from Norfolk.

We stayed at a hotel just outside Hay called the Black Mountain Lodge, on the road into the Brecon Beacons; the sort of location where it’s necessary to have a sign up saying Please remove walking boots by the door.

For those of you who don’t know, road signs in Wales are bilingual, so English-speakers quickly pick up bits and bobs of Welsh as you drive around. Every time you approach a bend, it says ARAF / SLOW in the road. You might also see DIM MYNEDIAD - NO ENTRY. Or DIM PARCIO - NO PARKING. My brain likes to interpret this as, “You’re bloody dim if you try to park here.” Confusingly for fans of British gangster films, there’s also FFORD ALLAN, which means NO EXIT, and actually has nothing to do with Cockney actor Alan Ford.

So we might not’ve gone to Venice or Barcelona, and we didn’t have time for a fortnight of lounging by a pool, but we did get to see a castle and loads of bookshops in a lovely old market town. So we didn’t do too badly at all.

Have you ever been to Hay-on-Wye/Y Gelli Gandryll? If you could turn your home town into a world’s first, what would it be?

Leave a comment

If you want the inside scoop on bookshop life, check out Framlingham’s and No Wriggling Out of Writing, and ’s Receipt from the Bookshop!

Out now!

The Lost Orphans, the first book in the brand new series The Runaway Evacuees, is out now! Based on a true story, it’s written by me and my friend Catherine Curzon, under our joint pen-name, Ellie Curzon. It’s available in ebook, paperback, audiobook, and in Kindle Unlimited. And we were chuffed to bits to see it reviewed in the latest issue of People’s Friend magazine. Get your copy now!

About me

I co-write WW2 saga fiction with my friend Catherine Curzon under our joint pen name, Ellie Curzon.

I’ve written two books on Victorian crime and forensics, and articles for Fortean Times and Family Tree magazine. I’ve appeared on BBC1’s Murder, Mystery and My Family, and BBC Radio 4’s Punt PI. I live in the West Midlands with a cat who looks like a Viking.

You can subscribe to this newsletter for free, or if you love what you’ve read and can find some spare coins down the back of the sofa, you can upgrade to a paid subscription.

And if you just want to chuck a couple of coins my way, you can give me a one-off tip!

Buy me a cuppa at Ko-Fi!

And hey - why not share the newsletter with like-minded chums?

This time, we're venturing a little further than Spain, all the way to Greece. Or to be more accurate, the Greek islands. We’ll encounter drunken Club 18-30’s revellers, survive a massive storm and hairpin bends on mountain roads, and even meet a saint!

Corfu

After two years on the trot to the same gorgeous resort in Mallorca (you can read about the mayhem my brother and I caused in an earlier newsletter), my family decided to shift gear and head to the resort of Kavos on the Greek island of Corfu. Obviously these days, I'm ancient and out of touch, but as I understand it, Corfu is a bit of party island. Not quite the ravers' paradise that Ibiza has become (or so I hear - I'm not a raver, so I have no idea), but not far off.

Back then, Corfu was still aiming its beaches at families, but I do remember evening walks which took us past bars and nightclubs (to the horror of my grandma), with plenty of drunk, lairy young people with espadrilles and George Michael haircuts rolling about. Maybe Club Tropicana was actually in Corfu? One evening, a boatload of Club 18-30 revellers landed a boat near our hotel, got very drunk, and left a right mess behind them afterwards. It was a strange factor of this family holiday: that there were other people on the same island having a very different holiday indeed. Cor-phew! as the tabloids no doubt said.

Because our hotel-apartment was right beside the beach, so there wasn't a pool. Every morning, we'd have breakfast, take only a few steps from the hotel's patio, and we were on the sand. The island's farmers were trying to barracade the airport with their tractors because the tourists were having so many showers that water was running out for their crops. This meant that if you wanted any chance of a shower after being on the beach, you had to go at three o’clock, and the water was freezing cold.

From the beach, I watched local kids walk into the sea with their masks and snorkels, returning a few hours later with tiny octopi on small harpoons. So then I went into the sea with a mask (but no harpoons) and learned to take a deep breath and float face down for ages, quietly watching shoals of silver fish flitting through the shafts of sunlight that cascaded into the sea.

My Dad bought a fun, new lilo, which was shaped like a huge hand. One of the fingernails was transparent, so you could use it to see the watery world below. But that wasn’t enough water-based excitement for my parents. Ooooh, no.

First up, windsurfing. My dad, being an avid sailor (he used to crew for a guy who won Olympic gold) was happy as larry faffing about with a sail and a bit of fibreglass, but my mum made the rookie error of allowing her sailboard to realise that she was nervous. It decided to take my mum on a bit of a trip - across the bay, threatening to head out across the sea to Albania, which isn’t far away from the Greek island. So fast did my mum head off that my dad had to mount a hot pursuit, windsurfing frantically after her. It could’ve been the opening of a budget Bond film with those two windsurfing up to the then-Communist state.

Second up: paragliding. If something as ordinary as windsurfing could nearly set off an international incident, then why not try going on skis behind a motorboat with a parachute attached to your back so that you take to the air? What could possibly go wrong? Quite a lot, but fortunately, the worst result was my mum’s purchase of an incredibly classy T-shirt which proudly read: Paragliders do it in the air.

We befriended a family staying at our hotel, with two girls who were about the same age as my brother and me. We'd all eat dinner together at the hotel and there was even a bar serving boozy cocktails bristling with tiny paper umbrellas, plastic mermaids, curly-tailed monkeys, and sparklers. This led to purchases of cocktail kits as soon as we arrived back in England, but a Tequila Sunrise in an Essex back garden isn’t quite the same as drinking one in a beach bar.

Builders were working on the hotel next door, and as my dad was a builder at the time (well, builder-slash-undertaker), he watched the Greek guys with fascination from our balcony. He was especially impressed by the builder who'd fashioned himself a sunhat out of the paper bag his plaster had come in. Then one day, the guy on the scaffolding above dropped a chunk of mortar from his trowel and destroyed the paper hat. The guy was apoplectic - it's probably as well that none of us could speak Greek.

Kefalonia

The following year, my family decided to try another Greek island for size: Kefalonia (or Cephalonia). It wasn't as developed as Corfu, which was no doubt my family’s attempt to avoid the drunks on their Club 18-30 holidays.

We noticed the difference as soon as the plane landed, when we realised that the baggage handler was an old boy in a flat cap driving a tractor, and that the airport looked quite a lot like a barn.

But Kefalonia had a far longer journey to becoming a holiday island than Corfu had. It sits just north of a fault line, and in 1953 a massive earthquake struck the island, which was so intense that it made the island rise by an incredible 60 cm. It’s never dropped back to its previous level. Every building, apart from a few in the north, was damaged or destroyed, and in the aftermath, many residents fled.

We stayed in an apartment building in a resort built around a bay. Every afternoon, a farmer drove by with a huge flatbed loaded with watermelons, a set of scales swinging from the back. Signs were up in our apartment warning us to secure opened windows otherwise they could slam shut in sudden breezes and smash. We might not’ve had the delicious ensaïmada pastries which we enjoyed in Mallorca, but they did have a wonderfully syrupy cake made of pastry strands. It was only years later that I realised the world generally knows it as basbousa.

I much preferred Kefalonia to Corfu. It felt more like being in Greece, whereas Corfu felt more like being in Clacton but with more sun. Every Saturday night, the locals got together in the village square in their traditional costumes and did traditional Greek dancing. It wasn’t at all for tourists, as there were hardly any of us there at the time; it was just something the locals liked to do, and presumably had done for centuries. They encouraged us to join in, and my grandad flung himself across the dancefloor with such enthusiasm that my mum took to calling him Zorba the Greek.

Something that had started on Corfu followed me to Kefalonia: Greek people wondering why on earth my name is Helen. Pretty much ever other woman in Greek is called Helen, so what on earth was a small English girl doing with the name? When we had our passports checked at Corfu airport, the immigration official made a crack about it. “Ahh, you must be Greek!” But as the days went by and I grew more and more tanned, Greek people were genuinely confused. I was called Helen, I had dark hair and a tan. Surely I must be Greek?

One day, a storm threatened, so we didn’t go to the beach. Instead, we went for a walk up to a little bar that you could see perched up on the right-hand arm of the bay’s crescent. It was run by a family, and the bar was basically their terrace, which looked out across the bay. Underneath was a huge wine store, which my parents found very interesting, but I can’t say I did at the time. Soon, a few drinks in, we realised we were trapped as we watched the storm roll in across the sea, the rain falling sideways. Dark clouds like bruises cracked open, sending forked lightning down towards the very spot where we had been sunbathing on our towels only the day before. So we had to stay, for hours. “Ahhh, you are a Greek!” said the family’s granny, pouring me a Fanta as the lightning raged.

Bizarrely, the fact that Greek people thought I was Greek, led to my first sight of a dead person.

We took excursions - my grandparents loved them. We took a boat trip to visit some tiny islands, and one of the sailors fell out. He was left bobbing about in the waves as all the passengers yelled at the captain to stop, but he never did, and I never found out what happened to the sailor. On another excursion, we went to Melissani Cave, where we rowed in boats across the perfect blue water of an underground lake with a circle of sky above it. The cave was only thirty years old when we saw it, as it’s a sinkhole caused by the 1953 earthquake. And after being stunned by the beauty of the cave (I still remember it as a magical place even all these years later), we headed to the monastery where the island’s patron saint was buried. I say, was, because they dug him up.

St Gerasimus’s long life spanned the first eight decades of the sixteenth-century. While in England we were busy fighting about whether to be Catholic or Protestant, and people looked like they had escaped from playing cards, St Gerasimus was tootling about the eastern-end of the Mediterranean. He arrived in Kefalonia in 1555, spending his five years there living in a cave. He became the island’s patron saint, and nearly four hundred years after his arrival, many locals claimed that in the days after the earthquake, they saw him up and down the length of Kefalonia, giving comfort to the stunned and grieving locals.

When we visited the monastery church, which had been built over the caves, you could go down a ladder into the rock that St Gerasimus had allegedly hand-carved to live in. I couldn’t understand why he’d want to do such a thing. “But there’s no windows down here - or a toilet!”

We emerged from the cave. The tour guide pointed out a large coffin in the church, which was covered over. This was where St Gerasimus’s incorruptible body lay. Now, from what I’ve read, barely a square foot of Italy is devoid of incorruptible saints, or their bones, or some other relic. But they’re rarer in Greece. Many years before, someone had decided to move the saint’s body - I assume around the time he was made a saint - and on doing so, realised that nature hadn’t entirely taken its course. They dressed his body in velvet and placed him in his glass coffin, so that locals could come and ask for his blessing. He has not one but two feast days, at which he is placed in a glass coffin crossed with a sedan chair and carried about, but despite all this, he’s very much not a tourist attraction, even though the monastery and caves are. Tourists weren’t allowed to see the saint’s remains.

Until my family came along. My grandad had been busy snapping photos in the church, and was going through the lengthy process of changing the film in his camera, which meant we were separated from the rest of the British tour. Suddenly, a procession appeared. I seem to recall a priest in black robes in the lead, and behind him a Greek family; Granny in her shapeless black dress, a little boy in shorts and a T-shirt with his mum. As we stood there, apparently looking so Greek that no one running the church realised we were tourists (or perhaps they had got bored waiting), the side of the coffin was raised and I found myself staring at a dead person.

I thought, perhaps, that he’d just look as if he’d fallen asleep, but he didn’t. He looked as if he’d been made from brown papier mâché, or like a very large, wrinkly sultana. As my dad was an undertaker-builder at the time, I’d often overheard him talking to my mum about funerals and coffins. But I was fairly sure that what I was seeing was quite unlike his working life in Essex. I couldn’t look away; I was absolutely fascinated. It was nothing like what went on at the Congregational chapel I attended back home. And I stared (sorry!) as the Greek family filed past the open coffin, kissing the gold-embroidered cross on the velvet covering that lay over St Gerasimus’s feet.

Greece has so much history that you can’t possibly do it justice during a two-week holiday; especially one that involves small children who want to spend every day on the beach. So after we’d visited the sinkhole, watched a sailor vanish into the distance, and seen a very dead person, we headed off on another boat trip. We crossed the sea to the mainland (no windsurfing involved) and then were subjected to one of the longest and most uncomfortable coach trips of my life. It was worth all that hot and dusty jolting, though, as we were visiting Olympia. We even got to run on the running track! There was a gallery full of statues and you could see the men’s tilly-tadgers, so quite a lot of the trip involved me asking, in ever-louder tones, “Why did they run around naked?” And the grown-ups pretended not to hear me. I can’t think why.

The coach driver zoomed along the mountain roads at speed to get us back to the ferry, around terrifying hairpin bends. The back of the coach swung out over the edge as mountain goats stared at us from thorn trees high on the rocks. By the time we reached the ferry, the police had caught up with the coach and fined our driver on the spot for speeding. The British tourists felt overwhelming guilt that he’d only been trying to ensure we wouldn’t miss our ferry, and so did a whip-round so he wouldn’t have to foot the bill.

It was only later that the tour rep admitted that he’d done it before. He wasn’t trying to get us to the ferry terminal on time at all; he just liked driving really fast.

This explained to me why Kefalonia was dotted with little shrines everywhere. In the pre-Diana, Princess of Hearts world, I don’t remember people creating public memorials in the UK. Nowadays, bunches of flowers are left where some unfortunate person has succumbed to an accident, and their floral tributes are refreshed for as long as someone remembers them. But back in the early 1980s, we just didn’t do it. On seemingly every hairpin bend, there was a glass booth, containing all the things that the deceased enjoyed in life. Down by a harbour we visited, I even saw a bottle of Coca-Cola in one. I thought at the time that perhaps they’d driven really fast along the harbour and accidentally went headfirst into the water, but I wonder now if that was a shrine to remember a sailor. I just hope the one we saw go into the sea got home alright in the end.

A few years after my family visited Kefalonia, a British writer went on holiday there, touring it on a motorbike. He fell in love with the island and its people, who I hope were still enjoying their traditional Saturday evening dances, and it set off an idea for a novel set during WW2. Louis de Bernières’ book was made into a film which you might even have seen; Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. My trip in the early 1980s hasn’t inspired a book or a film, but it has inspired this article, so I hope you enjoyed Captain Barrelli’s Mandolin.

Thanks as always to who inspired my first Postcard from the Past with his tale of his family holiday to Menorca.

Out now!

The Lost Orphans, the first book in the brand new series The Runaway Evacuees, is out now! Based on a true story, it’s written by me and my friend Catherine Curzon, under our joint pen-name, Ellie Curzon. It’s available in ebook, paperback, audiobook, and in Kindle Unlimited. And we were chuffed to bits to see it reviewed in the latest issue of People’s Friend magazine. Get your copy now!

About me

I co-write WW2 saga fiction with my friend Catherine Curzon under our joint pen name, Ellie Curzon.

I’ve written two books on Victorian crime and forensics, and articles for Fortean Times and Family Tree magazine. I’ve appeared on BBC1’s Murder, Mystery and My Family, and BBC Radio 4’s Punt PI. I live in the West Midlands with a cat who looks like a Viking.

You can subscribe to this newsletter for free, or if you love what you’ve read and can find some spare coins down the back of the sofa, you can upgrade to a paid subscription.

And if you just want to chuck a couple of coins my way, you can give me a one-off tip!

Buy me a cuppa at Ko-Fi!

And hey - why not share the newsletter with like-minded chums?

“The Lost Orphans”, the very first novel in a brand new series from me and my friend Catherine Curzon (writing as Ellie Curzon) is released on Wednesday 23rd July. It’s set in WW2 and based on the true story of evacuees who returned to London to protect their home. So today’s newsletter has a WW2 tale attached; a tragic one at that.

In my last newsletter, I took you to see the fake stone circle on top of Clent Hill in Worcestershire, built as a folly in the 1700s by Sir Richard Lyttelton. From up there, you can see the Cotswolds and even mountains miles away in Wales. But you can also see another of Sir Richard’s follies from the stone circle - an obelisk, which he decided to have built in 1764 so that he had something interesting to see from the windows of his Palladian mansion (the things people did before television was invented…). Bearing in mind he’d built fake temples and a full-size pretend castle, you might think that view from his windows was getting a trifle crowded.

My partner and I decided to go and have a look, so we drove down from Clent Hill, through the lanes, navigated a roundabout and headed down another lane towards the monument. As you can see, it stands in a field on the side of a hill, called Wychbury Hill. Behind it is woodland. There’s no formal car park as it’s not really a visitor attraction; bearing in mind it’s over 70 feet tall and can be seen from as far away as Shropshire, you’re not really supposed to stand at its base to look at it.

But that’s what we wanted to do.

I managed to park our car in a layby which might not’ve been an official layby, but it managed to fit our Picanto - just - and wasn’t too muddy. We followed a path into the empty and quiet woods. They were hemmed in one side and had a slightly sombre atmosphere compared to the trees on the Clent Hills. We could see tantalising glimpses of the obelisk, and as we got nearer, there was a break in the trees and we spotted a path that led out from the woods across the grassy hill.

Something was flitting about in the back of my mind like a fly in a hot room, but wouldn’t settle. There was something familiar about the obelisk, even though I knew I’d never been here before. Then we both noticed graffiti on the obelisk. Why would anyone bother doing that? But the buzzing in the back of my head was getting louder, and suddenly we saw what was daubed across one side of the obelisk’s plinth.

And then I remembered exactly why the obelisk seemed so familiar: I’d read about it in Fortean Times on several occasions. But someone had been messing about with the graffiti.

A skeleton in the wych elm

Back in 1943, as WW2 raged on, four boys were in Hagley Wood hunting for birds’ nests. As far as I know, this is woodland on the Hagley Park estate, on the lower slopes of Clent Hill, rather than the woods we walked through to get to the obelisk. Nowadays, you have to pay to walk around the grounds of Hagley Hall, so the boys shouldn’t have been there. One of them spotted an elm tree, which he thought looked promising for birds’ nests. The type of elm was a wych elm or Scots elm, but of course, for the purposes of this unsolved mystery, everyone refers to it as a wych elm. The boy climbed up, and realised the tree was hollow. And there inside it, he spotted a human skull.

Understandably, the boys were scared to tell anyone, because they shouldn’t have gone into the woods, but the oldest decided they should should come clean. The police arrived and discovered even more of the skeleton hidden inside the trunk, albeit without a hand; this they found nearby after more searching.

But who on earth was it?

Birmingham’s Home Office pathologist, James Webster, examined the remains, and said that they had belonged to a female who had been dead for at least a year and a half. There was a piece of taffeta in her mouth, which indicated that she might have been suffocated. Because of the tree trunk’s size, Webster suspected that the body had been placed inside it before rigor mortis had set in.

The police did what they could to try to identify the unknown woman. Some of her brown hair remained on her skull, and fragments of clothes and shoes had survived, to the point that they could put together a drawing of her. They could estimate her height - she was five feet tall - and was somewhere in her mid-thirties. They could tell from her skull that she had distinctive teeth - they overlapped at the front - but they didn’t have a name, and they had no idea who had put her in the wych elm, although it would stand to reason that whoever had put her there had also killed her.

On the edge of a city at war

The place the skeleton was found is significant. Although the Clent Hills are rural, they’re just to the west of Birmingham, and the Black Country is just to the north. Birmingham was once known as “The City of a Thousand Trades” and “The Workshop of the World.” Stourbridge, just north of Hagley, is famous for its glass. The Black Country was renowned for chain-making and the Titanic’s anchor was forged about five miles north of Hagley at Netherton. And if you’ve watched Peaky Blinders, then you’ll know about the gun factories as well. During the war, Birmingham and the Black Country’s industries went into overdrive; even iconic Spitfires were rolling out of factories in the area. The city was a target during the Blitz and the church just around the corner from where I live still refers to its hall as the ARP Room because it was the air raid wardens’ base every time the sirens wailed. And down by the Rag Market, there’s a memorial naming all 2,241 people killed in the Birmingham Blitz between 1940 and 1943.

Industrial workers headed to the area, and in the countryside around, in places like Hagley, young women arrived from all over the country to work as Land Girls on the farms. Every family in the country was split up somehow. I’m sure anyone reading this will be thinking of how their own families were affected. My grandma, pregnant with my aunt, was evacuated from the Essex coast to Cheshire to be safe from invasion across the North Sea. My other grandma had an office job in London and sheltered from the air raids in Underground stations. One of my grandads was trained as a fireman; the other was a soldier who was sent from Essex to Somerset for training, and landed on Juno Beach on D-Day. My stepgran, Sheila, who I’ve dedicated “The Lost Orphans” to, was evacuated solo aged just five; one of her sisters worked as a Land Girl. My other stepgran came out of her air raid shelter one morning to discover that her home had been completely destroyed. My partner’s great-grandmother died in a communal shelter with several people from her street on the night of the Greenock Blitz; their names are in the Books of Remembrance at Edinburgh Castle.

Life was chaotic. The population was in flux. Even with ID cards, and people living in towns and cities being advised to wear ID bracelets, and everyone having to register with certain shops in order to get their rations, the police had a tough job. Someone could be around one minute and gone the next, and no one would ever suppose that they’d been murdered. Maybe they’d moved away. Maybe they’d been killed in an air raid. Who would ever know?

The dead woman remained unidentified and her death unsolved. Crimes like this have a habit of lingering in people’s minds. In 1857, a carpet bag was found on one of the supports under Waterloo Bridge in London and was found to contain the partial skeleton of a man. The rest of his remains were never found, and he was never identified, although the way his socks were knitted suggested that he might be German. It fascinated Londoners up until Jack the Ripper started his campaign of horrors thirty years later (I write more about The Waterloo Bridge Tragedy in my book Fatal Evidence, should you want to find out more).

The woman in the tree was such an odd mystery that the locals didn’t forget. Graffiti began to appear. In 1944, someone daubed “WHO PUT LUEBELLA DOWN THE WYCH ELM?” on a wall near beautiful Haden Hill Park in Old Hill. Then more appeared, this time in Upper Dean Street in Birmingham city centre, not far from where the Blitz memorial would later appear, saying, “WHO PUT BELLA DOWN THE WYCH ELM, HAGLEY WOOD?” The police didn’t assume these were random acts of vandalism; they used the graffiti to guide their investigations, even though it didn’t lead them to the culprit.

Theories

Every unsolved - and let’s face it, plenty of solved - crime attracts theories, some more bizarre than others. Ten years after the remains were found, a woman came forward to point the finger at her deceased husband, who had been a patient in a mental hospital and had nightmares about a woman staring at him from the trunk of a tree. He had died before the skeleton was found, so it seems plausible - why else would he have been having such a nightmare? He had allegedly confessed to the crime, putting a drunk woman in the tree to teach her the errors of her ways. But that doesn’t explain the taffeta in her mouth, and surely leaving someone trapped inside a tree trunk is a pretty brutal way to point out to someone that getting drunk isn’t a good idea. And why did the woman wait ten years to come forward about what she allegedly knew?

Another theory revolves around Josef Jakobs, a Nazi spy who parachuted into Britain in 1941 and broke his ankle when he landed in a field. He was executed at the Tower of London. It was rumoured that his girlfriend was a German cabaret singer, and the theory seems to be that she was the woman in the wych elm. The slight wrinkle in this story, though, is that the cabaret singer was six feet tall, a whole foot taller than “Bella’s” alleged height, and eventually evidence came to light proving that the cabaret singer had died in Berlin during the war.

Yet another draws on the fact that the remains were found inside a wych elm, so OBVIOUSLY some sort of witchcraft MUST have been involved (I’m being sarcastic here), which only works if you ignore the fact that it’s also known as a Scots elm. The theory came in 1944 courtesy of Margaret Murray, a nowadays largely discredited archaeologist who came up with the “witch cult” theory. She put forward the idea that the unfortunate woman found in a tree had been killed by Romani people in a ritual. What inspired this idea was that the woman’s hand was found some distance from the tree. The most obvious reason for her hand not being with the rest of her remains would surely be because a wild animal had carried it off (driving through the woods about half a mile from where “Bella” was found, we were watched by a fox in broad daylight). But no, Margaret Murray decided the hand had been removed to become a “Hand of Glory”, even though they are associated with the cut-off hand of a hanged man, and is there any evidence they are part of Romani culture? Do Romani people generally go around murdering people for their hands? Perhaps people at the time believed they would do all sorts of underhand (no pun intended) things because of the prejudice against them (prejudice which, in mainland Europe, led to the murder of hundreds of thousands of Roma during WW2). And if they’d gone to all the trouble of killing someone for their hand, why on earth did they leave it in the woods?

Murray’s ideas led to a similarly occult theory being applied to the vicious - and still unsolved - murder of agricultural worker Charles Walton in 1945. He was found dead in a field in Lower Quinton, just outside Stratford-upon-Avon (30 miles south-east from where “Bella” was found) on the evening of Valentine’s Day. He was found pinned to the ground with his pitchfork. The likely theory is that he was killed with the implements he worked with, without any esoteric aims, but the problem is that there was no clear motive, although some have theorised that Walton had a stash of money and he was killed for it. With Murray’s “Hand of Glory” theory still ringing in people’s heads, and with a vacuum where a motive should be, many people assumed that Walton’s murder could be attributed to witchcraft too. Perhaps he was a sacrifice so that his blood would revive the earth as Spring came on. Really? Were murderous witches rampaging through the Midlands during WW2? Were they sacrificing people as protection spells against the Nazis? I tend to think that they’re both grisly, tragic deaths which have nothing to do with spells or witches at all. And in fact, occultist Dion Fortune was casting spells and performing meditation to protect Britain and bring peace: no human sacrifices required.

The most compelling theory came courtesy of a sex worker. In 1944, she reported to police that a colleague called Bella, who had plied her trade on Hagley Road with her, had disappeared about three years before. Women working on the edge are vulnerable to violence and can disappear without many people noticing. The taffeta that was found in her mouth could have resulted from a game with a client. Had an encounter gone horribly wrong, and in a panic, her customer concealed her body? Or had she been killed by someone who set out to take a life, and took a woman from the streets because he thought that no one would care?

The obelisk

But people do care, as the graffiti that appeared around Birmingham and the Black Country shows. The graffiti on the obelisk started to appear on the obelisk in the 1970s, thirty years after “Bella” was first discovered. Not only is the obelisk a very visible point near to where “Bella” was found, but some people assumed it was pointing the finger of blame to the grand occupants of Hagley Hall, as if the aristocracy were busy during the war committing violent acts of witchcraft. The Lyttletons did still live there during the war, but it had been requisitioned by the War Office and the Air Ministry as a military hospital. One wonders if any of the patients and medical staff knew anything about “Bella’s” death, but surely the police looked into that. It would be difficult for a nurse to go missing without anyone noticing, seeing as she would’ve been ruled by rotas and a strict matron (picturing Joan Hickson). Could a patient have got out and had a rendezvous in the woods with a woman, and something went wrong? But if he was a patient, how could he have lifted “Bella” into the tree?

By the late 1990s, the spelling of the wych elm changed to “witch elm”, thanks to Margaret Murray’s theory. There seems to be a general acceptance now of “Bella’s” murder having been motivated by witchcraft, which the use of “witch elm” reinforces in a never-ending loop. At some point, someone decided to draw a pair of stripy legs over the “W” of “WITCH”, apparently a reference to the Wicked Witch of the East, who Dorothy Gale accidentally kills when her house lands on her - a pair of stripy legs sticking out is all that we see of her. This adds another layer to the crime, as it could suggest to some people that the dead woman herself practiced witchcraft.

Another addition came with someone writing “HERS” over “WHO”, so “WHO PUT BELLA IN THE WYCH ELM?” now reads “HERS PUT BELLA IN THE [stripy legs]ITCH ELM”. We don’t even have a question mark anymore.1 “Hers” is thought to be a tag of a graffiti artist in the area, who evidently couldn’t resist the opportunity to tag such prime graffiti real estate after running out of motorway bridges, railway sidings, and garage doors.

Part of me should be glad to see local traditions evolve as the graffiti changes, and I’m really glad that I stumbled over the obelisk which has such a fascinating but tragic mystery attached to it. But another part of me feels disappointed. For as long as the graffiti existed in its original form, it reminded people that an unknown young woman had met a tragic end nearby. But as it changes, her story is being warped, and we risk doing a disservice to a woman who died such an anonymous, horrible death. We don’t even know where her remains are now. They were once stored at the police training college in Birmingham, but apparently are no longer there. So until they are found - if they are found - we can’t begin to work out where she grew up through isotope analysis, or identify her from her DNA. We may never know who killed her in the middle of a war where death was all around, and we’re unlikely to ever put a name to the woman who was hidden in a tree and found by boys who were hunting for birds’ nests in the woods.

Pre-order now!

The Lost Orphans, the first book in the brand new series The Runaway Evacuees, is out on 23rd July (tomorrow!) and is up for pre-order now on Amazon. It’s written by me and my friend Catherine Curzon, under our joint pen-name, Ellie Curzon. It’ll be available in ebook, paperback, audiobook, and in Kindle Unlimited.

About me

I co-write WW2 saga fiction with my excellent friend Catherine Curzon under our joint pen name, Ellie Curzon.

I’ve written two books on Victorian crime and forensics, and articles for Fortean Times and Family Tree magazine. I’ve appeared on BBC1’s Murder, Mystery and My Family, and BBC Radio 4’s Punt PI. I live in the West Midlands with a cat who looks like a Viking.

And if you just want to chuck a couple of coins my way, you can give me a one-off tip!

Buy me a cuppa at Ko-Fi!

And hey - why not share the newsletter with like-minded chums?

And that’s exactly what Lord Lyttleton of Hagley Hall did. In fact, he went on a folly-building rampage, covering his patch of north Worcestershire with them. He built several pretend temples in the Greek and Roman styles, an obelisk that could be seen for miles around - because why build an obelisk if no one can see it? - a picturesquely-ruined full-sized castle, and last but by no means least, “The Four Stones”,1 a cluster of standing stones at the summit of a very tall hill.

Hagley Hall is to the west of Birmingham, on the lower slopes of the Clent Hills. There’s four hills in all and from certain points on the hills, you can see the city (although fortunately not the dustbins…). I love the Clent Hills. They’re so near to where I live, but with their steep, wooded lanes and valleys, they feel like another world. If I’m heading out west, I often detour my way around the Clent Hills, which must seem like time-wasting madness to most people who would prefer to take the busy dual carriageway and annoying roundabout instead. But there’s something magical about the hills, and I take every opportunity I can to visit them. And yes, because he seems to regularly pop up in my newsletters, JRR Tolkien used to enjoy exploring the Clent Hills, too, just as I suspect he visited the cave houses at Kinver Edge.

The views from Clent Hill, the second tallest at just over 1,000 feet, are astonishing, and even better, you get to take in the views while hanging out with The Four Stones. To the south, you can see the gentle swells of the Cotswolds; to the south-west the blustery Malverns; to the west the majestic Clee Hills; to the north-west the Berwyn range in Wales; and to the north the Wrekin standing tall in Shropshire.

I wonder if Lord Lyttleton had visited the Rollright Stones, up on a hill in the Cotswolds, which had then inspired him to create his own? But imagine having to be the person who lugged those big bits of rock up to the top of a hill that high?

I must admit that I have a fondness for the Berwyns; my grandparents called their bungalow “Berwyn” as they loved the mountains so much, somewhat ironically seeing as they each lived for over ninety years in Essex, a county famously devoid of mountains. The northernmost peak of the Berwyns is Moel Famau (pronounced roughly Mole Vama), and can be seen through the window of my friend’s childhood bedroom. I became so fascinated by the mountain - being from Essex, I hadn’t seen mountains from people’s bedrooms windows that often - that we badgered her brother to drive us there. We walked up the slopes which were springy with purple heather that made the mountain smell of honey, and once we reached the top, we could see all the way to Liverpool. Of course, had I only known, I could’ve turned around and seen the Clent Hills.

Unsurprisingly, there was a beacon at the top of the Clent Hills during the time of the Spanish Armada, when England was threaded with beacons to raise the alarm if the Spanish turned up. How effective those beacons would’ve been really came home to me as I stood up there on a hill just outside Birmingham, staring out towards a mountain I’d been up that gives you a view of Liverpool. One beacon lighting up after another, hill to hill, mountain to mountain, up and down the length of the country. It would’ve been a sight to see.

The pretend ancient stones aren’t the only thing to see on the Clent Hills. There’s villages and pubs dotted about, and there’s even a holy well at St Kenelm’s church, which we’ve visited with disastrous consequences - I’ll reveal all another time.

If you’re planning a visit, there’s plenty of places to stop for a bite or a pint. When we visited, we had lunch at The Four Stones café, but we’ve also had lunch on other trips through the Clent Hills at the Vine Inn (which used to be a watermill and specialises in seafood), and the Fountain.

Once you’ve seen the stones, walked your legs off, and had some reviving lunch, there’s still more to see. Standing in the middle of a field, visible from the top of Clent Hill, is that obelisk I mentioned. And there’s a whole other story attached to that - both a tragedy and a mystery - which I’ll tell you about in my next newsletter.

Two of the Clent Hills, Clent Hill and Walton Hill, are cared for by the National Trust and they’re free to visit. There are carparks dotted about.

Edited 9th July because, like an idiot, I’d written “Clee” in a few places when I should’ve said “Clent”. Argh.

The mystery hat

It’s been a while since we heard from the mystery hat! Just to clear up one mystery, at least - it is a standard, adult-sized hat. It looks a bit small in the photo because 1. my hand is closer to the camera, and 2. my hand is weirdly enormous anyway.

For years, ever since I randomly bought this hat at the Rag Market in Birmingham, thus demonstrating the delights of ADHD impulsive behaviour, I have been under the impression that it was a train driver’s hat. Possibly a London Underground train driver’s hat. But I can’t find any similar hats online, and certainly not any which are to do with the London Underground. So - because there’s more to research than Google - I contacted the London Transport Museum and the National Railway Museum in York to see what the transport experts thought.

London Transport Museum: there’s nothing in their collections which looks exactly like this hat. But they think it looks similar to a uniform issued in the mid-90s. They have one in their collection although it has a badge and a different band, but it’s made from similar synthetic fibres. I discovered something I hadn’t known before: London Transport colour-code their uniforms. A red hatband is London Underground, yellow is buses, and green is for country buses. Country buses in London? But yes, it’s true.

National Railway Museum: their curator took a look at my photos. He said it’s not a train driver’s hat; it’s more likely to be the sort of hat worn by a guard or station staff. He went further and suggested it’s possibly from the early privatisation period, an even put forward a possible transport company name: Connex. But… he’s not 100% sure.

The verdict: I think it’s safe to say that the mystery hat is still a mystery. I like the National Railway Museum’s idea that it’s from the early privatisation period, and coincidentally enough, that ties in with London Transport Museum’s assessment of it being from the mid-90s. So many train companies popped up seemingly overnight as poor old British Rail got chopped about that it wouldn’t surprise me at all if that’s where the hat has come from. And perhaps also explains why the hat is rare as these companies come and go with speed (in fact, more speed than most of the trains…).

But now I’m wondering something else. What if we’re wrong and it’s not a train-related hat at all? What if it’s military? Then again, military caps like this have shiny brims, not plastic ones. The mystery of the hat rolls on…

Pre-order now!

The Lost Orphans, the first book in the brand new series The Runaway Evacuees, is out on 23rd July and is up for pre-order now on Amazon. It’s written by me and my friend Catherine Curzon, under our joint pen-name, Ellie Curzon. It’ll be available in ebook, paperback, audiobook, and in Kindle Unlimited.

About me

I co-write WW2 saga fiction with my excellent friend Catherine Curzon under our joint pen name, Ellie Curzon.

I’ve written two books on Victorian crime and forensics, and articles for Fortean Times and Family Tree magazine. I’ve appeared on BBC1’s Murder, Mystery and My Family, and BBC Radio 4’s Punt PI. I live in the West Midlands with a cat who looks like a Viking.

Roads to the Past is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

And if you just want to chuck a couple of coins my way, you can give me a one-off tip!

Buy me a cuppa at Ko-Fi!

And hey - why not share the newsletter with like-minded chums?

Fawsley’s church once served a thriving community, but you have to go back to Mediaeval England to meet them. In 1415, the Knightley family arrived from Gnosall in Staffordshire and, deciding that sheep were more profitable than people, evicted almost every one of the villagers. It’s a disturbing precursor to the land clearances in the Scottish Highlands, which saw the lairds boot out people who’d lived there for generations, and replaced them all with sheep.

And sheep evidently were more profitable for the Knightleys. No one can fill a church with as many fancy memorials as they have without having made a pretty penny. The memorials range in style from an elaborate alabaster tomb, bronzes set in the floor, engraved flagstones, plaques on the wall surrounding the altar, and a classically-influenced marble from the Victorian period. Anyone with even a passing interest in heraldry will find Fawsley an astonishing place, because the Knightleys really went to town in order to display their grandeur and family connections. And there’s even heraldry in the church which isn’t connected to the Knightleys through their various family ties, but what the heck, why not include the ancestor of the United States’ flag in the heraldic melée as well?

I should admit here that I am a heraldry geek. Whenever I see coats of arms in churches, I always take a photo, because you just never know when it might come in handy. And that sounds like a slightly bananas thing to say, because in exactly what circumstance would heraldry come in handy? Perhaps if you’re James Bond and you have to pretend to be Sir Hilary Bray from the College of Arms and hole up in a ski resort at the top of an Alp with Blofeld?1 Heraldry was tightly controlled (or at least was supposed to be), so if you’re tracing someone’s family, or your own, coats of arms can be handy clues and can take the family line further into the past. During lockdown, I learnt about heraldry (along with being ill, feeling lonely, and forgetting what day of the week it was), which meant I was able to work out that my own Knightley ancestors (courtesy of the fabulously-named Lettice Knightley, who sounds like a diet) connect with the ones you’re about to meet in Fawsley.

When you go in through the tiny door, which is like something from a children’s story, the first thing you notice, directly opposite you, is a huge, painted alabaster tomb with two figures lying side-by-side. This is the memorial to Sir Richard Knightley, who died in 1534, and his wife Jane Skenard. It’s bursting with so much detail that it’s hard to know what to look at first, but perhaps that was the point - to overwhelm the viewer with colour and the sculptor’s skill. The two figures are shown draped in their cloaks - Jane’s is over a dress, while Sir Richard’s is over his suit of armour - which are covered in their coats of arms. The Knightleys arrived in Northamptonshire with arms that already featured four different families’ arms: Knightley, on its own, is the vertical red and gold stripes with ermine, and the other arms of other ancestors were quartered with it - a golden stag’s head, several swans on a saltire, and a red-tongued lion.2 Everywhere you look in Fawsley’s church, you can see those elements repeated over and over again, in the memorials and in the stained glass rescued from the house, quartered with the arms that brides brought with them.

The figures of Sir Richard and his wife are extremely lifelike, with the folds of their clothes and Sir Richard’s chainmail visible in the stone. It’s remarkable that the Renaissance’s tentacles reached even to rural pockets like Fawsley. Then there’s the other figures on the tomb: the weepers. Sir Richard and Jane’s four daughters are shown along one side, carved with great detail. I love how they’re caught between praying and holding out their hands, because if you look quickly from one side to the other, it’s like a film strip of a Tudor woman clapping! And among those daughters is Susanna, who married William Spencer. Yes, those Spencers - William and Susanna (and therefore Sir Richard and Lady Jane) are the ancestors of Winston Churchill and Lady Diana Spencer.

Their eight sons appear as weepers on the other side of the tomb. Again, they’re wonderfully detailed little figures, and each man wears the clothes appropriate to his role in life; merchants, clerks, and gentlemen, all wearing their distinctive square-toed Tudor shoes. A Latin inscription runs around the edge of the tomb, which gives Sir Richard’s date of death but the gaps you can see above were for Jane, and were never filled in.

After being stunned by the alabaster tomb, you’ll notice several memorial engravings and slabs laid in the floor of the church. The oldest is from 1516 and marks the last resting place of Sir Thomas, who was one of Sir Richard’s sons. The style is completely different from his parents’ alabaster tomb, as it’s brass set in stone. So too is the grave of Sir Edmund Knightley - another of Sir Richard’s sons - and his wife Ursula de Vere.3 Their brass shows the couple with their six daughters, none of whom survived to adulthood. What does link the brass and the tomb, though, is that both couples are shown as if they were in bed, their heads supported by pillows. Ursula outlived her husband by many years, and the now-haunted (apparently) dower house was where she once lived.

Fast-forwarding a few decades, we reach an enormous memorial which looks for all the world like a massive, over-the-top fireplace. This vast memorial remembers several members of the Knightley family who passed away in the 1600s, including Sir Valentine Knightley. No, I am not making that up - he really was called Sir Valentine Knightley, and I’m sure that if an author gave that name to one of their characters, their editor would come straight back with a request for them to change it.4 This tomb is made of marble, with liberal daubings of gold leaf, and even more heraldry. There are plaques spelling out the illustrious ancestry of those memorialised here. The stone font which you can see in the bottom left of the image looks incredibly humble by comparison (it made me think of the carpenter’s cup in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade), and says a lot about memorial design: the small church, crammed with so many memorials, starts to feel like a monument to the Knightley family, rather than a place of worship.

The figures on the memorial seem to be symbolic rather than literal representations, and the focus is more on plaques giving information, perhaps an indication that the world was becoming more literate. At the middle, you can see a figure lying on its back and underneath it, the words, “Dust thou arte and to dust thou shalt returne.”

As mentioned above, a great deal of stained glass was rescued from Fawsley Hall, the Knightleys’ home. These days it’s a swanky hotel. While I drove up to the church in a budget hatchback to meet my distant relatives, a guest arrived at the Hall in a helicopter. The house has an extraordinary history - amongst its guests was John Merrick, known as The Elephant Man, who was invited to holiday in Fawsley and stayed in the gatekeeper’s cottage (and didn’t arrive by helicopter, one suspects). The complete lack of people in Fawsley must’ve been welcome to Merrick; I doubt the sheep would’ve stared at him.

But what about the American flag, I hear you cry? (I’m picturing my American readers bobbing enormous foam pointy-fingers at me while chanting “USA! USA!”).

Among the salvaged glass are pieces which had been rescued from Sulgrave Manor, ten miles south of Fawsley, and which was once the home of the Washington family. Yes, George Washington’s ancestors. There’s several pieces of stained glass in the church’s windows depicting the Washington arms. And what does the Washington arms consist of? Stars and stripes!

These memorials and fancy stained glass aren’t all that this tiny church has to say for itself. In the vestry, there’s a piece of glass depicting Adam and Eve, which is said to date back to the 1200s, and has presumably been in the same window for around 800 years. And the church still has its box pews, which are richly carved, with some extraordinary depictions: foxes preaching to fowls, a devil with a spear riding on the back of a pig, a fox playing a stringed instrument, and even a couple tucked up in bed.

I wish I could show you all the interesting memorials in the church, but 1. if you don’t find them as interesting as I do, you’d probably fall asleep, and 2. this newsletter would be so long that it’d break Substack. But if you’re interested in seeing the memorials and stained glass (I think I managed to photograph all of them), please do let me know and I’ll find a way to share them with you! Fawsley church is a real gem. It’s tiny, it’s surrounded by hundreds of sheep, and contains the sorts of memorials that even a cathedral would be proud of. It’s well worth a visit.

If you want to meet another Knightley, you can take a trip to Gnosall in Staffordshire in my newsletter back in March.

The mystery hat

I now have two possible origins for the hat, but I’ve run out of room this time!

Pre-order now!

The Lost Orphans, the first book in the brand new series The Runaway Evacuees, is out on 23rd July and is up for pre-order now on Amazon. It’s written by me and my friend Catherine Curzon, under our joint pen-name, Ellie Curzon. It’ll be available in ebook, paperback, audiobook, and in Kindle Unlimited.

About me

I co-write WW2 saga fiction with my excellent friend Catherine Curzon under our joint pen name, Ellie Curzon.

I’ve written two books on Victorian crime and forensics, and articles for Fortean Times and Family Tree magazine. I’ve appeared on BBC1’s Murder, Mystery and My Family, and BBC Radio 4’s Punt PI. I live in the West Midlands with a cat who looks like a Viking.

And if you just want to chuck a couple of coins my way, you can give me a one-off tip!

Buy me a cuppa at Ko-Fi!

And hey - why not share the newsletter with like-minded chums?

There were holidays before my brother was born, which I just about remember. The Balmoral1 Hotel in Benalmádena on the Costa del Sol sticks in my mind. This is where I threw a toy car off our balcony, and fortunately not onto any holiday makers, hotel staff, or locals passing below. I seemed to have a habit of doing this - around the same time, when we took a family trip to Birmingham because Ipswich were playing Aston Villa, I threw a jigsaw puzzle piece out of a hotel window. I was some sort of tiny Keith Moon.

And also at the Balmoral, I wouldn’t sleep, so was brought downstairs in my pyjamas and danced around with my D-Day veteran grandad, my toes on his feet as we whirled across the dancefloor to flamenco. Many years later, I was visiting my dad and my stepmum when they lived in Spain and we popped into the Balmoral for a bit of nostalgia. Because, not only had Dad and I stayed there, but my stepmum had actually worked there as a tour rep at the same time! What are the chances of that? My mum even remembered my stepmum from another night when I couldn’t sleep and she was walking back and forth across the foyer with me as my stepmum-in-the-future dealt with other tourists at Thompson’s desk. It would be over a decade before my dad met my stepmum properly. On our nostalgia trip, my stepmum immediately recognised one of the waiters and they chatted like old chums, while I spotted the door that went out to the pool and was suddenly two again, bubbling with excitement at the prospect of going for a splash.

Once my brother was born, we swapped the Costa del Sol on the Spanish mainland for Majorca (or Mallorca), one of the Balearic Islands in the Mediterranean. Instead of staying in a hotel, we upgraded to a whitewashed villa with terracotta tiles and dark brown shutters. It was one of several which were placed around a large, shared swimming pool, and in fact, the complex is still there in Cala San Vicente (or Cala Sant Vicenç, if you speak Catalan). The Apartamentos Turísticos Villas Can Botana appear to have all become privately owned and you can rent them out.2 The thought of people still holidaying there over forty years later makes me very happy!

We went to Can Botana two years in a row, so I apologise because what follows is a combination of events from two separate holidays which have since merged into one in my memory, but I’m sure you won’t mind.

The tiny criminal

Before we’d even left Britain, my brother started causing havoc.3

We were flying from Stansted Airport, just outside London (the one that comes after Heathrow and Gatwick in size). All of the London airports had started to sell teddy bears with branded T-shirts in the same colour scheme as the airport signage - yellow with black-dark brown lettering. There was Gary Gatwick, Stanley Stansted, and Harry Heathrow.4 Because I was annoying even as a small child, I was furious that there were no female bears. I wanted a Sally Stansted, and she didn’t exist.

We sat down in the departure lounge, for one of those insanely long waits that always goes with travelling anywhere at the same time as thousands of other people. The parents and grandparents chatted, I sulked, and my brother… disappeared.

A busy airport is surely one of the last places where you’d want a lose a small child. But vanish he did. Everyone panicked.

And then my brother made his grand reappearance.

All I remember seeing were two short, chubby legs, and a pair of mischievously glittering eyes peering out from a mound of Stanley Stansteds. He’d gone back into the airport shop, helped himself to as many Stanley Stansteds as he could carry, and… walked out with them. Not only had he scared everyone by vanishing, he’d now horrified us by shoplifting, but in a really cute way that made everyone laugh (even the staff in the shop). I suspect these days armed police would’ve arrived, but the early 1980s were a different time. My grandad turned him and his hoard of bears around and walked him back into the shop. And returned with a bear for each of us, which I grudgingly accepted despite the fact it wasn’t a Sally.

Years later, I reminded my brother of this, and he told me that he was trying to rescue them….

Call the doctor!

Once we arrived on holiday, the chaos continued to mount thick and fast. I woke up one morning completely covered in red spots.5 Was it chicken pox? Was it measles? The Spanish doctor was called, a sardonic man in a smart, short-sleeved shirt, who announced in a way that only just avoided eye-rolling that my mysterious red spots were in fact… gnat bites. At which point I decided to confess that I’d slathered myself in suntan lotion before going to bed, in order to maximise my pool time the next day. It seems that all the suntan lotion made me particularly delicious to the local Mallorcan mosquitos.

Then my brother disappeared again. My frightened parents looked everywhere, and kept coming back to me to ask if I’d seen him. Did they think I’d hidden him in a cupboard or given him away to the fishermen? Eventually, he was found - fast asleep under their bed on the hard, tiled floor.

Then I encountered another health problem: I had terrible ear ache. The doctor came out again. Was it because I had deliberately filled my ears with sand at the beach? The doctor didn’t look impressed (in fact, he seemed to be pausing as if he wasn’t entirely sure of his own translation, then realised that, yes, indeed, this idiotic child who’d already covered herself in suntan lotion at night had also been deliberately filling her ears with sand). I remember doing this, and I remember why as well - I wanted to see the shape inside my ears, and decided that sand was perfect for the purpose. It’s also possible that my ears had started to ache by that point and I was putting the sand in as a way to soothe them.

Strangely - and this is quite a surprise - it turned out that it wasn’t the sand that was causing the ear ache at all, and was instead an allergy to chlorine that was only bothersome for my ears. No other part of me had a reaction to it. It meant, back home, swimming lessons wearing wax plugs in my ears, resulting in me never knowing what the instructor was saying to me. A bit of a dry run for me going deaf at thirty, but that’s another story.

The sin bin

The villa had a playpen which my brother was plonked into. He absolutely hated that playpen and sulked and pouted every time he was put inside it. At home, he regularly escaped his playpen by stacking up his toys into a step and climbing out, but with only a handful of toys to hand on holiday (especially as his rouse to nick all those Stanley Stansteds had been rumbled), there was no makeshift step, and no way out. My dad called it “the lobster pot”; my grandad called it “the sin-bin” (an interestingly theological name for it, given that my grandad was a Methodist lay-preacher). He would lean over the side of it, ruffle my brother’s hair and say, “You enjoying yourself in the sin-bin?” which only made my brother scowl all the more.

The villa had a back garden, consisting of a small lawn, and then what seemed to be a vast flower bed which went off down a slope, full of flowering cacti and other plants that you didn’t see every day back in Essex. It was off-limits. So we all know what that means, don’t we? We’d got dressed up to go out for dinner, and I got bored waiting for everyone so decided to explore the flower bed. I skidded on the loose soil and went hurtling down the slope. By some miracle, I managed to avoid the cacti, but my brand new pastel-coloured canvas shoes (the eighties!) were ruined and never lost their patina of dirt.

More than once, I went running around on wet tiles and slipped over. No pool-side (or indeed, water-sprinklers-beside-tiles) holiday is complete without that happening, with a yelp of surprise followed by that two-second silent gap as the winded child gets up the wherewithal to cry. Loudly. And not at all annoyingly for anyone in ear-shot.

One morning, I sat and watched my grandad, who was relaxing on a patio chair in his shorts and T-shirt, staring silently at a book. It had a painting of a warship on the cover, so it was very possibly a Douglas Reeman.

“What are you doing with that book?” I asked him, as no doubt images of mariners scuttling over the deck as the Kriegsmarine opened fire filled my grandad’s head.

“Reading it.”

“But you’re not talking,” I said, confused.

“That’s because I’m reading it in my head.”

Reader, I still remember how stunned I was at that moment to discover that reading didn’t have to be done out loud.

Viva Mallorca/Majorca

I do have nice memories of those holidays, which don’t involve mystery illnesses or disappearing children. Almost every evening, we ate at a brasserie not far from the house. Not only was it exciting to eat at a place which barbecued your dinner right in front of you, and not only was I very excited indeed by the gigantic oranges and lemons that came with orange- and lemon-flavoured ice cream inside them, it was novel to have to cross a bridge to get to a restaurant. It sat on the other side of an enormous storm drain which, if you followed it, would take you to the beach. Very sadly, I heard that a few years later a particularly violent storm tore its way down from the mountains and washed the restaurant - along with its barbecue and giant citrus fruit - into the sea. A trip around town via Street View shows that the restaurant is back, though, with a rival next door.

We went on a trip to see Las Cuevas del Drach, which was the first time I’d gone underground and seen stalactites and stalagmites. I stood for a while puzzled by the formation which apparently looked like the Virgin Mary.6 My dad changed his shoes on the way back, swapping his handmade sandals that had car tyre soles for his driving shoes. He was very proud of his tyre sandals, especially as the soles were made from different brands of tyres - one was Pirelli, the other Michelin, I seem to recall.7 Sadly, he managed to leave one of them behind, and he insisted on driving all six of us back to the car park to rescue his forlorn, abandoned sandal from a dusty car park.

We went up the Calvari Steps - I remember my brother was carried up them in his pushchair like a tiny emperor on a litter, while I walked all the way up on my short legs, my ragdoll under one arm. There are 365 steps - one for every day of the year (maybe they have a temporary one that they add for leap years, I dunno). And then we went to Puerto Pollensa, which has a gorgeous long strip of beach with a boulevard running alongside lined with spiney trees. Every time we went, an old boy would ride by with a freezer compartment attached to the front of his bicycle.

“Helados! Helados!” he’d call, and like the Pied Piper, the children would come flocking. And my grandad as well; you couldn’t keep that man away from ice cream if you tried.

My grandparents were fond of excursions, so one night we all went off on a coach to the nearby resort of Alcudia for an evening do. We were drinking out of porróns, Spanish wine bottles with a long, slender spout, which the waiters hold above your head as you lean back and swallow - even us kids, although we had orange squash. The adults had red wine. The tour reps pleaded with the tourists not to drink too much, but of course, everyone ignored them. I remember there were bonfires as it was a night time event. I looked out of the window of our coach just before we headed home, watching a bloke in his twenties voiding his stomach next to a bus while his girlfriend fretted and a tour rep told them off. The bonfires and the drunken adults gave the event an apocalyptic vibe, which unnerved and fascinated me at the same time. The souvenirs from that night of debauchery were photographs of us wearing sombreros, which were stuck to Tex-Mex-style wanted posters. For years, one hung on the wall showing my gentle, affectionate grandma looking very tipsy in a sombrero while above her head it read: SE BUSCA - WANTED - FOR MURDER AND ROBBERY.

While putting this piece together, I asked my mum what she remembered from that holiday. She has memories of early morning, child-free swims, and after drying off, walking to the baker’s with my grandad to buy the most delicious ensaïmada pastries you’ve ever tasted for breakfast. She remembers my brother and I playing in the sea with our grandma while my mum took a well-earned nap. When she mentioned her early morning swims, it set off a memory for me. I knew she went for early swims and wanted to go too. For some reason, I thought that all that prevented me from joining her was the fact that I didn’t have my suntan lotion on (it’s very possible someone came up with this as a “reason” why I couldn’t go for an early dip - and why shouldn’t my mum have enjoyed a swim without having to constantly monitor her ridiculous offspring at the same time?). So using my child logic, I decided to slather that lotion on before I went to bed, thus summoning every gnat in Spain.

I took another trip on Street View and clicked my way along the road that runs along the bottom of the villas’ gardens. I turned the camera to look at the arid mountains which seemed to tower over the garden when I was a child, and I was taken straight back to being small again. I could feel the warmth of the sun and smell the scent of the pines and the lemon trees. The mountains haven’t changed, even though we all have; and two of us who were on that holiday have since passed away.

One day at the pool, my dad spotted a photographer setting up his camera and tripod. I was about to leave the pool, but Dad insisted that I stay there in the water with him, and strategically positioned us so that we’d be in the line of fire. I remember that I started to feel a bit bored, having to swim in the same small area for what seemed like hours.

But it paid off. The holiday brochures arrived from Thomas Cook a few months later, and my dad eagerly turned to the Can Botana. And there we were, two tiny figures bobbing about in a pool, advertising a very nice place to other families, who may or may not have had chaotic children too.

The mysterious hat

An update on the mysterious hat which I bought from the Rag Market in Birmingham is coming your way next time! Is it train driver’s? Is it a bus driver’s? Will we ever find out?

Going viral

Find out the story behind “FURING the pandemic” in Daniel Puzzo’s post about Notes that go viral on Substack. With and .

Teacher by Trade; Mentor by Mistake

Anatomy of a Viral Substack Note

I don’t really understand what going viral means…

Read more

a year ago · 30 likes · 43 comments · Daniel Puzzo

Pre-order now!

The Lost Orphans, the first book in the brand new series The Runaway Evacuees, is out on 23rd July and is up for pre-order now on Amazon. It’s written by me and my friend Catherine Curzon, under our joint pen-name, Ellie Curzon. It’ll be available in ebook, paperback, audiobook, and in Kindle Unlimited.

About me

I co-write WW2 saga fiction with my excellent friend Catherine Curzon under our joint pen name, Ellie Curzon.

I’ve written two books on Victorian crime and forensics, and articles for Fortean Times and Family Tree magazine. I’ve appeared on BBC1’s Murder, Mystery and My Family, and BBC Radio 4’s Punt PI. I live in the West Midlands with a cat who looks like a Viking.

You can subscribe to this newsletter for free, or if you love what you’ve read and can find some spare coins down the back of the sofa, you can upgrade to a paid subscription.

And if you just want to chuck a couple of coins my way, you can give me a one-off tip!

Buy me a cuppa at Ko-Fi!

And hey - why not share the newsletter with like-minded chums?

We’re off to the far south-west of Staffordshire today, to visit Kinver Edge and the last cave houses in England. And if it looks a bit like Tolkien’s Shire, then maybe we’ll find out why.

Holy Austin Rock

The earliest record of people living in caves at Kinver comes courtesy of a man who was given shelter from a storm in one of the homes back in 1777 by a “clean and decent family.” The last families left in the early years of the last century. It might seem bizarre that people were living in caves in the Midlands, especially into the twentieth century, but in fact, it makes sense. By the 1770s, the Industrial Revolution was gathering pace in the area, and if you lived in a cave house in Kinver Edge, you were on higher land with fresher air than in the towns. The village of Kinver was prone to flooding, which no doubt gave residents encouragement to find a home up at Holy Austin Rock.

It’s a huge sandstone ridge that rises out of the flatter land around it, a fossilised, pre-historic desert of sand. The relatively soft stone can easily be carved, and the sizes of the homes were only limited by how far the residents were willing to hack into the rock. There are three tiers of houses heading up the rock, with a National Trust tearoom selling scones at the top. If you keep going up from the cave houses, you find yourself on the grassy top, where there’s the remains of an Iron Age hillfort, which might go back even earlier into the Bronze Age. There’s evidence that there were several roundhouses at the fort, which means people had lived on and in this unusual rocky home for a very long time.

Locally, there’s a legend which says that Dick Whittington was associated with Kinver; perhaps even that he was Kinver’s most famous son. I like the idea of a famous pantomime character, who was based on a real person, knowing about the cave houses - if they’d existed in Mediaeval times - but sadly it’s not true. It’s just a coincidence that Kinver’s Whittington Inn was Whittington manor house and doesn’t have anything to do with Dick’s family. I also don’t think, either, that Dick Whittington ever danced with human-sized cats and rats while wearing sparkly tights, but we shouldn’t really demand historical accuracy from a panto.

Even while families were still living in their cave homes in the early twentieth century, their unusual houses became a tourist attraction. The residents presumably didn’t mind too much as they posed for photos and served teas to the visitors.

So here’s a strange thing to ponder - did JRR Tolkien ever visit? He lived in and around Birmingham as a child, at the time that the caves were inhabited and visitors were welcomed in for tea. And we know that Tolkien visited various places around Birmingham, like the Malverns, Clent, and the Lickey Hills (yes, really, the Lickey Hills), Sarehole Mill and Moseley Bog. The Hobbits’ homes in the Shire wouldn’t look unlike the cave homes at Kinver. You never know….

As the century rolled on, the families began to leave, although a café remained open on the rock until 1967. Then, the caves were abandoned and a mixture of bad weather and vandalism meant the homes were being scoured away. It wasn’t until the early 1990s that the area was rescued. The lower tier and top tier were restored to show visitors what it’d been like to live here in this most unusual of places, and while I wandered from room to room, it felt as if the family had just stepped outside.

The middle tier has been left as it was, which really demonstrates just how much work was involved in restoring the cave houses to show visitors what it was like to live here back in the early 1900s. Standing here, you can see over the rooves of Kinver and far into the distance, a view that made up for living in a cave. And in fact, life in the caves wasn’t too bad. They were warm in winter and cool in summer, which is exactly what the cave-dwellers of Granada province in Spain told me when I went to look around Guadix. It was impossible for me not to think of the Spanish cave homes while visiting Kinver Edge, so let’s take a quick trip to Andalusia.

Guadix and Granada

Guadix is located on a high plain in the Sierra Nevada and was at one point home to the Romans. Barrio de Santiago on the edge of the town is an extraordinary place, where people still live in caves. Just like the enterprising residents of Holy Austin Rock who made tea for visitors, residents of the cave barrio in Guadix will charge you one or two Euros to have a look inside their homes. And just like in Staffordshire, the walls are whitewashed and go as far back as the residents can dig. We met an hombre sitting by his front door who welcomed us in and told us just how comfy it is to live in a cave. And he told us too that the people who live in the caves today are descended from the gitanos1 who faced prejudice in the towns - and even from the Moriscos2 who had officially been thrown out of Spain if they refused to convert to Christianity. I like that - the outsiders making homes for themselves on the edge of town, and sticking it out through the centuries.

Then, when we went to the city of Granada, we found more cave dwellings in Sacromonte, and you can even rent some of them to stay in. The barrio is on a steep hill directly opposite the Alhambra Palace, and the views are amazing. We had lunch in a cave café, just like we’d do in Kinver several years later - although in Kinver, I’m sad to say, no-one drove past the door at speed in a rattly Seat with flamenco blaring from the speakers.

You’d never think that you could compare Staffordshire and Andalusia, or that it’d be cave houses of all things that would link them!

Kinver Edge

Back in Staffordshire… a trip to the cave houses can also include a massive hike through an amazing forest, powered by a National Trust cream tea. And yes, this is exactly what we did, on a hot, humid day, with just a photo of the map from the sign in the car park to guide us. That, of course, sounds like the backstory to a documentary on Netflix involving sniffer dogs and a helicopter rescue, but incredibly, we didn’t get lost.

There are so many interlinking routes that loop across Kinver Edge, but we somehow managed to keep on the path and I got my steps in. Exercise! And aside from enjoying a really nice walk through the shade cast by towering trees, there’s yet more cave houses to be discovered.

Nanny’s Cave hasn’t been restored, and unfortunately the soft rock has attracted some pretty annoying carvings courtesy of visitors (why do people do this…?). But it’s still incredible to walk from chamber to chamber and picture what a home here would’ve looked like. It was tucked away on the opposite side from the restored homes and would’ve been very isolated as it took us a good hour to get there from the other houses. No one knows why this particular cave is named after Nanny, nor even who she was, so inevitably it’s believed that a witch once lived there. Or is that suggested by the fact that when you look out through the windows it’s rather like looking out through the eyes of a skull?

Visiting Kinver Edge and the Rock Houses

This unique place is looked after by the National Trust. I don’t think there’s a separate car park for the cave homes, but there are a couple of free car parks on the fringes of Kinver Edge. If it’s warm, you’ll probably find an ice-cream van there as well.

The village of Kinver is worth visiting as well, with independent shops and cafés. The church is on another sandstone ridge overlooking the town, and is worth visiting for the view alone, although the road up is rather steep.

The mystery hat

I’m in the midst of the mother of all declutters at the moment and am having to face up to some pretty bizarre impulse purchases courtesy of Past Me. Why did I buy a hat from the Rag Market in Birmingham back in about 2010 when I had no idea what uniform it was from? And can I ever find out what the previous owner of the hat was getting up to? Driving a bus, driving a train… or something else?

I’ve contacted three different transport museums to see if they can shed any light on the hat. There’s an identical one for sale at Etsy, but the seller has no idea what uniform it’s from either. I’ll keep you updated as soon as I find anything out!

Next time…

I usually send out one newsletter every two weeks, but I’m going to experiment with some memoir, which really is a road into the past. I’ll be occasionally dropping them in between my usual newsletters. They’ll still be about travelling around, though - the first one will take us on some 1980s package holidays with nightmare children; namely, my brother and me!

Pre-order now!

The Lost Orphans, the first book in the brand new series The Runaway Evacuees, is out on 23rd July and is up for pre-order now on Amazon. It’s written by me and my friend Catherine Curzon, under our joint pen-name, Ellie Curzon. It’ll be available in ebook, paperback, audiobook, and in Kindle Unlimited.

About me

I co-write WW2 saga fiction with my excellent friend Catherine Curzon under our joint pen name, Ellie Curzon.

I’ve written two books on Victorian crime and forensics, and articles for Fortean Times and Family Tree magazine. I’ve appeared on BBC1’s Murder, Mystery and My Family, and BBC Radio 4’s Punt PI. I live in the West Midlands with a cat who looks like a Viking.

You can subscribe to this newsletter for free, or if you love what you’ve read and can find some spare coins down the back of the sofa, you can upgrade to a paid subscription.

Roads to the Past is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

And if you just want to chuck a couple of coins my way, you can give me a one-off tip!

Buy me a cuppa at Ko-Fi!

And hey - why not share the newsletter with like-minded chums?

And, if you’re reading this newsletter from your email, you’ll need to go to the website to read the full thing when if it cuts off for being too long - sorry about that, but I do have lots of interesting photos for you!

Today we’re off to Mistley, where we’ll meet The Witchfinder General, and see some quirky architectural remains! So snap on the seatbelt, share round the tin of Travel Sweets (without getting that sugar dust on the upholstery), and off we go!

Mistley is an English town in Essex, nearly 80 miles north-east of London and a few miles west of Harwich. It sits on the banks of the River Stour, and on the opposite bank you can see the south-east coast of Suffolk. Go a few miles west of Mistley, where the river narrows, and you find yourself in an area which was painted many times by a local lad you may have heard of… John Constable.

The main road that goes along Mistley’s riverfront has many Georgian-fronted buildings, but they must be older behind the plaster facades, as the town goes back a long way. It’s where the Witchfinder General started his lethal course, and it’s a place which is, unusually, now on its third (fourth if you want to be pedantic) parish church. Ruins remain of the earliest, and only two towers still stand from the second (or third), built by a wealthy man in a failed attempt to transform Mistley into a fashionable spa town. They’re used by sailors who navigate the River Stour, and if you’re really lucky - like I was - you can see what’s inside.

The Witchfinder General

But before we open the doors and take a peek into the towers, first of all let’s meet Mistley’s infamous (step)son.

Back in the mid-1640s, Mistley had a Mediaeval parish church, like many places in the country; once presided over by a Catholic priest, by the 1640s, Mistley’s was home to a Puritan one. This whole area was a Puritan stronghold, and Christopher Jones, captain of the Mayflower, was from Harwich, just up the road.

Thomas Witham began his tenure in 1610, bringing with him his wife Freegift (what a brilliant Puritan name!) and their family. In 1633, Freegift died and was buried under the chancel of the church. By 1641, Thomas had married again. His second wife was a widow from the Suffolk village of Great Wenham, only a few miles away over the border. Her name was Mary Hopkins, and she brought with her a son called Matthew.1

Thomas left Mistley in 1643 to head to London, and died the following year; Mistley was left in the lurch. These were tumultuous times, and without the local reverend incumbent to steer village life, there was a power vacuum. And it seems that Matthew Hopkins - son of the late vicar of Great Wenham, and stepson to Mistley’s - strode right into it.

One of the first witchcraft cases that Hopkins was involved in was the death of a young boy, son to Richard Edwards, a wealthy local, and his wife Susan. The death was pinned on Anne Leach, a widow, who was accused of being a witch. It seems very likely that Susan Edwards was Hopkins’s stepsister - her maiden name is given as Witham in the parish register when she married - and therefore the little boy who’d died was very likely to have been Hopkins’s step-nephew. His zeal for witch-hunting has led people to assume that he was “evil” or unbalanced, and that the turbulent times of the Civil War gave him the perfect platform for his reign of terror. But on top of that, it appears that it was a personal vendetta, because he believed that a member of his own family had been killed by a witch. And from there, stoked by revenge, he went on to terrorise dozens of people, some of whom lost their lives either because they were found guilty and hanged2, or because they died in prison.3

Hopkins was so proud of his achievements, getting confessions through sleep-deprivation and other cruelties, that he called himself The Witchfinder General. He had the ear of two powerful, Puritan Justices of the Peace: Sir Harbottle Grimstone (a name that only Charles Dickens could’ve come up with), and Sir Thomas Bowes. Dare I admit that Sir Thomas was my many-times great-uncle?

And dare I point out a very strange coincidence? Sir Thomas’ brother-in-law lived at Kentwell Hall in Suffolk, and several scenes from Vincent Price’s 1968 folk horror film Witchfinder General (or The Conqueror Worm, for those of you in the US) were filmed at Kentwell. It should be pointed out, of course, that Hopkins was only in his twenties at the time of his Witchfinding, whereas Price was in his late fifties when he portrayed him in the film.

I visited Mistley in November 2019 with my friend Charlotte, just before the world went mad. We tried to find the ruins of the old church, and failed miserably, only succeeding in scaring ourselves silly by getting lost in a lane and spooking ourselves by telling each other, “You can just imagine the Witchfinder General thundering down here on his horse, can’t you?”

In 1647, John Witham, son of Mistley’s former rector, replaced his father, and the very first burial he performed was that of his stepbrother; even The Witchfinder General couldn’t escape death. The Civil War ended and the Puritans held sway for a while, but finally a king returned to the throne; theatres reopened, songs other than psalms could be sung, and everyone was allowed to celebrate Christmas again. A century after Matthew Hopkins had rampaged across Essex and Suffolk, local historian Philip Morant wrote up his exhaustive (and exhausting) history of Essex. Beliefs had changed so much in the space of a hundred years that he could write that Sir Thomas Bowes “was cruelly busy in the prosecution and execution of some poor silly persons, called Witches.”4

The Age of Enlightenment had arrived, shunting Hopkins and his witch-hunting into the past. And a prosperous new future was planned for Mistley.

Mistley Towers

Richard Rigby made a fortune from the South Seas speculation and in 1735 built a new church for Mistley. The Mediaeval church, which had served the village for centuries, was demolished, and the new one was built further north, near the banks of the Stour. His son - another Richard Rigby - inherited his father’s fortune, and in 1768 was appointed as the Paymaster General of the Forces by George III. And he decided to make the church his father had built - Mistley’s second - even more impressive, and transformed it. Is it technically Mistley’s third, or a gussied-up version of the second? I’m not sure.

Why did Mistley need a fancy church? It wasn’t just for Rigby’s own use, but to bring about his plans to turn Mistley into a fashionable spa town. Bath and Cheltenham had sprung up by this time, attracting wealthy visitors who, deriving their wealth from other people’s thankless labour, had vast amounts of time to squander. Rigby wanted a piece of the spa town action, and the visitors he hoped to attract wouldn’t be satisfied with any old ordinary church; only Robert Adam, famous Georgian architect, would do. You can even see the two towers in the distance in this drawing of Mistley from the river by John Constable. But Rigby’s plans never came to pass. No baths were constructed in Mistley, and the small, riverside community was left with a fancy church and no wealthy visitors to attend it.

As all that’s left of the church are its two towers, it’s fascinating to see old images of Adam’s church, so we can picture what it looked like. Instead of having a tower at one end, it had two, with a grand porticoed door between them on the south side of the church.

Deciding the church wasn’t big enough, the Victorians demolished the nave around 1870, leaving the towers, which had become navigational aids for sailors. Burials still took place on the site, though, so headstones have popped up between the two towers, where people used to sit in pews. The Victorians built Mistley’s third (fourth?) church. It’s a typically Gothic Victorian construction, with the plaques and monuments from inside the Rigby/Adam church on the walls inside it.

And so they stand, two impressively ornate towers, surrounded by headstones and hemmed in by metal fences. So what’s inside?

Last year, I went back to Mistley, and was lucky enough to get behind the towers’ doors. The east tower was the chancel, where the altar would’ve been, and on the back wall, under a semi-circular window shaped like a fan is a board with the Ten Commandants written in gold, and flanked by columns. On one of the walls, there’s four ovals, each containing lines from the Bible. What’s most impressive is the design on the ceiling, which shows a symbol of the Holy Trinity with sun rays, a triangle, and the letter A in the middle surrounded by a circle which might partly represent an Omega. Maybe…

The west tower isn’t quite so grand and is used as a storeroom for headstones that are in need of some TLC. It was also full of ladybirds! The natural world can get in where few humans are able to. Just above the worktable there’s a plaque, telling everyone that Richard Rigby I had left money in his will for an almshouse, which was never built, and the money was redirected to a local charity instead. I’m sure the people of Mistley who were struggling by without an almshouse were overjoyed by the fancy church that Rigby II had built instead.

If you’re looking for the headstones of Caleb Candler, William Folkard, William Henry and Elizabeth Totham, and William Henry Ernest Avis, then - at least when I was visiting - they were being restored in the west tower.

In the grounds, there’s some interesting memorials. The Kiddells’ grave has a gorgeous design of angels and stars:

And then there’s… well… how else can I describe it? A sort of Egyptian mausoleum. I did not expect to find anything like this in north-east Essex. Maybe Highgate Cemetery, which was once rumoured to have a vampire (I kid you not), but not Mistley! It’s the last resting place of the Norman family. And no vampires - or indeed witches, or Witchfinder Generals - are involved.

Visiting

Mistley Towers are looked after by English Heritage and are free to visit. You can look around the churchyard during “any reasonable daylight hours”, and the interiors of the towers can be viewed from 10am to 4pm. They’re kept locked, and you just need to nip up the road to The Mistley Thorn pub to collect the key. Local rumour says that Hopkins once owned the pub. Maybe you’ll see his shade loitering at the bar, especially at Hallowe’en….

Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed your trip to Mistley. Where will we go next?

Pre-order now!

The Lost Orphans, the first book in the brand new series The Runaway Evacuees, is out on 23rd July and is up for pre-order now on Amazon. It’s written by me and my friend Catherine Curzon, under our joint pen-name, Ellie Curzon. It’ll be available in ebook, paperback, audiobook, and in Kindle Unlimited.

About me

I co-write WW2 saga fiction with my excellent friend Catherine Curzon under our joint pen name, Ellie Curzon.

I’ve written two books on Victorian crime and forensics, and articles for Fortean Times and Family Tree magazine. I’ve appeared on BBC1’s Murder, Mystery and My Family, and BBC Radio 4’s Punt PI. I live in the West Midlands with a cat who looks like a Viking.

You can subscribe to this newsletter for free, or if you love what you’ve read and can find some spare coins down the back of the sofa, you can upgrade to a paid subscription.

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At first, it might seem as if the three different monuments, each with their own highly poetic name - the King’s Men, the King Stone, and the Whispering Knights - were all built by the same people around the same time. But in fact, the stones were brought here and set up across a period of 2,000 years. It’s incredible that this place, high up on the Cotswolds, could be so significant to human beings for so long. Yet it’s still special now: I’ve visited twice because its magic has got into my bones, and there’s always other people coming to see it. And the stone circle - known as the King’s Men - is sacred to modern pagans.

The Rollright Stones are about a mile south of Long Compton, four miles west of Hook Norton, and about three miles north of Chipping Norton. They’re made from soft, local Cotswold stone, so didn’t travel the vast distances of the boulders that make up Stonehenge. The King’s Stone stands alone on a natural rise in a field which lies at the north of the site. Cross the country lane - which also means leaving south Warwickshire and entering north Oxfordshire - and you enter a small grove of trees. To your right, you’ll see the stone circle, which sits surprisingly close to the road. To your left, further away and more southerly than the circle, are the Whispering Knights.

A legend became attached to the stones, involving a Danish king and a witch. The king encountered the witch at the Rollright Stones, and he asked her if he would become king of England. She told him he’d be king if he walked to the top of the ridge and could see Long Compton below. He did, but discovered his view was blocked by a burial barrow. The witch then turned the king and his men to stone. The king became the King’s Stone, which stands alone near a burial barrow. Four of his knights, who were whispering treacherously behind his back, became the Whispering Knights, and the remainder, who were standing in a circle, became the King’s Men.

The Whispering Knights

The oldest stones are the Whispering Knights, which date from the early Neolithic, around 3,800-3,500 BC. They’ve stood, commanding their view of the surrounding hills, for nearly 5,000 years, marking the spot of a burial. Pottery has been found around it from later periods, so it would’ve been important to people for a long time. And it’s not hard to see why - even though it’s been built from local stone, they’re still enormous slabs which would’ve required enormous effort to move into place. Until the 1700s, the capstone was in place on top of it, making it look even more impressive.

When I’ve stood there next to the stones, thinking about the long-dead human buried there, it seems as if time contracts. As ancient as the monument is, there’s still a connection to be felt between then and now, even though our lives are so different. We still set up memorials for the dead; we still want to remember. Looking up at the stones, we stand where humans have stood for thousands of years, and whether we contemplate infinity, or wonder what we’re having for tea, there is still a link between us.

The King’s Men

The stone circle at Rollright was constructed about 1,000 years after the burial memorialised by The Whispering Knights. The soft stone found in the Cotswolds weathers easily and the seventy-something (the stones are allegedly uncountable) “men” are worn, some with holes going right through. They vary in size - some are quite small, not more than stumps, others are taller than I am, and I don’t know how far they go beneath the soil. Over time, human beings have helped themselves to some of the stones for building work, and they’re not all in their original positions, which explains why the circle is an irregular shape. Despite that, you can still see where the original entrance was, as there’s two stones just outside the circle which mark it.

And now the moment that Whovians have been waiting for: the King’s Men were used in an episode of Doctor Who in 1978, called “The Stones of Blood”, with Tom Baker as the Time Lord. The weathered look of the stones and their irregular poses is very cinematic, much better than a scenery department knocking something together from polystyrene.

The stone circle presumably didn’t mark a burial, but had a devotional purpose. It’s similar to stone circles in the Lake District and eastern Ireland, so it’s thought that the same people built them. The stones are used for devotion even today. The trees which are to the west of the circle are garlanded with pieces of ribbon and cloth, as you see at holy “clootie” wells. I’ve also seen evidence of people leaving offerings and sacrifices there.

It’s the first stone circle I’ve seen since my very first, on a trip to Ireland thirty years ago. I wish I could remember where that was, because I have a vague memory that it was similar to the King’s Men, and I think there was an ancient burial close by as well. The circle is difficult to photograph in a way that captures what it feels like to see it, and I wasn’t quite sure how to interact with the stones, which probably sounds a bit strange, but unlike the other monuments at Rollright, the stone circle isn’t fenced off. You can walk around the circle, walk across it, and even touch the stones. I did all of these things - and only very lightly rested my fingertips on the stones1 - before picturing the ancient people who built the circle, dragging the huge stones here, then after all that effort, quietly engaging with whatever spirits they believed in. They’re not so different to the Mediaeval masons who built the churches and cathedrals that dot the country, using something hard and durable to somehow connect with the invisible.

The King’s Stone

Crossing the lane into Warwickshire, we leave behind the Neolithic and enter the Bronze Age. The King’s Stone is a baby compared to the others, dating from 1,500 BC. It’s surrounded by burials, including a burial cairn that’s now under the grass, and ancient cremations have been found in jars close to the stone, so this part of Rollright is an ancient cemetery. It’s thought the King’s Stone was brought here as a marker.

It’s in a more exposed position than the other two monuments, and is noticeably windier. The view facing north is stunning, and seems like the perfect place to be buried, where it feels as if you’re already halfway into the sky.

The King’s Stone was been fenced off, like The Whispering Knights, in the late 1800s. Its odd shape - it reminded me of a chicken nugget, but that might be because it was getting towards lunchtime - is thanks to souvenir hunters in the 1800s chipping bits off - hence the railings. The same sort of people who carved their initials into other old monuments, like Sir John Knightley’s tomb.

Visiting the Rollright Stones

So now you’ve read about the Rollright stones, what are the ins-and-outs of actually visiting? First of all, check out the official website.

The site is owned by the Rollright Trust, a private charity, and cared for by English Heritage. There’s no car park, so you have to park in laybys which run along the lane. If it’s busy and the laybys are full, you have to carefully balance the car on the edge of the road, as far away as you can get from the traffic without 1. falling into a ditch, 2. meeting the sheep staring at you in a neighbouring field, or 3. having to climb through a tree. Please be careful and hide your bags etc from view - there are tiny warning posters (fliers, really) courtesy of Thames Valley police on some of the fences near the gate, advising that thieves are about. It’s such a quiet, remote spot, that it’s easy to forget to be careful. Someone’s car was broken into while we were there on our second visit, and sadly, Inspector Morse did not attend (the Rollright Stones would’ve been an amazing location for Endeavour, wouldn’t they!).

You’ll need to pay a small donation, either in a box at the gate, or online (if you can get a signal). There aren’t any staff present. Paths around the site have been set up to make it wheelchair-friendly. There’s no loos or café, which is a bit inconvenient, but a toilet block by 5,000-year-old stones would spoil the atmosphere.

What definitely spoils the atmosphere are the bags of dog-doings which I saw dangling from a fence on the site on my first visit. I loathe the sight of these in parks and woods, but why must they proliferate even here? Eurgh!2 Take your litter home with you. They weren’t there the second time I went, so perhaps I was just unlucky on my first visit!

Something else to be aware of are other kinds of offerings because the stone circle is an active site of pagan worship. It’s partly why a trust was set up to protect them, so that pagans could still access the site, rather than lose it to private owners. As mentioned, the trees are tied with clooties, but I’ve also seen offerings around the stone circle. On my first visit, someone had half-burned a bunch of daffodils in the middle of the circle, and on the second, someone had left a plastic box of chocolate chip cookies on top of one of the stones. Some people have even crammed coins into splits in the stones. I’m all for people enjoying their spiritual beliefs, if they have them, but I do have reservations about people damaging a 4,000-year-old monument in the process, and leaving things around which impinge on the enjoyment of the next person to visit - whether for religious purposes or because they’re a nosey historian. And please don’t leave chocolate around: it’s lethal to dogs, who enjoy coming here too.

That all said, it’s definitely worth a visit, whether you’re a pagan, a Whovian, or just someone (like me) who loves old things! Or, indeed, a dog.

Writing news!

So onto that writing news I mentioned… The Lost Orphans, the first book in the brand new series The Runaway Evacuees, is out on 23rd July and is up for pre-order now on Amazon. It’s written by me and my friend Catherine Curzon, under our joint pen-name, Ellie Curzon. It’ll be available in ebook, paperback, audiobook, and in Kindle Unlimited.

About me

I co-write WW2 saga fiction with my excellent friend Catherine Curzon under our joint pen name, Ellie Curzon.

I’ve written two books on Victorian crime and forensics, and articles for Fortean Times and Family Tree magazine. I’ve appeared on BBC1’s Murder, Mystery and My Family, and BBC Radio 4’s Punt PI. I live in the West Midlands with a cat who looks like a Viking.

You can subscribe to this newsletter for free, or if you love what you’ve read and can find some spare coins down the back of the sofa, you can upgrade to a paid subscription.

And if you just want to chuck a couple of coins my way, you can give me a one-off tip!

Buy me a cuppa at Ko-Fi!

And hey - why not share the newsletter with like-minded chums?