Weekly Roundup Vol. 2
Tracing History: A week of travelling
Welcome to this week's roundup. My second week on here's been just as rewarding as the first - I'm very thankful to those who've subscribed in that time. I'm going to try and do these in a slightly more organised manner (i.e. subheadings). After finishing writing this I’ll add a warning: It’s a long one!
First, I’ll go back to last Sunday. I went on a daytrip to Greenwich area with my family, making use of our English Heritage membership. (That was also the goal of this week.) I really liked the art deco look of Eltham Palace, all the sculptures, wooden engravings, paintings and inlays showcasing art and mythology and animals from all over the world.
Then we went to Greenwich Park's Ranger's House and looked at the Wernher collection of ‘splendidly ugly’ Medieval-Renaissance art. There were actually some really fascinating one-of-a-kind artefacts, like a double-sided memento mori ivory sculpture, a silver owl created around a coconut, and a lovely ‘Love of Angels’ sculpture. But no photos were allowed.
We finished off that day with a walk around Greenwich Park, to the observatory and the view out over London, and trotted back to the car via the site of a Roman temple. All of these places seem to be calling out to me as the story location for the London survivors of the world-changing event in Children of Shadows…
A hillfort that’s seen it all…
Now we’re actually onto this week. We left on Tuesday and headed for Salisbury via Old Sarum, which I think is the best way around to visit. Old Sarum is a fascinating site - I think I find the earthworks more impressive than any stone buildings that once stood there. The hillfort/castle has a commanding view over the landscape, including down to Salisbury and its cathedral’s tallest spire in the UK (hopefully you can make it out in the photo below:
I say visit in this order because Old Sarum used to be the site of the first cathedral in the area, before things were moved to Salisbury. Old Sarum is also much more ancient - a prehistoric mound and hillfort, the landmark a Roman village grew up around, and a castle for a few kings. It’s been an unchanging feature throughout England’s history.
Stones and Bones
That just had a nice ring to it, but it does sum up Wednesday’s visits. I think I may just genuinely be enamoured with history. Maybe it’s my second passion behind writing, but my favourite writing combines the two in some way.
It was a cloudy day at Stonehenge, though they always remain impressive. You’ve probably heard it all before. I have been before, but this visit my older fact-finding mindset was much more interested in the features of the surrounding landscape and the eras of the site, pre- and after the main feature. Now I’m much more interested in the Neolithic, Bronze and Iron Ages for my fiction writing, there was some great background information in this museum, Stonehenge perhaps being one of the most documented sites so a good example for others that I’m writing about.
From stones, to bones… The second half of the day was a visit to the Salisbury cathedral and museum, which may be the first I’ve been in that started with the newest stuff and guided you around all the way back to the first flint tools. There were plenty of beautiful artefacts and facts, about the whole region and its history, like if Old Sarum had written down everything it has seen. I heard about the museum from some TV documentary awhile ago, plus a book telling the history of these isles in 100 places, and this guy below is perhaps it’s main attraction.
It felt a bit weird to be staring at a skeleton in a glass box. He was a very important, revered man in his day, an archer and a metalworker; his burial is the earliest example of gold in Britain - little ornaments that would’ve decorated his hair. He also had knives of other metals, two archer’s wrist guards, some beaker pots and more. He travelled over to the Salisbury area over four thousand years ago from quite a way across mainland Europe (to visit Stonehenge…?).
Sites of Interest
This is meant to be a writing newsletter and not some travel/history thing but on Thursday we moved from history info-gathering and sightseeing to lesser-known writing-related sites, of great importance to me because of their inclusion and relevance to a short story I’ve been working on for quite a few months while doing other things, and getting all the research right. It’s a story that’s constantly evolving, and in the middle is a journey that a magical crystal takes, a journey to sites I’ll probably never see but beginning at two that I’ve seen this week! Sort of.
In the short story, the crystal lands on Earth in Neolithic times at what is now the Bodleian’s quad in Oxford. In those times of course there was nothing there, apart from a henge that may or may not have had stones, over which Oxford was built. (I find it fitting that the Oxford Museum and Natural History and the Pitt Rivers were unknowingly built near the edge of an ancient filled-in circle.
Of course, nobody can see that circle today, but there is one nearby that just about survived the many invasions, until World War II when it was levelled for an airfield… but a few of the original stones remained and it was reconstructed with new ones added in, and the ditch was re-dug so the site looked as it would’ve done when Romans found it. The circle is known as Devil’s Quoits - as if the devil would play that game where you throw rings onto a pole with giant stones, and miss…
I found it actually a more moving site than Stonehenge - perhaps because we were the only ones there, or maybe the simplicity of the uneven stones standing in a circle, or maybe it was because of its significance to me and my storytelling - I’d imbued it with my own fictional importance.
So, the crystal is revered at the henge, until the various native cultures leave it behind, the new tribes form, and then Romans invade. I haven’t actually written this part of the story yet, but one of the crystals will eventually be brought to one of the wealthy native families adopting Roman ways. And this family will live at North Leigh Roman Villa.
There’s the usual ground-level foundations left of what would’ve been a very nice place with baths, long halls, a large courtyard and easy accesses to a river and main Roman road. But the detail that the crystal will ‘see’ the most are the villa’s mosaics. There’s only a patch left today, under a protective building, so I had to take a photo pressing my phone against the rather reflective window…
Still, I think you can see it’s a lovely mosaic pattern with all sorts of motifs and geometric designs. From here, the crystal will take a much longer journey of trade routes and ancient sites. This is all for my next novel - a main story with fourteen interludes of which the crystal short story will be one.
We spent the next couple of days with family in the Midlands, and visited Oxford on the way back. We went up to the Sheldonian Theatre’s cupola for a 360 view of Oxford, which actually helped me get a small glimpse of where the henge there once stood - then we walked to Tolkien’s bench and back along by Keble College, tracing the circles of the henge on the modern roads.
That was a great experience. We also saw a great exhibit on the alphabet and its origins in the Weston library, and walked through the Bodleian’s quad - both major locations in my first novel and of course in the crystal-related short story. The Sheldonian is going to have to feature the next time a story takes me to Oxford, I think - I was particular impressed by the painted ceiling of 32 panels:
There is some writing new this week: I entered the Channel 4 Screenwriting Course competition with my Watchers pilot screenplay from my course at MetFilm School earlier this year - fingers crossed!
This week’s books
I thought I’d also add a new segment to these weekly roundups to showcase the new additions to my research and fiction collections.
It’s almost mandatory for me to get the guides to the old sites I visit. The new Percy Jackson is a very nice sprayed edge image like the cover design - and I saw that Golden Age of Myth book in an Oxfam and couldn’t resist; it’s meant to be a classic summary/retelling, mainly of Greek myths but other cultures’ too. So one of the newest and one of the oldest books on myth this week…
I’m very grateful for my parents taking me to see so much inspiring history, and for you, dear reader, if you’ve made it this far through my rambling showcase of my interests - really just one interest. Hopefully it was interesting for you - it’s nice for me to share what I’m learning, and the relevance it has to my work.
Let me know how your week went, if you feel like it.
Cheers,
Harvey
Old Sarum is fantastic, have visited it myself.
Have you ever been to Avebury?