Shropshire Holiday 2014 Part 1

Shropshire Holiday 2014 Part 1

This year we decided to go to Shropshire for although we have passed through briefly in the past we have never lingered in the area. My appetite was whetted by Housman’s Shropshire Lad poems as well as reports of friends. We left home at 0940 on Thursday 19 June and stopped for a cup of tea at Severn View Services and then for the first time in many years took the old Severn Bridge and went on to Hereford via Chepstow, the very scenic Wye Valley and Monmouth. The countryside was very lush with much sunshine after a lot of rain. We stopped for lunch and shopping at Hereford and then had an enjoyable hour or so with our old friends John and Ruth Thompson. That left a 1¼ hour journey to the Green Caravan Park at Wentnor. It took longer than usual to get set up because one of the fibre pole sections broke. Fortunately we managed without that particular pole though it meant turning the tent around so that the sleeping compartment was suspended from a sound pole. The tent is 12 years old and we reckon that it has done 120+ nights. 

The Green Caravan Park is in a very pretty setting with the river Onny running through it. Camping wise we tested out our new self inflating double sleeping mat and our verdict at the end of the holiday was that it is excellent. The new cooker was not as successful as we had hoped – the top burners were fine but the grill was a bit feeble. The little table which can double as a stool turned out to be very useful though. The electric cool box has been an excellent accessory for several years and was essential in the warm weather we enjoyed for most of the time. We had a lamp but didn’t need it very much as this is about the lightest time of the year with it still being light at 2200 when there is no cloud.

Our first night was disturbed by lots of noise which seemed to come from the nearby pub but turned out to be from the house next door where lots of youngsters were enjoying themselves celebrating the end of year/exams. There was very loud music until after 0100 and a family with small children was so upset that they packed up and left. The Park owner was not very happy next morning and let the revellers know what she thought!!

Our camping setup.

Friday 20/6/14.

The morning started dull and dry but it was very sunny by 10 so I found a shady spot to do some reading and looking at brochures. The site was quiet but a few people passed by on their way to and from the facilities. I met people from Doncaster who were on the way home after a nice few days here. And I chatted to a lady from W Brom who comes here for two weeks and then two weeks at home.

After lunch we walked up the hill for ½ mile to Wentnor village. From the road there were excellent views towards the Stiperstones which are high above the tree line. 

 View of the Stiperstones from road up to Wentnor

variety of kneelers in the church

We had a look around Wentnor village. The St Michael and All Angels church with its squat tower has splendid kneelers and the hurricane tomb which commemorates several people who were killed in a blizzard. There were quaint old cottages and a small holding with unusual fowls and a donkey with its foal which was born two days earlier. We looked at the Crown Inn and its car park and saw the splendid view to the Long Mynd. A hang glider landed in a distant field and the person had to carry it back a long way.

The Hang Glider

 2 day old foal and mother

The site was filling up with weekend visitors when we got back and more were expected.

In the evening a lady stopped as we were eating and said she noticed our fish badge and asked if we went to a church somewhere. We said Methodists in Somerset and she then said she was a Meth LP. And that opened up a conversation. She would be going back to take a service on Sunday and passed on a book she had finished reading. After our meal we walked around the campsite and as usual observed the great variety of tents and caravans. There are many camping fields at this site and some of them very pretty, especially one on a little island.

Saturday 21/6/14 Another fine day. It was much colder last night with glorious views of the stars when we went to the loo. Today we went to The Bog visitor centre. Had coffee and cake there and a good look around. It was once a thriving lead mining village with 100+ children in the school which is now the Visitor Centre. There are just a few remains and lots of info. We walked around some of the paths and then went back up the road to the Stiperstones and walked as far as the trig point. There were many larks and pipits there and various flowers. There are wonderful views from the Stiperstones - Wales to the west, looking north across the Cheshire Plain and south and west to the Long Mynd and beyond.

 Ruins of Miners' Institute at The Bog

 Visitor Centre (formerly the school) at The Bog

 View to south from Stiperstones

View to Wales from Stiperstones 

After that we went across to Bridges which was very crowded with a music festival at the pub so we kept driving on to Ratlinghope and had a look round the church which is quite small and with big churchyard and someone had noted all the plants there - a lengthy list. We returned to the campsite site along very narrow country lanes sometimes gated. There were cows and calves in one part but fortunately no cars and a couple of female cyclists opened a gate for us. (Coming down from the Stiperstones earlier a rather unpleasant chap seemed unwilling to back 10 yards into a passing place and expected us to back a long way uphill.) It was a very pretty drive as it turned out, sort of along but below the Long Mynd.

 Sunday 22/6/14 was another lovely day.

We went to Bishop's Castle Methodist Church and to a service led by Revd Hazel Ratcliffe. She took the lectionary topic of the peace of Jesus which often brings conflict when people are threatened by Jesus’ values. The intercessions were thoughtfully composed around the colours of the rainbow. We stopped for coffee and chatted with several people. Two brothers used to visit their relative in Somerset years ago. Another couple came to Shropshire from the Black Country. We went on then to the Poppy House restaurant and had a nice lunch of roast chicken etc followed by strawberry and cream meringue. On the way there we encountered the Morris dancers coming up the hill from the church which had a special service for rush bearing (we looked in there later). After our meal we saw that they were at the 3 Tuns and watched their last few dances. In the last one they got bystanders to join in. They had blackened faces which are said to be an ancient form of disguise.

 Lunch at the Poppy House

 Morris dancers

Another team of Morris dancers

 View down the main street at Bishop's Castle

  Then we walked round the town and returned to the campsite and sat in the Dingle (one of the small camping areas) by the river where we saw a dipper.

New Scientist, 28 September 2013

New Scientist, 28 Sept 2013.

I picked up this edition up on the way back from an enjoyable visit to Wales. The cover which mentioned an article on ‘The doctor taking on America’s gun epidemic’ attracted me. We had been discussing this topic in Wales and I tried to track down a lecture I watched back in January; it was by Jim Attwood who went into the subject pretty thoroughly. The NS article is by an emergency room doctor. Since gun violence takes more than 30,000 lives a year in the USA it is clearly a major problem but research is tied because it would be criminal to talk about the policy implications of any findings. Nevertheless, although gun ownership is not allowed to some people, e.g. to felons, the doctor thinks it would help if some other risky people were also excluded from owning firearms.

That was interesting but then I saw an article about how people respond to scientific evidence. This can become a serious philosophical discussion but it is clear that if something appears to threaten a person’s value system they are likely to react with reasons and arguments to oppose the science or its implications. They may join like minded people who have made dissent into an industry. And the scientists fight back and the result is trench warfare and deadlock. Climate change is the example discussed in NS and in spite of increasing scientific confidence that human activity and climate change are closely linked there is an increase of apathy and outright denial of these findings. The recent IPCC report will add to the factual arsenal but Adam Corner, a psychologist, considers that this will simply intensify the war because ‘the argument is not really about the science; it is about politics and values.’ [New Scientist, 28 September 2013, p. 28.] With that in mind he suggests that discussions on this subject should proceed from values to science.

Something on those lines probably applies to the gun control issue mentioned above as it did with cigarette smoking years ago. And it seems relevant to another matter that I came across in this issue of NS. Rosie Waterhouse, a journalist, is also a PhD student researching myths about Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) and satanic ritual abuse (SRA). She describes how MPD, SRA, false memories of abuse and alien abductions are all of a kind. They are created by such processes as suggestive questioning and/or the influence of media presentations of these matters. Waterhouse follows the story of ‘Carol’ who had years of therapy which helped her to recover repressed memories of many kinds of trauma as well as enabling dozens of personalities to emerge. ‘Carol’, and many others, have now realised that they were totally misled and in the USA where all this started there is now a backlash against MPD diagnoses. A 2006 report by memory researchers and psychologists regarded repressed memory and MPD as ‘pernicious myths’. Satanic abuse claims are also regarded as mythical but in the UK many therapists believe such accounts are usually accurate. Indeed, ‘there remain overlapping networks of believers in MPD, recovered memories and satanic abuse... who publish books, run websites and meet up at conferences.’ [New Scientist, 28 September 2013, p. 49.] Waterhouse’s PhD supervisor, Chris French, hopes that the UK will follow the USA in rejecting the MPD diagnosis.

This may happen but things are not that simple. Indeed, I suspect that even in the USA there are many people, professional and lay, who use various techniques to ‘recover’ hitherto hidden memories of trauma, usually of some kind of abuse. An impressive edifice of theory, practice, compassion and commitment has been built on sincere testimonies of such ‘unblocked’ trauma. This is not surprising because it has been the prevailing view for a long time. However, research into memory, especially over the last 25 years, shows quite clearly that traumatic events are not repressed but are remembered all too clearly, that memory is reconstructive and malleable and that people can be induced or otherwise led to believe sincerely in events that never happened. Although this undermines theories and practices that depend on releasing ‘blocked’ memories the sincere testimonies produced by that approach are so convincing that counter views, no matter how well supported by facts and research, are ignored, minimised or brushed aside by the supporting sub-culture of intertwined networks mentioned earlier. Overall, the result is again a kind of trench warfare and deadlock. Would starting from values as Corner suggests help to break the deadlock here?

My opinion is that living and our approaches to issues are value driven. I don’t believe that science offers a complete panoply of values and it may be driven by many kinds of value from greed to altruism that are hard to disentangle but science does offer truth about the material world. Where this kind of truth is relevant to some issue then the findings of scientific research have to be taken very seriously indeed.

Sir Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917)

Sir Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917)

I first heard of Tylor many years ago when I was researching Edwin Smith (1876-1957) who became President of the Royal Anthropological Institute in the 1930s. I read anthropological books which pointed back to Tylor and his minimum definition of religion as 'the Belief in Spiritual Beings' and his view that culture/civilisation covers all human activity. I studied Edwin Smith for many years but only looked more closely at Tylor a few years ago after we moved to Wellington, Somerset, in 2006. I read about the town's history and discovered that Tylor had lived here for some time and was buried in the local cemetery. I agreed to speak on him at the Nynehead Local History Society so this prompted me to look more closely at his life and work. I gave the talk last Friday (12 April) and it went very well. Here is a very brief account of Tylor and his work. I had to cut out a lot of material to speak on Tylor for an hour so what follows is a very brief summary.
Edward B Tylor was born at Camberwell to a Quaker family of London brass founders. Tylorstown in South Wales is named after his brother Alfred, an eminent geologist, who started a coal mine there. Edward Tylor attended a Quaker school in North London before working in the firm's office. Signs of tuberculosis started in the 1850s and he travelled in the United Stated to recuperate. When he went on to Cuba he met a fellow Quaker, Henry Christy, who persuaded him to tour Mexico and introduced him to the emerging discipline of anthropology. Tylor studied this subject so enthusiastically and comprehensively that he would become the leading British anthropologist of the late nineteenth century. In 1858 he married Anna Rebecca Fox whose family had a textile manufacturing business in the town. They would settle at Linden, his in-laws' home on the outskirts of Wellington. He was described as an 'armchair anthropologist' and his armchair was about half a mile from mine!

 He and his wife left the Society of Friends in 1864 but remained on good terms with their Quaker family and friends. Tylor read widely and wrote articles and books. All his books were published during his time in Wellington including his most famous title, Primitive Culture (1871). He lectured at the local Literary Institute and many other places, chaired the Wellington School Board and served as a magistrate until appointed Keeper of the Oxford University Museum in 1883. This included moving the huge Pitt-Rivers collection of artefacts from London to Oxford. He was Reader in Anthropology and became Oxford’s first Professor of Anthropology. He was twice President of the (now Royal) Anthropological Institute, received many academic honours and was knighted in 1912. After retiring in 1910 he returned to Wellington where he died in 1917.
Tylor's anthropology is dated now but he did a lot to create and give credibility to what is now regarded as a serious and important discipline. 
He was buried in Rockwell Green cemetery and the headstone is most unusual in being imbedded in a tree.

 Is there something symbolic about this?
Tylor has been commemorated recently in Tylor Place off Mantle Street in Wellington.

Budry's Easter Hymn

Edmond Budry (1854-1932) wrote a hymn in French after, it is believed, his wife died. It has become famous in the English speaking world as 'Thine be the glory' a version Richard Hoyle (1875-1939). The first two verses are based on Budry's hymn but the last verse is an original composition - not many people know that. Either Hoyle was baffled by it or, more likely, he had fresh inspiration and so gave us that new verse with 'aid us in our strife' and 'Make us more than conquerors' etc. A few years ago I made my own version of verse 3 and later found that I had reinvented the wheel for Alan Gaunt redid the whole thing some time earlier. Nevertheless, I thought that I would look again at the hymn and over the weekend produced the following:

A fresh version of Budry’s Easter Hymn

1. To you the glory, and the victory!

Resurrected Jesus, for eternity!

Brightly shines the angel coming down in light,

Rolls the stone away and death is put to flight.

To you the glory, and the victory!

Resurrected Jesus, for eternity!

2. See him, our Saviour, Jesus who is here,

He’s our living Master, doubt must disappear!

We as his disciples constantly encore,

Joyfully confessing: Christ is conqueror!

To you the glory, and the victory!

Resurrected Jesus, for eternity!

3. Are we afraid now? He lives for evermore,

Prince of Peace is Jesus, He whom we adore;

Victory he gives us, strong, supportive aid,

He’s our life and glory: we are not afraid!

To you the glory, and the victory!

Resurrected Jesus, for eternity!

WJY 7/4/12 based closely on the French hymn by Edmond L. Budry (1854-1932)