UK #1

Avebury (England): Neolithic Henge Monument (View from Outside the Southern End of the Outer Ring)

Avebury, in southwest England about 17 miles north of Stonehenge, contains the remnants of the largest megalithic stone circle in the world, 380 yards in diameter. While not as well preserved as Stonehenge, it attracts fewer visitors and access is much freer. The immediate area had been mostly abandoned by the Iron Age; the village, which has encroached on the henge, dates from the Early Middle Ages. Over the centuries much of the monument has been destroyed, whether to repurpose the conveniently available stone or to eradicate pagan structures.

Various Neo-Pagan and New Age adherents, watched by crowds of the curious, carry out rites or pursue various other practices at Avebury which lack any documentable foundation in the cultures that originally constructed the henge and its stone circles. The monument authorities maintain peace and fairness by setting various days of the week for the activities of, for example, the Loyal Arthurian Warband, the Secular Order of Druids, and still others. Presbyterians come and go largely according to their own free will.

Avebury (England): Neolithic Henge Monument (View from Inside the Southern Inner Ring)

Some of the original stones weighed as much as 40 tons or more, and stood about 4 meters tall. The construction of Avebury monument marks the transition from a hunter-gatherer society to a settled agricultural one that could afford such a project and remain to use it. And thus the landscape had changed as well; woodlands receded and were replaced by grassland.

The origin of the name “Avebury” is unsure, or rather part of it is. “-bury”, with alternate forms like “borough”, “burg”, comes from Old English “beorg” or “burh”, meaning “earthwork”, primarily a fortification. The place name first appears in writing in 1086 as “Aureberie”, which as a Norman French scribe’s attempt at the spelling, with “u” and “v” indistinguishable at the time. The spelling with “v” came to predominate. One local historian, Bob Trubshaw, proposes the quite plausible source of the “Ave-” in the female name “Afa” or “Aeva”, possibly referring to a saint, and possibly a contraction of longer names like “Aelfgyth” and “Aeflwaru”. See http://www.indigogroup.co.uk/avebury/as03.htm

England (Somerset): Burcott Inn and Burcott Mill Guest House

The village itself, two miles west of the cathedral city of Wells, is Wookey, and is two miles south of the Wookey Hole Caves.

The guest house (1864, modernized) houses an operating mill. There has been a mill on the site since Domesday Book of 1086.

Harmondsworth (England): Town Center)

Harmondsworth appears in Domesday Book (1086), though the name was first recorded in 780. Harold Godwinson, the last Anglo-Saxon king of England, owned it, but at the Norman Conquest (1066) it became the property of William I. The Great Barn, built between 1425 and 1427, is the largest extant timber-framed building in England. Locals may regale visitors with stories about the famous highwayman Dick Turpin (1705-1739), who had a base in the very near Hounslow Heath, once a large area (4000 acres, now just 200) that was a lair for robbers.

Harmondsworth is immediately north of Heathrow airport and may be encroached on by airport expansion. The plan filed in 2016 shows the western boundary of the extension running near the furthest buildings visible to the east in this panorama, and continuing to the northwest, though apparently leaving standing (but subject to airplane noise and the congestion of ground transporation) the center of Harmondsworth (camera location here), the medieval church of St Mary, and, further to the northwest and a few centuries newer, the Great Barn. In early 2020 the UK Court of Appeal overturned the plan because it did not take climate commitments into account. In late the Supreme Court ruled that some such plan could be proposed as long as it met the newer and more stringent restrictions on climate effect.

Harmondsworth (England): View from West Side of the St Mary’s Church, near the West Entrance

The church is a hodge-podge of architectural styles, but then again, most ancient churches are. See https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1080201.

More interesting, if one can manage terms like “impropriate”, “glebe”, “asvowson”, and “rectorial tithes”, is how the church’s ownership and financial structure changed over time. For centuries it was owned by various nobles, as part of their manors, but was also leased out to others. Clergy collected various funds, often in kind. The valuation of the church, meaning apparently what money could be raised by those who had the right to do so, sounds quaint £20 in the 14th and early 15th centuries, then rising to £270 in 1738. At least once, in about 1340, some of the tithes were reduced because dry summers had hindered agriculture. Sometimes a minister served two churches, and for a few centuries the church decayed, in its structures and in its worship, even though along the way various additions were made to the building. See https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/middx/vol4/pp17-19

Various recent popular TV series, and of course the news, picture a Church, and particularly a Church of England, that dwindled into empty formalities and then irrelevancy. Sometime before 2010, when this panorama was made, St Mary apparently become part of the shift that has made Africa, once the target of Christian missionaries, now the source of African and African-heritage clergy that are, as it were, missionizing the West, including the heathens near Heathrow. Thus the current lead pastor of St Mary is the Venerable Doctor Amatu Onundu CHristian-Iwuagwu, and at least some of his assistants are African as well. Through spring of 2020 St Mary’s was listing its usual regular services. It was closed by COVID, and now is possibly with further instability by the planned encroachment of Heathrow Airport into Harmondsworth. A Google search in early 2021 shows a sidebar that labels St Mary’s “permanently closed”.

Harmondsworth (England): View from the West Side of St Mary’s Church, within the Graveyard

We know little about those who attended St Mary’s long ago. Most were common people with largely unrecorded lives. There is more information about the more notable people who attended services, but the local notables were still not very notable. The ownership of the church, however, is filled with garish figures and startling events that make spectacular the Wheel of Fortune that characterized, particularly, the Tudor, Elizabethan, and Jacobean periods of English history. In 1564 the rectory came into the ownership of Thomas Paget, 3rd Baron Paget, as part of his bride’s dowry. Paget was a devout Catholic. After he participated in two failed plots to depose Elizabeth and replace her with the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots, he was “attainted” of treason, which meant the loss of his civil rights, including, along with life, the right to own property. (Those successful plotters and rebels, the founders of the United States, wrote into the Constitution a prohibition against bills of attainder.) Paget died in Brussels in 1590. In 1604, after Elizabeth had died (1603), her successor, James I, son on Mary Queen of Scots, restored Paget’s properties to his son William, a Protestant. William participated in the effort to settle Virginia and Bermuda, but was buried in West Drayton, which is very near Harmondswirth but to the north, and thus likely to escape the probable upcoming expansion of Heathrow Airport. The Pagets had been established there since 1537 and, in constructing their own manor back then, had done their own version of Heathrow-expanding by demolishing villagers’ homes and building on the graves of generations of local people.

So when Lord Paget lost Harmondsworth, Elizabeth leased it for a few years to Christopher Hatton (1540-1591), one of her many favorites but one who at least survived that attention. While he became Lord Chancellor in 1587 and in that same year was one of the commissioners who found Mary Queen of Scots guilty of treason, he was also, so it was said, a Catholic in all but name. And he was also a sort of careful rake. Early on, tall and well-favored, he attracted the Queen’s attention, acquired the nickname “The Dancing Chancellor”, and was rumored to have been her lover. On one occasion he had sent to her a ring for her to wear on her breast. As he put it with great solicitude and calculated risqué-ness, the ring would have “the virtue to expel infectious airs” if it were “worn between the sweet duggs, the chaste nest of pure constancy”. (In its time, “dug” as a reference to the human female breast, was regarded as contemptuous – though such terms can also be used – cautiously, especially if the intended or pretended is a regal preying/praying mantis, and of the protesting-Protestant variety, as was Elizabeth –  as endearments.) Hatton never married, and he died in debt, but Elizabeth visited him as he neared death.

Harmondsworth (England): Harmondsworth Hall Inn

The Hall, now a B&B, is of 17th-century base with an 18th-century front. Or, to cite https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1080123: “1. 5018 SUMMERHOUSE LANE (West Side) HARMONDSWORTH Harmondsworth Hall (Formerly listed as Harmondsworth Hall Club, Harmondsworth) TQ 0577 NE 34/409 1.3.50. II 2. Early C18. Brown brick with red dressings. 2 storeys, 1st floor 3 dummy windows with flat arches and cills and 1 double hung sash in architrave with semi-circular arch, brick imposts and voussoirs and raised keystone. Ground floor 1 modern window and 2 circular windows with radiating glazing bars. Wood door surround of Roman Doric pilasters, entablature and pediment, 6-panel door in reveal with fanlight over. Cornice and panelled parapet, pediment. 2-storey right extension of circa 1800.”

Wendy Tibbetts, an Oxford-trained specialist in English Local History, writes: “Right in the centre of Harmondsworth is Harmondsworth Hall which is now a guest house, and where I had booked a bed for the night. This grand-sounding building was built in the early 1700s, but still has elements of a fire-damaged Tudor building which was on this site. The central chimney and a fireplace are remnants of the former house. There are tales of ghosts in the garden, priest holes and secret tunnels. In the garden is the remains of an old cannon thought to have been put there by the wife of an Admiral after it had been captured off the Spanish Main.” But her comments are part of an article (2019) with the title “Designated for destruction”, referring to the possible demolition of the Hall if the expansion of Heathrow Airport goes through. – https://www.wendytibbitts.info/harmondsworth-hall

Oxford (England): View from Dead Man’s Walk

Most of the panorama is of Merton College.

A questionable tradition has it that “Dead Man’s Walk” refers to the route taken by Jewish funeral processions in medieval times from the “Jewry” (now around St. Aldate’s Street) to the cemetery outside the city walls in the area of what is now Magdalen College. Whatever the accuracy of the tradition, the route to the cemetery was a direct one, and discreetly follows the old city wall on its outside, thus avoiding the unwelcome, even hostile, attention that might well come from a route through the city.

Oxford (England): Merton Grove

The path runs between Merton College and Corpus Christi College and connects Merton Street with Dead Man’s Walk.

Merton, founded in the 1260s, is one of the oldest of Oxford University’s constituent colleges. Its library, dating to 1373, is the oldest continuously functioning academic library in the world.

Oxford (England): View from the South Side of St Giles’ Church

The site had a church by the time of Domesday Book (1086). The current structure dates from 1120. At that time it stood in open fields, 550 yards north of the city wall of Oxford, which then had only about 1000 inhabitants. When the church was consecrated, in 1200, the annual St Giles’ Fair was established, celebrated in early September – the saint’s day is September 1. The two-day event is now a funfair and St Giles’ Street, a major thoroughfare, is closed for its duration. One wonders how many or few of the merrymakers known anything about the saint, beyond his name, at least before they attend the fair. 

Actually, the saint has two names, or rather two sets of names. His Latin name was and is Aegidius, which appears in German as Ägidius or Egidien (and similarly in some other languages). The French version, Gilles, yielded the English form, thanks to the Norman Conquest (1066). Forms of that name, such as Gilg(en), Ilg and Jilg, appear in German along with the Ägidius-type. Giles-Aegidius was born around 650 in Athens, and died around 710 – not a bad lifespan for a hermit, who traveled a considerable (and dangerous) way to found the abbey which took his name. It is located in southern France, on the major pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela. The Greek for of his name is Aigigios (“shield-bearer”) or Aigeides (“doe” or “hind”), and in sacred art he is often shown with that animal. He is the patron saint of cripples and is also invoked to aid against convulsions, despression, and childhood fears. While many of the once-great throng of saints have remained or become obscure in the general culture, or have lost their status as saints because of uncertainty about their lives and miracles, in the middle ages his cult spread widely through Europe. Thus, while not one of the “star” saints like Paul, the Apostles, Francis, and national saints like Louis and George, he maintains a certain cultural viability.

Oxford (England): Christ Church College from the SW

at the west end of the Broad Walk along St Aldate’s (A420)

The immediate area is the Christ Church Meadow and its Christ Church War Memorial Garden.

Oxford (England): Christ Church Cathedral School

A preparatory school for boys, its special purposes is to train choristers for nearby Christ Church Cathedral and the chapels of Pembroke and Worcester Colleges of Oxford University.

A prominent figure in the history of the School was Henry Liddell, father of the Alice of “Alice in Wonderland”.

Oxford (England): Bodleian Library Courtyard from NE Corner

Founded in 1602, the Library is the second largest is Britain. It has over 12 million items, many now digitized and online for public access.

The statue is of William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke (1580-1630), Chancellor of Oxford from 1617-1630. He donated many manuscripts to the Library.

Oxford (England): Bodleian Library Courtyard from Its NW Corner

Founded in 1602, the Library is the second largest is Britain. It has over 12 million items, many now digitized and online for public access.

The statue is of William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke (1580-1630), Chancellor of Oxford from 1617-1630. He donated many manuscripts to the Library.

Oxford (England): St Michael’s Hall

St Michael’s Hall houses the University’s Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. The Centre promotes research and also offers a program for international students, mainly from the US.

Not all of Oxford, and even not every Oxford college, is as resplendent as, say, Merton, Christ Church or Balliol. It is difficult to research the history of the Hall. The name appears in several documents over several centuries, but the early documents leave one in confusion about the possible locations at various times and about how St Michael’s Hall may or may not be related to the ancient St Michael at the North Gate Church, which is a few streets to the northeast.