Between the 1870s and 1970s there were extensive open-cast ironstone quarries in parts of Leicestershire. However few traces of these survive. In this video Bob Trubshaw summarises and updates the extensive research of Eric Tonks, which was published in the 1990s, shortly before his death.
From 33.17 you can see the quarries at Nevill Holt near Market Harborough. Most critics now accept that Nevill Holt Hall was the principal model for Bonkers Hall.
This feature from the Leicester Daily Mercury (Friday 21 September 1934) tells the story
When Society Descended on a Leicestershire Spa
The Doctor Bottled its Waters and Let His Imagination Go
In a wood in one of the highest parts of Leicestershire, where wild pigeons seek the topmost branches of fir trees, rabbits scamper unheeding of alien eyes through an autumn carpet of leaves, and an earthy tang brings a curious peace to traffic-jangled nerves.
That is the sylvan setting of an ancient spa where once Society leaders used to flock to sip the health-giving waters.
You will find it Neville Holt, a few miles from Market Harborough, but its fame died with the crinoline.
To-day it is a mere trickle as a result of a dry summer, and its crumbling brickwork is a danger adventurous boys of the neighbouring Neville Holt School.
How the spa became nationally famous is a curious story. In 1728 a tenant farmer of the owner of the estate of Neville Holt Italian Count Migliorucci, dug a pond in Holt Wood where his cattle could slake their thirst.
Much to his dismay, however, after all his hard work, the cattle would not drink the water.
Curious as to the reason, he had the water analysed and it was found to contain a medicinal mineral known as nitro-alluminous.
He imparted this information to Count Migliorucci, who caused an arch to be built over the spring, making it a grotto of two compartments.
A Doctor Short of Sheffield came to hear of this wonderful spa, which was found to cure all inflammatory diseases, and as result of energetic advertising in London and elsewhere it soon became famous.
Society and fashion hurried to the spot in search of a cure for their ailments, either real or imaginary and a road was constructed from Neville Holt to the wood for them to ride in their carriages to the spa. A search is now necessary to find the road, which is moss and weed covered through long disuse.
The water was bottled and sent to London for sale. Dr Short, who was actually something of a knave, advertised on a pamphlet that the spa waters could cure among other things "enlarged liver through excess of drinking anaemia and even corns."
His illustration of some of the cures effected could scarcely be credited by even the most gullible modern people.
The popularity of the slow-flowing health-spring waned after a few years. Perhaps the doctor’s patients found him out!
The pamphlets are in the possession of Mr. F.S. Phillips, headmaster of Neville Holt School, and form a curious link with yesteryear.
F.S. Phillips, it turned out, was no more to be believed than was Dr Short of Sheffield. (There's a heavy content warning - child abuse - for that link, particularly the comments below the story.)
Thrill to footage of Nevill Holt Hall (now widely accepted to be the chief model for Bonkers Hall) from 1:13 and of Market Harborough cattle market from 9:57.
This film brings home just how powerful the British state became during the Second World War. Thanks to Mark Howson for posting it on Bluesky – he says the Clarkes are still farming near Medbourne.
In those days the house belonged to a Mrs Beadon, who tells the paper she has seen the ghost on quite a number of occasions but has never resented his presence because he is a "perfectly good-tempered old man".
She then added:
"Not like the horrible ghost up on Nevill Holt hill, who makes the village people scared to walk up there after dark."
Nevill Holt Hall, you may remember, is now accepted by most scholars as the chief inspiration for Bonkers Hall, though I don't recall the old boy reporting any hauntings there. Come to think of it, he never mentions Bonkers Hall being on a hill either.
So I wonder if the ghost was really the headmaster of the notoriously abusive prep school at Nevil Holt manufacturing a haunting to keep prying eyes away, like a Scooby-Doo villain.
Charles Spencer
William Collins, 2025, £10.99
There used to be two prestigious prep schools near Market Harborough. Nevill Holt closed in 1999, shortly after the police arrived to talk to the deputy head about allegations of sexual abuse and he fled the building and hanged himself in some nearby woods. Later that year a former member of staff was jailed for ten years for 33 sexual offences against boys aged between eight and twelve.
The second school was Maidwell Hall, which closed earlier this year and is the subject of Charles Spencer’s book. He was a pupil there from 1972 to 1977, and reveals it to have been a nest of physical and sexual abuse.
The headmaster was skilled at keeping parents and even governors away from the school, which he had to be because his regime was geared to providing him, each evening, with half a dozen boys to beat. Some of Spencer’s fellow pupils still bear the scars 50 years later.
Life was no better at Nevill Holt. In the school’s last years, its sporting teams had to travel up to 50 miles to find other schools prepared to play them. Visiting teams had noticed that the facilities for showering and changing at Nevill Holt were designed to maximise masters’ opportunities to ogle naked boys and declined to return.
Charles Spencer writes beautifully – this is no run-of-the-mill celebrity memoir – and what he brings out is the misery of being sent to board at the age of eight, even if the school is more benign than Maidwell Hall and Nevill Holt were. The child loses his parents, his home, his bedroom, his pets and his toys and is instead looked after by strangers those parents know little about.
Psychologists liken the experience to bereavement and some children never get over it. Others learn to dissociate themselves from their feelings, building a false personality that will please the school authorities. If you are reminded of some of our recent political leaders, I recommend Richard Beard’s book Sad Little Men, which explores this idea further.
When A Very Private School came out, Maidwell Hall issued a statement saying that “almost every facet of school life has evolved significantly since the 1970s”. No doubt that’s true, but it still comes as a shock to find that a group of parents who opposed the closure of the school lodged a formal complaint about it with the Charity Commission.
What kind of country has charities that exist to send children away from home at the age of eight? After reading Charles Spencer’s book, you will feel we ought to have ones that campaign against the practice instead.
This review appears in issue 432 of Liberator magazine.
The Welland Valley is part of an area often dubbed 'the Notswolds' on account of it being as beautiful as the Cotswolds, but without the price tag.
Residents of this stretch of south Leicestershire and north Northamptonshire flanking the River Welland will tell you there’s no comparison, though - it’s more picturesque, more accessible and more affordable.
Debate rages over exactly where the Welland Valley starts and finishes, but the stretch between Market Harborough and Harringworth represents the "heart" of this beautiful area to Ellie.
Convinced of its potential as a getaway spot for capital-dwellers, the Three Goats has invested £3m in The Nevill Arms, a boutique country hotel and pub in Medbourne, one of the Valley’s most iconic villages.
"Medbourne epitomises this region," she says. "It has a brook, lots of stone and thatched houses, a village hall, a shop-cum-post office, a pre-school, a church and a sports club.
"There’s a strong sense of community and many residents work from home or commute to London. Having Market Harborough and Uppingham nearby is a big bonus, plus you don’t have to travel too far to be in Leicester or Nottingham."
Ellie has noticed an upturn in visitors to The Nevill Arms on "scouting missions" ahead of potentially relocating here. "They’re always surprised how easy it is to get to," she says.
On his blog Unmitigated England, the writer and photographer Peter Ashley describes one of his favourite Midlands locations, the lane that circles Cranoe church in a hairpin bend as it drops into the Welland valley: "I once used to say to companions on this road 'Look at this. You could be in Dorset. Or Devon. You'd never think you were in Leicestershire.'"
But he has managed to raise his consciousness: "I have now realised what a fatuous remark this is. This is Leicestershire, and in fact very typical of the eastern side of the county."
A thorough survey of a vanished local industry and its associated railways. At 33:20 we visit Nevill Holt, which is believed by many scholars to be the inspiration for Bonkers Hall.
The trouble is that, as Adrian Tinniswood shows in this endlessly entertaining book, every part of this version of events is questionable.
By 1900, the owners of large country houses were already finding it hard to maintain the large staffs necessary to run them. You may recall that Nevill Holt Hall, held by many to be the model for Bonkers Hall, had already been vacated by the Cunard family when Suffragettes tried to burn it down in 1914.
Where it remained possible to continue to operate on the 19th-century model, it was often because an American bride brought a new fortune across the Atlantic with her. There's a 1 in 20 chance that the first Lady Bonkers was American.
Death duties were indeed a heavy burden on country estates, particularly during the first world war when more than one set of them might have to be paid, but then we Liberals brought them in precisely to reduce the economic and social dominance of the landed interest.
But before 1950 the solution most houseowners came up with was to sell off part of the estate and perhaps to demolish unwanted wings of the main house - no doubt to their architectural advantage in many cases.
The worst period for country houses was the 1950s, when many were demolished after failing to find buyers. There's a Malcolm Saville story from 1958, The Secret of the Gorge, which pictures the demolition gangs moving in on a country house.
The same landscape - the Teme Gorge on the Shropshire and Herefordshire border - features in Tom Sharpe's Blott on the Landscape, as does an attempt to demolish a house. That's because both Sharpe and Saville's eldest son were pupils at Lancing, which was evacuated to Downton Castle during the war. This was another indignity that befell such houses at the time, but Downton Castle is very much still with us.
Around Market Harborough, both Gumley Hall, which became a training centre for agents to be dropped into Nazi-occupied Europe and was then home to Leonard Cheshire's first community for service veterans, and the Lutyens house Papillon Hall near Lubenham were demolished. But Nevill Holt Hall survived by becoming a prep school, which lasted until it closed following a police raid that included helicopters.
The mood of despair at the future of country houses was captured by Evelyn Waugh in Brideshead Revisited, which was published in 1945. But events moved on, and in his preface to its 1960 edition he wrote that the novel had proved "a panegyric preached over an empty coffin", but who reads prefaces?
They do watch television - or they did in 1981, when the ITV adaptation was screened. I enjoyed it, just as I enjoyed the novel when I went through a Waugh phase at university, but I have never found a more profound message in either than the thought that old money is nicer than new money.
The damage wrought upon a whole generation of Oxford-educated politicians by the TV version, however, is enormous, and the damage they have wrought upon the country as a result probably incalculable.
Yet even in the Fifties new country houses were being built, and their precursors were about to experience a revival thanks to a new phenomenon of the Sixties: the rock god. The Beatles did not live together in four knocked-through terraced houses: they had a country house each. So did several members of the Stones and the Who.
In his own quiet way, Steve Winwood is worth notice here too. He bought a Cotswold house when he was 20, in an area where only rock stars and royalty can afford to live. The result was that one of his daughters married the nephew of Camilla Parker Bowles and his grandson was one of the Queen's pages at the Coronation.
And that exhibition at the V&A? Tinniswood paints it as, in large part, an attempt to ward off Denis Healey's plans for a wealth tax. But then it's often been hard to distinguish where calls for the maintenance of the country house end and calls for the maintenance of their owners begin.
The current controversy over the National Trust, for instance, must surely be born of impatience with those of us who insist on asking awkward question about where all this affluence came from. Why can't we do the house and gardens, have a scone in the café, buy some out-of-the-way chutney in the gift shop and then leave them in peace?
With so many memoirs and diaries of upper-class eccentrics, Tinniswood had loads of enticing material and made good use of it. What I want to do now is read The Last of Uptake, a 1942 satire by Simon Harcourt-Smith that he draws on. It ends with Titmarsh the gardener burning the old pile down.
If Maidwell Hall was the most prestigious prep school around here in the Seventies, then Nevill Holt was its closest rival.
And on that post I have dozens of comments detailing the abuse that took place there.
Someone in the field has told me that when professionals talk about child abuse scandals that were not sufficiently investigated, Nevill Holt comes high on the list.
No, we've not been invaded. This story appeared in the Aberdeen Press and Journal on 14 September 1933:
English Schoolboy Assaulted
Nazi Attack Because He Did Not Salute
An English schoolboy, J. R. K. Preedv, Market Harborough, last night, in London', told remarkable story of an experience had in Germany on August 31 when Nazis brutally assaulted him because he did not salute Hitler's standard.
1 was walking with some German friends along the Stresemannstrasse in Berlin, and met a column of Hitler's Jugend (young men), he said.
On each side of them on the pavement were about eight or ten Nazis about eighteen years of age. They were put there for the purpose of seeing that everybody saluted, and I was told afterwards by my German friends that they would have attacked anybody who did not salute.
Exempted by Order
I did not salute the standard as the others did, being English, and therefore exempted from it by an order of Hitler's.
Suddenly I was attacked from behind by the Nazis on the pavement. 'Some held me while others kicked me. No great damage was done, but my glasses were completely smashed. It happened so suddenly that my friends saw little. I am claiming compensation for my glasses.
The people he was staying with told him it was lucky he made no resistance, or he would have been severely beaten up. '
A search of other reports of this incident reveals that the lad's first name was John and that he was a pupil at Wellington - presumably the public school Wellington College. And after the war there was a medical researcher called J.R.K. Preedy with a number of publications to his name.
The reports also reveal that John Preedy was the stepson of the owner of Nevil Holt preparatory school, Frederick Phillips.
A post of mine, which still attracts worrying accounts of abuse from former pupils of the school, quotes a now-vanished Times Educational Supplement story about Phillips:
A headteacher who faked his name, age and qualifications to run a boarding school in Leicestershire for 40 years has been exposed as a fraud by his son.
Frederick Phillips cheated parents, pupils and his bank manager into believing he was a qualified French teacher and aristocrat with military honours in order to buy and run Nevill Holt preparatory school in Market Harborough. He died in 1982 ...
Swansea-born Frederick Phillips changed his accent and pretended he was a graduate from the Sorbonne to get a job teaching French at Nevill Holt.
He had, in fact, only attended summer school at Besancon university, France.
In 1927 he adopted the double-barrelled name Serille-Phillips and claimed he was the son of a gentleman (his father was a wheelwright) to secure a bank loan of £12,000 to buy the Grade I listed 13th century school building.
He said he was 30, to substantiate a lie that he was a former squadron leader, secret service agent and medal-winner in the First World War. In fact, he had only just completed his military training at Uxbridge.
HFM News reports:
Five men have gone on trial accused of stealing rare art work worth over £1.5m from a stately home near Market Harborough.
The paintings, including two worth half-a-million pounds each, were stolen from Nevill Holt Hall near Medbourne in April 2019.
The property’s owner - millionaire David Ross - was on holiday at the time.
As Nevill Holt Hall is regarded by most scholars as the principal inspiration for Bonkers Hall, I was naturally alarmed. But Lord Bonkers assures me that both his own Sunset Over Bonkers Hall and the priceless The Circumcision of the National Liberals are safe.
Kate Cronin reported the first day of the trial for the Northamptonshire Telegraph:
A gang stole £4m of 'high value' loot during a two-year spree that began with an art smash-and-grab at a stately home, a court has heard.
Among their alleged haul – taken in 22 separate raids – were 319,000 NHS facemasks taken during lockdown, Range Rovers, JCBs, piles of goods from Amazon, pallets of Joules clothing and 540 solar panels.
During an astonishing opening day of the trial at Northampton Crown Court, a jury heard details of how each of the organised crime gang was a 'willing and enthusiastic participant'.
Adel Chouhaib, Barry and Robert Mitchell, William Castle and Suray Hamdi are said to have run a plot that involved many others across Corby, around the country and across the world. They deny all the charges against them.
You will remember that most scholars now accept that the model for Bonkers Hall is Nevill Holt Hall in Leicestershire.
This makes the Prufrock column in The Times all the more interesting.
It begins with speculation about who will get a gong in Boris Johnson's Defenestration Honours List:
Westminster types wonder if the Carphone Warehouse co-founder, David Ross, could finally be recognised for his dutiful friendship with the Johnsons. The Grimsby tycoon famously facilitated the couple’s use of a free holiday pad in Mustique, resulting in the PM getting a dressing down by MPs.
Prufrock then continues:
Speculation is swirling that Ross will host their wedding at his Nevill Holt estate in Leicestershire now Chequers is no longer available. It wouldn’t be the first time. Word is Ross lent them...
At that point the paywall kicks in, which is frustrating as I don't suppose that sentence ends "...ten bob to see them through the week".
Nevill Holt, incidentally, used to be a boys' prep school. It closed after a police raid.
There is a website devoted to that scandal, though much of the content comes from comments left on this blog.
February
The old boy was fully in support of Harry's decision to elope with Meghan Markle:
Congratulations to the Duke of Sussex for making it over the wall and quitting the Royal Family, together with his delightful wife and child.
In my experience his family are a ghastly crew – in my young day it was common knowledge that the Jack the Ripper murders had been committed by Queen Victoria – and he is well shot of them.
April
By now the coronavirus was affecting life on the Bonkers Hall Estate:
Meadowcroft has taken this damned virus badly, locking himself in his potting shed and morning, noon and night. You may very well feel he is Going A Bit Far, but he is determined not to pass the virus on to his beloved geraniums. As I gaze out of the window I see Cook pushing slices of cheese on toast under the door. What a fine woman she is!
Whenever I questioned their actions, Clegg and Alexander assured me they were making Britain a better place to live. Yet now I find that the former has upped sticks to Seattle and the latter has fled to China.You may feel that rather gives the game away.
Jamie Stone telephones, full of his plans for his new spaceport in Sutherland; no wonder they call him the Wernher von Braun of the Flow Country.
I recall telling LG at the time that this was Going A Bit Far, but by then he only had ears for his new Conservative friends and the trade with Japan never recovered. Really, I wonder what they teach in school History classes nowadays.
Lunch with the High King of the Elves of Rockingham Forest, who tells me of their plans to help during the new lockdown: "We like to think of ourselves as putting the 'elf' into 'welfare'." ...
In the afternoon I call on the Wise Woman of Wing and purchase some of her herbal remedies as a precaution against the virus. "I’m much cheaper than those elves, dearie" she tells me, "and what’s more my shit works."
December
At the end of the year I took to reprinting Lord Bonkers' thoughts from 30 years ago, as his diaries have been appearing there that long.
Here he is on the 1990 Eastbourne by-election:
I presented myself bright and early at the committee rooms and was asked to drive some pensioners to the polls. A menial task for a man of my experience, you might think, but we Liberals are nothing if not democratic and I went about it with a will.
Fortunately, I had brought with me my collapsible travelling horsewhip and this eased matters considerably. the elderly voters made a terrible fuss and were constantly tripping over each other's Zimmer frames, but I got them all into the booths eventually.
Published between 1953 and 1959 these books are a satire on English prep schools of the period, narrated by the schoolboy Nigel Molesworth. Searle illustrations accentuate Willans' words and introduce a strange humour of their own. No one who has seen his Romans and Gauls or his gerunds will forget them.
I read these books as a boy and loved them, because you don't have to have been to a private school to appreciate their humour. Molesworth's St Custards is the universal skool (as he would write it) and its satire can be applied to all hierarchical institutions - in other words, to all institutions.
Whatever the limitations of his spelling, Molesworth has a penetrating intelligence. I like the podcast's suggestion that he grew up to be Jonathan Meades. He is particularly clear-eyed about relations between adults and children: they are natural enemies. See his advice in Back in the Jug Agane to "beware of addults, whether parents or beaks".
And yet. I have come to the conclusion that sending boys away to boarding school at the age of seven or eight is not only a form of child abuse - see the comments on my post about Nevill Holt, a local prep school that closed after a police raid - but also produces men who go on to make a dreadful hash of running the country.
So I have some sympathy with what Thomas Jones once wrote:
the great disingenuousness of the Molesworth books is that they appear to exaggerate the institutional horror when their actual effect is to condone the institution. It’s perhaps worth noting that the books have never been samizdat texts in prep schools.
Willans, indeed, is reported to have been delighted when he learnt that schoolmasters were giving out his books as prizes - not the reaction of a mordant satirist.
But then, though the awfulness of prep school life was an accepted them of English letters since at least the publication of F. Anstey's Vice Versa in 1882, fathers went on sending their sons there. Not only that: you suspect that after being shown round they had a quite word with the head to make sure the old place still had cold showers and a school leopard.
Despite this, I still like the Molesworth books: it's hard to reject anything work that helped form your own sense of humour. And I can certainly recommend the Backlisted podcast.
One of the beneficiaries of money from the Culture Recovery Fund hereabouts was Nevill Holt Opera.
It has its own little opera house in the former stables of Nevill Holt Hall, the stately home that many academics believe to be the model for Bonkers Hall.
So I was interested to see this from Norman Lebrecht on his Slipped Disc blog:
We’re hearing cries of ‘foul!’ over a £100,000 Arts Council handout to Nevill Holt Opera in the Midlands.
Nevill Holt was founded by Tory donor and Boris pal David Ross on his estate in Leicestershire.
Ross, 55, is chairman of the National Portrait Gallery and the Royal Opera House in London.
Last month, he handed over the running of Nevill Holt Opera, giving the title ‘patron’ to his son, Carl, perhaps to avoid any suspicion of conflict with his own ROH role.
Carl is 17 and still at school. He has just accepted a lavish Arts Council cheque for £85,000.
Lebrecht concludes that "Something’s not quite kosher here."
I don't know about that - this Twitter thread from Nevill Holt Opera looks like a reply to critics of this grant - but it does sound more Darren Grimes than Peter Grimes.
By 1886 Sir Bache found himself in constrained financial circumstances which caused him to mortgage the Estate to some clients of Peake and Company, Solicitors in London. By 1893 however the mortgagees wished to foreclose on the mortgage and Particulars of Sale were prepared. However, his marriage in 1895 to Maud Burke enabled the Estate to be maintained.Maud Burke was yet another of those American heiresses who married into the British aristocracy in this era. And many of them, like Maud Burke, rescued the finances of the family they joined.
In 1911, after leaving her husband in Leicestershire, Maud moved to London with Nancy and became a leading light in London society becoming known as a lavish hostess. Later in 1911 the Cunards separated and Maud fell in love with Sir Thomas Beecham the conductor, becoming recognised as his companion. ...
In the 1930’s she formed a friendship with Wallis Simpson the fellow American who had a liaison with Edward Prince of Wales. Thinking that Wallis would become Queen, Maud hoped to secure a position in the Royal Household but her dream was dashed when Edward abdicated in 1936.His wife’s departure from Nevill Holt left Sir Bache in financial difficulties again and the mortgage was foreclosed in 1912. After the original purchaser of the estate died, it was auctioned again at the Assembly Rooms in Market Harborough on 19 August 1919.
Boris Johnson’s Caribbean holiday over the New Year was a £15,000 gift from a wealthy and controversial Conservative donor, newly released documents disclose.
The prime minister and his partner Carrie Symonds accepted accommodation for a private holiday in St Vincent and the Grenadines.
David Ross, a Tory donor who co-founded the Carphone Warehouse chain, provided the accommodation, which was reportedly on the private island of Mustique, one of the Grenadines.David Ross, as regular readers will know, is the owner of Nevill Holt, which most historians now accept to be the model for Bonkers Hall.
But last night Mr Ross – a Tory donor who co-founded the Carphone Warehouse chain – insisted he was not the owner of the villa and had not paid for Mr Johnson’s stay.
Police say they are uncovering a hidden “epidemic” of paedophile abuse in the 1970s and 1980s, with thousands of allegations leading to convictions against people who abused their power to attack children.
New figures seen by the Guardian show that 4,024 allegations led to guilty verdicts at court after police investigations since 2014 into decades-old child sex offences.
Officers say hundreds of offenders, including teachers, religious workers, youth and care workers, thought they had got away with their crimes. Many victims have been traumatised, and some have killed themselves or been left with severe mental health problems.Yet the press and public seemed to have lost interest in the subject.
The GNR based its passenger operations on Leicester Belgrave Road station where for some years there were daily departures for Grantham, Newark and Peterborough.
The last of these three services was short lived however. It had commenced on 2 July 1883 with four trains in each direction, but the 50-mile route via Tilton, Medbourne, Seaton and Wansford somehow managed to avoid all settlements other than small villages and in 1916 the two surviving Peterborough trains were withdrawn as a wartime economy measure.
This brought about the closure of Medbourne station, which later burnt down.You cross the railway on the way to
Growing up in Market Harborough, it was hard to ignore Lord Bonkers. If you climbed any of the hills that ringed the town then the slender spire of St Asquith’s, the gaunt pinnacles of the Home for Well-Behaved Orphans and, most impressive of all, the towers, domes and follies of Bonkers Hall and its grounds, would dominate the view to the North.
Lord Bonkers himself was rarely seen in town, though his longevity – he had ceased to be Liberal MP for Rutland South-West as long ago as 1910, people said wonderingly – and his generosity to local charities were often spoken of.
That said, his incursion into the Market Harborough North Ward by-election of 1982 – and the subsequent court case – kept us in gossip for months.
As a teenager, armed with a water bottle and Ordnance Survey map, I cycled out to find Bonkers Hall many times, only to return defeated on every occasion. Those towers and domes seemed clear enough from a distance, but when you neared them strange things began to happen.
Rounding the final bend that would surely bring you face to face with the Hall, you found that it was not there after all but somewhere over your shoulder instead. Turn your bike round to complete the pursuit and the same thing would happen. The harder you pedalled towards the place, the more quickly it seemed to retreat.Today I went to Bonkers Hall again - or at least to Nevill Holt, which many scholars believe to be the model for it.
