The Major Oak is dead and Phil Harding has discovered another ancient site near Stonehenge

Forget Sycamore Gap: this is real tragedy. The Major Oak in Sherwood Forest is dead.

The Guardian reports:

The Major oak, one of Europe’s oldest, largest and most celebrated ancient trees, has died.

The huge tree, which has grown in Sherwood Forest in Nottinghamshire, England, for at least 1,000 years, failed to produce any leaves this year, after becoming stressed by a series of hot, dry summers.

Thousands of visitors admire the oak each year, with its great age, enormous 11-metre girth and 28-metre canopy inspiring a forest of folklore. Although the oak would not have been hollow in Robin Hood’s day, it was said to have provided a sanctuary for the outlaw and his gang when fleeing the tyrannical Sheriff of Nottingham.

Of course it did.

The paper's report blames the tree's demise on climate change and "well-intentioned historical interventions":

Experts believe that the props that continued to support the tree’s mighty limbs also placed it under strain. Left alone, ancient oaks shed their limbs and “grow down”, retreating into their trunk and thereby requiring less water and nutrients as they age.

There's more on Sherwood Forest and the Major Oak in my post about an old travelogue.

Now the good news. A team of archaeologists led by the mighty Phil Harding has discovered an ancient site close to and even older than Stonehenge.

Harding told the Salisbury Journal:

"In a few days’ time, Stonehenge will be filled with people celebrating midsummer solstice.

"But what few will realise is that 5,000 years ago on a nearby hillside overlooking modern day Bulford, people were doing the exact same thing – revering and celebrating the sunrise on midsummer’s day.

"This discovery is probably one of the greatest finds of my career and what makes it so important is just how early it is.

"Up till now, our knowledge of this ancient feat of astronomy was based on Stonehenge and other monuments of a similar period, but what we’ve discovered at Bulford is 500 years earlier than the famous stones we know so well.

"It makes me incredibly proud to be an archaeologist."

The Joy of Six 1494

"After months of rhetoric from Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves blaming newts and bats for supposedly blocking growth, it’s good to see the Land Use Framework recognises nature restoration is a priority, underpinning all our other uses of land. Senior civil servants in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs now view their ministry as a 'department of land', and regard implementing the Land Use Framework as their overriding mission." Guy Shrubsole welcomes the news that revealing who owns England has just become government policy.

Josiah Mortimer finds that Reform UK councils are dismantling the fight against climate change.

Sarah Fitz-Claridge on the relationship between Karl Popper's account of human knowledge and her view of raising children.

"The new Peaky Blinders film, The Immortal Man, offers us a character, John Beckett, who is a British Nazi. One of the two founders of Britain’s first Nazi party in 1937, alongside William Joyce, was indeed a man named John Beckett, who was formerly a Labour MP. He had been director of publications for Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists, but that year he fell out with Mosley. I'm Beckett’s biographer. I'm also his son." Francis Beckett decries the trend for popular films to create populist myths about the second world war – myths that will do us real harm as we confront the new face of fascism in 2026.

"What if Auden had died on the cusp of exile? If, say, his first airplane flight, to Denmark in 1935, had crashed into the sea? Auden would still be remembered. He was, after all, an astonishingly prolific poet, already well known in Europe and America. But he would not be known as a poet of anxious urbanity, and certainly not as a Christian, or even as a leftist. Instead, he would be defined, as many young people are, by the land of his parents and ancestors. The young Auden was, first and foremost, an Englishman, haunted by England's tortured landscape and its war-battered population." James Chappel considers the early poems of W.H. Auden.

Jo Hutchings has some behind-the-scenes photographs of Jon Pertwee filming filming the Doctor Who story The Dæmons in Aldbourne.

Richard Jefferies Museum plans new Centre for Arts and Wildlife

The Richard Jefferies Museum, which is housed in the writer's birthplace at Coate Farm, Swindon, is raising money to fund its plans for a new Centre for Arts and Wildlife. You can read all about those plans on the museum website.

A spokesperson for the trust that runs the museum told the Swindon Advertiser:

"Our little museum has been growing – more events, more activities, more volunteers and more visitors.

"But we think it is time to grow some more, by creating something that will help the old farm site accommodate everything that's going on.

"So, we have come up with an idea for a new building to honour the things that were important to Jefferies, and are important to us."

You can read more about Richard Jefferies and his importance as a writer and thinker on the museum website.

Back in the Nineties I wrote my MA dissertation about Jefferies and gave the Richard Jefferies Society's Birthday Lecture. The lecture took place in the church hall at Aldbourne in Wiltshire – the village where the classic Doctor Who story The Dæmons was filmed in 1971.

Richard Jefferies: If we had never before looked upon the earth

During Covid lockdown in 2020, the actor Simon Russell Beale, who lives in the town, recorded some readings from the work of my man Richard Jefferies for the Marlborough Literary Festival. You can still find them on the festival's website.

The extract below is from one of those readings. It's taken from Jefferies' essay Wild Flowers, which is included in his collection The Open Air, published in 1885.

If we had never before looked upon the earth, but suddenly came to it man or woman grown, set down in the midst of a summer mead, would it not seem to us a radiant vision? The hues, the shapes, the song and life of birds, above all the sunlight, the breath of heaven, resting on it; the mind would be filled with its glory, unable to grasp it, hardly believing that such things could be mere matter and no more. Like a dream of some spirit-land it would appear, scarce fit to be touched lest it should fall to pieces, too beautiful to be long watched lest it should fade away. 

So it seemed to me as a boy, sweet and new like this each morning; and even now, after the years that have passed, and the lines they have worn in the forehead, the summer mead shines as bright and fresh as when my foot first touched the grass. It has another meaning now; the sunshine and the flowers speak differently, for a heart that has once known sorrow reads behind the page, and sees sadness in joy. But the freshness is still there, the dew washes the colours before dawn. Unconscious happiness in finding wild flowers—unconscious and unquestioning, and therefore unbounded. 

I used to stand by the mower and follow the scythe sweeping down thousands of the broad-flowered daisies, the knotted knapweeds, the blue scabious, the yellow rattles, sweeping so close and true that nothing escaped; and, yet although I had seen so many hundreds of each, although I had lifted armfuls day after day, still they were fresh. They never lost their newness, and even now each time I gather a wild flower it feels a new thing. 

The greenfinches came to the fallen swathe so near to us they seemed to have no fear; but I remember the yellowhammers most, whose colour, like that of the wild flowers and the sky, has never faded from my memory. The greenfinches sank into the fallen swathe, the loose grass gave under their weight and let them bathe in flowers.

Thank you. I needed that. 

Wadworth brewery in Devizes transformed by demolition

For what I believe is the first time, Wiltshire's Gazette & Herald wins our Headline of the Day Award.

Don't worry: the historic parts of the brewery have not been razed – the judges just liked the headline.

The Joy of Six 1425

"The Cabinet Office, Lord Gove and Ciga Healthcare were approached for comment but did not respond by time of publication." Byline Times has news of another alleged scandal in government procurement during the Covid pandemic.

Max Sullivan on his experiences of introducing on-street bicycle hangars in the London Borough of Westminster: "Make decisions on merit. Objections that don't have merit can be listened to, but not indulged, if you want to move faster. Officers need to have the confidence in the need for the scheme (lack of space to park a bike is a major barrier to cycling) to give their politicians good advice. Politicians must be prepared to respectfully disagree with their residents, to deliver for their other residents. Who are many in number, waiting for somewhere safe to keep a bike."

"A spooky convergence is happening in media. Everything that is not already television is turning into television." Derek Thompson explains his theory.

James Coverley draws an important lesson from the death of the Roman Emperor Domitian: "Caesar, of course, was betrayed by someone close to him. Mussolini ended up hanging from a streetlamp. You can only bully people into liking you for so long until someone, one day, realises that you’re the problem and that your grip on power is, actually, paper-thin and depends on the illusion of fear."

Koraljka Suton takes us deep into David Lynch's Mulholland Drive (2001): "Some of these narrative threads appear superfluous at first glance because we seemingly never get back to them. Others take us down rabbit holes that leave us feeling dazed, confused and disoriented. But all of them have their rightful place in Lynch’s surrealist picture that stubbornly defies genre categorization."

"A few clubs have boreholes, able to provide clean water on their wickets which then filters back into the aquifer in a virtuous circle. This was interesting and unexpected, revealing how certain clubs can benefit from their local geology, whereas others rely on ageing infrastructure and water companies." Dan Looney recently walked the Kennet & Avon Canal from Reading to Bath, then onwards via the River Avon to Bristol, visiting 11 cricket grounds along the way to see how they are adapting to climate change.

The Joy of Six 1407

"The puzzle for me is what drives Labour politicians (and some others) around the ID card loop? What is the enduring appeal of ID cards that always survives facts and logic? Paul Krugman talks about ‘zombie ideas’, ideas that keeping coming back to life no matter how many times they are apparently killed off by reason and experience, such as the idea that the path to national prosperity is taxing the rich less. For New Labour, with Tony Blair still out ahead, ID cards are a beloved zombie." David Howarth on Labour's fixation with the idea of a national identity card.

Tim Leunig argues that Angela Rayner's problems with Stamp Duty shows that our taxation system is too complex: "When Angela Rayner bought her flat in Hove she owned no other house, in full or in part. It seems to me that the government’s own website is clear that Rayner was not liable for the higher rate of stamp duty. None of the further information on that page suggests anything different."

"A student can easily feed a PDF of the assigned book chapter to their AI application of choice and pass off the bot’s lukewarm analysis as their own; construct a study guide by uploading their notes to an AI tool marketed on LinkedIn by their peers; and even generate plausible rebuttals to arguments posed in discussion sections – all without arousing any suspicion from their overworked teaching assistants." Maria Gomberg on AI in American universities.

Marc Morris asks if William I's "Harrowing of the North" should be regarded as genocide.

"The best comedy does not 'feed prejudice and fear' but rather makes them 'clearer to see' he tells his students. But this view is challenged by talent scout Challenor, a smarmy agent up from London who takes a very different line. Comics are 'servants to the audience', not ‘missionaries’ but ‘suppliers of laughter’.  And in those two opposing views, we have the central tension of the play." Gerard Clough marks the 50th anniversary of Trevor Griffiths' play Comedians.

Gardens, Heritage and Planning visits the lost village of Imber on Salisbury Plain.

GUEST POST The state of our canals - and canalside pubs - today

Fresh from a canal holiday made difficult by unannounced closures, Peter Chambers looks at the many challenges facing the Canal & River Trust.

The British have been using waterways for a long time: we are told that the canal called the Fossdyke was created by the Romans. 

Things started to get busier as entrepreneurs such as the Duke of Bridgewater and Josiah Wedgewood raised capital for specific ventures that would pay for something that by-passed the toll roads of the day – iron mining and pottery in their cases. 

This was the start of the first Industrial Revolution in the 1700s. Once these connections existed, the marginal cost for other uses dropped and more firms used them. The logic of places such as Birmingham became evident, as you were taught in O level Geography. The more you link, the more profitable it is to link more.

At the time. each new major canal required an Act of Parliament. Limited liability companies solicited funds, and shopped around for an MP to propose another Canal Bill. The canal age had started. The emergent network was a strange one. Different fees, widths, depths, keys, windlasses, heights and naming conventions. It topped out at about 8000 miles. Today we have the best 2000 in preservation.

The canals survived into the 20th century. They played a part in winning the two world wars, helped by a big public works programme run by Herbert Morrison in the 1930s.

Then reality caught up. The combination of the post-war car economy and the railways removed most of the profitable trade. The network was taken into public ownership under the British Transport Board. The canal network was put under the British Waterways Board (BWB). Even today there are artefacts stamped BWB. 

The Department of Transport debated the future of the waterways with its boards. However, despite attempts at running high-latency cargo, leisure was the only viable long term use identified. The BWB settled in for a long stretch running a national ‘linear leisure park’. 

During this time a large number of restoration societies restored hundreds of additional miles to use. They then handed over the restored mileage to the BWB, often during ceremonies involving the Queen. Or Prunella Scales.

This led to a happy time for many people. The canals had been built by thirsty 'navvies' for whom real-ale pubs had been constructed. These pubs were retained for the thirsty boatmen who worked the boats during and after the first Industrial Revolution. 

Generally, blond continental beer was kept away from key waterway junctions for decades. Additional supplies of real ale could be supplied by breweries such as Wadsworth's at Devizes on the Kennett and Avon Canal, which operates today and runs tours ending in a small shop only a short walk from the Caen Hill flight of locks.

The restoration effort even benefited from additional charitable funds from the National Lottery. An umbrella body – The Waterways Trust – was formed in 1999 to use charity funds to open new facilities and attract new interest and spending to the waterways. 

Restorers entered a peak activity phase, linking up old routes, and pushing into Wales with the Montgomery Canal past Offa’s Dyke. The "Monty", as it is known, is only a few miles away from the award-winning real-ale pub The Bailey Head in Oswestry (dogs welcome). 

It is probably best to moor outside the Queen’s Head (closed on Mondays) and make your way into town. Alternatively you can cross the border near Chirk and press on to Llangollen, with its excellent hostelries. Ideally do both.

Time, however, moved on. In 2012, during the time Justine Greening was transport secretary, all of British Waterways responsibilities and assets in England and Wales were transferred to a new charity, the Canal & River Trust (CRT). This had the advantage of removing the liabilities of the waterways from the books of the government. 

The CRT was endowed with the assets of the BWB. It was also intended that it would receive tapered funding from the state. It would continue to provide a public benefit, but would increasingly stand on its own thousand feet. One day licence fees and other charges would have to rise, and the ageing physical infrastructure of the endowment would require gradually increasing maintenance charges. 

The restored plant of the waterways had been stabilised, but no programme of replacement or upgrade was baked into the system. There would be no refresh, only an endless set of repair patches, done in priority order. The staff and facilities of the BWB started to age out. After a while the maintenance capability became increasingly contractorised.

Following the Covid pandemic, many old canalside pubs closed. They lacked the financial 'bottom' of large chains, and often served distinct local clienteles. A victory for continental lager seemed certain,, with blond 'craft beer' often substituted to tempt the unwary.

In 2025 there exist many unplanned remedial works that will consume millions in unbudgeted funds. This will mean that planned work to partly remediate the effects the pandemic will not happen, and the deficit of the CRT will rise above £10m. A general review of fees is promised, with all up for grabs – widebeam fee increases, loss of green initiatives, possible closures.

In addition to the effects of long-postponed asset failures, the long-term effects of climate change are making themselves felt. Several waterways this year have restrictions or stoppages due to low water conditions. The Pennines are all but closed. The Macclesfield is in doubt. The Rochdale looks rather dry. The Trent is low, but usable. When planning journeys in these areas, the bleating of the fossil-fuel shills sound particularly self-serving.

Finally, I could mention the pollution levels and the water companies. It is enough to say that you should wash your hands every time you go indoors afloat. I mean it.

Peter Chambers is a Liberal Democrat member from Hampshire.

Phil Harding: Insights from 50 years as an archaeologist

Here's Phil Harding, star of Time Team, talking about his life in archaeology. The video is chiefly aimed at those taking up a similar career themselves.

It's interesting as history because he says that when he began as an archaeologist it wasn't a profession and was barely a job - you were paid subsistence rather than wages.

As I recently suggested, Time Team's cancellation rivals the death of David Bowie as the event after which everything started going wrong.

The Joy of Six 1343

"The UK AI Action Plan quite explicitly encourages building up a greater tolerance for 'scientific and technical risk'. This is the language and ethos of venture capital investing, but with government funding: ”move fast and break things” on the path to AI dominance." Elke Schwarz says the British government has thrown caution to the wind in favour of an uncertain, speculative benefit.

Amanda Dylina Morse says youth workers can be powerful counters to figures like Andrew Tate and provide a positive example of manhood.

Andrew Pakes, Labour MP for Peterborough, introduces his co-operative housing bill: "Co-operative housing sits in stark contrast to the exploitative rental market or unaffordable home ownership, because the model gives power and control to the people who live there."

"In 1958 the Roman Catholic archbishop, John Heenan, was stoned while visiting a sick woman at her home off Netherfield Road; in 1967, prime minister Harold Wilson, a Merseyside MP, advised against Queen Elizabeth attending the consecration of the city’s new Roman Catholic cathedral for fear of a Protestant backlash. In the following year, Protestant Party candidates were again elected to seats on the city council." Ian Cobain on the evaporation of sectarianism in Liverpool.

Jeff Swim goes wandering through pagan Wiltshire with Richard Jefferies: "The Uffington White Horse ... showed me that paganism, as it is expressed in Jefferies, is an aesthetic of the process of walking the countryside and seeing things scurry in and out of view as you proceed, of seeing lines and figures take shape as you move with them."

At last! I've found a site celebrating cats in cinema and television: Cinema Cats.

Richard Jefferies: The granddaddy of nature writing

This is another of the columns I write for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy - you can read more about the JCPCP on the Egalitarian Press site.

I believe this column, on this blog's hero Richard Jefferies, was published a few issues ago.

Richard Jefferies: The granddaddy of nature writers

Nature writers lived for decades in the shadow of Evelyn Waugh’s William Boot, author of the Daily Beast’s ‘Lush Places’ column: “Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole." But today Boot would get a respectful mention in a Guardian survey of the new nature writing occasioned by Robert Macfarlane’s latest. 

The granddaddy of nature writing is the 19th-century Wiltshire journalist and novelist Richard Jefferies, who died in 1887 aged only 38. He has enjoyed periods of popularity, notably during the Second World War, when there was a widespread sense that rural Britain was somehow ‘what we are fighting for’, but still awaits a full rediscovery. 

When he is rediscovered, we shall find he is far more than just a nature writer. After London, for instance, is an early essay in post-apocalyptic fiction:

The old men say their fathers told them that soon after the fields were left to themselves a change began to be visible. It became green everywhere in the first spring, after London ended, so that all the country looked alike.

The meadows were green, and so was the rising wheat which had been sown, but which neither had nor would receive any further care. Such arable fields as had not been sown, but where the last stubble had been ploughed up, were overrun with couch-grass, and where the short stubble had not been ploughed, the weeds hid it. So that there was no place which was not more or less green; the footpaths were the greenest of all, for such is the nature of grass where it has once been trodden on, and by-and-by, as the summer came on, the former roads were thinly covered with the grass that had spread out from the margin.

That may just be the best nature writing Jefferies ever produced. It’s certainly good enough to build a convincing world, even if the action of the book is rarely worthy of living in it.

******

One of the things I value in Jefferies is his ability to surprise. Try his 1885 essay ‘Wild Flowers’:

If you have been living in one house in the country for some time, and then go on a visit to another, though hardly half a mile distant, you will find a change in the air, the feeling and tone of the place. It is close by, but it is not the same.

To discover these minute differences, which make one locality and home happy, and the next adjoining unhealthy, the Chinese have invented the science of Feng-shui, spying about with cabalistic mystery, casting the horoscope of an acre. There is something in all superstitions; they are often the foundation of science.

Fend-shui is mentioned by some 19th-century Western writers, but they tend to scoff where Jefferies sounds intrigued. More sympathetic accounts appeared in the early 20th century, but it was not until the 1990s that it became a vogue.

******

Though it was published as a three-volume adult novel, Bevis: The Story of a Boy is the urtext, the motherlode, of children’s holiday adventure stories. It’s why generations of us grew up on books where nicely behaved kids found buried treasure or rounded up Nazi spies and criminal gangs – a school of fiction that, one critic suggested, began with the agricultural depression of the late 19th century and was killed off by the Beeching cuts and the EEC’s Common Agricultural Policy.

I think I know Bevis well, but when I pick it up, the way the action is told entirely from a child’s point of view still astounds. Mark Twain got there first, but you won’t find many other examples in the fiction of this period. 

And Jefferies can surprise with snatches of social history too:

For seventy years he had laboured in that place, and never once gone out of sight of the high Down yonder, and in all that seventy years no one till Bevis and Mark, and now their pupil Jack, had learned to swim. Bevis's Governor was out of the question, he had crossed the seas. But of the true country-folk, of all who dwelt round about these waters, not one had learned to swim. 

Very likely no one had learned since the Norman Conquest. When the forests were enclosed and the commonality forbidden to hunt, the spirit of enterprising exercise died out of them. Certainly it is a fact that until quite recently you might search a village from end to end and not find a swimmer; and most probably if you found one now he would be something of a traveller, and not a home-staying man.

This explanation sounds deeply speculative, but it’s a fact that few young black Americans can swim and that this is often put down to poverty and historic segregation.

And this is a battle now being fought again in Britain. Jefferies was born at Coate Farm, just outside Swindon. Today the town’s Oasis leisure centre, from which a certain Nineties rock band took its name, lies empty and local politics are all about the struggle to reopen it – and in particular its swimming pool.

******

Scoop ends with William Boot home from Africa and writing ‘Lush Places’ again in his study:

“The waggons lumber in the lane under their golden glory of harvested sheaves,” he wrote; “maternal rodents pilot their furry brood through the stubble."

But Waugh adds a chillier observation of his own: “Outside the owls hunted maternal rodents and their furry brood.”

Jefferies was well aware of this. In his Wood Magic, the young Bevis can talk to the animals and understand their speech. The world he discovers through this is far from the pieties of the Victorian nursery – it’s not one where birds in their little nests agree. 

Instead, Jefferies uses a convoluted tale of imperial conquest and political intrigue to make us understand that nature is a Darwinian war of all against all.

It’s not a jungle out there, but it is an English woodland.

First newspaper listing for what became the Spencer Davis Group?

It's not much to look at, but this notice from the Birmingham Mail for 23 October 1963 sets a new record for the earliest press mention of Steve Winwood I can find.

The previous record was 3 December 1963, and because new titles are being added to the British Newspaper Archive all the time, it's possible that this one will be broken too.

Here again, though he was only 15, Steve Winwood shares top billing with Spencer Davis. The band has not yet become the Spencer Davis Group.

This notice is on page 2 of the newspaper. Stories on page 1 include:

• Final moves made to allow prime minister Alec Douglas Home to renounce his peerage;
• All seven aboard a test flight of the BAC III die when it crashes in Wiltshire;
• Michael Foot continues to recover from a serious car accident.

Spencer Davis is in the Manchester Evening News for 18 October 1963, but it looks as though he was sitting in with the Graham Bond Organisation the following evening rather than playing with the rest of the SDG.

Coate Water, Swindon, filmed from the air

Coate Water in Swindon was formed by diverting the River Cole. It was originally a reservoir for the Wilts & Berks Canal, and when the canal was abandoned in 1914, it became a pleasure park for the people of the town.

It was the inspiration for the New Sea of Richard Jefferies' book Bevis: The Story of a Boy, which was published in 1882 and is the urtext of all children's holiday adventure stories. In a later book, the postapocalyptic fantasy After London, the New Sea has effectively expanded to cover much of Southern England.

Jefferies' birthplace was Coate Farm, which is close to the reservoir and is now a museum devoted to his life and writings.

Conservationists say beaver bombing is the fault of government

Why are there now so many beavers living on rivers across the south of England? Patrick Barkham will tell you:

"Beaver bombing", covertly releasing beavers into the countryside, is increasing in England because successive governments have not fulfilled promises to permit some planned wild releases, conservationists are warning.

Beavers now live freely on river systems across swaths of southern England, and conservationists are calling on Labour to allow official releases of free-living beavers and produce a national strategy to maximise the biodiversity and flood alleviation benefits delivered by the industrious mammals.

Eva Bishop, of the Beaver Trust, said: "Beavers are a native species with lots to offer in terms of landscape resilience, boosting biodiversity and climate change adaptation and mitigation. It would be crazy not to look at wild release as a key tool for the government."

When, a couple of weeks ago, I discovered there are hundreds of beavers living wild on the rivers of Kent, I was astounded. But Patrick Barkham confirms those reports here:

An established population has been living freely and largely unnoticed in lowland Kent for years and now numbers 51 territories – more than 200 animals.

And, he says, beavers have turned up on river systems across Devon and spread through Somerset to Wiltshire and Gloucestershire.

Listen to a short radio essay on Richard Jefferies' The Pigeons at the British Museum

The life of the country writer can be riven with contradictions. This blog's hero Richard Jefferies, for instance, spent a significant period of his childhood in South London, and seems to have been happier there than he was with his family back in Wiltshire. 

This makes me wonder if the endless adventures and exploration we see in his Bevis: The Story of a Boy are as autobiographical as is usually assumed. 

And Coate Water outside Swindon, beside and upon which these adventures were set, was an artificial reservoir built to supply the Wilts & Berks Canal.

As an adult writer, Jefferies moved nearer to London - to a still-rural Surbiton - to be closer to the market for his work. This proximity to the capital made its mark on that work - one example of this is an essay that was the subject of a Radio 3 Sunday Feature in 2022:

New Generation Thinker Will Abberley reconsiders Richard Jefferies' The Pigeons at the British Museum and argues that an essay written in 1884 should be essential reading today. He talks to Andrew Blechman, the author of Pigeons: The Fascinating Saga of the World's Most Revered and Reviled Bird, and to nature writer Richard Mabey.

You can listen to the feature on the BBC website.

The Holy Dipstick of Salisbury is now just for show

Salisbury Cathedral's foundations are so shallow that it effectively rests on a bed of gravel and water. If the water gets too low, it has to be topped up to keep the building up.

Which is why the cathedral, as well as attracting dubious Russian tourists, inspiring The Spire by William Golding and housing a bust of Richard Jefferies, has a dipstick.

This was used to measure the water level under the cathedral, so it could be topped up if necessary.

Paul Whitewick says a system of sluices was built to make this possible, but today the water is monitored automatically by the Environment Agency, so the Holy Dipstick of Salisbury is just for show.

But he couldn't discover where the water it taken from.

Those Lib Dem targets for the next general election in full

Embed from Getty Images

Michael Mullaney, who was our candidate in Hinckley and Bosworth on Thursday, has tweeted a list of the Liberal Democrat near misses at this election. They form a handy list of targets for the next election.

The second column gives the number votes we were adrift of the winner, and the third the percentage swing needed to win it next time. It is this latter figure that determines a seat's ranking in the list.

All these seats are held by the Conservatives except Burnley, which is held by Labour.

                                                                         %

Godalming and Ash                         891         0.81

Farnham and Bordon                     1349        1.27

Hampshire East                              1275        1.27

Shropshire South                            1624        1.57

Dorset North                                   1589        1.60

Romsey and Southampton North   2191        2.19

Cotswold North                               3357        3.34

Torridge and Tavistock                    3950        3.89

Burnley                                            3420        4.31

Hamble Valley                                 4802        4.35

Hertfordshire South West                4456        4.62

Salisbury                                          5285        5.27

Buckinghamshire Mid                      5872        5.44

Sevenoaks                                       5440       5.45

Hinckley and Bosworth                    5408       5.66

When I blogged about Gordon Birtwistle, who was our candidate in Burnley having been MP for the town between 2005 and 2010, I wondered about his claim that the contest was between him and Labour, But he turned out to be quite right.

Aldbourne: John Barleycorn was there before Mr Magister

Last time we were in Aldbourne we saw Jon Pertwee get the better of The Master, or Mr Magister as he was known in this Wiltshire village.

But before the Doctor was in Aldbourne, another BBC camera crew had been there. Click on the still above to watch Desmond Hawkins's meditation on changing attitudes to the countryside and whether village life can still exist in 20th century.

Early on there is much talk of the downs and the ancient bones buried on them. This put me in mind of "the man in the hill" in Richard Jefferies's Wood Magic:

"There never was a yesterday," whispered the wind presently, "and there will never be a tomorrow. It is all one long today. When the man in the hill was you were too, and he still is now you are here."

Jefferies duly gets a namecheck, but the film soon moves on to look at social change in the village. New houses, newcomers, changing farming methods and a groovy Sixties chick.

We see the Aldbourne Carnival, and the parish council meets in the hall where I once gave the Richard Jefferies Society's Birthday Lecture.

But the eeriness has not quite done with us. The film ends with an old boy singing John Barleycorn Must Die.

Desmond Morris, surrealism, The Naked Ape and Richard Jefferies

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The Rest is History podcast on history's greatest monkeys was a disappointment in that there was no mention of the Barbary ape that bit King Alexander of Greece in 1920 and caused his death - perhaps it didn't go to the right school? - but it was invaluable for another reason.

Because it mentioned that Desmond Morris is still alive and living in Ireland at the age of 96. This led me to look at Morris's remarkable career and discover that his grandfather was a school friend of Richard Jefferies, about whom I wrote my Masters dissertation many years ago.

Morris's book The Naked Ape was a bestseller, and a scandal to some, in the Sixties. It sought to explain human behaviour as the result of the conditions under which we evolved, annoying both the religious right and the cultural left.

His qualifications for writing the book were that he had a doctorate in zoology and had worked for the Zoological Society of London in various capacities for some years. He was also, alongside David Attenborough, a well-known presenter of natural history programmes on the BBC.

But before all that he had enjoyed a radically different career. In his early twenties Morris was one of Britain's foremost surrealist painters.

All of which explains Getty's caption for the photo above:

16th December 1966: English zoologist Dr Desmond Morris at home. Morris, who has been the curator of mammals at London Zoo since 1959, leaves in the new year to take up an appointment as director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts. Morris is a keen artist himself and the walls of his home are decorated with many of his own contemporary paintings. 

There is a full chronology of Desmond Morris's life on his website.

Morris came from Swindon - if you saw him in the Seventies it was often on a chat show where he was paired with the town's most famous daughter, Diana Dors.

Desmond Morris's great grandfather was William Morris (not that William Morris), who founded Swindon's first newspaper and was an importance influence on the young Richard Jefferies.

Walter Besant wrote in The Eulogy of Richard Jefferies:

His chief literary adviser in those days was Mr. William Morris, of Swindon, proprietor and editor of the North Wilts Advertiser. Mr. Morris is himself the author of several works, among others a "History of Swindon," and, as becomes a literary man with such surroundings, he is a well-known local antiquary. 

Mr. Morris allowed the boy, who was at school with his own son, the run of his own library; he lent him books, and he talked with him on subjects which, one can easily understand, were not topics of conversation at Coate. 

Afterwards, when Jefferies had already become reporter for the local press, it was the perusal of a descriptive paper by Mr. Morris, on the  "Lakes of Killarney," which decided the lad upon seriously attempting the literary career.

Richard Jefferies died in 1887 at the age of 38. If he had lived to 79, he could have dandled the infant Desmond Morris on his knee.

Richard Jefferies and the Northern Lights

There's a Twitter account that's currently retweeting the whole of Bevis by Richard Jefferies. I thought I knew the book pretty well, but Jefferies has still surprised me.

The tweeting has reached the chapter Bevis's Zodiac, which breaks off from the young heroes endless camping and shooting adventures to give an awed description of the night sky.

All the stars from Arcturus to Capella came about the elms by the orchard; as Arcturus went down over the place of sunset in autumn, Capella began to shine over another group of elms—in the meadow to the north-east. Capella is sure to be seen, because it begins to become conspicuous just as people say the sky is star-lit as winter sends the first frost or two. But Capella is the brightest star in the northern sky in summer, and it always came up by the second or north-east group of elms.

Between these two groups of tall trees - so tall and thick that they were generally visible even on dark nights - the streamers of the Aurora Borealis shot up in winter...

Jefferies writes as though seeing the Aurora Borealis - the Northern Lights - was an annual or even a nightly experience.

And though it can be misleading to read Bevis as a simple reconstruction of Jefferies's own boyhood - he spent a significant part of it with relations in London - it's clear that the setting of the book is Coate Farm, just outside Swindon.

I grew up thinking of the Northern Lights as something that might occasionally be glimpsed in the North of Scotland,  but never in England.

But as we have been reminded in the past couple of years, the solar activity that causes them occurs in 13-year cycles (more or less). We are at the peak of one of those cycles, and the lights have been seen as far south as Cornwall.

Richard Jefferies was born in 1848, and if we look at the records we find there was a peak of solar activity in 1860, when he was 12. This (though we are never told) is about the age Bevis is in the book. So I suspect this reference to the Northern Lights comes from a memory of one Wiltshire winter in Jefferies own boyhood.

The whole chapter, incidentally, is a good example of what Charles Masterman said about Jefferies:

He did not find a Presence which disturbed with the joy of elevating thoughts. He found a Glamour - inimitable, inexplicable - which excited to passionate emotion. Others have demanded Order, Understanding, evidence of Purpose or Compassion. He asked only for Beauty. And that Beauty is not denied to the supplicant.