by Desconhecido
KENDAL MINT CAKE was apparently invented in 1869 by Joseph Wiper, a Kendal confectioner, when he overcooked a recipe for glacier mints, containing glucose sugar and water, and the mixture started to ‘grain’ and become cloudy. When the liquid was poured out from the pan and cooled, mint cake was the result. Wiper set up a factory and began to market his secret recipe, which was an instant success, particularly as a source of energy for those climbing the Lakeland mountains. WIPER’S KENDAL MINT CAKE was supplied to Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition of 1914–16.
ROMNEY’S, founded by another Kendal confectioner Sam T. Clarke, began making Mint Cake in 1918. ROMNEY’S KENDAL MINT CAKE was carried to the summit of Mt Everest in 1953 by the first men to conquer the world’s highest mountain, Sir Edmund Hilary and Sherpa Tensing. Tensing left some mint cake at the top to appease the mountain gods.
Kendal is Westmorland’s largest town. Holy Trinity Church, begun in the 13th century and added to in the 15th and 18th centuries, has five aisles and is ENGLAND’S WIDEST PARISH CHURCH, 103 ft (31 m) across.
LONGSLEDDALE, near Kendal, was the inspiration for Greendale, the setting for the postal round of the children’s television character POSTMAN PAT, and the old Beast Banks post office (now closed) in Kendal was the model for Greendale’s post office. Postman Pat’s creator, JOHN CUNLIFFE, lived in Kendal while writing the stories.
SIR ARTHUR EDDINGTON (1882–1944), astrophysicist, who introduced Einstein’s Theory of Relativity to the English-speaking world, was born in Kendal.
DAVID STARKEY, historian and TV presenter, was born in Kendal in 1945.
Wiltshire
FIRST KING OF ALL ENGLAND ∗ FLYING MONK
∗ LAST PERSON IN ENGLAND TO BE EATEN BY A TIGER ∗ OLDEST HOTEL ∗ EARLY ENGLISH CHURCH
∗ BRIDGE CHAPEL ∗ A QUEEN’S RETREAT
Bridge chapel at Bradford-on-Avon, one of only four remaining in England.
WILTSHIRE FOLK
Thomas Hobbes ∗ Joseph Addison ∗ Joseph Fry ∗ Henry Shrapnel
∗ Henry Fawcett ∗ Robert Morley ∗ Diana Dors ∗ John Francombe
Malmesbury
King Athelstan, who reigned from 925 until 939, was the first king to rule over a united English nation. He won his kingdom at the first English battle to be recorded in epic poetry, the Battle of Brunanburgh in 937, defeating the Vikings and driving them out of York and the North. He is buried in the abbey at Malmesbury, England’s oldest borough, which was granted its charter by Athelstan’s grandfather King Alfred in 880. In Athelstan’s day Malmesbury served as England’s capital.
MALMESBURY ABBEY stands on the site of a Benedictine monastery founded in AD 675. One of the early abbots was St Adhelm, a great scholar and teacher, who installed ENGLAND’S FIRST ORGAN in the church in AD 700, ‘a mighty instrument of innumerable tones, blown from bellows, and enclosed in a gilded case’.
In 1010 a monk from the abbey named ELMER became the first Englishman to fly, if only briefly. Widely known as a student of astronomy and mathematics, Elmer had observed jackdaws in flight and calculated from them how to use simple aerodynamics. His fame attracted a large crowd to watch as he fastened rudimentary home-made wings to his arms and feet, climbed the tower of the Saxon abbey, posed for a moment on the balustrade, essayed a tentative flap and then, commending his soul to Heaven, launched himself into the Malmesbury sky. For a few magical seconds all appeared to be going well until, as contemporary records have it, Elmer panicked, stalled, and plunged to earth, breaking both his legs. Even in his agony, Elmer was undaunted. He had flown 660 ft (200 m) and knew where he had gone wrong – no tail! Alas, the abbot banned further experiments and Elmer lived to a venerable, if disappointed, old age. It would be 800 years before another Englishman took to the skies, when inventor Sir George Cayley, inspired by watching seagulls in flight, sent his coachman soaring high above his garden in Yorkshire, the first man in the world to fly in an aeroplane.
The abbey we see at Malmesbury today is the truncated nave of the Norman abbey church built around 1150. While much diminished, what is left still dominates the town and is one of the finest and most impressive Norman buildings in England, with a spectacularly carved outer doorway and, inside, massive round pillars and pointed Late Norman arches. In medieval times the abbey had a stupendous central spire soaring 427 ft (130 m) – 23 ft (7 m) higher than the spire of Salisbury Cathedral, which is England’s tallest spire today.
In the churchyard is the grave of HANNAH TWYNNOY,THE LAST PERSON IN ENGLAND TO BE EATEN BY A TIGER. In 1703 she was working as a barmaid in the White Lion Inn, when the travelling circus came to Malmesbury and set up in the pub courtyard. Hannah couldn’t resist teasing the tiger, which finally broke free from its cage and mauled her to death.
Just outside the west door of the abbey is the OLD BELL, ENGLAND’S OLDEST HOTEL, which was built around the remains of a Saxon castle in 1220 by Abbot Walter Loring, as a guest-house for important visitors to the abbey. It has been in continuous use as a lodging house and hotel ever since. At the eastern end of the building is a spiral staircase that spirals upwards in an anti-clockwise direction, a sign that it was constructed by the peaceful monks, for men of war made their castle staircases spiral upwards in a clockwise direction so that the defenders could have room to swing their sword arm.
NANCY HANKS, the mother of US President Abraham Lincoln, was born in Malmesbury, to a family that had lived in the town since the days of King Athelstan.
Bradford-on-Avon
The Abbot of Malmesbury, St Adhelm, founded a little chapel dedicated to ST LAURENCE in the Wiltshire town of BRADFORD (Broad Ford), early in the 8th century. The church was nearly lost during the Middle Ages, being used as a charnel house for the Norman church next door, a workshop, a storeroom, a school and even just a cottage. In 1857 the Vicar of Bradford, Canon Jones, looked down on Bradford from the top of the hill and thought he discerned the shape of a small church amongst the ramshackle cottages below. From his subsequent excavations emerged England’s most perfect Saxon church. It is tiny, THE CHANCEL ARCH THE NARROWEST IN ENGLAND. It is also exquisite, with elegant pilasters, beautiful arcading and carved stone panels in the chancel. Most thrilling of all, high up on the east wall of the nave there are two flying angels, the most important Saxon sculptures surviving in England.
Bradford-on-Avon is a gorgeous old mill town with shops and houses that scramble over each other to climb the impossibly steep hillside in a series of terraces. All roads tumble down to the quaint town bridge, originally built in stone by the Normans and widened in the 17th century. The pointed Norman piers can still be seen on the upstream side. The bridge boasts one of the only four bridge chapels remaining in England. Once common, bridge chapels were built for travellers to pray for, or to give thanks for, a safe crossing of the river. This chapel was later used as the town lock-up, where drunks and troublemakers would be incarcerated for the night.
Bradford also possesses one of England’s largest and best-preserved tithe barns, dating from the 14th century. In feudal England it was customary for landowners to give a tithe, or one-tenth of their produce, to the Church, and great barns were built to store these tithes.
A Queen’s Retreat
Down in the Avon valley below Stonehenge lies AMESBURY ABBEY, where King Arthur’s Queen Guinevere fled after the death of her husband and took up the life of a nun. Her lover Sir Lancelot came to Amesbury to find her, but she refused to give up her life of penance and Lancelot retreated to become a recluse. He dreamt one night of Guinevere’s death and returned to Amesbury to carry her body to Glastonbury, where she was laid to rest next to Arthur.
In 979 Queen Elfreda founded a Benedictine monastery at Amesbury, as penance for her part in the murder of her stepson King Edward at Corfe Castle, which placed her own son Ethelred on the throne of England.
Amesbury Abbey today has taken on the form of a classical mansion built by Inigo Jones for the Dukes of Queensberry. The playwright JOHN GAY, a frie
nd of the Queensberrys, was staying here as a guest in 1727 when he wrote The Beggar’s Opera – the first of what became known as ballad operas, in which original dialogue was set to the tunes of popular ballads and folk songs.
On the Amesbury estate to the west of the house, beside the A303, is a clump of beech trees planted by the Duke some 200 years ago to represent the alignment of the British and French ships at the Battle of the Nile. This was done at the request of Lady Emma Hamilton, Nelson’s mistress, who became friends with the Duke after the Admiral’s death.
Well, I never knew this
about
WILTSHIRE FOLK
Ancestors of the English Race
Wiltshire is where England’s most ancient temples stand, emerging from the mists of time, created by people who shaped this land before it was England, but whose genes run deep through the English race.
AVEBURY, begun around 3,000 BC and surrounded by a ditch a mile (1.5 km) long, covers 28 acres (11 ha) and has at its heart THE LARGEST STONE CIRCLE IN THE WORLD. Here you can wander in amongst the stones and touch the walls of this mighty cathedral where 4,000 years ago families came to worship and wonder, much as Englishmen of all faiths do today.
The largest stone at Avebury is called the Swindon Stone. The Barber’s Stone killed a man trying to move it in the 14th century by falling on top of him. Young women used to sit on the Devil’s Chair on May Day Eve (Beltane) and make a wish, and even now, if you run round the Devil’s Chair 100 times anti-clockwise you can summon up the Devil himself. Meanwhile the Diamond Stone apparently crosses the road by itself at midnight – many coming out of the Red Lion pub at closing time have witnessed it.
The stone circle at Avebury is so large that an entire village has been built inside it. As well as the Red Lion, there is an Elizabethan manor house and a Saxon church, built to praise the Christian God where pagan gods were once worshipped. There is also a museum founded by the marmalade millionaire Alexander Keiller, who used the wealth of his family marmalade business to purchase Avebury and set about restoring it, excavating the circle and resurrecting the stones that had been toppled and neglected. Avebury is now in the care of the National Trust.
About a mile (1.5 km) from Avebury is the enigmatic SILBURY HILL, THE LARGEST AND TALLEST PREHISTORIC MAN-MADE MOUND IN EUROPE, perhaps the world. It was built around the same time as the later stages of Avebury, and no one knows why. Even modern scientists, who claim to know how the Universe began, are stumped.
Stonehenge
STONEHENGE, the High Temple, is the greatest achievement of prehistoric man in Europe. Now England’s most venerable icon, it stands alone on bare Salisbury Plain, a monument to the ingenuity and enquiring minds of our ancestors. Stonehenge is an observatory, built and developed over a period of 1,000 years or more by early men of science, to help them learn the secrets of the seasons and the heavens. The stones are placed to line up with the sun on the summer solstice, and although they no longer match exactly, they would have been accurate in 3,500 BC, which is how we know when they were laid. The bluestones were brought by land and water from the Presceli Hills in Pembrokeshire, while the bigger sarsen stones were dragged overland on rollers from the hills near Marlborough.
Stonehenge may be thousands of years old, but the aura that drew our ancestors there still casts its spell today. New Age travellers, modern pagans, druids and others still descend on Stonehenge on Midsummer’s Day every year to celebrate the solstice. In 1985, at the famous Battle of the Beanfield, the travellers battled with police who were trying to prevent them from reaching the stones. Stonehenge is now fenced off, but organised festivals are allowed on the site, which is run by English Heritage.
THOMAS HOBBES (1589–1679), philosopher, was born in MALMESBURY. Celebrated for his book Leviathan, which argues that individuals should cede power to a strong central authority in return for protection, and that abuses of that power are the price to be paid for security.
JOSEPH ADDISON (1672–1719), essayist, poet and founder of the Spectator magazine, was born in MILSTON.
JOSEPH FRY (1728–87), founder of Fry’s, the makers of Fry’s Chocolate Cream and Fry’s Turkish Delight, was born in SUTTON BENGER. He made THE WORLD’S FIRST SOLID CHOCOLATE and THE FIRST EDIBLE CHOCOLATE BAR.
HENRY SHRAPNEL (1761–1842), army officer and inventor of the shrapnel shell, a hollow cannonball that burst in mid-air and showered the enemy with shot, was born in BRADFORD-ON-AVN.
HENRY FAWCETT (1833–84), Postmaster General who introduced parcel post, postal orders and the sixpenny telegram, encouraged the setting up of public telephone boxes and campaigned for women’s votes, was born in SALISBURY.
ROBERT MORLEY (1908–92), character actor, remembered fondly for playing ‘pompous windbags’, was born in SEMLEY.
DIANA DORS (1931–84), actress, seen as the English ‘blonde bombshell’, was born in SWINDON.
JOHN FRANCOMBE, jockey and TV presenter, was born in SWINDON in 1952.
Worcestershire
MUSIC ALL AROUND US ∗ BATTLE OF WORCESTER
∗ TRAIN SETS ∗ PUBS AND PUB SIGNS
Sir Edward Elgar, as English as the Malvern Hills that inspired his music.
WORCESTERSHIRE FOLK
Sir Rowland Hill ∗ King John ∗ A.E. Housman ∗ William Richard Morris ∗ Nigel Mansell
The Land of Heavenly Spring
Worcestershire’s own Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, described his home county as ‘The Land of Heavenly Spring’. Worcestershire is England’s orchard, one of the most English of counties, quiet, beautiful and unassuming. Worcestershire has England’s oldest hills, the Malverns, with bubbling spring water fit for a queen. It has the Vale of Evesham, ripe with plums, apples, pears and currants for the fruit baskets of England. Its cricket ground boasts the most perfect setting in English county cricket, set on the River Severn and watched over by King John from Worcester’s medieval cathedral.
Sir Edward Elgar
1857–1934
‘There is music in the air, music all around us . . .’
There is certainly music in the Worcestershire air, for it is the fields and hills of this mellow English county that gave birth and inspiration to that most English of composers SIR EDWARD ELGAR.
Elgar was born in a humble brick cottage called The Firs in UPPER BROADHEATH, near Worcester, on 2 June 1857. His father owned a music shop in Worcester and, as a boy, Elgar would take manuscripts from the shop out into the countryside on his bicycle to study them, and so came to associate music with the scenery around him. He lived in Worcestershire until he was nearly 30, playing and teaching the violin, composing, cycling along the country lanes and wandering across the Malvern Hills. Perhaps this is why his music manages so powerfully to capture the essence of England and the English countryside.
Any film-maker who wants to establish an English setting will choose Elgar’s music for his soundtrack, for it is as iconic of England as a thatched cottage, a red telephone box, a cathedral, a Constable painting, a cricket match or a cream tea.
His music is associated with two great national occasions. ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, adapted from Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1, with words by A.C. Benson, was composed as a Coronation Ode for Edward VII. It is considered to be a National Anthem for the English and is sung lustily amidst much flag-waving at the Last Night of the Proms.
The performing of ‘Nimrod’, from Elgar’s Enigma Variations, by massed bands at the Cenotaph in London on Remembrance Sunday is often cited as one of the most moving moments of that reflective day, along with Laurence Binyon’s famous poem ‘For the Fallen’, which Elgar put to music in his Spirit of England.
The Dream of Gerontius, Elgar’s choral setting of Cardinal Newman’s poem about a man’s journey into the next world, resurrected the reputation of English choral music and established Elgar as England’s foremost composer.
On 12 November 1931, Sir Edward Elgar performed the opening ceremony at ENGLAND’S, AND THE WORLD’S
, FIRST CUSTOM-BUILT RECORDING STUDIOS, THE ABBEY ROAD STUDIOS at St John’s Wood in London, conducting the London Symphony Orchestra in an historic recording of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’.
Sir Edward Elgar died in Worcester on 23 February 1934. He is buried beside his wife in the churchyard of St Wulstan’s Roman Catholic Church in Little Malvern.
From 1999 until 2007, Elgar was featured on the Bank of England’s £20 notes.
Battle of Worcester
The last great battle of the English Civil War took place in Worcester on 3 September 1651, between Prince Charles (later Charles II) and Oliver Cromwell’s troops. Charles watched the battle from the top of the tower of Worcester Cathedral, and when he realised the day was lost he ordered his bodyguard to fight a rearguard action while he escaped. The Prince stopped to have his horse reshod at Ye Olde Black Cross inn at Bromsgrove, now supposedly haunted by a Royalist soldier, and then made his way into Shropshire, where he was forced to spend the night hiding in an oak tree.
Train Sets
The English invented the railways and they also invented model railways, and Worcestershire boasts an exquisite piece of model railway heritage. The railway footbridge used by Hornby train sets is modelled on the wonderfully preserved Victorian footbridge across the railway at Hagley Station, south of Stourbridge, which was built in 1884 and is Grade II listed. Hornby, founded by Frank Hornby in 1901 as a model toy manufacturer, is THE OLDEST MAKER OF MODEL RAILWAYS IN THE WORLD. The engines were originally made with Meccano, which Frank Hornby invented in 1907.
Pubs and Pub Signs
‘When you have lost your inns drown your empty selves, for you will have lost the last of England!’