Very grateful to @bbctms for inviting me on, & giving me the chance to talk about Monday week’s elite #CricketWalk: raising money for the homeless in Britain & Yazidi refugees in Iraq
The village of Nuneham Courtney - which in 1425 was bought by Thomas Chaucer, son of the poet - was demolished in the 1760 by Lord Harcourt, who wanted to build himself a slap-up Palladian villa on the site. In WW2 it was requisitioned by the RAF; today it’s a Buddhist retreat.
The villagers were moved by Lord Harcourt into 2 rows of semi-detached cottages on either side of what today is the A4074.
The spectacle of an ancient village being cleared to make way for a rich man’s landscaped park provoked Oliver Goldsmith to write The Deserted Village.
“Sweet smiling village, loveliest of the lawn,
Thy sports are fled, and all thy charms withdrawn;
Amidst thy bowers the tyrant's hand is seen,
And desolation saddens all thy green:
One only master grasps the whole domain,
And half a tillage stints thy smiling plain…”
Hoving into view: the Joint European Torus (JET), where Europe’s top boffins are busy trying to solve the energy crisis by doing brilliant things with fusion.*
The plasmas in JET are apparently hotter than anything else in the Solar System.
*Though Brexit a spanner in the works
Enjoying the bucolic calm…
Cricket bat willows!
We cross the grounds of Radley College. They have a golf course.
And beagle kennels.
In the footsteps of Sir Arthur Evans and Matthew Arnold…
“And that sweet city with her dreaming spires,
She needs not June for beauty's heightening.”
Which is just as well, since our view of Oxford from Boar’s Hill is a rather gloomy, Augustan one…
Closing in on the end of our walk around Oxford…
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To the seas of Suffolk, there to embark tomorrow with @jamiembrixton on a journey across England to Blackpool: coast to coast, as directly as we can, stopping off along the way to admire & explore what may lie in our path...
And so it begins.
@jamiembrixton kneels in admiration before the spectacle of the river Deben, as it meets the North Sea. 2 Martello towers stand on sentry in the distance. #CoastToCoast
Bawdsey Manor: built in 1886 by thé splendidly named art collector & Liberal MP, Sir William Cuthbert Quilter; requisitioned in WW1; bought in 1936 by the Air Ministry to serve as a centre for radar research. Amazingly, it continued as a RAF base into the 90s. So Dr Who…
Huge excitement as we arrive at the first stop on our tour of #PreConquestKent: a Romano-British temple found during the building of a housing estate in Newington, just off Watling Street.
@jamiembrixton engages in some top archaeological research, scoping out the very site.
The remains of the temple were moved 70 metres to a neighbouring recreation area. It dates to the 1st century, & stood in what seems basically to have been a huge industrial zone, producing iron & pottery. Although massively developed under the Romans, it was originally Iron Age.
The readiness of faith leaders to ignore the evidence of history should it conflict with their doctrinal positions is always a bit depressing
No! By and large, we owe what survives of classical literature to Christian copyists. Christian emperors might order heretical & astrological books burned - but there was never any campaign to destroy pagan learning. Quite the opposite, in fact.
This, by @TimONeill007, is an excellent summary of why the notion that Christians destroyed classical learning is a myth of the kind that atheists pride themselves on opposing. (Whereas in fact they tend merely to be recycling Protestant anti-Catholicism) historyforatheists.com/2020/03/the-gr…
To the ancient city of Mandu, for a millennium and more a mighty stronghold, but also, in the 15th century, the scene of what @DalrympleWill has described as “one of the most singular experiments in pleasure that the world has ever seen.”
“Ghiyath Shahi filled Mandu with no less than 16,000 beautiful female slaves and the good-looking daughters of his feudatory rajahs; the walled hilltop citadel was defended by an army of five hundred armour-clad girls from Abyssinia.”
Ghiyath Shah’s other enthusiasms included: samosas (“don’t forget to add saffron, fried aubergines & ginger”); hunting; perfumes (especially aromatic oils); and aphrodisiacs (“sparrow brains fried in milk and ghee”).
H/t Hannah Robinson’s excellent @secret_unusual guide to Edinburgh
“The lodge is designated No. 1 in Scotland & it may well be the oldest Freemason lodge in the world. References are made to it in 1504 & it holds minutes of the oldest Masonic meeting on 31 July 1599, making it the world’s oldest Masonic document.” #Edinburgh
The birthplace of James Clerk Maxwell, without whom I would have been unable to post this tweet