Talk on the Armstrong Murder Case

 Tony Pryce started his interest in the Armstrong murder case back when he was an officer with West Mercian Police, and he had to visit a local solicitor's office in Hereford.  The firm was TA Matthews, and in a glass case there was a pipe and a letter.  The pipe had belonged to Major Armstrong, and the letter was to thank the original TA Matthews for all his help during the Major's trial and appeal process.

Since then, he's gone into incredible detail on every aspect of the case, including every person involved and their family backgrounds, and how they related to each other.  He believes the evidence is overwhelming that Major Armstrong was guilty.

One interesting detail is that some evidence from the case ended up in the Metropolitan Police Museum.  Back in 1921, when a murder investigation needed to be done, small police forces often didn't have the expertise to carry them out, so they applied to the Metropolitan Police to send experienced officers.  Modern day investigations typically involve 26 police officers and 4 support staff - back then the Met sent a Detective Chief Inspector (this was his last case before retirement) and a Detective Sergeant, and they started their investigations in secret, while staying at the Green Dragon Hotel in Hereford.

So there is a packet in the Black Museum labelled as arsenic from the chemist at Hay - but it has never been analysed.  Tony Pryce tried to persuade them to find out what the white powder was, but when they realised that the objective was to prove Major Armstrong's guilt rather than overturn the guilty verdict, they decided it wasn't worth spending the money to do it.  Tony Pryce believes that the packet was planted in the Major's bureau (which was produced as a surprise exhibit during the court case) by a member of the defence team, because he owed Major Armstrong a favour.  It's a fascinating theory, and very convincing.

There were so many fascinating details like this that the talk ran for an hour and a half instead of an hour, and he could have continued.  However, he got as far as the execution at Gloucester Prison (an ex-prison governor now gives guided tours of the building!) and stopped there.

Cusop Village Hall was so full they ran out of chairs and had people standing at the back and into the entrance hall!  And there wasn't time to show the video advert for the Cusop Castle dig, which will be happening from 5th to 14th June this year.  Also, I'll be giving a talk on Saturday 9th May at Cusop Castle at 4pm on medieval weapons and arrows, hopefully with audience participation! 

Cusop History Group Talk

 The next talk from Cusop History Group is on Thursday 16th April at Cusop Village Hall at 7pm.  The topic is The Murder of Katherine Armstrong and the Trial of Herbert Rouse Armstrong, and the speaker is Tony Pryce, with an introduction by Peter Ford.

Strange to think that this happened just over a hundred years ago.

Entry is £2, with donations for refreshments.

I'll be at the hall a bit earlier than that, because the Cusop Dig committee will be having a quick meeting - everything seems to be going well so far! 

The Herefordshire Hoard

 Tim Hoverd came to Cusop Village Hall on Thursday evening to talk about the Herefordshire Hoard (or 'how can two metal detectorists be so spectacularly stupid?').  It's a talk he says he's given "too many times", but it's part of his job to publicise things like this, to show what happens when people don't follow the law in metal detecting.

Put briefly, two metal detectorists from South Wales walked some fields near Leominster without the land owner's permission (they asked the tenant farmer, who did not have the authority to allow it), and they found a hoard of silver coins from the Viking era.  They did not declare the find, as they were supposed to do, but eventually produced a few pieces to satisfy the Finds Liason Officer - an arm ring, a ring, a crystal orb bound with gold, and a badly damaged coin.

They intended to sell the rest of the coins - it was later estimated that there were around 300 of them. But the police quickly became involved.  The detectorists had taken photos of their finds, which is how the archaeologists could estimate how many coins were in the hoard.  Some were found when their homes were searched.  Others had been already sold, but once the story became public, it became almost impossible to sell any more of the coins on the open market, because they are very distinctive.

If archaeologists had been able to study the hoard, as a whole, they would have been able to tell a lot more about the dating, and the conditions at the time the hoard was buried, and who was most likely to have buried it.  From the few pieces that were recovered - about eighty coins were found - they can tell that the hoard was likely buried at the time that the Great Viking Army was sweeping across Saxon England.  The coins were mostly from Wessex and Mercia - and the designs on the coins showed an alliance between King Alfred the Great and his Mercian counterpart Ceolwulf II.  Some are struck with only one king's head, but there are others with both, known as "The Two Emperors" coins.

If the detectorists had declared the hoard, they would have got a huge payout.  As it was, they got six and ten years in prison, and one of the coin dealers they tried to sell the coins through was also prosecuted.  They were involved with the criminal underworld in South Wales, and owed someone nasty a lot of money - and Tim Hoverd suspects that the bulk of the coins went to some crime boss, and may never be seen again. 

Earlier in the evening, before the talk, Tim sat down with the committee of the Cusop Castle dig to flesh out a few details.  The dig will take place from Friday 5th June to Sunday 14th June, and they are looking for volunteers.  It won't all be heavy digging - there are plenty of jobs around site for people of all sorts of varying ability, and full training is given.  I'm going to be there as much as I can - bearing in mind that I was last a professional archaeologist over thirty years ago, and a full day's digging now would probably kill me!

If anyone is interested in volunteering, they should contact Cusop History Group - there's a link on their front page.  Under sixteen year olds must be accompanied by an adult who is taking a full part in the dig, and Tim has a strict No Dogs policy. 

Also at the talk, to sell copies of his new book, was Joseph Emmett.  It's called New Roots, Ancient Lands: Walking Through Herefordshire's History, and it looks very interesting - I bought a copy, but it might be some time before I get round to reading it.  In it, he visits local sites like Arthur's Stone and Mouse Castle, Snodhill Castle and the Gloucester to Hereford Canal, as well as other sites right across the county. 

The next Cusop History Group talk will be "The Murder of Katherine Armstrong and the Trial of Herbert Rowse Armstrong" with Tony Pryce, introduced by Peter Ford.  It will be at Cusop Village Hall on Thursday 16th April at 7pm.  Entry is £2, with donations for refreshments. 

Archaeology Talks

 This morning, I was whisked off to Brecon to give a talk about archaeology to a dementia group there.  I was talking about some of the digs I'd been on, and showing slides, and I had a few things to hand round, too, including my trowel!

The group meets at Kensington Baptist Church, near the Castle Hotel, which is a lovely modern building.  I gave the talk in the chapel part, and we had lunch in the hall (there's a proper kitchen - we had fish and chips).  All the people in the group were absolutely lovely, and told me all sorts of things about the local history of Brecon, and the farms they grew up in, and so on.  They asked interesting questions during the talk too.  I'd prepared quite a bit, but I was ready for the talk to go in several different directions, depending on what people were interested in.  In the end, it even included Martello Towers on the South Coast and the Wrexham Lager Brewery!  

Apparently there is another archaeologist who is one of the volunteers for the group, and she recently gave them a talk about Orkney and the archaeology up there (which is fascinating - I'm sorry I didn't get to meet her). 

So I had a lovely time - and I got a great compliment.  One of the ladies said that sometimes, speakers came and they couldn't wait for them to finish, but they wished I could have gone on for longer. 

So it was rather later than I had hoped when I got back to Hay, and I only caught the tail end of the Cusop Castle group meeting in the Swan.  Still, it was great to get back in touch with Denise Darbyshire again - who is doing research into the history of settlement in Cusop along with Peter Ford who lives across the road from me.

Next week, I'll be nice and early for the talk at Cusop Village Hall on the Herefordshire Hoard - the talk starts at 7.30pm and will be given by Tim Hoverd, the archaeologist from Herefordshire Council.  The group organising the dig at Cusop Castle this summer will be able to have a short meeting with him before the talk begins, and there will be a form available for anyone to sign if they are interested in being a volunteer on the dig.  Some people have already expressed an interest.  The dig is taking place at the beginning of June.  For further information, email the Cusop History Group.

Cusop Funeral

 I was very sad to hear of the sudden death of Ian Jardin.  He lived in Cusop and was a keen member of the Cusop History Group and member of their Castle Project team.

I knew him because of his partner Tracy, who was one of the founder members of the Stitch and Bitch group that used to meet in Hay.  As I was another of the founder members, I've known them both for years, and I liked Ian a lot.  He will be missed.

The funeral will be held at Cusop Church on Thursday 6th November, at 2pm.  They have asked for family flowers only, and if anyone attending would like to give a donation, it will go to the upkeep of Cusop Church and the graveyard.

Cusop History Society - The Baskerville Family

 I got it slightly wrong yesterday - the Cusop History Society meeting actually started at 4.30pm, so I was rather early.  The hall was full, though, and the £3 entry fee included a glass of wine.

Paul Remfry was talking about the Baskerville family and their lordship of Cusop.   He was also talking about the difficulties in interpreting medieval documents - were Ralph, Roger and Robert brothers, for instance?  We know the mother of one of them was called Juliana, but was she the mother of the other two - or were they some sort of cousin or nephew?  Some of the documents were written long after the events they recorded - the Diocese of Llandaff, which had land holdings locally, claimed to have records dating back to 500AD - but did they really?  Or were they writing documents that just claimed that they had always held that land?

Another famous chronicler of medieval Wales was Gerald of Wales - who was notoriously selective in his recording of facts, especially concerning families who he considered to have blocked his ambitions to be Archbishop of Wales (there was no Archbishop of Wales until 1924, when the Welsh Church finally became independent from the Church of England). So it was Gerald who attributed a quotation to Henry II about how terrible the Baskerville family were, presumably because he had fallen out with the Baskervilles himself.

What we do know is that Ralph who died in 1086 held most of the Baskerville lands, including Cusop, and across to near Aberystwyth and in the other direction across the Midlands, and there is a paper trail through the records that survive showing that Cusop was passed down the family until it came to a family called the Clanvowes, which may be a corruption of theWelsh Llanfair - and one of the Clanvowes may have married a Baskerville daughter.  Possibly.

But what about the time before the Baskervilles arrived?  They were Normans, so before 1066, Cusop was Welsh, and there are various Welsh princes who were probably lords of Cusop.  It all got quite complicated, and also included stories about the Earl of Hereford known as Ralph the Timid!

At any rate, it was the Normans who built several of the local castles - Hay, Clyro, and Cusop all have a very similar plan, though Cusop doesn't seem to have a motte like the others, and Hay became far more elaborate over the centuries.

It was a fascinating talk, about a complex and confusing period of history (though doubtless the original Baskervilles would have been quite clear about who was related to who, and which brother owned which lands).

I'm looking forward to the next meeting - possibly in March?  Details to be arranged.

Enchanted Hour

 I had great fun at the Library yesterday - I was giving the talk for Enchanted Hour.

I trained as an archaeologist, so my chosen subject was the obscure archaeological remains in the local landscape.  The area around Hay is rich in Neolithic and Bronze Age tombs, and there's a Roman fort at Boatside Farm, and several medieval mottes.  A good crowd turned up for the talk, and they asked interesting questions afterwards, and everyone seemed to have a good time.  I even got filmed!  John Price, who films a lot of local events, was there with his camera.  It's the first time I've ever worn a microphone to do a talk.

Mary Anne, who organises the talks, thought it would be a wonderful idea if a group could get together to go to visit the tombs later in the year, and she's a lady who gets things done, so I may end up acting as a tour guide!

This afternoon, at 4pm, the Cusop History Society are meeting at Cusop Village Hall - I hadn't heard about it until someone told me yesterday.  They're going to get an update on work at Cusop Castle, so I'm going to go along to that.

Mary Anne is going back to South Africa in February, so the next Enchanted Hour will be in March, a talk about a journey that involves a dancing hippoptamus!

Cusop Snail

 

                                                                    Sounds intriguing!

Cusop History Group on Film!

 John Price has kindly sent me the link to the February meeting of Cusop History Group at Cusop Village Hall.

There's a talk about Cusop Castle by Tim Hoverd, the archaeologist from Herefordshire Council, and updates on the research that's been going on about Cusop Church.

Cusop Castle is on private land, and is also a Scheduled Ancient Monument, so no holes can be dug, or geophys a la Time Team done without applying for a license.  In the case of Cusop Church, a faculty would have to be applied for from the diocese for any archaeological work, but it would be fascinating to find out more about both sites.  Cusop Castle is a very unusual shape for a Border castle - there's no motte, and Cusop Church may once have had a round churchyard, which is a very early, Celtic, feature.

The meeting rounds off with a short AGM.

The new date for the Roman Roads to Railways talk is Thursday March 23rd, at 7pm, at Cusop Village Hall.  Cost is £3 for members, £5 for non-members, and includes wine.

Unfortunately, the film has copyright material in it, so can no longer be viewed publicly, so I have deleted the link.

(all the more reason to turn up to the next meeting in person!)

Fairtrade and History on Thursday

 It's Fairtrade Fortnight at the moment, and I was chatting with Chris on the Fairtrade stall on the market last Thursday.

This coming Thursday, there will be a coffee morning at Eighteen Rabbit from 10am to 1pm.  Their special guest is Jenipher, from Uganda, who has been organising farmers in Uganda (mostly women) to produce coffee which they now market under their own brand.  It's available at Eighteen Rabbit, and she will be talking about how they make it and offering samples.  The event is free, but donations of £1 minimum are requested.

Then in the evening, Cusop History Group is meeting at Cusop Village Hall.  Tony Usher is giving a talk on Roman Roads to Railways - how the transport networks shaped the fortunes of Herefordshire.  It starts at 7pm, and costs £3 for members, £5 for non-members, and includes wine.

[Edited to add: the Cusop History talk has been postponed due to snow]

Cusop History Group

 While I was at the Castle for the Volunteer Fair, Cusop History Group were re-launching themselves in Cusop Village Hall.  The evening included an AGM, a talk on Cusop Castle and the meeting was also attended by Herefordshire Archaeologist Tim Hoverd.

They also have a Box of Books of local interest for members to borrow.

Cusop Churchyard

The talk last night at the Cusop History Society was about Cusop Churchyard.
There was a serious technical problem at the beginning of the talk where the memory stick wouldn't talk to the laptop that controlled the projector, but a Heroic Tech Guy took the laptop outside, and when he came back, it was fixed, and Jane could quickly go through the pictures that accompanied her talk up to the point she had reached.

Jane Weaver, who also belongs to the Camera Club, was asked to take photographs of the graves in Cusop Churchyard. An old list had been found (from around 1990) with a map of the graves and their inscriptions. Since then, of course, more graves have been added to the churchyard, and the churchwardens wanted to have an up to date record.
Then, when Jane had started the project, someone else found a different list of graves, so there were two documents to work from, one with 43 pages and the other with 13 pages.
It wasn't as easy as it sounded, to just record them all. Jane decided to work from the "John Wilkes list" (he compiled it), as it was more comprehensive, and started in the corner of the churchyard near the lych gate, where the graves are mostly in neat rows. The Booth family are buried there, the most recent being Richard Booth the King of Hay.
One of the problems Jane found was that the churchyard has not always been as it appears today. Her map showed rows of flat graves up in the top corner (if you take the lych gate as the bottom corner), which have been overgrown to the extent that many are no longer visible. Other grave stones have broken, and there is a pile of them against the wall of the church. In the 1970s, a group of men "who were good with crowbars" tidied up the churchyard by moving a lot of gravestones, and laying them flat under one of the yew trees like a pavement. They had a serving police officer as part of the group, to add a veneer of legality to the proceedings, but they didn't seem to make any record of what they were doing. Apparently, at the time, the churchyard was in a bit of a state, with a pony tethered near the lych gate and sheep grazing, and brambles overgrowing areas.
Another problem Jane found was that memorials which had been legible in 1990 had deteriorated, and were no longer legible, so that in some cases she couldn't find graves that had been recorded.
The oldest grave she found was by the church door, of Thomas Watkins who died in 1792, I think - he'd been a local JP.
One of the other early graves was of William Seward - it's now illegible, but they know where it is, because William Seward was a nonconformist preacher who was injured while preaching to an unruly crowd, and later died of his injuries. Jane wasn't sure why he had been buried in Cusop, but someone in the audience thought that he had been taken to a farm nearby, where he had died. There is a memorial to William Seward inside the church. Celia, one of the present churchwardens, said that their next project would be to restore the box tomb where William Seward is buried.
Jane also photographed the memorials inside the church - William Seward's, and also the First World War memorial, which starts with a member of the Royal Flying Corps. There is no memorial for the Second World War. One memorial mentioned in an old historical article is no longer there, and the two bells mentioned in the article were removed in the 1960s.
Another member of the Royal Flying Corps buried at Cusop went on to train as a doctor after the First World War, and ended up as quite a high ranking surgeon in the Royal Navy.
Another interesting grave is of "Johnny the Pilot". He was a Polish airman during the Second World War, and one of the Cusop History Group is doing a little project to find out more about him. He was shot down twice, and came to live in Cusop after the War. There are quite a few other graves of military men in the churchyard, too, including one young soldier who died in India, and another who died in the Transvaal.
One picture Jane showed was of a typical family plot, with eight members of the family buried there. "It's the Adams Family," she said, looking round the room. "Not a titter!" she complained.
She had also looked at the grave of a Victorian curate who worked at Cusop - I missed the name. The rector of Cusop had been absent at the time, so he employed the curate to do the parish work. He is buried with his wife Isabella, and the grave monument is interesting. It consists of three steps, meant to symbolise God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit, with a cross on top. The memorial to Isabella is on the East side, where Jane expected to find the curate's details - but he is memorialised on the West side of the monument. Various beliefs about the Last Judgement were mentioned here - like the idea that Jesus would come from the East to raise all the dead from their graves - so the details were recorded on the west side of the grave where Jesus would see them!
After the talk, I mentioned the previously unknown chapel I had helped to dig in Norwich, back when I was an archaeologist. We found the grave of a man we assumed to be the priest, partly because he had been buried with a small chalice and paten, and partly because he had been buried in the opposite direction to everyone else in the graveyard - so that on the Day of Last Judgement, he would rise from the dead to face his parishioners.
It was a fascinating talk, and brought out quite a few memories from the audience who had known some of the people mentioned, or their families. Jane was thanked at the end, for the quality of the research she has done.

The next talk will be by John Price, on 13th March, who will be showing local photographs from the Mary Ridger Collection, including some stereographic 3D photos of Cusop.
On Friday 17th April, Tony Usher will be giving a talk "From Roman Roads to Railways: Connecting People in Herefordshire"
In June there may be a trip out, to be confirmed, and on July 10th Heather Hurley will be talking about the Green Lanes of Herefordshire.

Herefordshire Life Through a Lens

Cusop History Group are having their first meeting of the year tomorrow evening (Friday) at 7pm, at Cusop Village Hall. They'll be showing the film Carousel, from Herefordshire Life Through a Lens. Cost is £3 for members, £5 for non-members. It's based on the Derek Evans photographic archive from the 1950s to 1970s - he took photos of all sorts of local events around Herefordshire.

Stars in their Eyes

There were three really interesting things that I could have gone to see last night - the Walking Festival talks at the Swan, a folk singer at the Globe, and a talk about medieval astronomy at Cusop Church.
I chose the medieval astronomy, because I went to the talk that the speaker, Martin Griffiths, did last year, and thought it was absolutely fascinating.
This time the church wasn't quite so full, but the weather had been pretty awful, which may have dissuaded people from going out.
The talk centred around the state of knowledge in the medieval period in Europe, where a lot of the knowledge of the Classical World had been lost - or rather, it had moved East, to the Islamic world, Vedic India and China, where they encouraged the love of knowledge for its own sake. In the Medieval Christian West, theology was the Queen of Sciences and anything else wasn't seen as important.
The situation was complicated, though, because on the one hand the Church was limiting knowledge to what was acceptable, and what fitted with the Bible (even if it was contradicted by actual experience), and on the other hand the Church had saved knowledge from the Classical world such as Plato and Aristotle (who was a "rubbish scientist", but whose works were copied for 1500 years).
Astronomy was important to the Church because of the difficulties of calculating the correct date for Easter every year, so that was studied - with the proviso that the Earth was, naturally, in the centre, with the planets, Moon and sun going round it.
Astrology was also important, and to cast an individual's horoscope you need to know the positions of the planets. Astrology also had a correspondence between an astrological sign and each part of the body. Chest problems which we would now call lung cancer were common in the smoky atmospheres of medieval housing, with all those open fires, and the chest was ruled by Cancer the Crab - which is where the name for the disease came from.
Another difficulty for medieval scholars was trying to do maths with Roman numerals. At this point Martin Griffiths looked around the church to find some numbers to point at with his laser pointer - Arabic numerals, except they're not really Arabic either. They originally came from Vedic India. When they had numerals which were easy to use, and one of the Popes had re-invented the abacus, they were able to do all sorts of maths problems which had been incredibly difficult before.
And then an Arab invented algebra, which made even more complex maths possible.
At around the same time, someone went down to Cordova in Islamic Spain and translated 87 books into Latin - which caused a great expansion in universities across Europe, as scholars came to grips with this flood of new knowledge. At the time, one of the biggest libraries in Europe, near Rouen, had a grand total of 39 books. Cordova had a library of half a million books.
Later in the talk, Martin Griffiths said something quite staggering while talking about Leonardo da Vinci - when Leonardo was born, it is estimated that there were only 7,500 books in the whole of Europe. During his lifetime, the printing press was invented (or rather, pinched from the Chinese, along with paper which made printing much cheaper) and when Leonardo died there were 30 million books in Europe. The Church wasn't going to be able to keep control of that outpouring of knowledge.
Back to cosmology, and Dante's Divine Comedy, which has 9 circles of Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. This was based on the Aristotelian system, and is also where the phrase "on cloud nine" comes from - the highest circle of Heaven!
So it was a fascinating evening, with a lot of questions at the end. Even better, I won a prize in the raffle (some Roses chocolates) and got a lift home!

What's Been Happening While I've Been Away?

I don't know - I go off for a few day's holiday, and when I come back there's a Twitter and Facebook storm about a volunteer in the local Oxfam abusing a Welsh family for speaking Welsh in the shop (which is IN WALES). Happily, Oxfam Cymru are aware of the incident, and seem to be taking it seriously (they also post in Welsh).

And the new Powys County Council budget for the year has now been voted through.
On the plus side, Hay Library is safe (for now, at least).
On the minus side, the Council tax is going up by nearly 10%.
Still, we might have lost the library and had the rise in Council tax.

More happily, Cusop History Group seem to have had a wonderful time at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford on their day out. I would have liked to go, but it was the day before I was due to go away, and I didn't feel I could do both. They got to put on gloves, pick up magnifying glasses, and examine some treasures from China, Iran, India and Japan in great detail, as well as learning about the Indus Valley civilisation, which had a writing system which no-one has been able to decipher so far.

If anyone's interested in What I Did On My Holidays, I'm writing it up on Morwenna's Tower (see the sidebar for the link).

Stories from the Hopyard, and other Cusop History Society Events

There's a fascinating line-up of meetings planned for Cusop History Society this year.

The first is Stories from the Hopyard, a film that's part of the Herefordshire Life Through a Lens project. It mixes archive photos and film with oral history interviews with people from Hereford, South Wales, the Black Country, Polish migrant workers and Roma travellers. The film is an hour and a half long. That's on Friday 15th February at 7pm at Cusop Village Hall.

On Sunday 3rd March there's a visit to Redwings, the house in Cusop Dingle.

On Thursday March 7th there's a special behind the scenes visit to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, hosted by Denise Darbyshire. I won't be able to go to this one (and places are limited, so it's wise to book early - there will be car sharing to get down there), but I went last year and it was a brilliant experience!

On Friday 12th April, at 7pm, Cusop Village Hall, the talk will be on Voices of the River Wye, an oral history project.

There's also information on the research being carried out by members of the Society on their website at cusophistory.wix.com

Meetings cost £3 to attend, free to members, including refreshments.

A Munitionette's View

Cusop History Group are starting off the year with a look at the women who worked in the munitions factory at Rotherwas in two World Wars. The talk is by Angela Williams, and is at Cusop Village Hall at 7pm on 11th January. Tickets are £3 for members, £5 for visitors and include refreshments.

War and Pieces

This looks as if it's going to be good.
I had intended to go, but I'll be elsewhere that evening.

Clifford Castle

What a wonderful evening!
Cusop History Group organised a trip to Clifford Castle, which is privately owned, yesterday. The present owners have been there for 7 years, and have just completed extensive renovation of the castle with the help of Historic England. As part of the agreement with Historic England, they have to open the castle to the public for 20 days a year. The castle is also open today and Sunday morning, though they do ask on their website for any group larger than 5 people to contact them in advance. The website is http://cliffordcastle.org
Parking is limited in Clifford, so the group met up in the Co-op's car park for car sharing. Signs are now up in the Co-op car park restricting parking to one and a half hours for customers only, but permission was granted for the History Group to park there.
I've been to Clifford Castle before, many years ago, as the guest of Mrs Parkinson, who used to own it. The people who owned the castle after her were not well liked in the area - there were stories of them stopping local people from walking their dogs and so on - but the present owners seem both enthusiastic and knowledgeable about the castle.
We were taken round by the owner, who had prepared laminated sheets with details of the castle's history and features, and a rather good reconstruction drawing. One of the group is an expert on Fair Rosamund, who was the daughter of Sir Walter de Clifford and mistress of Henry II. Henry was known to have visited the castle, and the owner commented that he couldn't see the king being entertained in the Great Hall of the keep, because it's really quite small. There is a possibility that there was a larger, wooden great hall in the outer bailey, though there would need to be more excavation to find out.

As part of the renovation work, several trenches were dug around the site, and the soil taken out of the tops of the walls was sieved, yielding mostly Victorian pottery. They think that Dr. Trumper, who owned the castle in the 19th century, and built the present house there, deliberately planted ivy in the walls to make the keep look more like a "romantic ruin". All that ivy, and the several trees that had burrowed their roots into the walls, have had to be removed to save the stonework from further damage. They also had to remove masses of brambles. The owner said that he only found one of the five towers by accident, when he fell into it while strimming - it was completely covered in brambles, and he went into them up to his waist.
The trench in the middle of the shell keep revealed, somewhat disappointingly, that the present ground level is about a metre above the original ground level - and across the courtyard stones from the castle walls had been neatly stacked on end. They assume that this was done by Dr Trumper, who probably intended to use the stone to rebuild some of the walls. When he came to sell the castle, not having used the stone he collected, he just covered them with earth. The owner said he wished he'd known the stone was there - they wouldn't have needed to buy in new supplies!
Other walls have primitive repairs, with little columns of stones holding up walls where there are gaps or the facing stones have disappeared. One wall, overlooking the river, has a solid buttress at one end, provided by the railway engineers who were building the railway down below, between the castle and the river, presumably so stones from the castle didn't fall down onto the tracks!

View of the entrance to the keep

And here's the reason that the castle was built on that spot in the first place - the ford across the river Wye, as seen from the walls of the castle. You can see how high above the ford the castle is, hence the "Cliff" part of the name.

There is a lot of potential for more work to be done to discover the secrets of the castle - they still don't know where the kitchen was for sure, and they don't really know the purpose of the hornwork behind the keep either - but the work that has been done has ensured the castle's survival for perhaps another hundred years.

Cusop History Society - Imagining the Divine

About half of us had brought a packed lunch, while the other members of the party went off to find a café. So those of us who stayed in the Museum had about half an hour to dash round the main exhibition halls. My eye was caught by the Greek and Roman statues - there's a lovely one of Diana to which the owner in around 1600 added a small dog.
And then I noticed the exhibition on Minoan Crete.
They have the throne from Knossos! I've seen pictures of that throne, with its distinctive curved back, for years (I studied Minoan Crete and Ancient Greece as part of my archaeology degree) - and there it was, almost close enough to touch! Next to it was one of the huge storage jars from the store rooms beneath the palace at Knossos, and the whole room was full of ceramics, with a portrait of Sir Arthur Evans on one side. In the background of the painting is a fresco of a young boy holding a long, narrow cup - and in the niche next to the picture, there is the same type of cup.
Further up the museum there's a large bronze figure, probably Zeus hurling a thunderbolt, though whatever he was about to throw has been lost - I recognised it immediately. It was all very exciting! Nearby was a display of gorgeously ornamented musical instruments - I think I walked straight past a Stradivarius!

At 2pm we gathered in the exhibition gift shop, and were led into the special exhibition Imagining the Divine, where Denise led us through a selection of important pieces (and some of her favourites) to explain the theme of the exhibition. It's about the way that different religions used art to show their beliefs, and how that art was influenced across different cultures and religions. For instance, the head of Jupiter in sculpture is a man with a flowing beard - which became the inspiration for Christian depictions of God the Father. Nearby is a statue of the Good Shepherd - not Jesus, but Apollo three hundred years before Jesus, with a ram slung across his shoulders.
Off in the Buddhist area, we found that the Buddha forbade any depictions of himself, and for 500 years there were no statues apart from things like his footprints, or the wheel symbol. Then Buddhists started to want to make statues - but what had the Buddha looked like? Nobody knew - but there were Jain statues of seated figures with curled hair and serene expressions that seemed to fit the bill, and that's what they adopted.
There was a picture of one of the giant sculptures of the Buddha in Afghanistan on the wall, and Denise told us that, when the Taliban blew up the figures, it was not quite the disaster it appeared. When the sculptures were made, they were intended to be seen by travellers coming up the pass (here's the importance of trade routes again), and the stone was augmented with plasterwork, and finally gilded so that the statues shone. After a thousand years of neglect, they were in pretty poor shape, and the explosions actually made it possible for archaeologists to study the way the statues had originally been put together.
Another really famous piece, in the exhibition, is the Chi Rho mosaic from Hinton St Mary - it's in many books about Roman Britain, and is supposed to be the first portrait of Christ in the British Isles - or is it? "Christ" means "the anointed one", and there was an emperor (I forget the name she gave) who used the Chi Rho symbol on his coinage, and also had a cleft chin like the portrait. So were the owners of the villa just showing their loyalty to the Emperor?
We also learned how to tell the end of each verse in the Koran (there's a circle surrounded by dots to look for) while looking at some of the most beautiful manuscripts - one was written on indigo paper, in gold.
The other religions covered in the exhibition were Judaism, and the depiction of Vishnu in Hinduism, again showing the cross-fertilisation of ideas from one religion and culture to another.
At the end of the exhibition we came to the British Isles - and I got ridiculously excited again over the slab with Pictish symbols carved on it, and the ogam incised on the edge of another slab from Wales.
I'm only scratching the surface here of the objects on display - it really was a fascinating afternoon - and the exhibition will be on until 18th February, and costs £10 to get in.