This fine mansion was built on the site of a major fortification during the English civil war. This mansion was built by James Bridges for Thomas Tyndall, city banker, on a top overlooking the city of Bristol. It is now part of Bristol University but can be viewed from the outside any time. James Bridges … Continue reading
Posted in December 2011 …
Edinburgh in the Snow – December 2010
I was up there for the wonderful snow. It was great despite the national chaos, the city was really organised, the gritters were out and everyone was helping each other. A wonderful city full of great art and great people.
Blind Boy, Waltham Abbey
As a historian I have seen lots of memorials in churches in Britain and Europe, but this is very unusual if not unique. Tudor monuments show effigies of the parents recumbent above a representation of their children praying for them, the males on the left, females on the right. But on the left here is … Continue reading
Where The Cornish Went, Went their Words
I grew up in Australia, and remember my mother and father sometimes seemed to use different words. He came from the city, and she was a country girl, her parents had come from the former goldmining area of Ballarat. My mother used to call piles of earth ‘mullock heaps’ and if she was hunting in … Continue reading
The Great Vowel Shift
text-headerFor anyone who has had to explain our wonderful but exasperating mother tongue, this may be of help. Ever wondered why read can be pronounced two different ways, and why more than one goose is a geese but a group of moose are not meese, then all is explained by this verbal earthquake which struck … Continue reading
