Victorian Urban Legend: The Red Hand and Seven Years in a Cave June 25, 2016
Author: Beach Combing | in : ModernBeach is absolutely fascinated by this story. It is clearly genuine and it somehow manages to convey a great deal of menace. There are four English counties beginning with ‘W’ (or at least there were): Westmorland, Worcestershire, Warwickshire and Wiltshire. It seems rather futile to look for ‘T’ because ‘W’ may have been to mislead… Much more […]
Pan in Warwickshire?! December 29, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary, ModernIn 1885 a neophyte priest William Herbert Seddon arrived at the parish of Painswick in Warwickshire. Seddon had a strong classical background, he appears for instance in that monument of Victorian learning, The Concordance to the Septuagint, as an important contributor. And he was interested to find, on his arrival, that until the early nineteenth […]
BB and Fairy Belief December 4, 2012
Author: Beach Combing | in : ContemporaryBB (Denys Watkins-Pitchford, obit 1990) was a superlative writer and illustrator, who spent most of his time celebrating gnomes, the English countryside and fowling: his pseudonym comes from the BB shot used to bring down wild geese. For present purposes, we are interested in BB and gnomes for the man wrote two excellent gnome books […]
Billesley and Shakespeare: Books, Weddings and Fornication November 8, 2012
Author: Beach Combing | in : ModernMany times on Strange History we have looked at the possibility that a small community is capable of remembering a tradition over decades, generations and even centuries without any recourse to writing. And Beach has just stumbled on a possible example of this in the deep English village of Billesley in Warwickshire. There are fewer […]
Shakespeare’s First Anne October 29, 2012
Author: Beach Combing | in : ModernEarlier this year we publicised that famous inventor of the compass, Flavio Gioia, who never, in fact, existed. Today, we offer a parallel tale from English literature: the story of Shakespeare’s first love. We refer here not to that hated appendage, Anne Hathaway, who married the bard after he got her pregnant and eventually got […]
Indecent Lifting and Heaving May 6, 2012
Author: Beach Combing | in : Medieval, ModernBeach recently came across the custom of ‘lifting’ for the first time courtesy of Invisible and Two Nerdy History Girls (an excellent blog should you get the chance). The girls describe an instance of lifting in Shrewsbury. This is part of the relevant extract: the full extract is to be found chez Nerd following the […]