Glastonbury Thorn

 

It’s been pouring heavens hard here ever since I got up this morning. Not the weather for working out in the garden unless you absolutely have to. Just right for settling down in front of a roaring log fire though, and telling the story of the Glastonbury Thorn once again.

Legend has it that Joseph of Arimathea came to England shortly after the crucifixion to spread the word of Christ. Finding the people of Glastonbury unreceptive to what he had to tell them, Joseph asked God for a sign that the people might find more convincing. God’s response was to cause Joseph’s staff to burst into flower and leaf even though it was Christmas Day.

The staff took root and grew into a tree which continued to flower every Christmas Day for centuries, attracting great crowds, who came from far and near to see the miracle. In 1752, however, the Gregorian Calendar was introduced, one of the outcomes of which was that though the date of Christmas Day remained the same, the actual day on which it had previously fallen had been shunted along into January.

The Gentleman’s Magazine reported in1753 that “a vast concourse of people attended the noted thorn on Christmas Eve, new style” but to no avail. “There was no appearance of it flowering: which made them watch it narrowly the 5^th of January (or old Christmas) when it flowered as usual”.

And there I suppose I ought to leave the story, with the legend still intact, but this is a gardening column, so I won’t. Crataegusmonogyna ‘Biflora’, the Glastonbury Thorn, is, as its name suggests, a tree which, given the mild winters of southern England, will flower twice. Once in early January and again, more abundantly, in May.

Luckily for the monks of Glastonbury Abbey, who almost certainly planted the original tree, and milked the legend surrounding it by getting folk who came to wonder at the tree to hand over their worldly belongings to them in return for a better place in Heaven, people couldn’t just go out to a nursery and get a similar tree for their own garden in those days, though you can now. If you do, however, it probably won’t bear any winter flowers in this part of the country.

Dana Prison in Shrewsbury

HM Prison Shrewsbury was a Category B/C men's prison in Shrewsbury Shropshire, England. It closed in March 2013.

The prison is mentioned in "On Moonlit Heath and Lonesome Bank" which is part of the poem, "A Shropshire Lad by A E Housman. The proximity of the prison to Shrewsbury railway station and junction is highlighted in the verse:

They hang us now in Shrewsbury jail:

The whistles blow forlorn,

And trains all night groan on the rail

To men that die at morn.

The former prison site, on Howard Street is near the site of the Dana Gaol, a medieval prison. The name The Dana is still often used for the prison, as well as being the name of the road to one side of the prison and the pedestrian route that runs from near the front of the prison into the town centre via a footbridge over the station. The now disused platform 8 at the station, masked from the opposite platform by a high wall, was used for transporting prisoners between 1868 and the First World War.

A bust of prison reformer John Howard is above the main entrance to the prison. The street leading up to the prison from the main road is also named after him.

Currently the Dana Prison, Shrewsbury is open as a tourist attraction. Jailhouse Tours runs guided tours, theme events and experiences, educational days, history days, seasonal events, horror tours and School tours. Jailhouse Tours will continue to manage the site until development work begins on the building.

There has been a prison on the site since 1793, the original building being constructed by Thomas Telford to plans by Shrewsbury architect John Hiram Haycock the present prison building was constructed in 1877. The prison took female convicts until 1922.

For 20 years, Samuel Webster Allen was the Roman Catholic chaplain at the prison before being made the Bishop of Shrewsbury in 1897. Former Wales Rugby Union international player John Strand-Jones was the part-time Church of England chaplain from 1930 to 1934.

Between 1902 and 1961 the following seven people were executed by within the walls of HMP Shrewsbury for the crime of murder:-

· Richard Wigley, aged 34 years, on Tuesday, 18 March 1902, for the murder of his girlfriend Mary Ellen Bowen.

· William Griffiths, aged 57 years, on Tuesday, 24 July 1923, for the murder of his mother Catherine Hughes.

· Frank Griffin, aged 40 years, on Thursday, 4 January 1951, for the murder of Jane Edge.

· Harry Huxley, aged 43 years, on Tuesday, 8 July 1952, for the murder of his girlfriend Ada Royce.

· Donald Neil Simon, aged 32 years, on Thursday, 23 October 1952, for the murders of his estranged wife Eunice Simon and her lover Victor Brades.

· Desmond Donald Hooper, aged 27 years, on Tuesday, 26 January 1954, for the murder of Betty Smith.

· George Riley aged 21 years on Thursday, 9 February 1961, for the murder of his neighbour Adeline Mary Smith.

The names of their victims and their relationships with them appear also. In almost every case the murder victim was female. Executions took place at 8.00 am. All executed prisoners were buried in unmarked graves inside the prison, as was customary. The four executions which took place during the 1950s were all conducted by Albert Pierrepoint and his assistant. The last execution in 1961 was conducted by Harry Allen and his assistant. In February 2014 the Ministry of Justice stated that the remains of ten executed prisoners were exhumed from the prison in 1972, with nine cremated at a local crematorium and the ashes scattered there. The remaining body was handed over to relatives.

In September 2004, Member of Parliament George Stevenson called for an enquiry into the number of suicides which had occurred at Shrewsbury Prison. This came after 3 inmates had hanged themselves at the jail in 2 weeks.

A report in 2005 named Shrewsbury prison as the most overcrowded in England and Wales. In August 2008 a further report stated that the prison had 178 places in use but held 326 inmates - an overcrowding rate of 183%. A report in June 2012 by the Prison Reform Trust awarded Shrewsbury second place in England and Wales for overcrowding, holding 326 prisoners in space designed for 170 men, a figure exceeded only by Kennet in Liverpool at the time. In 1934, the prison had contained the larger number of 204 cells.

Before closure, Shrewsbury was a Category B/C prison accepting adult males from the local courts in its catchment area. Accommodation at the prison consisted of double occupancy cells in mostly Victorian buildings. The prison offered education and workshops to inmates. A Listener Scheme was also available to prisoners at risk of suicide or self-harm.

In January 2013, it was announced that the prison was scheduled for closure. The last inmates were transferred from Shrewsbury to other prisons on 27 February 2013, ahead of its closure in March.

Noctule bats in Shropshire

Some years ago now we were sitting watching television when something passed through the room on the periphery of our vision and disappeared into my study. When I went to investigate I found a Pipistrelle bat clinging to one of the long curtains covering the bay window. Not wanting to handle it, I searched out a butterfly net I had in the garage, caught the bat in it and put it back outside where it belonged. Further investigation showed there was a window open along the upstairs landing the bat must have come in through.

August bank holiday Monday was a very hot day in Shropshire and we had been sitting outside on the patio watching the martins catching insects high in the sky above us. Just after we came indoors from doing that around 6.30 pm something which looked very like a swallow in shape flew into our kitchen and then disappeared from view entirely, though we went from room to room downstairs looking for it. It seemed unlikely it could have been a bird had flown into the house like that, because previous experience of birds doing that is that they fly around in a panic and are difficult to control. This intruder had disappeared completely. With our previous experience of having a bat in the house we thought that was a more likely intruder.

We saw nothing more of the intruder and had begun to believe it must have flown back out as swiftly as it had flown in though we hadn’t seen it go.

We went to bed around midnight and I came out of my bedroom almost immediately to come face to face with something with large pointed wings flying at high speed along the landing. At my sudden appearance in front of it it wheeled into the adjacent bathroom and I closed the door behind it so it couldn’t escape, wondering how I was going to open the window in there to let it out without it coming back onto the landing past me. When I opened the bathroom door to do just that, however, it was no longer there. I met it coming back up the stairs at high speed and assumed it must have escaped via the gaps around the pipes leading from either the sink or the bath.

I went to put on the overall I wear when looking at my bees, because I had only been wearing pyjamas until that point. Coming back up the stairs wearing it I met the fast moving creature just flying down the stairs to escape my wife, who had appeared at the top of them at that moment. At my sudden appearance in its path again it wheeled away into the study to avoid me. Lucky for all of us that was, because the study has a door I was able to fix and stand in front of so it couldn’t escape back into the house.

It was clear by now this was some sort of bat, though not a Pipistrelle this time. It clung to the same curtains that had whilst I opened the windows at either side of the study and with frequent bursts of rapid speed on those long pointed wings, it eventually made its way to the larger of the windows, out of it and away.

Consulting the internet the next day showed our visitor to have been the largest of the British bats, a Noctule, noted for its rapid flight on pointed wings. The internet also said Noctule bats fly two hours either side of dusk, often in the company of Martins, so I suppose that was what it had been doing when it accidently strayed into our kitchen.

I also suppose the reason we didn’t see it after it had done that was that it had been hiding from potential enemies in the shape of two humans, who might have harmed it in some way if they’d come across it, until we seemed to have gone to bed, after which it came out from wherever it had been hiding and tried to find its own route to freedom. It wouldn’t have succeeded though without my help, because we don’t leave windows open overnight. Who knows what might have happened to its bid for freedom without me there to help it on its way.

Nomads of Time - better than Lord of the Rings or a Song of Ice and Fire?

The best fantasy worlds need to feel real while still providing readers with their fill of the fantastical. They need to be unique and not at all derivative. And they need to be fully fleshed out so it feels like the characters are moving between real world locations across open areas which seem vast and give a good sense of distance while cities should feel cramped and populated and not at all like their country-set counterparts.

The amount of detail given about a world is also important. It should feel incredibly real, even when we are reading about dragons and shadow assassins. Characters in Westeros in The Game of Thrones talk about where they need to go or who controls what lands so naturally and vividly it’s as if they are talking about real places. A Song of Ice and Fire is a perfect example of how a writer can create a fantasy world without it being cliche or derivative.

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth, however, is the fantasy world by which all other fantasy worlds are judged. Almost everything Tolkien ever wrote took place, in one way or another, in Middle-earth. The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings series give a good idea of just how detailed a fantasy world can be. Everyone has a family tree in Middle-earth and every place has a detailed history.

The Five Kingdoms, the other dimension to where the time travelers are taken in Nomads of Time, has a similar detailed history as one of the characters in the story explains to another character.

Best described, as an alternative Wales, the first character says, with the borderlands around it being like the Welsh Marches. Very like twenty- first century earth, in some ways, and yet very unlike them in others, because in The Five Kingdoms elves and sprites and fairies still live alongside mortals, like they used to on earth in days gone by. And there are Sorcerers too!

One area of The Five Kingdoms in particular, a land of extremes where the burning desert of Myrrhia meets the icy wastes of Cyonil and the overwhelming heat of day is matched only by the icy cold of the nights, is ruled by a queen called Setura, who appeared there suddenly, and without warning, in the dim and distant past, and just took it away from the people who had been living there before she came. No one really knew where she had come from, or even when it was she first began to gather her army about her, because once she was there, no one dared venture into that land again. And those who had been there when she first came were never free enough afterwards to leave and tell the rest of the world about it.

This was the forbidding land into which Aurora Bradley had blundered because she refused to believe it could exist, and from where she spent the rest of the story trying to escape.

Chelsea Flower Show

When I was an apprentice gardener back in the 60s, working for Ealing Parks Department, we were expected to go to Chelsea Show every year, but as that involved being driven there in his car by the Parks Superintendant, it wasn’t such a great hardship. We got in free and spent the day being shown round by him. I never actually had to pay to visit Chelsea Show because when the Superintendant stopped taking us I stopped going.

My sister, who wasn’t employed by the Parks Department, used to go to Chelsea Show regularly and used to have to pay. She gave up doing that several years ago because she said it had got too expensive. Mind, in the days when she did use to go to the show, she could have bought a copy of my book on plant religions and mythology, Gardens of the Gods, still available from Amazon, which the RHS used to sell at Chelsea Show when it was first published.

The BBC seem to set a lot of store by Chelsea Flower Show, sending all sorts of odd people to visit and report on it. Malvern Show as well, to which they do at least send gardening types like Monty Don and Joe Swift to report on events.

I don’t watch any of their coverage, I’m afraid, preferring to be out in my own garden when the weather allows, and it has done recently, surrounded by red hot pokers, day lilies, laburnum and azaleas at the moment to name but a few.

I haven’t got to the state of mind of my grandmother, who wouldn’t go away on holiday anywhere because it meant missing something growing in her garden giving of its best at that moment, but I can see why she got like that.

Wales in the days before time

Free from Amazon Kindle on Saturday 20th April and Sunday 21st April!

 Download your copy to read over Easter whilst you're enjoying your eggs and hot cross buns!

 Your chance to read The Unintentional Time Travellers Guide to Other Worlds and Other Dimensions, by Brian W Taylor, set in a  Wales in the days before time and before it was ever known by that name. A Wales where elves, sprites and fairies live alongside mortals and where people are fighting to free themselves from the sorceress whose fire ice jewels, mined in the depths of the mountains there, can control the minds of anyone who comes into contact with them. A war which has been simmering for centuries.

The person the story centres on, very reluctantly ventured through the time portal at the end of their garden to try to find someone who’d gone through it deliberately and bring her back before she came to any harm and before the war which was only simmering before broke out again. It’s too late for that now, though. They’ve found that the war is in full spate.

How easy is it going to be to find the missing person they’ve gone through the time portal in pursuit of? And how easy is it going to be to escape with her back through the time portal without either of them becoming casualties of war?

                                                               

A new title by Brian W Taylor

A man digging up the flowerbeds in search of the golden cockerel he believed had been buried in them by a writer trying to promote his latest book; a boy passing himself off as a girl, knowing that the obligatory staff medical he would have to go through soon if he wanted to keep his job, would lay bare his secret to a sniggering world; a woman who had found love late in life and now wondered if she should be doing the things her new lover was asking her to do in the park during her lunchtimes; police officers in the park pursuing a flasher the local press had made into a rapist in order to sell more copies of their newspaper; a reorganised parks department in which newly appointed office staff, many of them promoted beyond their comfort zone, were jockeying for position; a local councillor forced to endure a commemoration of his twenty-five years of service he didn’t want.

A tree planting ceremony held in the park one summer’s day in 1983, to mark that twenty five years of service, wasn’t supposed to end with one of the people involved losing their job, and another losing their life, but as events turned out, they did. Doing It In The Park - a new title by Brian W Taylor

During the 1960s 70s and 80s I worked for several different local authorities in London, and in a lot of different parks as apprentice, gardener, and then supervisor. Not all of my fellow workers had set out to follow a career in horticulture, some were failed actors, some were would-be artists, working in the parks during the summer months to earn enough money to be able to spend the winter months painting, some were rehabilitating criminals who had served their time, some were society's misfits, people who just couldn't find a more suitable niche for themselves anywhere else, some were just doing the job until something better came along - except that sometimes it never did. Some were just there to take advantage of the security of a job for life on the council, which was one of the perks in those days.
Job security, indeed the job itself, disappeared during the years when Mrs Thatcher ran the country, and you won't find parks or their staff like those depicted in my book anymore. Some might say that's as good thing, but I think it's a pity that that way of life has gone.
The people and events depicted in the book, those which really happened, are taken from several of the parks in which I worked and added to those which are purely fiction to make a story, the ones which are pure fiction are simply that. I hope they all gel together to make a story people will enjoy. It always makes me nostalgic for those times when I read the story again, and I do from time to time, because I enjoy it.