Bills Posts

Jane Austen, Gilbert White and Charles Dickens are all famous or well known and were people with connections to Hampshire.

There are also places that are of interest, a lot of them associated with the run up to D-Day, Winchester, which has a significant History, and of course places like Highclere which is famous for a variety of reasons.

I’ve been looking on the web for people & places that relate to the history of Hampshire. There are just a very few of course, but something tells me that there is a bubbling story, which I am missing out on. I can see a trip to the Portsmouth Municipal Library to try and identify a book, because I am sure there is more history here, and historical people, hidden here.

This is The Manor House at Longleat. I wanted a picture of a really nice old house.

I went on a trip today, it involved travelling on the A34. As I was driving along, quite near to Newbury, I went past a sign saying Highclere.

Now, you will either know, or not know the significance of Highclere to an awful lot of people. That’s.because Highclere is the home of Downton Abbey. Ordinarily, I stay away from programmes about “olden times”, but during Covid times, we were binge watching and one series that came up was this one.

With a high degree of scepticism we (I) sat down to watch the first episode, it was OK, so we watched another. We ended up buying the DVD’s because for some reason they weren’t being streamed. They are now of course.

We were so frustrated when the series came to an end, and were delighted when two films were made, both of which I thoroughly enjoyed. I believe there may even be talk of a new series. Times will have moved on, cast will change, but if they stay true to the series, I can see lots of potential for that. It would be really nice if it were to happen.

I would very much like to visit Highclere, it will always Downton Abbey in my mind.

I know that it is really only mid-week, but we are well past the midpoint, which I take as lunchtime on a Wednesday.

Now we do, as it happens, have some plans for the weekend, but I’m not really talking about those. It’s more a case of harping back to is it a locality weekend? Not really because of those other plans. But I have been thinking about what I could do.

I would quite like to go back to Amberley Museum. Looking at the year, there’s a lot on; https://www.amberleymuseum.co.uk/whats-on/ with a few events that I would very much like to go to,

The other thing I would quite like to do,m is see how easy it is to get there by bus, and if that is even possible. I’m sure it must be – why not take advantage of my bus pass?

There’s some planning to be done here. I will investigate.

Here is a special message for Mar & Clivek; You’d like Amberley.

Also; the BBC series Chivalry and Betrayal: The 100 years War is not available anywhere, not on iplayer or anywhere else as far as I can find. Most frustrating. Anyone have any suggestions?

I’ve been reading about Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, quite a story really, and fascinating stuff. Of course the problem I have is that this wonderfully interesting history has absolutely nothing to do with Gosport. Indeed Gosport won’t exist as a place for another couple of hundred years or so, even if only a a manor, created by the Bishop of Winchester.

In the meantime, whilst Henry and Eleanor are rolling about in hay, what will become Gosport is a bleak windswept marshland, Although two areas of which will become (eventually) suburbs of Gosport, namely Rowner and Alverstoke, are doing quite nicely.

But nothing is happening there as far as I can tell.

We’d had a really lovely weekend away, visiting Mark and Helen, I must admit I wasn’t looking forward to the drive on the M25, but actually it wasn’t at all bad. I think it’s one of the clearest trips we’ve had in a very long time.

The car behaved very well, both on the journey up and back we used only just over 50% of the battery. Range anxiety pretty much gone.

What an honour to be writing Bill’s 1300th blog.

Today had been full of…….food. A trip to the 3 horseshoes in Gravely forced us to eat a range of yummy meat and a splendid range of vegetables. The only answer to this stomach extension was to sit in the summer palace and wait for digestion to work.

Dilly the cocker spaniel had other ideas. The tennis balls had to be thrown round the garden. By everyone, without stopping. that’s my little princess!

I need to be careful she isn’t stolen by Elayne!

The thing with Dilly, is that you can’t leave things laying around. A lesson That Elayne has still to learn, especially when it comes to the wool she is using for crocheting baby clothes. Dilly very adroitly grabbed a ball of wool and excitedly ran off around the garden. Luckily, she followed instructions and trotted back to hand it over along with a small clump of cut grass she had managed to pick up. Courtesy of Bill’s efforts to copy Forest Gumps grass expert cutting, but seeing as this was the first time he’d sat on a ride-on mower was not expert at all, but an enjoyable experience.

A really quite relaxing day, not doing very much at all. We did go to a plant fair thing, where Elayne bought some plants and some metal works, which will be useful in the garden.

I started reading the Plantagenets book, which is quite well written in that it reads a bit like a story, rather than a list of facts. So it’s quite entertaining. I learnt about Henry 1 lost his heir after a drunken episode on a ship that got wrecked and nearly everybody drowned.

Whilst he tried appoint his daughter Matilda as the queen, it turns out that the Barons weren’t having it so supported the other son, Stephen, and so it looks like there’s going to be a bit of a fight. Of which there seem to have been quite a lot in those days.

Through School,, but not through colllege, and then beyond that, I have always had an interest in history. The colllege thing is where it went a bit awry, but we can ignore that.

I have been wondering what to doo with the blog, I was in Waterstones, and I had a thought. What if I looked at a particular period in history? But which period? Well, the thing is I want a period which has a good written record. Whilst the Saxons would be kind of OK, I think something a bit more recent would better.

I got to thinking about the 14th century and what period that represents. It seems that the Plantagenets ruled. I know nothing about them. Seeing as i was standing in Waterstones, it seemed reasonable to buy a book on the topic.

That’s fine, but how is the blog going to work? Well, obviously l will have other things to write about, but I think at least one or two posts per week should be about the historical topic. I think I may devote a bit of time to this. Working out what I want to do. Let’s give it a go.

Pre-history, according to my understanding, is what happened before written history. In my mind, I am trying to work out how Dorset has so much pre-history in comparison to Hampshire? Now that may be a misconception on my part, but when searching, many more instances of pre-historic features appeared in Dorset than in Hampshire.

On the other hand, Hampshire, particularly Winchester appear to have a lot of history, with many written records. I’ve been reading about some of the things that have been written down. One thing in particular piqued my curiosity, the names and titles given to the kings and the queens of England. For example, Eathelread the unready. Who was he, and why was he called unready?

It appears that at the time he was called unread, which meant ill advised, unread became unready. I hadn’t known that.

Winchester has played an important role in the history of both the county and the country. I feel the need to explore it a bit, but first, I wonder how far back Portsmouth goes – it’s a bit nearer home. Gosport is not anywhere near ancient.

The header picture? It’s of the clouds in this mornings sky, reflected in the waters of the Cockle Pond, which were still to the point of being mirror-like.

I’ve started writing on Facebook again. In the past, generally I wouldn’t do FB over the weekend, but since I started numbering this blog, I’ve done it (nearly) every day. I stopped doing FB almost a year ago, about the same time I stopped walking in the early morning.

Having started both walking and FB (OK, not everyday at the moment), I need to pay a bit more attention to both mediums are for.

I view my facebook entries to be about the town, the wildlife & Misty the cat. My blog on the other hand should be about other stuff, the model railway, vlogging, when we visit different places, when I have something I want to think about.

It is important to keep a clear separation. So that is what I am going to try and do.