Charles Boundy

The spring and summer months are starting to look quite lively. My next (quarterly) u3a national talk by Zoom is booked in for Tuesday 21 April at 2pm on the fascinating Anglo-Saxon period From the Dark Ages to the Viking Age. That will be sandwiched between a couple of trips abroad to new places for

After very positive feedback from earlier talks, on 15th January I’ll be giving my next u3a national talk by Zoom. This will follow the Roman ‘colonisation’ of Britain through to the next period, sometimes called ‘the Dark Ages’. I’ll unpick what we know happened, when, how, and possibly why. Whatever else, the immediate post-Roman period

In Ice to Athelstan I mention the ancient hill fort at Crickley Hill in Gloucestershire as the site of an 4th millennium BCE massacre of the local tribe who had settled there. Having now visited the site, perched on the spur of a long ridge on the scarp slope of the Cotswolds near Birdlip, with

The picture shows a section of a magnificent life-size representation of King Athelstan created by award-winning contemporary embroiderer, Jacky Puzey, for Kingston-upon-Thames. This is part of the ‘Seven Kings’ set of vividly embroidered panels, inspired by this year being the 1100th anniversary of the crowning of King Athelstan there in in 925, with Kingston also

History can help us make sense of traditions that have their roots in the past but have become something rather different over the ages. And this massive spider in a small front garden in Whitstable on the Kent coast got me thinking about why we associate spiders with Halloween. The name itself is a contraction