This was the scene at Thame Library on a warm spring day for an informal talk – and perhaps the beginnings of a history discussion group! It’s another experience talking to a small group without PowerPoint, as I also did at the local Cuttlebrook Hall, encouraging some interesting exchanges with the audience. The next couple of sessions are likely to be quite different. One is a talk in June to the Friends of Kingston Museum, where Athelstan was crowned king 1100 years ago this year, and the other is a talk on zoom in July to unknown number of members of the u3a (University of the Third Age) nationwide. There are a couple more already in the offing for later in the year.
Meanwhile I’ve revisited Pulpit Hill, featured in the Introduction and Postscript to Ice to Athelstan to re-check the ‘view from the hill’, and received a wonderfully detailed review of the book from the vice-chair of the Friends of Kingston Museum. Here’s a photo of last week’s view from the hill and part of that review:
‘The subtitle of the book is “The emergence of England”. In the last chapter, this emergence is encapsulated in an evocative “fast-forward of the 10,000 years” of Boundy’s account, as visualized from the top of Pulpit Hill in the Chiltern Hills. It is almost as if a drone time-machine is soaring over the landscape, unreeling an animation that moves from the shift from “grey tundra to flowing water and green shoots” to “open land with ditches, hedges and fences” and “the landscape becoming marked by tracks, muddied by groups and occasionally trampled by armies”. The film moves on to the site of Thame, nearby, with its “Roman settlement growing alongside the river, adjacent to a former neolithic causewayed enclosure”. It rounds off this beautifully written, informative book just perfectly, with the opportunity taken to prompt further thought about the thing that has emerged – country? nation? people? culture? This book is not just a well-spun tale and thoroughly researched history, but it is also a resource in pondering vital questions of historiography.’
Thank you, Bob.