Lost Lines

A few will be aware I have been known to speak on various subjects over the years. Fundamentally these all revolve around my favourite subject of etymology. Have always enjoyed bringing this fascinating subject to others. It’s not for me to say whether the audiences have, although many have asked me to return.

Thought it might be worthwhile sharing a snippet or two from these etymological presentations, continuing with Lost Lines. In 1963 the infamous Beeching Report saw the closure of more than 2,500 railway stations and the lifting of 5,000 miles of track. This released a large amount of land that has since been put to an amazing array of uses. The gentle gradients that were once perfect for trains are in turn perfect as footpaths and cycleways. Stations have become refreshment stops or cycle hire premises on leisure routes. Yards now serve as recreation sites, grassland, retail parks or housing developments. And there are the unusual and quirky: signal boxes used as greenhouses, hen coops and art studios; railway sheds housing mechanics, youth groups and dance studios; and, of course, much has simply become overgrown. There is a PowerPoint presentation to accompany this talk if required.

One route where the rails have been removed is the 21-mile long Cinder Track from Scarborough to Whitby. I use this example simply because I enjoyed this walking/cycling route and the views it affords. Being a former railway track, the gradients are very easy – certainly another plus.

Starting at Scarborough the first sign of a stop comes at Hayburn Wyke Station after around 7 miles. Opening on 16 July 1885 on the up side of the line, it was quickly moved to the down side on the request of the North Eastern Railway. Rebuilt in 1893 it closed temporarily between 1 March 1917 and 2 May 1921. Reduced to an unstaffed halt in 1955, it closed permanently on 8 March 1965. The former stationmaster’s house is still a private residence and the platform very evident.

Ravenscar, the resort that never was, is around the halfway point. Planned as a Victorian resort, the streets were laid out, along with the sewers and drainage, but none of the planned buildings appeared. Approaching from either direction it is the steepest part of the route, and that was the problem. The path down to the beach was a long descent and climb, but the real end came when the company went bust.

Flying Hall Station is three miles further along. It only ever served a population of around 200, and today little evidence can be seen as the platform is very much overgrown.

Robin Hood’s Bay station is 15 miles along, where the station building survives, the stationmaster’s house is now holiday accommodation, and the goods shed is now the village hall.

Hawsker station has only ever been a small intermediate stop, ticket sales reflect this. Indeed, as the headquarters of Trailways Cycle Hire, it likely has more ‘paying customers’ annually today than before it closed in 1965.

Larpool Viaduct, also known as the Esk Valley Viaduct, is among the highlights of the journey. With excellent views over the valley it also crosses the North Yorkshire Moors Railway shortly after it leaves Whitby.

Whitby marks the end, where both the modern railways services, the heritage steam line, and the Cinder Track all terminate.

If you think you know someone who would like to hear me speak on this subject, drop me a line.

Ley Lines

A few will be aware I have been known to speak on various subjects over the years. Fundamentally these all revolve around my favourite subject of etymology. Have always enjoyed bringing this fascinating subject to others and, while it’s not for me to say whether the audiences have, many have asked me to return.

Thought it might be worthwhile sharing a snippet or two from these etymological presentations, continuing with Ley Lines. An examination of ancient trackways, how they were laid out and why. Using a number of models and images to demonstrate just what to look for and why, take a virtual walk across our ancient landscape. There is a PowerPoint presentation to accompany this talk if required.

My book accepts that ley lines do exist and takes the reader along a number of these ancient routes across the counties of the Midlands. While the different leys have similar markers in a general sense, each has its own individual story to tell and is a different piece of the whole incomplete puzzle. Incomplete because the several leys can be traced across distances much greater than just central England. Not only will we discover something of the places and the markers, but will look at the possible reasons and uses for the trackway, and the people who have followed these same paths.

Although they lie outside the area covered by Ley Lines Across the Midlands, the stone circles of Avebury and Stonehenge in Wiltshire are well-known as focal points for a number of trackways and importantly can be dated. These two religious sites are over five thousand years old. Clearly they were built on trackways existing beforehand, hence the leys themselves are older and likely very much older. Since the original markers have long since disappeared it is difficult to know exactly when any particular track was created. Indeed it is virtually impossible to say just how old any of the leys are.

Therefore we must guess as to the age of these tracks and for this we need clues. The only ones we have are the people, and when they first settled into permanent homes rather than leading the life of hunter gatherers. The only other really relevant factor are the forests, which severely hampered the vision of those people of the British Isles and created the need for marked trackways. This all happened closer to ten thousand years ago.

Whether any of the routes covered in my Ley Lines Across the Midlands are among the original tracks of ten thousand years ago is unknown and never will be known. However it is safe to assume they date from at least the pre-Roman era of two thousand years ago and are likely to be twice that age.

If you think you know someone who would like to hear me speak on this subject, drop me a line.

The Fastener Industry

A few will be aware I have been known to speak on various subjects over the years. Fundamentally these all revolve around my favourite subject of etymology. Have always enjoyed bringing this fascinating subject to others. It’s not for me to say whether the audiences have, although many have asked me to return.

Thought it might be worthwhile sharing a snippet or two from these etymological presentations, continuing with The Fastener Industry, this an engineer's non-technical look at nuts, bolts, screws and washers. Not simply an engineering lesson but an examination of just how early these technologies were first created and named, how they developed, and why successive improvements were made and by whom. There is a PowerPoint presentation to accompany this talk if required.

The first mention of a ‘screw’ has nothing to do with fastenings. This was the Archimedes screw, a means of raising water, with the water trapped in gaps in the screw thread and raised as the screw was turned endlessly (never tightening as it had no mating part) by an oxen or other draught animal. It is almost certain the screw had nothing to do with Archimedes, nor did it resemble a screw as we would understand it today but appears more like an enlarged corkscrew in a tube. And if you want to see one in action, get yourself a chocolate fountain, it’s the same thing.

The whitworth thread, possibly still the best known thread form, named after Joseph Whitworth who defined the world’s first standard for threads in 1841 and remained popular until the metric system took over in the late 1970s.

Ever wondered why a ‘washer’ when it clearly has nothing in common with ‘washing’? For the engineer it has three practical applications: to prevent damage to a surface from a nut or bolt, as a spacer, and as a locking device. A simple item and a versatile one but nothing compared to the etymology of this six-letter noun. It is easy to find this coming to English from the Old French vis. However, this was not used to mean ‘washer’ but either ‘vice’ or ‘screw’. Both of these should be seen in the sense of ‘tighten’ or ‘wind up’ and related to the root of ‘winch’. Hence this terminology is all interlinked, with the whole assembly speaking about ‘tightening’ both as a whole and individually. Even more intriguing is where the trail leads if we trace this further back through linguistic generations. Ultimately this has the same root as Latin vinis or ‘vine’, itself from viere meaning ‘to bind, twist’. Thus, the climbing vine, which had evolved to wind itself around and climb, eventually gave its name to the fastenings used today to hold the framework up which modern vines are trained.

If you think you know someone who would like to hear me speak on this subject, drop me a line.

Watling Street

A few will be aware I have been known to speak on various subjects over the years. Fundamentally these all revolve around my favourite subject of etymology. Have always enjoyed bringing this fascinating subject to others. It’s not for me to say whether the audiences have, although many have asked me to return.

Thought it might be worthwhile sharing a snippet or two from these etymological presentations, continuing with Watling Street. This famous 'Roman road' and why it is more than one road and indeed why it was a road several hundred years before the Roman Empire even existed. There is a PowerPoint presentation to accompany this talk if required.

A couple of teasers on Roman roads – none of them were named by the Romans, for all but one are known as ‘street’, which comes from Old English straet meaning ‘paved road’. The exception being the Fosse Way, also named by the Saxons from Old English fossa meaning ‘ditch’.

There is around 2,000 miles of Roman roads in the UK, but if we include undiscovered and minor routes, it is thought that figure could be as much as 6,000 miles.

If you think you know someone who would like to hear me speak on this subject, drop me a line.

Salt Routes

A few will be aware I have been known to speak on various subjects over the years. Fundamentally these all revolve around my favourite subject of etymology. Have always enjoyed bringing this fascinating subject to others. It’s not for me to say whether the audiences have, although many have asked me to return.

Thought it might be worthwhile sharing a snippet or two from these etymological presentations, continuing with Salt Routes. As the original trade route, I look at why it existed and why these routes are still used today. While our distant ancestors were largely self-sufficient, for most one vital commodity meant having to trade. Bringing salt to the user produced a network of trails which can still be followed. Yet this is not just a travel history, salt has found its way into our culture, our language, our folklore and the talk brings all these factors to the fore. There is a PowerPoint presentation to accompany this talk if required.

Salt has long been the most valuable of necessary commodities – gold, saffron, diamonds might all be more valuable, but you can live without them, unlike salt – and retained its value until the spice trade brought other items to the table. Ironically, salt was knocked off the top by pepper.

Place names which reflect salt production include Hallein and Hallstat.

Words which have come to reflect a ‘salty’ origin include ‘soldier’ and ‘salary’; and we still speak of someone being ‘worth his salt’ or ‘sitting below the salt’.

If you think you know someone who would like to hear me speak on this subject, drop me a line.

Talking Butts

A few will be aware I have been known to speak on various subjects over the years. Fundamentally these all revolve around my favourite subject of etymology. Have always enjoyed bringing this fascinating subject to others. It’s not for me to say whether the audiences have, although many have asked me to return.

Thought it might be worthwhile sharing a snippet or two from these etymological presentations, continuing with Talking Butts. An odd title which looks at the many odd ideas, often accepted as a part of history, which have no basis in fact. The title comes from the many minor place names, found most often for fields or narrow lanes, seen as 'The Butts' or similar and commonly thought to show where medieval villagers honed their skills with the long bow. Yet it is easy to see this could never be true as the name nearly always appears several centuries before the law allowing the male villagers to miss church on Sundays in order to practise. Many other 'facts' are given an airing and shown they could never stand up to scrutiny. There is a PowerPoint presentation to accompany this talk if required.

Some years ago I gave a talk in Banbury, Oxfordshire, when someone asked me if I could explain the origin of the place name ‘The Butts’ (as explained above) and then proceeded to argue with me saying he knew shooting took place at this particular spot. I thought he was arguing for the long bow around 700 years ago and I was contradicting in saying it was a physical abutment about twice that length of time ago. It turned out he was arguing he knew because his dad told him – and dad was doing the shooting closer to 70 years ago – the Home Guard were on rifle shooting practice.

Queen Victoria said “we are not amused” – and yet the only written account appears in 1919 (18 years after Queen Victoria died) by former courtier Caroline Holland writing about an equerry’s visit to court and how he tried to impress the queen with a story of scandal and impropriety. Yet it is a matter of historical record that Holland wasn’t even in the country at that time.

Thomas Edison invented the light bulb – nope, several versions had been developed before this, Edison’s design was simply better and lasted longer.

And the Wall Street Crash of 1929 saw brokers leaping to their deaths from skyscrapers in Wall Street. It may have been the Great Depression, but there were only four suicides recorded, just two on Wall Street, and all four shot themselves.

If you think you know someone who would like to hear me speak on this subject, drop me a line.

The Saxon Era

A few will be aware I have been known to speak on various subjects over the years. Fundamentally these all revolve around my favourite subject of etymology. Have always enjoyed bringing this fascinating subject to others. It’s not for me to say whether the audiences have, although many have asked me to return.

Thought it might be worthwhile sharing a snippet or two from these etymological presentations, continuing with The Saxon Era. A revealing look at the so-called Dark Ages, revealing why they were anything but 'dark' and gave us a language, a system of government, many of the imperial measurements, and much, much more. There is a PowerPoint presentation to accompany this talk if required.

The talk focuses on that which the Saxons brought to our culture and which we still use today. Now while we are officially a nation which went metric years ago, we still use the pint and the mile.

Mile comes from the Latin for ‘one thousand’, the idea being it represented a thousand paces. Now the Romans didn’t have extremely long legs or a ridiculously long stride – which would be required to walk a mile of 1,760 yards in a thousand paces – it is simply that, for the Romans, a pace was two steps (or what we would see as two paces).

Pint comes from a time when we didn’t drink ale from a glass but from a clay or leather vessel. The latter, made from leather scraps joined together and sealed with tar even less likely to be accurate than the clay version. To ensure the measure served would be the same for all, a line was painted on the inner surface to show when the measure was correct. A paint line became a ‘pint’ line and the measurement stuck.

Acre, still a popular measurement of land area, was for the Saxons was never a measurement but simply a reference to land used for agriculture.

If you think you know someone who would like to hear me speak on this subject, drop me a line.