The Whitby Penny Hedge

All sorts of strange things go on in Great Britain! Some of them are ceremonies and customs that have been performed for centuries in certain places, although the reasons for so doing are either uncertain or completely forgotten. One such is the annual planting of the “penny hedge” at Whitby in North Yorkshire.

Every year, on the day before Ascension Day, a small hedge is planted on the east bank of the River Esk estuary that must be strong enough to withstand three tides before being washed away. The hedge must be completed before 9 a.m. The hedge is carefully woven from hazel and willow branches but is only a few feet in length.

Traditionally the hedge is laid by two men, one of whom plays the role of “factotum to the abbot of St Hilda’s” – which is the abbey the ruins of which overlook the town. The factotum blows a horn and shouts: “Out on ye!” (meaning “Shame on you”) three times.

The question that must surely strike anyone is: Why? Two explanations have been offered.

According to local folklore, in 1159 a group of hunters were thwarted by a hermit who gave sanctuary in his chapel to the wild boar they were hunting. They promptly beat the hermit to death, but with his last words he forgave the hunters on condition that they built a hedge every year on Ascension Eve as their penance. They, or their successors, would meet the abbot’s bailiff in a wood and cut a penny’s worth of sticks which they would then plant at the water’s edge before blowing a horn and denouncing themselves.

This sounds highly unlikely for all sorts of reasons, which is why a second explanation is more believable. This is that the custom derives from a medieval practice known as the “horngarth”, which is another name for the penny hedge ceremony. This was an obligation that tenants owed to the lord of the manor – the “garth” part of the word being an Old English term for an enclosure. The horngarth was originally a substantial boundary fence to land belonging to the abbey, but the obligation to maintain the fence had become a token event by the mid-14^th century.

The “penny” may refer to the cost of the knife used to cut the stems, or it may simply be a corruption of “penance”.

Whatever the explanation, the ceremony is still performed every year on the appointed day, and sometimes the hedge survives for more than three tides!

© John Welford

The Samoan legend of Tuifiti and Sina

The people of Savai’i, the largest of the islands of Samoa in the Pacific Ocean, tell a story about an eel named Tuifiti and a beautiful girl called Sina.

Tuifiti was enchanted by Sina’s beauty and he swam to where she was so that he could admire her all day. She caught him in a calabash gourd and fed him so that he grew bigger and bigger. Indeed, he could not stop growing, and grew so large that he eventually became a nuisance to her and she tried to get rid of him.

Tuifiti went to a gathering of the island elders and told them that he loved Sina so much that he could not live without her. He therefore knew that he was going to die, but he did not want his death to be in vain. He told the elders that, when he was dead, they should cut off his head and bury it in the ground in front of Sina’s house. A tree would grow that would be a blessing to her, because its leaves could be woven together to provide shelter when the sun was too hot and its fruit would provide drink when she was thirsty. Every time she did this she would be kissing him.

And that was how the first coconut tree came to be!

© John Welford

The mystery of England's sinking churches

English parish churches, if they have been there for any length of time as most of them have, tend to display a strange characteristic, which is that they seem to be sinking into the ground. Quite often the lowest course of stones appears to be a couple of feet below the level of the surrounding churchyard.

However, this is not because the church builders did not set the foundations properly, or that they regularly chose to build on soft ground into which the structure would sink over time. The fact is that the surrounding land has risen, and not that the church has sunk.

The reason for this is that churchyards are where people from the surrounding village have been buried for century after century. It is not all that long ago that the only legal way of disposing of a dead body was to bury it (cremation was first legalised in the United Kingdom in 1902, although the practice had started in the late 19^th century). Burials could only take place in consecrated ground, and that meant the village churchyard.

However, churchyards were limited in area, which meant that space for burials was at a premium. The same piece of ground would therefore be re-dug for fresh burials several times over. Bones do not always decay completely – it depends on the acidity of the soil – so many burials took place on top of the bones of previous ones. Over time, layer upon layer of human remains, as well as the action of repeated digging, pushed the land surface higher and higher.

In a parish with a steady average population of 300 people, one might expect around a thousand adults to die every century. However, with child mortality being what it was in the past, there would have been many more than that number of burials. In a churchyard that was first laid out in the 10^th or 11^th century, the number of times that the gravediggers got to work between then and now could have been as many as 20,000, possibly even more.

It is little wonder that many churchyards seem to be swallowing their churches!

© John Welford

A mysterious library

I am a bit mystified about a mystery writer and a mysterious place that celebrates another mysterious person. Are you mystified already? I don’t blame you!

Choosing a career

Back in 1974 I had just finished at university and was unsure as to what I wanted to do for a career. One possibility was librarianship, but before committing myself I decided to have a go at the job to see what it entailed. I therefore found myself at the central library of the University of London, working as a junior assistant for a whole academic year.

This involved moving round a number of departments within this vast library, housed in a towering edifice very close to the British Museum. One of the departments was the Reference division, which was responsible for a number of special collections. And that brings us to the mystery!

It is not unknown in academic circles for scholars to accumulate vast collections of material and stipulate in their wills, or even during their lifetimes, that they want those collections to be housed by prestigious university institutions. This is partly out of vanity, but also because the value of their work is widely recognised and it is the university that has persuaded the scholar to make such a provision. However, in the case I want to mention here, I reckon that vanity had much more to do with it!

Harry Price

Harry Price is a name that was much more widely known in the first half of the 20^th century than it is now. He was one of the chief pioneers of “scientific” psychical research, investigating claims of ghostly apparitions, spirit phenomena, and all sorts of weird and wonderful things. He came to public attention in a big way when he investigated the ghostly goings-on at Borley Rectory in Suffolk, which caught the public attention as “the most haunted house in England” in the years just prior to World War II. Unfortunately for Harry’s reputation, later investigations have shown that in his efforts to expose frauds and mountebanks he committed a huge number of fakeries himself.

However, the gift of his library to the University of London in 1936 was made before the truth was known, and the collection was accepted in good faith as a contribution to the world of learning and knowledge. 

The Harry Price Library

When I found myself having to visit this collection on an almost daily basis, it had been in situ for nearly 40 years, kept intact in a part of the building that was not generally accessible to students and other visitors, except by special arrangement. The space it occupied was crossed by pipes through which the wind whistled eerily or water gurgled menacingly, and the lighting was not of the brightest. This all seemed highly appropriate for the contents of the library, namely Price’s vast accumulation of books and papers on virtually anything to do with the occult, mediums, ghosts, witchcraft, magic, astrology, conjuring, and much more. Several of the young ladies who worked as library assistants were very reluctant to go near the place, and I quite often ran gallant errands on their behalf!

I mentioned above that visitors were only allowed by special permission, and the few who did ask tended to be of a different nature from the usual class of researchers that would be expected in a university library. I remember one little old lady who had a fascination with witchcraft and the occult and who established herself in the library on a virtually permanent basis. It may have been her resemblance to a witch that made visits by the girl library assistants so unpopular! The lady had eventually to be asked to leave when it was found that she had brought in an electric toaster that was plugged into a lighting socket!

So who is the mystery writer that I mentioned in my opening sentence? Not the little old lady with the toaster, but another “scholar” with an abiding interest in all things mysterious, and who might indeed have gathered much from the contents of Harry Price’s library. She even features a very similar library in her stories about a boy wizard, curiously named Harry.

Did J K Rowling ever make use of this library? No biography I have read has said so, but it would not surprise me if this was the case.

© John Welford

The ghost of the Hotel del Coronado

The Hotel del Coronado is a resort hotel near San Diego, California, that is said to be haunted by a woman who died there in November 1893.

The Coronado ghost 

The woman was Kate Morgan, although there are different stories to account for how she met her end. One is that she checked into the hotel alone, under a false name, after she and her husband, named Tom, had quarrelled during their journey there by train. She had told him that she was pregnant, which was not welcome news to him. He got off the train early and said that he would join her later.

After two days alone, staying in Room 3312, she went to San Diego where she bought a gun; she was found dead the following day on the north steps of the hotel, apparently by suicide.

However, there was something very strange about her death, which was that the gun she had bought, and which was in her hand with one chamber empty, was not of the same calibre as the bullet that killed her.

Another mystery concerned the maid who disappeared the day after the funeral and was never seen again. So did Kate’s husband Tom turn up at the hotel and kill both Kate and the maid, who had seen enough to implicate him in the murder?

Another account has Kate committing suicide because she found her husband with another woman. In this version the married couple had arrived together and booked into Room 3502. He went down to the gaming room on his own and Kate later decided that this would be a good time to surprise him with the news of her pregnancy. He had not thought that he would be disturbed by Kate turning up, hence the discovery of his flirting so shocked Kate that she killed herself.

As with many such stories there are elements that don’t really hold water, but the hotel seems to have done all it can to boost the stories for what they are worth. For one thing, there are two rooms, not one, that guests can sleep in that might produce odd sensations – and, naturally enough, they duly oblige with stories of mysterious presences, cold gusts and subdued whispers. Then there are the two possible scenes of the drama, namely the hotel steps and the gaming room, either of which are worthy of attention from the ghost-hunting perspective.

In addition to the sensations mentioned above, guests have reported seeing the ghost of Kate Morgan moving through corridors or standing by windows.

Many haunted houses increase their attractiveness by being the scene of hauntings by numerous ghosts. The Hotel del Coronado has achieved this trick by splitting their one ghost into two, which sounds like an excellent marketing ploy!

© John Welford

Dreams of one's death

When people talk about “dreams that come true” they usually have in mind beneficial situations that they have dreamt about and which they wish can become reality. However, there have also been instances of people dreaming about their own demises, and which have indeed come true.

Abraham Lincoln

President Abraham Lincoln was in a sombre mood at the White House on 11^th April 1865. He told his guests at an evening function that he had had a vivid dream a few nights before in which he had walked into the East Room of the White House and found a corpse lying on a catafalque, surrounded by mourners. He was told that the body was that of the President, who had been killed by an assassin.

Three days later Abraham Lincoln was shot in the head by John Wilkes Booth during a performance at Ford’s Theatre. He died the following morning.

Thomas, Lord Lyttleton

Lord Lyttelton was 35 years old in 1779. He told his friends that he had had a disturbing dream on the night of 24^th November, at around midnight. He said that a woman dressed in white pointed at him and said that he would be dead within three days.

Lyttleton was clearly troubled by this prediction and left town for his country estate in Surrey in the hope that the three days would pass uneventfully. On 27^th November he went to his room at about 11 o’clock, clearly convinced that he was now safe. His servant helped him to undress and left the room for a few minutes. When he returned the young man was having a fit from which he failed to recover. He was dead before midnight.

Robert Morris

Robert Morris was a tobacco planter in pre-Revolution America. He was invited to inspect a warship but turned down the invitation on the grounds that he had had a dream in which he was killed when one of the cannons was fired. The ship’s captain was disappointed by this refusal and told Morris that no guns would be fired in salute until he was safely back on shore, and this was enough to persuade Morris to change his mind.

The visit proceeded as planned and the boat taking the visiting party back from the ship was on its way when a fly landed on the captain’s nose. He waved his hand to brush it away and the sailor in charge of the salute gun took this as his signal to fire. Robert Morris was killed by shrapnel from the shot, just as in his dream.

Spooky or what?

The thing about dreams is that they are created by the subconscious from elements that are already present somewhere in the brain. Abraham Lincoln was convinced that dreams were sent by angels and were therefore messages from God, but he must also have been aware that he was an object of hatred for many Americans in the defeated South. A dream of his demise was therefore a high possibility. The timing of dream and fulfilment was what made the event “spooky”.

The death of Thomas Lord Lyttleton was also not to be wondered at. Given that he took the dream seriously, it is entirely possibly that his brain could not cope with the pressure and brought on a fit. Had his servant had some medical or first aid knowledge it is possible that he might have survived the fit, but that is mere speculation. The “fit” might have been a stroke or brain haemorrhage that was more likely to be fatal.

The story of Robert Morris comes closer to “spooky” than the other two. Morris was clearly worried about being close to a discharging gun, and the prospect of having to attend a function where this would happen was presumably what inspired the dream. The tragic outcome, caused by a fly and a misunderstanding, must be put down to coincidence.

There must also be plenty of cases in which dreams of death have not come true, and even more in which nobody has known about such dreams because the dreamer chose not to relate it to someone else.

© John Welford

Dunting the Stone at Newbiggin-by-the-Sea

We Brits are renowned worldwide for our eccentricities and for hanging on to ancient customs that have long since passed their sell-by date. One such is the ceremony of Dunting the Stone, which takes place from time to time at the small town of Newbiggin-by-the-Sea in Northumberland.

Newbiggin-by-the-Sea

Even locals would be hard pressed to say that Newbiggin-by-the-Sea has a great deal to attract the visitor, although the beach and promenade are pleasant enough. Since 2007 it has boasted one very unusual feature, which is a sculpture by Sean Henry of two young people, a man and a woman, looking out to sea from a platform built in the middle of the bay. Entitled “Couple” it is a talking point if nothing else.

However, if one goes back far enough, Newbiggin was a very important place indeed, being a major port for the export of grain, third only to London and Hull. The status of freeholder was therefore a highly cherished one, because freeholders were entitled to collect dues from ships using the harbour.

There are fewer than 80 freeholders in Newbiggin today, and their privileges have diminished somewhat down the years. They do (jointly) own land on Newbiggin Moor, where the links golf course is now situated, and they also share ownership of the foreshore with the crown. Every year since 1235 the freeholders have “beaten the bounds” by walking or riding round the entire perimeter of the town as a symbolic gesture of ownership.

You cannot become a freeholder except by inheritance. When a new freeholder gains this status they are initiated according to the ancient custom of “Dunting the Stone”, which is where things get more than a little weird.

The “Dunting” ceremony

The stone in question is on the edge of the golf course, and to be dunted you must be held by the feet and shoulders and have your backside bumped against the stone, three times. The secretary of the Freeholders’ Trust then declares, in formal Middle English, that the “duntee” has now acquired full freeholder status and all the privileges that this entails.

If one is going to be dunted in this manner, it is probably a good idea to be properly padded in the right area, otherwise having one’s posterior thumped against a rock could be a bit painful. The people doing the dunting are supposed to be the two oldest freeholders, so this might also be a problem if they are in their nineties and you tip the scales at 17 stone! Presumably there is a Plan B should that prove to be the case.

It is an utterly pointless piece of nonsense, but that is absolutely no reason why the freeholders of Newbiggin-by-the-Sea should not go on holding such ceremonies for as long as they like. At least they won’t be spied on by “The Couple”, who are staring resolutely in the opposite direction.

© John Welford

Homophone trouble

Homophoneuality can get you into big trouble!

According to a piece in the Salt Lake Tribune, using the letters h, o, m and then o again – within an educational establishment - can get you into real trouble however careful you are. This is especially true if your boss is a complete idiot.

A teacher at an English language school in Provo, Utah, decided to teach his students about homophones – that is, words that sound the same but have different spellings and meanings. Examples include ‘bear’ and ‘bare’, or ‘flaw’ and ‘floor’. The teacher posted several examples on his blog (which presumably had the word ‘homophones’ in the page title) so that the students could read them and suggest their own examples.

The next day he was called into the principal’s office, to be shouted at and sacked on the spot. His crime had been to hint that the school had a gay agenda, because people might get the impression that ‘homos’ were welcome there.

The principal complained that students would not know what a homophone was – which is a bit strange given that the whole object of the exercise was to teach them exactly what they were – and they might easily get confused.

Presumably there were other words that the principal would not allow his teachers to use, such as ‘homogenous’ and ‘homo sapiens’ – but this is pure conjecture!

© John Welford

The mystery of "The Man in the Iron Mask"

The title “The Man in the Iron Mask” belongs to a novel by Alexandre Dumas (1802-70). He based his story on a real event, namely the incarceration for almost 34 years of a prisoner whose face was always concealed. Who could the mysterious prisoner have been?

The bare facts

The story begins on 24^th August 1669, with the arrival of a prisoner at Pignerol prison (in what is now northern Italy but under French control at the time). He was delivered in person by a minister of King Louis XIV, but the document that was handed to the prison governor contained some very unusual stipulations, namely:

“The prisoner must be closely guarded and be unable to communicate by letter or any other means. He must be kept in complete isolation so that his guards cannot hear him, and you will never listen to anything he might wish to tell you, threatening to put him to death if he ever opens his mouth to speak to you of anything other than his needs”.

There were occasions when the prisoner was transferred to other prisons, including a move in 1687 to the Ile de Sainte-Marguerite (off the south coast of France near Cannes), when he was transferred in a sealed sedan chair with his face covered by a mask of black velvet.

In 1698 he was transferred to the Bastille in Paris, with instructions that every precaution be taken to ensure that he was not seen by anyone. The officer who was second-in-command at the Bastille later made it known that he was not told who the prisoner was, it was not written down anywhere, and his face was always masked.

The prison log recorded the man’s death in 1703, and that he had always worn a black velvet mask which he was never allowed to remove, even for eating or sleeping.

The mention that the mask was of iron, not velvet, came courtesy of the writer Voltaire, who was a prisoner in the Bastille in 1717 and heard stories from the jailers about their earlier mysterious prisoner.

Speculation about a royal twin

Alexander Dumas only wrote his novel in 1850, and clearly he based it on what he had read. He used speculation, rumour and imagination to concoct his tale, in which the mask followed the “iron” tradition begun by Voltaire and the prisoner had become a twin brother of King Louis XIV.

The idea was that Louis had had an identical twin brother, but his father (King Louis XIII) was concerned that the younger twin might come to challenge his brother for the right to be the heir to the throne. He was therefore removed from the royal household when very young and brought up as the son of a French nobleman.

However, at some point after Louis had become king (which he did in 1643 when still not five years old) the younger twin had seen a picture of Louis and realised who he was. When this was reported to the king he took the extraordinary step of having his brother incarcerated for the rest of his life in the manner that has been described. At least, that is how Dumas imagined things to have been.

Could this have happened?

If Louis had had a twin brother, is it at all likely that he would have taken such action? Even if King Louis XIII had been afraid of sibling rivalry to the extent that the younger twin would have challenged the older for the throne, why must one assume that Louis XIV thought the same way? Did he see his brother as a potential threat, even when he was established as the most powerful ruler in Europe – which he was in 1669 after 26 years on the throne?

Another question is whether Louis knew that he had a twin and, if so, when did he know this? Was it only in 1669 when he was told that his brother had recognised him from a portrait?

If the facts are as Dumas surmised, then Louis’s action does make some sort of sense. Rivals to the throne would normally be dealt with more severely and be done away with, either publicly or secretly, but when that rival is one’s own twin brother, one can imagine that this would have gone against the grain.

Under such circumstances, one can also see why it would be important for the brother not to be recognised by anyone else, and for him not to be allowed to communicate with anyone that he was indeed the king’s twin.

However, there are also huge problems with this scenario. For one thing, there is absolutely no evidence that Louis ever had a twin brother.  Royal births were hardly secret affairs (it was typical for the room in which a birth took place to be crowded not only with doctors and midwives but also with high ranking people who would witness the birth and thus confirm that the child was definitely the son or daughter of the queen and not a smuggled-in substitute), and it is hard to imagine that a second baby would have been overlooked or that everyone present would have been sworn to secrecy and kept that secret for decades afterwards.

Then there is the question of why concealing the identity of the prisoner was so important after 1669 but apparently less so before then. If the twin brother had suddenly realised who he was when aged around 30, why had nobody else noticed the similarity at some point before then? If, as Dumas suggests, the twin had been brought up in a noble household, there must have been plenty of people around who regularly saw the king and who would surely have spotted the likeness. It also seems unlikely that anyone brought up in such an environment (the supposed twin brother, for example) would not have seen the king on many occasions, especially as Louis XIV was renowned for maintaining a large court of aristocratic hangers-on and engaging in many lavish ceremonies and functions in which all the nobility of France would have played a part at one time or another.

For all these reasons, the notion that Louis had locked up his twin brother and insisted that he always be masked does sound to be highly unlikely.

In that case, who was the masked man?

More than sixty suggestions have been made as to who the man in the mask (whether iron or velvet) might have been. These have included some very well-known names such as the Duke of Monmouth (an illegitimate son of King Charles II of Great Britain) and the French playwright Moliere. However, all these candidates pose a particular problem, namely that it is known when they died and it wasn’t in 1703.

Many of the suggestions have related to less well-known people, such as French army officers and obscure aristocrats who fell from favour. However, if the person was not of any great importance, why bother with the charade of keeping them alive in such circumstances for such a long time?

My own theory

This may not be an original idea – highly unlikely! – but it strikes me that there could be another reason why a prisoner was kept masked for 34 years. This was not so that they could not be identified but because their face had become so disfigured that its sight would be too great a shock for any observer, including the person himself should he happen to see himself in a mirror.

A disease such as leprosy or necrotizing fasciitis (the “flesh-eating bug”) might have had this effect. With little understanding of the cause of the ailment it might have been assumed that the condition was infectious and that the victim had to be kept as far away from human contact as possible, such as in a secure prison.

If the person was of high birth – such as a member of the royal family – they would have been allowed to live out their natural term of life, however long that might have been. This might have applied, for example, to an illegitimate son of the king. According to Voltaire’s account, passed to him by prison officers, the man was finely dressed and an accomplished musician who was clearly not treated in the manner that a dangerous criminal might have been, so imprisonment for protection as opposed to punishment does sound at least possible.

However, this is mere speculation, as is virtually every other account of the case. Stories tend to grow in the telling, and Alexandre Dumas wrote his novel some 150 years after the events in question, so there had been plenty of time for growth! Nobody knows the answer to the conundrum, and it is unlikely that anyone ever will.

© John Welford

The Pascagoula alien abduction, 1973

The Pascagoula River enters the Gulf of Mexico at Pascagoula, Mississippi. This was where, on the evening of 11^th October 1973, 19-year-old Calvin Parker and 42-year-old Charles Hickson were fishing from a pier jutting into the river when, according to their testimony, they had an experience that brought them considerable fame – or possibly notoriety, depending on your point of view.

The story goes that they heard a loud buzzing noise behind them and turned round to see a glowing egg-shaped object, about 3 metres wide and 2.5 metres high, at a distance of about 12 metres. It was hovering above the ground and had flashing blue lights on it.

Three strange creatures emerged from the egg. They were quite short, at little over a metre in height, vaguely humanoid but with round feet and claw-like hands. Their heads were bullet-shaped, they had no necks, or even eyes, but slit-like mouths and odd lumps that seemed to serve as ears and noses.

These “aliens” grabbed hold of the two fishermen and hustled them on board their craft. The younger man, Calvin Parker, fainted from the shock and therefore could not offer any further details of what happened, but Charles Hickson remained conscious and he was therefore the sole source of information for the supposed event.

According to Hickson, once on board the craft the two men were examined closely for about 20 minutes by a hovering electronic eye, after which they were returned to the pier completely unharmed.

The craft then took off and disappeared skywards at great speed, leaving Parker and Hickson with an extraordinary tale to tell. Or to put it another way, it left Hickson with a tale to tell because – as mentioned above – Parker was apparently out cold from beginning to end of the “alien encounter”.

The only corroboration of Hickson’s story came from reports of a sonic boom heard that evening across Ohio and Pennsylvania, for which no direct cause could be assigned. Could this have been caused by the alien “egg” heading off back to its mother ship?

During the following days hundreds of other reports flooded in of UFO sightings, notably from Ohio and West Virginia, thus lending credence to the tale told by Charles Hickson. Pressmen from far and wide descended on Pascagoula and the two “abductees” became celebrities in the UFO watching community, being invited to conventions and conferences for years afterwards. Their story clearly did them no harm as far as their bank balances were concerned.

But what is the possibility that the men were talking about a real experience as opposed to an invented one? There are several factors in this story that should make sane people wonder at the credulity of some their fellow human beings!

For one thing, as mentioned above, we only have Charles Hickson’s word for most of the story, due to Calvin Parker’s apparent unconsciousness during most of the supposed encounter. A sceptic will immediately conclude that this would be remarkably convenient for someone who wanted to spin an alien abduction yarn – if only one person tells the tale, they cannot be accused of telling it differently from someone else. As it was, Charles Hickson was happy to take a lie detector test from an inexperienced polygraph operator but not from someone who knew what they were doing.

There are in any case some facts that don’t add up. Why, for example, would a sonic boom heard in Ohio have anything to do with an alien spacecraft taking off on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, 850 miles away? If this strange craft with its flashing blue lights was able to land close to a town with a population of around 20,000, how come no-else else saw it arriving or leaving?

Then of course there is the massive improbability of alien lifeforms travelling for many years across the vast distances of space for the sole purpose – it would appear – of scaring the living daylights out of two guys fishing beside a river in Mississippi! No-one else reported a similar encounter at around that time, so what were these aliens doing during the rest of their visit to Planet Earth? For the Pascagoula encounter to be even remotely credible one would have to assume that the aliens’ mindset would have been similar to that of the crew of Apollo 11 had they stepped on to the Moon, grabbed a few rocks and headed straight home again!

A highly unlikely story!

© John Welford

Point of Ayr: a haunted lighthouse

Lighthouses, especially abandoned ones, are often cited as buildings that are subject to ghostly goings-on. This is hardly surprising given that they stand as isolated towers in remote locations where they are battered by waves and winds. There are many stories of lighthouse keepers who have disappeared without trace, or been murdered by colleagues who had lost their minds as a result of having to live in a virtual prison for months on end. The Point of Ayr lighthouse, in North Wales, is reputed to be one such haunted lighthouse.

Point of Ayr

This is the most north-easterly point of Wales, on the western side of the Dee Estuary. The lighthouse was built in 1776 to warn ships approaching and leaving the port of Liverpool not to stray on to the sandbanks that stretch for miles into Liverpool Bay. It stands on the beach at Talacre and can be reached on foot at low tide. The building has not been used as a lighthouse since 1883 but the structure has been kept in good repair down to the present day.

Many people have reported odd sensations and sightings in the vicinity of the lighthouse, with some complaining of feeling unwell but recovering when they have left the area. There have also been sightings of a keeper on the walkway round the top of the tower. There is a story that a man named Raymond died there of a broken heart and that it is his sprit that troubles visitors.

There has been a “keeper” permanently on duty at the top of the lighthouse since 2010. This is a 7-foot-high metal sculpture created by Angela Smith, a local artist. She used many pieces of high-grade polished steel to build the figure, thus allowing the wind the whistle through his ribs and create all the eerie sounds one might want to hear!

© John Welford

The Ogham script of Celtic Ireland

Ogham is a script method that was used mostly by Irish Celts from around 300 to 700 AD, although it also spread to parts of Britain where a number of examples have been found, most commonly in Wales.

Ogham script

The script consisted of straight lines inscribed to the left or right of a central line. On standing stones, the central line was a vertical edge, such that short horizontal lines could be scratched on the faces that met at that edge. Because the writing started at ground level, the length of the message was limited by the size of the stone, even if more than one edge was used. The visual appearance of Ogham script, with lines branching off a central “trunk”, was that of a tree, and the system is sometimes referred to as the “Ogham tree”.

Ogham, in its original form, was an alphabetical system comprising fifteen consonants and five vowels. These were delineated by groups of up to five lines, to the left, to the right, or right across the central line. To distinguish five of the consonants from the five vowels, the former were long lines that crossed the central line at an angle, whereas the latter were short lines that crossed “straight”.

The origin of Ogham

The name Ogham betrays its Irish origin, because it was named after the Irish god of learning and poetry, Ogma, who is credited in legend with being its inventor.

Another name for Ogham is Beth Luis Nuin, which equates to the use of ABC for the modern English alphabet because the Ogham names are those of the first three letters, which are delineated by one, two and three lines to the right, respectively. The resemblance of Ogham to the depiction of a tree also gave rise to the letter names being used to mean specific trees, with Beth meaning “birch”, Luis “rowan” and Nuin “ash”. The Irish Celts held trees and forests in high regard, such that their word for “wood” also meant “knowledge” and Ogham script had religious significance as well as being a means of recording facts.

How Ogham was used

Ogham may well have been used on materials such as wood and leather, but these are perishable and it is therefore the case that Ogham script is known today almost exclusively from its use on standing stones.

Because of this, it is not surprising that the uses to which it was put related to the functions performed by the stones themselves. Many were boundary markers, with the inscriptions stating the names of the owners of the land on either side of the stone. Others were grave markers, bearing the name of the person buried beneath (typically followed by the names of their father and their tribe).

More recent uses of Ogham script

Ogham has also been used in post-Celtic times, notably by medieval scribes who may have been inspired by original manuscript Ogham sources that have not survived. Sometimes these scripts mixed Ogham and runic symbols, and they were often transliterations of Latin texts. When used, the central line was usually horizontal and extra characters were incorporated to account for letters that were not available in the original Ogham alphabet.

The “Book of Ballymote” is a 14^th century manuscript that is preserved in the Royal Irish Academy, Dublin. This contains pages in Ogham and other scripts that have been used as a key for deciphering the Ogham alphabet.

As mentioned above, the majority of surviving Ogham inscriptions are on Irish stones, and they are highly prized as relics of Celtic history. Modern developments have threatened the loss of many such stones and efforts have therefore been made to collect and preserve them. The best such collection is at University College Cork, where a covered walkway known as the Stone Corridor is lined with a large collection of Ogham stones. There is another important collection at the monastery of Mount Melleray in County Waterford.

© John Welford

A sceptical look at Astrology

I find it very difficult to take the claims of astrology seriously. On the face of it, the idea that the relative positions of the stars and planets can have the remotest effect on human life – except on the rare occasion when a lump of rock hits us or there is an eclipse that robs us daylight for a short period – seems absurd to me. However, I think it is worthwhile to analyse exactly what I believe astrology to be, so that I can assure myself that I am being entirely rational and not making unwarranted assumptions.

My intellectual background

I think of myself as a reasonably intelligent and well-educated person. I did well enough at school to get to a middle-ranking University (Bangor, then part of the University of Wales), although I did not come away with a particularly high grade of degree.

I took a joint honours degree in English and Philosophy. The study of English Literature inevitably brings one into contact with Astrology, because many writers of literature, from Chaucer to Shakespeare and right down to J K Rowling, have included astrologers among their characters, and many have believed in what astrologers have said, to a greater or lesser degree.

However, Philosophy is all about examining theories and assumptions and subjecting them to rigorous analysis. Throughout the ages, people have come up with systematic ideas to explain the way the world is and suggest ways in which people could lead better lives. Some of those ideas have proved to be highly influential, but it is the job of Philosophy to point to the weaknesses (should they exist) of schemes of thought that might well be capable of leading us (as mankind) down paths that we really should not be going.

Although my University course in Philosophy did not tackle the subject of Astrology, it is just the sort of belief that could be subjected to philosophical tools and techniques, and it is with the mindset that my course inculcated in me that I want to look at Astrology now.

What Astrology is not

It is very easy to criticise something when one has a totally false notion of what that something is. Politicians do this all the time when they lambast their opponents for holding views that they have never advocated, or distort what has been said and then attack the distorted version rather than the real one.

I therefore want to state at the outset that I do not equate Astrology with Fortune-Telling. That is a mistake that is often made, based on the natural human desire to want to know what is going to happen to them and the dishonest practices of some people who use the Astrology umbrella to provide such a “service”.

“Real” astrologers do not predict the future. It should not take long to see why this is the case, namely that they would soon be discredited if their predictions failed to come true. Instead, they attempt to relate the relative positions of stars and planets to make statements about individual human beings in terms of their personality and potential.

There is a very crude form of astrology that divides the whole human race into twelve groups, based on their date of birth, and then tells each group what their strengths and weaknesses are in terms of their personality, the assumption being that, for example, an “Aquarius” is fated to be a different sort of person from a “Leo”. Advice is then given, for example, on whether it is a good or bad idea for a Pisces man to marry a Capricorn woman.

Leading on from this is the notion that one’s “stars” can determine what sort of day one is likely to have and whether one should or should not leave certain decisions to another day when the stars are likely to be more propitious. This sort of astrology was taken very seriously in past centuries, when monarchs would decide whether or not to go to battle based on what their court astrologer told them. Today, we get “What your stars say” in popular daily newspapers, and there are people who take these statements just as seriously as any medieval warlord.

However, as I said above, I do want to criticise Astrology based on the versions mentioned in the previous two paragraphs. I am perfectly willing to accept these as distorted versions of Astrology that are not worth the effort of trying to refute – although it does worry me that there are many people who cannot see through their nonsense.

So what is Astrology then?

My understanding of Astrology, based on what astrologers themselves say, is that it sees significance in the pattern of the heavens at the exact time that an individual human being is born. Modern astrologers are careful to avoid the suggestion that stars and planets have any sort of direct physical influence on the new-born child – it is not a question of gravitational pulls coming into play, given that those of a doctor’s forceps are far more likely to outweigh anything exerted by Mars or Saturn – no, it is a lot more mystical than that.

What astrologers appear to claim is that the pattern of the planets at someone’s birth (and the moon and the sun counts as planets for this purpose), particularly when seen against the background of the stars, represents a mirroring of the potential personality of that person. What they are therefore doing when creating a person’s astral birth chart is re-creating that mirror and reading what is reflected in it.

The elements of that re-creation include certain characteristics that belong to the individual planets – for example, Mercury influences the way you learn and handle information, and a strong showing for Jupiter in one’s chart is indicative of a an optimist.

Another interesting aspect of the claims of astrology is that the birth chart does not predestine the individual to be any specific sort of person – as I said before, astrologers are not fortune-tellers. All it does is indicate potential strengths and weaknesses and it is up to the person to forge their own path through life, but with the knowledge that they should find themselves more naturally inclined to go into some directions than in others.

Reasons for scepticism – 1

Modern astrologers do not claim that Astrology is a science, although this was not always the case. They therefore see themselves as being beyond the reach of reasoned scientific argument when it comes to defending their “art”. They see Astrology as having to do with the realms of spiritualism and mysticism which they expect people to accept on trust.

I’m sorry, but for me that is just not good enough. Astrology is in the same bracket as religion, magic and wicca – you can believe in it if you like, but it will never be open to having its claims proved to be true. Belief in Astrology is a matter of faith, with no evidential grounding whatsoever.

Reasons for scepticism – 2

There are many factors that affect someone’s personality, the strongest of these being upbringing, environment, education and life experiences, as well as genetics. There is no reason to give precedence to yet another – in my view highly dubious – factor, namely their birth chart.

Given that astrologers gladly admit that the birth chart does not predestine, it would appear that they recognise that it is the weakest of the factors that I have listed above. That being so, why bother with it at all?

Reasons for scepticism – 3

The qualities that are assigned to the various planets, as having roles to play in the birth chart, are pure inventions. Granted, they are based on ancient beliefs that go back thousands of years, but they are inventions nonetheless. There is not the slightest reason to believe that Mercury is the “information handling” planet – but then reason has nothing to do with it, of course.

It is also interesting to note that ancient astrologers had fewer tools to play with than modern ones, because many more celestial bodies are known about now than was the case before the days of powerful telescopes. I find it fascinating – not to say ridiculous - that newly discovered planets and planetoids seem to have been fitted into the astrological cosmos and appear to have roles to play in birth charts.

Reasons for scepticism – 4

It worries me that some people take the statements made by astrologers far too seriously. I will repeat that I do not hold astrologers guilty of being fortune-tellers, but the same cannot be said of the expectations of some of their customers.

People will pay good money to have a complete birth chart made, and one has to ask why they do so. If you only regard Astrology as being a bit of harmless fun, which makes no difference one way or the other, then fair enough – but there are plenty of much cheaper ways of having harmless fun.

It should come as no surprise that people who have paid good money for a chart should treat it with a good measure of respect and believe what their astrologer says it means. If they then let that meaning rule their lives – for example by basing their relationships with others on its findings – then they are in danger of being guided along paths that might not be in their best interests. They might make life choices that they would not otherwise have done, simply because they had paid for advice that was based on the extremely flimsy evidence (as I would see it) of an astral birth chart.

People who seek advice from others on how they should lead their lives are often emotionally vulnerable and are prime targets for manipulation by people who are stronger than themselves or who appear to have the answers that they cannot discover for themselves. These clients are the sort of people who can end up in weird religious cults or be brainwashed into taking dangerous and/or violent actions. I see Astrology as being another area that offers respite for vulnerable people, and it therefore presents another source of danger.

An experiment?

I know that Astrology sees itself as being outside the realm of science, and so it is not really susceptible to proof by scientific method, but can I suggest an experiment that could produce some revealing results?

If you take two people who were born at exactly the same time and in the same place – such as in different rooms of the same maternity hospital – then the two babies should have had identical astral birth charts. If after, say, thirty or forty years, they were to approach different astrologers and ask to have their birth charts prepared and interpreted, it would be very interesting to see how alike those results were.

It would also be very interesting to see how those two people, as adults, were alike or different in terms of personality. If Astrology is all about determining potential personality traits, should not those two people have exhibited very similar ones during the intervening thirty or forty years?

If this is the case, despite all the other influences that they have been subjected to over the years, then maybe – just maybe – there might be something in it. However, without such evidence I would continue to remain as sceptical as ever!

© John Welford

Titanic and Olympic - were the ships switched?

Everyone knows the story of the sinking of the Titanic in April 1912, but did you know that some people believe that it was not the Titanic that hit the iceberg, but her sister ship, the Olympic?

The two great liners

The White Star Line was a large company that excelled in commissioning and running ocean-going liners, particularly to take advantage of the trans-Atlantic trade that grew during the 19^th century as millions of Europeans sought a new life in the Americas.

In 1907 they commissioned two new liners to be built by Harland and Wolff at Belfast, to be called Olympic and Titanic – all the ships of the White Star Line had names ending in “ic”. These were each to be twice the size of any ship in the existing fleet run by the company, with Olympic weighing in at 45,000 tons and Titanic at 46,000 tons – although a third ship, the Britannnic which entered service as a wartime hospital ship in 1915, would be even larger at 48,000 tons.

Olympic was the first to be completed – in 1910 – and she entered service in April 1911.

The unfortunate Olympic

Olympic did not have a smooth early life. On 20^th September 1911 she hit a Royal Navy ship, HMS Hawke, in the Solent near Southampton. The damage done to the ship was such that she had no choice but to return to Belfast for repairs, where she sat alongside the nearly complete Titanic (see photo).

The damage was so extensive that the shipbuilders now had a real problem – should they finish work on Titanic or switch their attention to Olympic? The White Star Line would clearly lose a considerable amount of money if the much-vaunted entry into service of Titanic had to be delayed, and the prospect of having neither ship afloat was one that they wanted to avoid if at all possible.

Another problem was that the Navy refused to accept blame for the Olympic’s collision, and the insurers were not willing to meet the costs of the repairs until the matter was settled. The White Star Line could see their profits disappearing fast.

Were the ships switched at Belfast?

This is when the intriguing thought emerges of whether the White Star Line performed a clever trick to get themselves out of trouble. Suppose the Titanic was lost at sea – surely there would be nothing to prevent the insurers paying out on that occasion. But suppose that the ship that was actually lost was in fact the already damaged Olympic? White Star would still have a perfect ship to trade with – namely the Titanic.

The plot – if there was one – was therefore to switch the nameplates of the two ships and make a few cosmetic changes so that people would think that the ship that began its maiden voyage on 10^th April 1912 was the Titanic when in fact it was the partially repaired Olympic.

The idea would have been to stage an emergency in mid-Atlantic, safely offload the passengers, then scuttle the ship. White Star would then claim all the insurance money after this undisputed calamity and have a seaworthy ship – namely the real Titanic masquerading as the Olympic – with the prospect of the even larger Britannic to come along in a few years’ time.

As we all know, things didn’t turn out that way. The ship (whichever it was) sailed off into the Atlantic but encountered a real emergency when it hit an iceberg with the loss of more than 1,500 lives.

Could it have happened?

It seems highly unlikely! For one thing, how could the “safe” scuttling of the ship possibly have worked? If the idea was to offload the passengers in mid-ocean, this could only have been done by shuttling them across in lifeboats to rescue ships, given that the lifeboat capacity of the ship was less than half that of the number of people who would have been on board.

There would therefore have had to be other ships reasonably close at hand to accept the offloaded passengers. So would White Star have included other ship’s captains in the plot so that they would have been primed to arrive at a pre-arranged location?

If not, the event would need to have been arranged at a place where there was a reasonable prospect of other shipping being reasonably close by, which presumably must therefore have been further on in the voyage than the point at which the real disaster took place.

 It would also have inadvisable to stage the “accident” at a point where other ships were close enough to witness what was really going on. It would appear that the plotters would really have been trusting to luck to find a suitable spot.

Apart from that, it would not have possible to disguise one ship as another at Belfast without a huge number of people being aware of what was going on. Even years after the disaster, nobody who worked at Belfast ever admitted to being part of a fraud, so the chances are that no fraud took place.

It sounds like an interesting story, but no more than that. Besides, the wreck of the Titanic has since been found on the bed of the Atlantic, and it is abundantly clear that it is the Titanic and not the
Olympic pretending to be the Titanic!

As for the Olympic, she remained in service with White Star until 1935. The ship was already seaworthy before the maiden voyage of Titanic, and was actually making an eastbound crossing at the same time that Titanic was heading west, but the ships were too far apart for Olympic to come to Titanic’s aid.

Had there really been a plot to swindle the insurers, would White Star not have arranged matters so that their two ships, of similar size, were able to keep the whole thing “between themselves”, by “Titanic” coming to “Olympic’s” aid, thus lessening any risk of detection?

In other words, as conspiracy theories go, this one is a non-starter!

© John Welford