Olympic Games

Sun And Shadows On The Linden Walk And Olympic Games Connections

The Olympic Games begin in Rio today – cue views of Copacabana Beach and Corcovado Mountain with its astonishing statue of Christ the Redeemer. Now switch scenes to a small town in rural England, to a meadow in Much Wenlock, and turn back the clock to 1850, for this is where it began – the source and the inspiration for the modern Olympic Movement.

The town’s physician, Dr William Penny Brookes was the man behind the revival of the ancient Athenian games. His objective was clear:

for the promotion of the moral, physical and intellectual improvement of the inhabitants of the town & neighbourhood of Wenlock and especially of the working classes, by the encouragement of out-door recreation, and by the award of prizes annually at public meetings for skill in athletic exercise and proficiency in intellectual and industrial attainments.

He had already started the Agricultural Reading Society and been hard at work raising funds from Shropshire’s gentry to establish a working man’s reading room, while lobbying every famous writer of the day to donate copies of their works to the cause. Much of the library still exists in the town’s archives and includes some heavy-going and esoteric histories of far-flung lands. It is hard to guess the appeal of such books to farm hands and quarrymen after their long day’s labours, but at least they would have had decent light to read by. Brookes was also behind the founding of the town’s gas works.

Wenlock’s Olympian Society grew out of the Agricultural Reading Society. The very first games were held on the town’s race course but in later years took place (as they still do every year) on the field below Windmill Hill, now known as the Gaskell Recreation Ground, or as Penny Brookes himself called it, the Linden Field.

Nor was it any rustic village fete affair. The local MP J M Gaskell provided seating on Windmill Hill to give everyone a fine view, and the event was heralded with much ceremony, the town streets decked out from end to end, a parade of competitors, flag bearers and officials all marching with the local band. From the start, then, pageantry was a key part of the games, lifting people from their humdrum, hardworking existences. And although there were many fun contests and traditional country sports, the athletic events were taken seriously, and attracted competitors from all over the country. Prizes included silver cups and ink stands presented by local worthies and Penny Brookes designed elaborate medals – gold, silver, bronze, and had them made at his own expense.

News of the games spread far and wide, and indeed were spoken of in very high places. In 1890, when the French aristocrat Baron Pierre de Courbetin had been charged with finding ways to improve the fitness of the French Army, he was advised to go and see the Wenlock games. He stayed in Brookes’ house on Wilmore Street during his visit, and what he saw and also learned from Brookes inspired him to found the International Olympic Committee. The IOC held their first games in Athens in 1896, and although Brookes did not live long enough to see the extent of his influence, de Courbetin gave him due recognition:

If the Olympic Games which modern Greece did not know how to establish again is revived today, it is not to a Greek that one is indebted, but to Dr. W P Brookes.

We the people of Much Wenlock are also indebted to Dr. Brookes for his planting of the lime tree avenue alongside the Linden Field where the games took place. As I’ve said before, it is one of the town’s enduring treasures. The trees are over 150 years old, and still in fine form. There is no time of the year when this avenue is not beautiful. In winter it is deeply mysterious, a colonnade to another reality. But whatever the season, there is always a play of light and shadow. And there is windrush in the high canopies, and crow call. And in summer the soporific scents of tiny green lime tree flowers.

Here, then, are a few more views, and so when you see the grand and glamorous opening of the Rio Olympics, give a thought also to this place and the Shropshire doctor, who with the well being of his townspeople in mind, inspired the modern Olympic Movement:

This post was inspired by Paula’s Thursday’s Special theme ‘shadow’. Please visit her blog and join in this week’s challenge.

#2016OlympicGames

Seeking Spring ~ A Walk on Wenlock’s Wild Side

I knew there was only a small window of opportunity. At nine thirty yesterday morning there was sunshine. Go out there at once, I told myself. The way the weather is these days, it might be the last you see of it. Carpe diem and all that.

So seized it I did, and it was certainly warmer to the touch than it has been for many days, and as you can see from the above photo, the ancient, and thus arboreally wise lime trees on the Linden Walk definitely think it is spring. Drifts of green. Blissful.

The dog walkers, too, were out en masse, owners chatting amiably on the Linden Field quite as if it were – well, spring. And despite Thursday’s appalling election results (Scots Nationalists excepted) and the return of a government that treats food banks as something to be proud of, and regards the nation as a resource for unbounded fracking, everyone I met seemed pretty cheerful. I will thus make no further mention of Tory attrition and spoil the moment.

The little green building you can see in the background behind the dog walkers is Much Wenlock’s Bowling Club HQ. It occupies a re-cycled railway carriage, a relic from our erstwhile lovely railway that once ran beside the Linden Walk and, until the 1960s, when the wretched Dr. Beeching axed thousands of miles of Britain’s railways, linked Much Wenlock to the outside world. But enough! Too much negativity already.

I headed off behind the Bowling Green to see what was growing on Windmill Hill. This quest was motivated by Meg at Snippetsandsnaps. In response to an earlier post here, she said she would like to see more of what happens on the old limestone pasture on which the windmill stands. I’d mentioned the wild orchids for one thing, so I thought (given our erratic climate) I’d better go and check if they were flowering yet.

They weren’t. Still too early. But the first thing I spotted were the cowslips, also known in Olde Shropshire as cowslops. The richly eggy coloured clumps were growing here and there. In the past they would have grown in yellow meadowsful all around Much Wenlock. I even remember them. When I was a child, my parents would make a point of driving out from Shrewsbury where we lived, simply to visit them. We’d have picnics amongst them.

Once, too, cowslips were an important resource. In the days before modern farming methods seriously reduced their habitat, Wenlock’s school children would absent themselves from class at the National School in order to help with the annual gathering. The flowers were used to make herbal infusions to combat coughs and bronchitis, and in a town regularly doused in limestone dust from the quarries, bad chests would have been a common problem.

Doubtless, too, the town’s doctor, William Penny Brookes, (he who inspired the modern Olympics and planted the avenue of lime trees that we have just walked along), supported such an activity. He practised for the last fifty years of the 19th century and, as well as being a physician, he was also a highly knowledgeable herbalist, having trained both in medicine in London and herbalism at the renowned University of Padua.

And this was by no means quackery in action as some are wont to call herbal medicine. After all, from where does Big Pharma get so many of its notions if not from trying to concoct synthetic (patentable) analogues of the deemed active chemicals teased from botanical compounds? All of which is to say, we lose our plant heritage at great cost to our future well being, to say nothing of the planet’s well being.

Besides which, flowers can mean fun and festivities. Cowslips were also used to make wine, and to strew the paths of spring brides. Mm. Just think of the air filled with their subtle, sunny scent in times when May was WARM.

And talking of warmth and nuptial pursuits, the next thing I came across while snapping cowslips, was a pair of mating molluscs, also known Cepaea nemoralis (Linnaeus, 1758), Britain’s commonest snails. Spring has certainly made this pair frisky, but I will spare you the more intimate shots, and leave you with their rather pleasing Northamptonshire dialect name of pooties. Canoodling pooties then.

Windmill Hill has more than its open, calcareous pasture. There are wooded flanks to the north and south and here, beneath the trees, I found violets and celandines. You can also see leaves of tiny wild strawberry plants (north of violets), germander speedwell (northeast of the celandine), and sprigs of Dog’s Mercury at the bottom of the shot.

And coming up is Dog’s Mercury (Mercurialis perennis or Boggard Posy) in full flush. This unremarkable looking plant is a member of the spurge family and very toxic, a fact reported in a letter from Shropshire in 1693 and published that year in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 203 VIII. The letter gave a detailed account of how one Mrs. Matthews had gathered, boiled and then fried the herb with bacon for her family’s supper. Two hours later there was much purging and vomiting followed by heavy sleeping. Sadly one of her children died after remaining unconscious for several days. Mr. Matthews, however, reported going to work the next day three hours late, but feeling as if “his Chin had bin all Day in the Fire.” He had therefore been forced keep his hat at his side as he worked, filled with water, so he could keep dipping his chin in it.

This next plant, Arum maculatum, also has toxic characteristics. And it has a host of intriguing country names, some of them certainly alluding to what William Shakespeare referred to in Hamlet as ‘country matters’. For instance we have Lords-and-ladies, Ladies and Gentlemen (Shropshire version), Devils and Angels, Willy Lily, Cows and bulls, Red-hot-poker. Then there are the more curious Jack in the Pulpit, Cuckoo-pint, Fairy Lamps and Shiners. Its hooded sheaths (spathes) do glow in a faintly sinister, not to say priapic fashion in the shadiest spots. When done flowering, and presumably duly fertilised, the sheath collapses in a disturbing manner. In the autumn, though, there are spires of fire-red berries that light up gloomy days.

As to usage, in the times when people still wore lacy ruffs, the arum roots were crushed to make starch, although the processing apparently gave the launderers nasty blisters on their hands. It presumably did not do much for the ruff-wearers’ necks and faces either. So yes, it’s also good to remember the toxic properties of plants along with their more healthful aspects.

And now for something seriously edible, if you like garlic and onions, that is. The Wild Garlic or Ransoms (Allium ursinum) grows in profusion at the foot of Windmill Hill, and especially along the banks of the old railway line. Those who don’t care for the smell will appreciate its vernacular names of Stink Bombs and Stinking Nanny.

But you can certainly cook, or add to salads, both the leaves and the flowers, and their flavour is not as strong as the smell suggests. Excellent wilted in olive oil with pasta, for instance, or in soups – cream of potato and wild garlic say.

This wild garlic photo was taken while the sun was still shining, and as I said at the start, I knew it wasn’t going to last. Even if I hadn’t read the Friday forecast of rain by noon, followed by more rain all day, the green woodpeckers would have warned me. As I headed down the hill and along the old railway line their cries, known as yaffling, dogged my footsteps. It’s interesting how this member of the woodpecker family likes to alert everyone to a coming downpour. In Africa it is the red-chested cuckoo that performs reliable rainbird duty.

Those yafflers were dead right too. As I turned for home, the sky was leaden, and the first drifts of rain were falling through the trees. Bye bye sun! But then the old railway line is a good place to be whatever the weather. It is one of the town’s most popular footpaths, and it is hard to imagine that along it the Great Western steam engines once came rattling into Wenlock – the Olympic special bringing thousands of spectators to the annual Wenlock Olympian Games on the next-door Linden Field; goods trains from South Wales coming to collect limestone from Shadwell Quarry behind Windmill Hill. These days, then, there a trees as well as leaves on the line (NB for those living outside the UK, ‘leaves on the line’ has long been the old British Rail’s excuse for non-arriving trains.)

Finally, I’ll leave you with a few more shots of botanical specimens discovered round Windmill Hill and along the railway line. Clearly the natural world is busy cracking on – full of vim and vigour – even as I shiver in the cold wind, and hang on to my much layered clothing. That’s good to know though – that nature will out, even if, as time goes on, it may not quite do what we expect.

Reference: Richard Mabey Flora Britannica

Forces of Nature

This post was also inspired by Jo’s Monday Walk at restlessjo, a great venue for walkers, whether in body, mind or spirit.

Rambling Tales: My Little Pony, Windmills, Olympian Dreams

For a small community a lot goes on in Much Wenlock. In fact you never do know what you will find even a stone’s throw from the doorstep. So it was that on a recent foray up Wenlock’s Windmill Hill, and for quite another purpose, G and I met up with this astonishing little horse. Given its newness on the planet, I was impressed by its air of stolid self-containment. It did not move an inch as I walked around it snapping photos. I asked it a few questions of course, but it seemed lost in thought. I even felt it might be having an identity crisis: I am a real little horse, aren’t I? Or am I?

Then at last it reached a happy horsey conclusion and went off to do a bit of grazing with the other little ponies. But please do not ask about the man in the next photo. He has the most irritating habit of walking into my shots. Does anyone else have a man who does this? Here, though, he is perhaps adding some sense of scale, a factor drilled into me as important during my student-archaeologist days. And archaeology, not little ponies, was the real reason for this outing to Windmill Hill.

In the background you can see the limestone tower that gives the hill its name. It is a famous local landmark, and only a short walk from our house. In its time, it has been both a watch tower and a windmill. Carved stones from its interior suggest construction dates of 1655-57, but none of the members of the Windmill Trust, the volunteers who look after the monument, has been able to discover quite what the mill would have looked like during its working life.

On the day of our visit a small archaeological dig was taking place beside it to investigate the possibilities of earlier human activity on the site. We went to see how the diggers were getting on, but disappointingly they said they had not found much that was particularly old. There were broken clay pipe stems of course– a feature wherever you turn a spadeful of earth around the town. Clay pipes were an important manufactured product here in the 17th century, and clearly used extensively by the locals as well as being exported.

On finding there had been no great discoveries, we wandered off across the hill. In early and late summer the pasture here is covered in wild flowers typical of a limestone meadow – orchids, cowslips, agrimony, wild thyme, St. John’s Wort, knapweed, drifts of yellow Lady’s Bedstraw, but now the grassland has a tired look, though clearly tasty enough for the ponies.

We scanned the fields all round. Recent lidar remote sensing surveys have revealed the existence of extensive mediaeval remains a few fields away from the windmill, and also the possible outline of a Roman villa. In any event, there would have been much human activity in the area from at least 680 AD when Milburga, the daughter of the Mercian king, Merewahl, became abbess of Much Wenlock Abbey. Her land possessions were extensive. She also later became a saint, renowned for all manner of odd miracles.

But great antiquity apart, the views from the hilltop reveal everyone’s idea of a typical English farming landscape, although it does not come without its adjacent ‘blot’. The ground immediately behind the hill falls away into a bleakly huge quarry with a deep pool of strangely turquoise water.

Now disused, the workings are screened by conifers, and also by this astonishing display of hawthorn berries. Plans to turn the site into a diving school with log cabins seem to have to been dropped.

At the foot of Windmill Hill is the Gaskell Recreation Ground, or Linden Field. Having long been used for village cricket and bowls, it was bequeathed to the people of Much Wenlock in the 1930s by a descendent of the Gaskell family who owned much of Milburga’s former domain. It was here too, from 1850 that the first modern Olympian Games took place every year, attracting athletes from across the country. The man responsible for reviving this prestigious sporting event was the town’s local doctor, William Penny Brookes.

Every year, thousands of visitors would come to watch the games, arriving on the Olympian Special train. The station was conveniently situated beside the field, the bringing of the railway being another of Penny Brookes’ successful projects for the benefit of Much Wenlock. The field was bare of trees in those days, so spectators could sit on Windmill Hill, amphitheatre-style, and have a fine view of track and field events.

Penny Brookes was also a campaigner of national standing. It was he who argued for the introduction of physical exercise into Victorian schools. He even did clinical trials to prove how young bodies grew well as a result of it. His fame spread, and in the 1890 Baron Pierre de Coubertin, charged by the French Government to improve the physique of the French army, came to Wenlock to see Dr. Brookes’ Olympian Games for himself. An elderly Penny Brookes apparently took this opportunity to share his ideas with the younger man, but sadly died four months before the launching of the first international Olympics in Athens in 1896. De Coubertin did, however, pay tribute to the Shropshire doctor’s vision:

” If the Olympic Games that Modern Greece has not yet been able to revive still survives today, it is due, not to a Greek, but to Dr W P Brookes.”

The Much Wenlock Olympian Games still take place on the Linden Field every July, and attract sportsmen and women from around the world. The Olympic Association also acknowledged Much Wenlock’s contribution to the modern movement with the naming of the Wenlock Mascot in the 2012 games.

But now here we are heading homewards, taking the path that runs down edge of the Linden Field, and beside the old railway line. Here William Penny Brookes left another legacy. He planted an avenue of lime trees – the Linden Walk. Many of the trees are around 150 years old and still going strong. The scent of the blossom in summer is transporting, but the walk is beautiful any time of the year. It is one of the town’s many treasures, and accessible to all.

As I stopped to take this photo, a young woman went powering past me, clearly in training for some event. But as you can see, that man is also there again. It is a puzzling phenomenon – how he is ever in my sights.

Jo’s Monday Walk

Flickr Comments

Tish Farrell

Writer on the Edge

Olympic Games

Sun And Shadows On The Linden Walk And Olympic Games Connections

Seeking Spring ~ A Walk on Wenlock’s Wild Side

Rambling Tales: My Little Pony, Windmills, Olympian Dreams