Category Archives: High Ham and Somerset

Christmas treats

For the fainthearted . . .

“I was feeling hungry, so I had a bar of Turkish Delight.” The lady’s face beamed with a look of guilty pleasure.

“Do you remember when we only had Turkish Delight at Christmastime? It came in wooden boxes and was coated in sugar and we were only allowed one piece each.”

“I do. And there were dates, boxes of dates. We only had those at Christmas.”

The dates were easy to remember, round-ended boxes containing two rows of the fruit, with a thin two-pronged fork for taking them from …

Pike carriers

For the fainthearted . . .

“We were on opposing sides in the Civil War,” laughed a local man. It seems his family had supported the Crown, whilst our family were Commonwealth people. Cavaliers versus Roundheads: ours had not seemed the sort of family who would support the beheading of a king, but which family did?

An uncle confirmed the tradition of the two families having stood on opposite sides at the Battle of Langport in 1645, “but we would have been the sort of people who carried the pikes,” he added. It seemed a much …

Arthur’s place

For the fainthearted . . .

There were two hills that might have been climbed, Camelot or Avalon; the former was chosen. Whatever the road signs might say about the village being South Cadbury, the house names declared this place to be the seat of the last British king, the man who held back the Saxon invaders, the man who was the stuff of legends.

Rain and autumn leaves had mixed to make the path a muddy and slippery ascent, but the bright morning meant the car park was filled. Wise people wore stout boots and …

Real life stories

For the fainthearted . . .

“To tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.” It wasn’t just an oath in court, it was what was required of her pupils by our schoolteacher. Stories must be told without exaggeration and without embellishment; any suspicion of distortion or invention would have met with a stern rebuke. Our teacher lived in our small village, she knew our families, she knew our community, she knew our ways; to have told an untruth would have been been silliness. Veracity was not virtuous, it was a wisely practical …

More a web than a tree

For the fainthearted . . .

“Where are you from?” asked the man.

“Here, this parish; my family are Crossmans of Pibsbury.”

“Not another one!” he exclaimed.

Had he lived in the Nineteenth Century, he would have greater cause to comment on the frequency with which he encountered family members. Maureen Pittard, of Eli’s, the Rose and Crown pub in Huish Episcopi, (who is a fourth cousin, our mutual forebear being Thomas Crossman of Ham Down), has an extraordinary obituary of Harriet Crossman, our great-great-great grandmother.

HUISH EPISCOPI

A REMARKABLE FAMILY The interment of the late

…

Floating on land

For the fainthearted . . .

To a schoolboy, the pumping stations seemed like battleships in hostile waters, protecting the farms and the villages against the rising floods. They seemed always there; although a second thought about the buildings would have told even someone who knew nothing of architecture or engineering that they were recent arrivals on the scene. A government website says they were built in the 1960s and that there are twenty-one pumping stations in Somerset. Prosaic in appearance, the grey concrete and steel adding to the childhood impression of their being like naval …