Category Archives: High Ham and Somerset

Not the place expected

For the fainthearted . . .

“Why don’t we choose somewhere nice to go for a walk on the way?” The lack of an answer seemed to provide license for a unilateral decision. “I’ll tell you what, we’ll go to Weston-Super-Mare.”

An inward groan. Having said nothing, any objection would be ignored. Weston-Super-Mare? What had we called it in the 1970s? Weston-Super-Mud.

It was hard to remember last being in Weston-Super-Mare? Had it been 1979? Had there been any more recent visit? What might it be like now? We had been to too many English seaside …

My England

For the fainthearted . . .

Sixteen years of living in the village, 1967-1983, probably hardly qualifies it for the description of “home”, but it is where my parents have lived since 1967, and in the absence of anywhere else, it is the place I describe as “home”.

Time was when I might have named the families living in every house in High Ham; well, in the ordinary houses anyway, it was hard to know the people in the big houses, they had little interest in schoolboys on bicycles. Little seemed to change, though it, of …

The celebrations are not over

For the fainthearted . . .

“The Somersetshire people are of large size and strong, but in my opinion are very slow and lazy and are very much given to eating and drinking,” thus wrote William Holland, an irascible priest of the Church of England around about 1797. Somerset people would not have regarded the passing of New Year’s Day as an end to the midwinter celebrations and Holland would have disapproved of much that happened in the county in January of each year, particularly the customs surrounding “wassailing.”

The wassail was a ritual asking God …

Arthur and Galahad

For the fainthearted . . .

A visit to my sister’s home in Belfast brings an encounter with her delightful duo of dogs, Arthur and Galahad. In Northern Ireland, the names probably find little resonance, do children even read such tales now? Growing up in Somerset, neither name would have been spoken without evoking the legends and folk tales with which we grew up.

Glastonbury Tor was Avalon. It was a place with mythical status in childhood; a place where legends began and ended. Cadbury Hill, in the south of the county, might have been an …

Frightened by the primary teachers

For the fainthearted . . .

It is the primary school assembly in the morning, even in the thirtieth year of parish ministry it is still an intimidating experience. The teachers might be of the generation of our own children, but they still have the potential to evoke memories of primary school teachers fifty years ago.

There were two teachers at High Ham primary school, ladies who had devoted their lives trying to impart knowledge to unpromising children in a rural backwater. Miss Rabbage lived across the fields; the roof of her green Austin A35, parked …

The town I knew has gone

For the fainthearted . . .

A photograph on the Wall Street Journal website had a familiar look – it was Glastonbury Tor. Admittedly, it was Glastonbury Tor as the foreground to the orange-tinted Moon that was in the skies last night, but the choice of the Tor by Matt Cardy of Getty Images was presumably intended to create a particular atmosphere around the appearance of the “supermoon” and the eclipse that followed. Supermoons have a straightforward scientific explanation, they are just occasions when the orbit of the Moon brings it closer to the Earth than …