In my last post, I referred to Pomparles Bridge as ‘legendary’ — and so it is. But while that Pomparles Bridge was in the same location, give or take, as the present-day bridge, they are not the same thing. The visitor, misty-eyed and semi-delirious from the effects of Arthurian tales, nerves tingling with the notion of sighting the Lady of the Lake, will be crushingly disappointed with the reality.
It seems you can’t walk anywhere in the West Country without tripping over a stone circle. I came across this one by the A39, when I was walking out of Glastonbury, in the direction of Street.
Glastonbury Tor shifted from prehistory into the kind of history we now called legend when Caradoc of Llancarfan, a Welsh monk, published his Vita Glidae (‘Life of Gildas’) in the early twelfth century.
I hadn’t heard of Tam Black’s shack until I saw a mention of it in a local newspaper, included in a brief description of a walk from Wendover to Dunsmore and back. There was no context and no precise location given. But the name, and the fact that it was thought worth mentioning, intrigued me. Who was Tam Black and how did he come to have a shack in this part of the Chiltern Hills?
Here is a stretch of leafy road between Wendover and Ellesborough, at the north-eastern edge of the Chilterns, what you might call deep Buckinghamshire. And here on the boundary wall of one of the grand houses along this stretch are a pair of t-shirts, or rather t-shirts converted to banners.
Anne Greene’s luck only began to turn after she was hanged. A maid-servant in the household of Sir Thomas Read in the Oxfordshire village of Duns Tew, her misfortunes began when Sir Thomas’s grandson Jeffrey took a fancy to her.
