Oil Drum Lane

  This weblog  isn't a diary or a diatribe. Rather, it is mostly  a scrolling collection of notes  on places, real and imagined and the events and people that shaped them. The content wanders, and so do I, but there is a bias to London and its surrounding counties. It is formatted for reading on a phone, so I try to keep the word count down to a 10-15 minute read.    To see if there is anything that interests you, check the 'Contents' index above; all the posts are linked from there.      A note on methodology. I read a lot: books, articles and (thanks to the British Library) academic papers.  If theories conflict, I usually go with the most popular or credible one, as the word count doesn't allow me to detail the alternatives. AI is only used as a glorified search engine, to spot egregious errors and for quick checks on dates, etc.  Why Oil Drum Lane?  The boomers among you might recall the TV comedy 'Steptoe & Son'. ...

The King of the Romans Berkhamsted Castle has a rich history. It was built on the spot where Edgar Aethling gave up the English throne to the Normans, Thomas Becket (probably) enlarged it, Prince Louis of France besieged it, and the Black Prince owned it. By the 17th c. it was derelict and had been plundered for stone. What was left became the first ‘listed’ building in Britain when the builders of the adjacent railway proved an even more potent threat.  It was a proper castle; not like the cramped, desperate redoubts of the Marcher Lords or the later efforts,  constructed for show long after cannons made the old walls redundant,  with stained glass windows and goldfish in the moat,  Berkhamsted Castle Ruins After Louis had been seen off, it passed into the hands of Richard of Cornwall, a character who had popped up in the story of several of my other favourite castles. He was referred to as the King of the Romans. I was intrigued not least because I didn't think Rom...

Would you rather meet the King / Stormzy (delete as applicable) in real life, or at Madame Tussauds? Would you rather glimpse Britain's pre-history in a glass case in a museum, or climb on it?  You can do that with Britain's hillforts, and unlike Stonehenge, they are free and not fenced off.  John Constable said that his famous painting of Stonehenge was intended to capture something in the air that "carries you back to beyond all historical records into the obscurity of a totally unknown period". That is where I wanted to go, and I reckoned that hillforts were a better way of getting there, so  I visited dozens of them before wading through dense archaeology papers in the British Library (did you know that fossilised snail shells were used to date these things!), scaling a mound of local landscape history books and tiptoeing through prehistory nerd websites.  Stonehenge: Constable: 1836  This is a  much-revised version of an earlier post I wrote ...