Course and Effect

I have always lived in towns and cities with a common feature of a river running through. This must be more by destiny than on a statistical basis.

There was the lower reaches of the mighty Thames at Abingdon, the Lark through Bury St Edmunds, the natural and man-made courses of the Ancholme at Brigg and the Humber Estuary and River Hull, the latter giving its name to the short version of the otherwise grand sounding Kingston Upon Hull.

I even went away to college in another riverside town, Nottingham on the banks of the Trent. I have, at different periods in my life, paddled, swimmed, fished, boated, canoed and fallen in to these watercourses and many others and have understandably felt a great affinity to and affection for rivers and what goes on around them.

A family outing when I was young often included the thrill and excitement of approaching a hump-backed bridge in the car and that fairground feeling of losing your stomach for a few seconds over the peak before the fast run down the other side. The resounding cries of "wheeeeeeeeeee" did help with the feeling of sickness and weightlessness for that brief moment of perceived flight.

In my late teens I was often a willing passenger in a mates's car or van in an attempt to get all four wheels off the ground on a local bridge crossing and to contribute to the deep scars and ruts in the roadway from the impact of the engine sump and exhaust pipe in the tarmac.

When a young driver myself I was confronted on occasion by the impasse of vehicles on a narrow pack-horse bridge where the right of way was a matter of interpretation, good manners and consideration in favour of the most expensive or faster car first.

The increase in road traffic in terms of volume and axle weight has meant that many historic bridges and crossings have been by-passed with new, wide, flat and boring routes and in some way there has been a detachment of rivers from their previous co-existence with travellers.

A bridge over a river or stream was a place to pause and look down into the waters, throw in a stick and follow it in Pooh Bear concentration to the other side or try to catch a view of the fish or wildfowl in the eddying flow of deeper pools and backwaters.

Blinkered modern motorists may not now be aware of the presence of a watercourse as it is culverted and concealed under a roadway or hidden behind a high parapet wall. The white backed information boards with the river named on them are quickly passed with not so much as a second glance of notice or comment.

That is, of course, until a river dares to impose a threat on our regular journeys and timetables.

This was foremost in my mind last week when, after the melting of the persistent snow on top of the seasonal rainfall , the usually docile River Derwent at Kexby, on the Hull to York road was lapping eagerly upon both verges giving me the sensation of driving along a causeway with a real prospect of being overwhelmed by the turbulent waters.

The Derwent is one of those rivers that maintains a quiet existence for the majority of the year and can be reduced to a mere trickle in drought conditions but yet the residents of many of the towns it runs through have a respect and fear in equal proportions based on the intermittent risk of flooding.

The river has a surprising course from its sources on the south side of the North Yorkshire Moors down to its eventual outfall into the Ouse and out to the North Sea along the Humber. In the pre-Ice Age era the feeder streams took a direct route to the coast discharging at Scalby, north of Scarborough and at Filey to the south. The glacial deposits left after the retreat of the ice blocked the eastern exits and the immoveable force found its own way southwards.

Along its 72 miles and elevation difference of some 250 metres the river has a significant catchment of nearly 800 square miles including the high moors and the hillsides of Cleveland and Hambleton. It is invariably from this large hinterland that tremendous volumes of surface water can be produced on a seasonal basis or, under the climatic changes in more recent years attributed to global warming, in a matter of hours from deluges creating flash flood conditions.

The upland drainage streams include the poetically named Jugger Howe, Black and Troutdale Becks through the narrow Forge Valley before the flatter lowland areas are reached.  Malton, Stamford Bridge, Sutton upon Derwent and Bubwith  all suffer from  flooding on a regular basis although modern relief measures including a Sea Cut and overflow areas to fields that have been engineered and acquired to divert larger volumes from these vulnerable settlements.

Water from the Derwent is used to supply the larger regional cities including Hull and Leeds because of its good quality as well as use for irrigation, leisure and sporting activities. The Roman occupation of the area will have been influenced by the previous navigability of the Derwent and there are civil engineering works from that period to improve its military and commercial use in conjunction with the major garrison at York.

Water and Corn Mills developed along the banks of the river and entrepreneurs of the 18th Century built Canals with locks, turnpikes and further wharfs and warehouses to link in with the natural course. Maintaining an artificial water level to allow the passage of barges and vessels led to conflict with adjoining landowners who complained of more frequent overwhelming and flooding ruining their crops and livelihoods. The halcyon days of steam Railways soon took away any meaningful freight trade previously of corn downstream and with return loads of coal. The Derwent became more of a recreational river but vested interests produced legal wrangles over Rights of Navigation in the 1930's which persist to the present day.

On this weeks drive through Kexby the water level has receded slightly. In the meadow on the south side of the road the rough looking horse has been able to find dry ground after a few occasions on which I have seen it stranded, dejectedly on a small divot of land patiently waiting for a path to open up with a parting of the flood waters.

The old stone bridge, now relegated to a role as a private driveway to a farmhouse, hearkens back to the days when horse drawn coaches and wagons struggled over its incline and the infamous highwayman, Dick Turpin may have paused a while to skim stones fancying his chances of catching a good prize on the York Turnpike.

Men and their Canoes

A 23 foot long through lounge may have been top of the wish list for aspiring homeowners in the 1970's but for my Father it afforded an opportunity to build a canoe in the rear 11 feet whilst still retaining the front 12 feet, with settee, pouffe, coffee table and TV aerial socket for family use.

My Mother may have agreed to the idea prior to the commencement of the project but had she known that canoe launch day did not actually take place for another 2 years she may have had a different view.

The canoe was in kit form through a company called Ottersports and arrived in a very large box like an oversized Airfix model.

The particular project was entirely in wood which must have been marine ply or laminated .

The parts forming the hull had to be glued, taped and carefully pinned in position and some evenings and some weekends when not attending to family responsibilities my Father did a little bit more work on the single seater.

On finer days the work took place on the patio with the superstructure, bows and cockpit taking shape al fresco.

The lounge carpet held up well on inclement working days.

My parents, then in their early forties , had "Keeping fit Commando Style" on cassette and the same rear section of the lounge doubled up as a gym in early morning sessions . This was apt as many of the exercises around the boat assembly line took on the appearance of training for an amphibious assault.

Progress with the wooden torpedo was slow and my Mother took us kids off for a week after matrimonial relations became strained over the prolonged project.

I often thought that the all-pervading smell of varnish in the later stages may have contributed to behaviour otherwise totally out of character for a loving couple.

It was a very proud day for my Father when the completed canoe was loaded onto the VW roofrack as part of the mass transit that was the Thomson's going on holiday- estate car, boat, caravan, 5 children, overflow tents and chemical toilet, in fact all the trappings.

On it's maiden voyage what a machine the canoe was.

The steeply raked hull made for a very fast speed through the Scottish Loch but on the downside this was accompanied by considerable instability. It had the sensation of riding  white water rapis but in fact the surface of the Loch was nothing but a smooth mirror of water.

I seem to remember initial enthusiasm from us kids for a paddle but second requests were not forthcoming and we busied ourselves with looking for fish, bleached sheeps' bones and following severed fishing lines to find abandoned spinners and lures stuck in the rocky floor of the shallows of the Loch.

I must have put 'Experienced with watersports' on my CV as I soon found myself being pushed headfirst into a fibre glass canoe at my Scout Troop Hut in order to resin together the moulded hull and deck. It was a very unpleasant task indeed and only bearable for a few minutes and probably outlawed now in all but the illegal sweat-shops.

Was it my experience or as I suspect that I was undersized for my age and ideally suited to the fume laden , runny eyes and wheezy chest operation in the narrow confines only intended for the canoeists legs.

A bit later on my Father acquired another canoe - an open deck Canadian version for expeditions up river but it was just too heavy to be even lifted on and off a roof rack and I am not sure now that it ever had a christening under our ownership.

I am still fascinated by all things canoe and recently marvelled at a metal hulled Grumman canoe on the canal at North Frodingham. It was a  flat bottomed tourer in which the elderly owner regularly took his grandchildren and multiple dogs up river for hours on end with no jeopardy or instability even with an unruly and inquisitive crew.

I have some intentions to one day canoe the full navigable length of the River Hull from the Tidal Barrier to its deep set source in the hinterland.

My wife has expressed some concerns but it's not as if I'm going to disappear off the coast of Hartlepool and turn up in Panama.....is it.

There is to my knowledge no direct route from the Humber Bank Horsewash to South America - or is it there to be discovered..........?

Why were 58 LIves Lost?

As a result of the tragic loss of deep sea trawlers and their crews, brought into sharp focus by the loss of three Hull based trawlers, St Romanus, Kingston Peridot and Ross Cleveland all within just 36 days with the loss of 58 Lives in 1968,  the President of the Board of Trade appointed a Committee to examine the major factors affecting their safety and to make recommendations.

The inquiry revealed that the standardised mortality ratio of fishermen for accidents at work for the years 1959-63 was 1726, seventeen times that for the male population as a whole.

In the age-group 15-44 a fisherman is twenty times more likely to die as a result of an accident at work than all men in other occupations.

The most common cause of death was by losses overboard and deckmen were specially at risk. Deaths were more common on distant water trawlers than others, probably because they operated in more dangerous waters.

Accidents and fatalities on stern trawlers were less common than on side trawlers.

It was not just the perils of the occupation in distant waters that exposed fishermen to such life threatening and life changing risks.

Fishermen had a high mortality from cancer of the lung and stomach, hypertension and bronchitis, and suffered unduly from peptic ulcer and other gastrointestinal illnesses.

Skin disease was about twice as common among fishermen as among all men in the general population and included especially sea water boils and folliculitis, the latter from exposure to chemicals, oils and such things as coal tar.

The Committee recommend the continued operation of a support ship including medical staff off the main fishing grounds of Iceland and it would be an advantage if support ships could be organised on an international basis. 

The Committee noted the poor recording of accidents and recommended that comprehensive and detailed statistics should be sought if accidents were to be prevented and progress in improving standards was to be measured.

With regard to measures to improve the personal safety of deckmen, the main risk occupation on board a trawling operation ,the Committee suggest an investigation of "the ergonomics of human locomotion in an oscillatory and slippery environment". Research should be undertaken with the object of designing a safer layout for the cables that ran out the nets on deck and on the guarding of warps running near working areas. The layout should ensure that men and warps were kept apart. Also recommended were a safer design of towing block, preferably an automatic one, and improvements to the operation and guarding of otter boards (used to spread out the net) and the winch. 

The Board of Trade was to seek powers to lay down statutory requirements on the design, testing and periodic inspection of trawler equipment and gear. 

Research should continue in the effort to produce new and improved working clothing and the Committee recommended that owners should meet the cost and ensure that it was worn. Survival clothing should be supplied in life rafts and crew members should have warm clothing available at all times. 

The Committee were convinced by their own observations, supported by medical experts, and by what was heard from ordinary crew members, that fatigue was a major factor affecting the accident rate on deep sea trawlers. It was recommended, therefore, that the Government should seek powers to lay down statutory requirements that the crew of distant water trawlers receive minimum continuous rest periods on the fishing grounds of at least 6 hours, followed by periods of duty of not more than twice the rest period, and, except in emergency, of not more than 16 hours.

For the crews of near and middle water trawlers there should be at least 6 hours' continuous rest every 24 hours on the fishing grounds. For boys under the age of 17 years, referred to as Deckie-Learners , minimum rest periods of 12 hours per day were recommended.

A minimum of 84 hours' shore leave between voyages was recommended for distant water trawlers and 60 hours for near and middle water trawlers who spent 10 days or more at sea. This gave rise to the name given to trawler crews on their days back on shore as the “Three Day Millionnaires”.

Although the Committee doubted that the common method of payment based on volumes of catch had a major direct effect on fatigue and accident rates at sea, it was suggested that it may have had undesirable effects. It was recommended, therefore, that the present importance of poundage payments was progressively reduced, particularly in the distant water fleet.  Many groups of ship owners ran annual competitions for best performing trawler Skipper such as the Silver Cod amongst the Hull fleet which was prestigious in reputation and cash reward. Many rules and practices designed to safeguard crews would be overlooked in the pursuit for the ultimate accolade of best trawler.

Other recommendations on safety include advice on radio-communications, search and rescue, the design and construction of trawlers, training, management and industrial relations. 

An occupational health service for fishermen would reduce the number of men who were taken ill at sea and have to be landed at ports abroad for medical treatment. There would also be savings in the costs of medical treatment of trawlermen landed abroad. It was recommended that medical services to trawlermen should be extended to all ports and should be increased in scope. 

New entrants to the industry and all men who had been off work owing to sickness or injury should be examined before they were allowed to go to sea. There should be regular examination of older men. The examinations should be thorough and should at least include chest X-ray and an electrocardiograph examination.

There should be full-time medical officers at the larger ports. 

Finally, the Committee recommend the representation of both sides of the industry on joint safety committees in the main ports, and the setting up of a National Trawler Health and Safety Committee was suggested to advise Government departments and the industry on the major factors affecting health and safety in the deep sea fishing fleet. 

The implementation of these measures will have saved countless fishermen from an unnecessary death or injury and ensured that for the few remaining years of deep sea trawling as a viable industry the hard working crews would be able to return to Port and their loved ones.

(Source; HM Government.1968 Enquiry. Record Number : 19702700905 Publisher : London: H.M. Stationery Office)

Chapeau

Was it a subconcious and collective decision by the male population of the world to go outside and about their business without a hat?

The whole thought process behind this momentous culture and fashion change must have started somewhere and with one individual because it appeared to have taken place overnight.

When was that momentous day?

Well, certainly towards the end of the decade that was the 1950's. In the preceeding period, in fact going back centuries, the wearing of a hat was a defining thing about your social status, affleunce, influence and intelligence.

I was fascinated to read about the passing of a Law in England in 1571 which made it compulsory and under the sanction of a fine or other equally draconian penalty for those over the age of 6 to wear a hat on Sundays and on National Holidays.

What hat to wear was also dictated to a large extent by your position in the hierarchy of the society of that period.

Those of noble or gentlemanly standing could afford and were expected to wear a real hat, something to set them apart from the masses. At the other end of the social scale would be the impoverished and those still in poverty but fortunate enough to be bound in servitude or an apprenticeship. Their headgear usually comprised a basic wool or wool/silk mix flat cap, a bit like a Tam o'shanter.

The imposition of such a law may have been primarily to boost a fledgling, emerging but still very much a cottage based textile industry . Lobbying by interested parties with vested interests may not have changed much over subsequent centuries on the basis of the success of the Elizabethan wool mix sales drive and forerunner of the 'Buy English' campaign.

Whatever the background of a person in 16th Century England it was very rare to come across anyone bareheaded. It may have been considered in the utmost bad taste and of poor culture to show forehead, crown, a head of lice infested hair , ringworm ravaged patches or just a plain bald pate.

The hat served as a symbol of respect and was also a means to express support for or against a particular idea or movement. In the former use the taking off, or doffing of a hat was expected in the company of your betters and elders. The throwing up of a hat was the simplest method of showing agreement and sympathy for a cause.

Phrases have persisted in the English language from the halcyon days of hat wearing. If a person of lower class was in need of alms, sustenance or just a favour then the practice of approaching a potential benefactor involved holding your hat in reverence as in 'cap in hand'.

Whilst citizens were compelled to wear a hat it was not a reason for rebellion or protest. The type of hat imposed on the wearer soon became established as a form of social identification, a badge to be proudly worn to show where you were from and that you were happy to remain firmly entrenched there with no real prospects or inclination to better yourself.

Fast foward a few centuries and hat wearing was heavily influenced in the 1930's and 1940's by the role models of the Big Screen. What better way to emulate the matinee idols of the time than mimicking them in their choice of hat and also their style of wearing it, tipped back as Bogart, tipped forward as Alan Ladd, askew as Cary Grant, optimistic and hopeful as James Stewart.

The other essential accessory for any hat was of course a cigarette with the glow of the tip made cool and chic under the brow of a homburg or fedora.

Any photograph of a streetscene or social gathering in the 1950's, anywhere in the western world emphasised the popularity of hats amongst the male population.

What appears to have sounded the death knell for hat wearing was the decade of the 1960's, a time of big expansive hair, expressions of individualism in huge gatherings, protests about everything and nothing and the real beginnings of social equality. Being upwardly mobile and not ashamed to admit it meant that the symbol of oppression and social stereotyping, deep set in the psyche of the male population just had to be left at home on the hat stand or relegated to the children's dressing up box.

My Grandfather, Dick was of that generation of not being properly dressed without his hat and was, to my fond recollections the last of a long line of my family and ancestry to maintain the trend and fashion on a daily and not just high day and holy day basis. My own Father went through a hat stage but then again that was part of the uniform of a Scout and followed by National Service.

Hat wearing today has come around full circle from the 16th Century but in a more sinister guise. The popular choice by far is the baseball cap but unfortunately this has become more a symbol of an underclass and as a badge of honour attracting unwanted attention and perpetuating a poor representation of those who wear them by the media. In the making of snap judgements about an individual, which is a trait of the less trusting in our society, the baseball cap immediately differentiates and condemns the wearer even though the motivation to be so attired is more of a fashion than any intentional social statement.

Myself and hats?

I attribute my bald head on the poor conditions imposed on my scalp by many years in my youth of the compulsory wearing of cub scout caps and, later, scout berets. I still live in hope of getting a phone call from a firm of lawyers who can guide me through the process of suing for loss of hair and opportunity on a no win, no fee basis.

A Sheltered Life

Elizabeth Mainwaring (pronounced Mannering) was the wife of George, the Captain of the fictional Home Guard of Walmington on Sea as depicted in the 1968 to 1977 comedy classic- Dad’s Army. 

For all of the long running and still repeated episodes Elizabeth remained as an unseen character at the end of a phone conversation, heard moving about upstairs at her home, at best as a vague shadow or in the bulging shape of someone on the top bunk in the bomb shelter. 

Her influence over her husband and as a consequence his subsequent moods, attitudes and behaviour in relation to the members of the Platoon was nevertheless tangible and an important undercurrent to the adventures and antics of the principal characters. 

The writers, Perry and Croft did invent a back story for Elizabeth to give her depth and as an explanation for some of her later unconventional or illogical outbursts and acts. 

These regularly ran within the main scripted dialogues.

For example, Captain Mainwaring surprised everyone in his ability to play the bagpipes which he attributed to spending his honeymoon on a remote Scottish Island where there was nothing else to do. 

In conversation with the haughty and foppish Sergeant Wilson, Mainwaring tells him about his wife’s fondness for silent movies but only because she was so shocked to hear a character on a film speak a line that she refused to return to any cinema. 

Her regular criticism of George is attributed to a privileged fictional upbringing as the daughter of a Suffragan Bishop and that she and her family believe that she married below her own social standing.

George is very hard done by as he has attained the heady heights for a provincial town of Bank Manager through working hard at his education and banking exams. He does have her best interests at heart however and strives to provide goods and services even though these sometimes go against his own morals and sense of citizenship, especially in wartime. 

This is particularly evident in his turning a blind eye to contraband from the black marketeer spiv Private Walker or gifts such as an extra portion of sausages or offal from the good natured Corporal Jones, the town butcher. 

He is also protective of Elizabeth in saying that she had led a sheltered life in not even trying tomato sauce before she met him and a fondness shows through in his referring to her as the little woman and alluding to a blissful married life. 

His selflessness is to be admired as Elizabeth’s reclusive nature will have impeded any upward mobility that George may have hoped for within the hierarchy of the Bank at a time when socialising and hospitality were an essential part of getting ahead in commerce. The actuality of his domestic situation will have been behind his complete lack of hesitation in putting himself forward, uncharacteristically pushily, as leader of the Local Defence Volunteers, or as they became known, the Home Guard. 

Mrs Mainwaring’s persona is achieved, in her very obvious absence, by clever writing by which we assume that she is a larger than life woman ( described as being a bit bigger in physical dimensions that the effervescent Mrs Fox- a friend of Jonesy), a bit handy with her fists with George suffering a black eye in a hushed up domestic incident and always making an excuse on the grounds of health or fear of being bombed so as not to participate in the social functions of the platoon family.

One visualisation, conjured up in my mind, of the mysterious Elizabeth is of her in a siren suit, a sort of one piece flight or boiler suit so much trademark attire of Winston Churchill when out and about visiting his blitz affected countrymen and women. Unfortunately this produces the startling image of a character part Michelin Man and part Gas Engineer and hardly flattering.

Jokes at her expense are regularly inserted into the dialogue such as her not having left the house at 23 Lime Crescent,  “since Munich” or when George, excited at having obtained some scarce cheese rang Elizabeth to say that he might have a surprise for her that evening. This double entendre meant that he ended up eating the delicacy with Sergeant Wilson in the Vicar’s Office. 

Gradually we come to the realisation that she is always to be an elusive figure but then are shocked, as is George,  by revelations such as her playing the role of Lady Godiva on horseback riding through Walmington on Sea to raise funds for a Spitfire fighter plane. 

It is not all one way traffic in terms of who obviously wears the trousers in the Mainwaring household as in one series episode George has a platonic tea room and station platform liaison with one of the new female recruits to the platoon but is mindful of his married status and upholding his position of responsibility in the bank and town. 

There is an underlying melancholy to the relationship between George and Elizabeth but it works so very well in the cleverly woven story lines and characterisations that have made Dad’s Army such a loved bit of British television. 

The Leaving of Eden

This island of ours, Britain, is a small land mass.

There cannot be a square foot of its soil on which no soul has trodden over the millenia.

Imagine this scenario. You buy a house and look out over the back garden.

You might wonder, in an idle moment, about its history or past land use but in the majority of cases not much thought is given to this theme.

It is different when you purchase something with a designated Ancient Monument within your boundaries.

This was the case just this week when I was asked to look around an old farmhouse close to the North Sea coast of Yorkshire.

The Estate Agents were understandably vague in their sales details about the existence in the grounds of the site of a deserted Medieval Village but then again some folk are a bit wary and suspicious of the thought of long lost souls on their doorstep.

On the adjoining paddock there is nothing really to see apart from a few lumpy bits of earth and a regular arrangement of trench type excavations but in the context of a nicely elevated site, proximity to a source of fresh water and an abundance of natural resources who would not think that this specific location would be an ideal place to make a home and a living?

A few country dwellers around the time of the Domesday Survey obviously held the same opinion as a settlement existed at Southorpe just to the south west of the town of Hornsea around that time and evidently thrived for some centuries after that.

By the year 1374 there was reported to be a population of 60 persons of which 28 were of sufficient personal means to be liable for an early form of taxation- the Poll Tax.

The land was obviously capable of providing a livelihood in what must have been a fairly precarious existence and all crammed in to a life expectancy not beyond 30 or so years.

This Deserted Medieval village (DMV)  has been the subject of archaeological and scientific study in the modern era being regarded by the academic community as a well preserved example but still with considerable evidence of an ordinary working life yet to be investigated.

Nothing much has been imposed on that environment to disturb the wealth of information and insight concealed within those earthworks.

The house adjacent to the undulating pasture has been part of a larger agricultural estate for decades and the land  kept , as though in thoughtful consideration, as pasture.

In fact the only alien structure in that landscape is a lozenge shaped concrete pill box from the second world war civil defence programme.

A series of investigations in the near past identified a small group of houses, gardens, yards, streets, paddock, village green, a manor house and church all of which were fundamental to a God fearing community devoted primarily to survival through agriculture.

So what contributed to the decision of the occupants, en masse ,or at least in the majority to abandon Southorpe village some time around 1600?

Those villagers were not alone in making that sort of life changing thought process.

Across the UK there are over 2000 deserted Medieval Villages and the reasons for leaving are almost as numerous.

Most cited is the decimation of human life by the ravages of the Black Death in the 14th Century but other documented cases suggest peculiarly local or regional circumstances at play.

The whims of a powerful landowner in handing over a village to sheep pasture often resulted in depopulation.

Environmental changes could not be ruled out as although we regard Climate Change as a modern phenomena there were crop and livestock failures at other periods in history from volcanic eruptions, mini ice ages and heat waves, drought and flood.

In the situation of Southorpe Village there may have been a disastrous decline in the potability of the freshwater supply of the adjacent freshwater Mere or an inundation affecting the grazing and cultivation of the lower lying marshland.

Fluctuations in the ground water levels or water table could cause bore holes and wells to run dry therefore depriving villages of one of the prime resources for habitation.

The abandonment of any place of livelihood will not have been an impulsive decision, being more of a grinding down of the residents with variable determination and means to tough out any threats.

Financial burdens will have been a contributing factor through the imposition of lay subsidies, poll and hearth taxes and pressure exerted by the landed classes with Manorial Rights.

The Civil War in England in the 17th Century saw a few villages burnt to the ground by either of the protagonists for strategic reasons withe their populations distributed elsewhere locally.

Villages which had, for example, relied upon the trade and patronage of Medieval religious pilgrims could become discredited by rumour or falsehoods of miracles and experience a catastrophic decline in fortunes.

The rise in the attraction of a neighbouring settlement could also sound the death knell for a previously thriving one.

The Domesday roll call could conceivably have been misleading in its recording of a local population as although a monetary value was given to a certain location this could have been concentrated on a cluster of farmsteads and buildings giving the impression of a larger cluster of population where none existed.

 A very specific example of the desertion of a village is from another location in East Yorkshire when in the 17th Century a popular Preacher took with him to America the majority of his parishioners. In reality they could probably be counted on one or more hands but still represented a good proportion of the village-folk.

So, in the case of Southorpe we may not ever know the motivation to vacate what even today was clearly a bit of a garden of Eden.

Grow Your Own

The upsurge in interest in growing your own produce is an inevitable consequence of increasing mis-trust and suspicion about where our food comes from.

What better way to be absolutely sure about the source of our basic foodstuffs than to plant, nurture and harvest them ourselves.

It is not a case of extreme measures as depicted in the comfortable middle class ways of The Good Life. Indeed in all of my years I do not recall ever having seen anyone turning their residential gardens over to intensive horticulture.

It was quite different back in the inter-war and early post war periods when householders were expected to keep a few chickens, ducks, geese and the odd pig at the bottom of the garden amongst a well tended and seasonally productive vegetable plot.

Newer housing developments with their postage stamp sized gardens, whilst not conducive to agriculture ,actually prohibited the keeping of livestock with restrictive covenants in the title deeds. The ethics behind growing your own did not sit easily with the chattering classes of the suburban estates. Such covenants were probably prudent and in the public interest to prevent neighbourly conflict, petty pilfering and a proliferation of vermin who are inevitably attracted to such land use.

In response to concerns over the provenance of our food there has been a increase in the allocation of land for allotments and I know of very large and very recently established areas on the edge of two large towns in my home area. These have been well received and have rapidly reached full occupancy and with a fiercely contested waiting list, to rival the best educational institutions.

The new allotments are well managed with a standardised size and style of permitted shed on each plot and good levels of security within a stout and tall perimeter fence. There are controls prohibiting fires, hours of attendance and control of substances, biological or not.

In the past, the allotment served as a recreational outlet and a refuge for the men folk. The images of old gents sat snoozing or chatting collectively or perhaps smoking a pipe or Capstan non-filters are familiar and comforting. It was only the arrival of the youngest member of the family to fetch their dad or grandfather for his tea back home that caused the disbandment of many a session down at the plot.

The new style allotment has become the pursuit of the upwardly mobile families with everyone mucking in to take on the mundane tasks of clearance, preparation of the soil for planting and overseeing the process through to food on the table. There are the stalwarts of home-grown produce in durable spuds, carrots, turnips and onions, the spring vegetables  for salads and a few ambitious attempts, micro-climate permitting to cultivate grape vines, quinoa, passion and citrus fruits.

The original social movement behind allotments was to provide fresh air, exercise and a means of supplementing the diet of the working classes. Land was usually leased by a Local Association from the Town Council, placed in perpetuity for such use by a generous philanthropist or just permitted on land holdings of the railway companies or industrial sites. It was a cultural thing. There were intense rivalries for best marrows, root veg or soft fruits and the Association Annual Show would be a highlight of the social calendar for many.

The hard working ethic required for the manual labour of the day job continued in the tending of the allotment. The decline of traditional industries and working practices impacted on the numbers of those willing and able to commit to home grown duties.

Pressure to provide places for a rapidly increasing population to live also saw many parcels of former growing land disappear under roads and housing estates. What may have once been an allotment on the very edge of town found itself surrounded, overrun and surrendering to urban expansion.

Cheap and plentiful food on the supermarket and hypermarket shelves was a deterrent to growing your own. It was conceivable that a small crop of home grown carrots, based on hours tended and effort expended could be very expensive indeed.

Food scares and scandals in recent years have shaken the confidence of the public in the food supply industries and this has been the catalyst for the renewed interest in small scale cultivation.

A militancy has also developed in the larger cities and towns by individuals or groups to take over vacant or derelict land for production on a co-operative and social venture basis. In almost guerrilla actions there have been raids and seed scatterings on dormant development land, potato planting on council owned holdings, ploughing and planting on traffic islands , verges and motorway embankments.

The mass action in some urban areas has been accepted by the authorities and what were in the first instance aggressive land grabs have been put on a formal basis with short term leases and agreements. Growing Clubs have taken root with members paying a subscription fee in addition to participating in organised and structured working parties which entitles them to a proportionate share of the harvest.

A few random plantings have taken place with anyone encouraged to help themselves. The natural path of progress from the early green shoots of a public awareness of what can be grown. There is a renewed momentum for city farms and larger enterprises including spin-offs for education in diets, variations in menus and to nurture the resurgence in all things cooking. It is a return to the good life.