Maiden Castle and Stonehenge

On the way back from Dorset we decided to stop off at Maiden Castle. which is one of the largest and most complex Iron Age hillforts in Europe. The sheer scale of the earthworks and defensive ditches is huge, apparently you can get 50 football pitches inside the walls, however finding a photograph that looks anything other than a grassy mound proved impossible. Maiden Castle’s earthworks are thought to date from around 600 BCE, although the site was first occupied in the Neolithic period around 6000 years ago.

Foundations of Roman Temple, Maiden Castle

When the Romans overran Maiden Castle in AD 43 they moved the local tribespeople to a new town Durnovaria, on the site of modern Dorchester, where they could keep an eye on them. However being the practical folk they were they built a temple in the castle grounds absorbing the Celtic holy site and gods into their own portfolio brand of paganism. Maiden Castle is just two miles south of Dorchester and free to explore.

Crossing over the county line into Wiltshire we stopped off at Stonehenge before heading for home. For my money Stonehenge is one of the most marvelous ancient sites in the world. When you consider the design and engineering that went into the construction it’s far more impressive than say the Pyramids (I’m not knocking them. but pyramids are simple structures to build) and all this was created by people with stone tools.

Stonehenge

Before we visited the stone circle we had a bite to eat at the snack bar, which used to be really good. Unfortunately it’s been taken over by Digby Trout restaurants, so the food is now a bit homogenized and pricey. We also had some guests.

Jackdaw

who came looking for crumbs.

Starling

The stone circle was packed with coach parties of American and Japanese tourists from London, but that didn’t put off this fellow from enjoying a strut.

Rook Stonehenge

As English Heritage members we have free access to Stonehenge, normal admission is £7.80.

Tags: Dorset, Maiden Castle, Sonehenge, travel, Wiltshire

Weymouth Ho – A Bit of Victoriana, a Bit of Art Deco and Some Old Bangers

After leaving Abbotsbury it was a short drive to the seaside town of Weymouth where we were booked into the Seafront Premier Inn (Lodmoor Country Park). Weymouth became a fashionable tourist resort when the Duke of Gloucester built a residence there in 1780 and his cousin George III spent several holidays in the town. A welcome shower and a change of clothes were followed by a stroll along the seafront into the town centre with its Georgian and Regency terraces.

One Art Deco building you won’t see Poirot entering.

On the way we passed this Art Deco building that houses a Chinese restaurant upstairs and an amusement arcade below. We happily wasted a few coppers trying to dislodge the piles of coins in the machines before venturing further. There are two war memorials on the sea front, one to the men of the town and the other to the ANZAC forces that passed through Weymouth between the evacuation of Gallipoli and being sent to the Western Front and Palestine during the Great War. During the Second World War over 500,000 allied troops departed Weymouth for the beaches of Normandy.

There is also a very fine clock tower.

Weymouth Clock Tower

A local subscription raised the funds for the clock tower back in 1887 to mark the Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria. So as the day was drawing in we headed back to the Premier Inn for the night.

The following morning the car park was filling up with classic cars.

Classic Riley

It was the start point of the  Weymouth Vehicle Preservation Society’s Dorset Tour. There were some really exquisite vehicles on show, including, Jaguars, Rileys, Saabs, MGs and even a Ford Capri and an Austin Allegro!

Classic Jag

I liked this Wolseley

Wolseley

It reminded me of the police cars that I used to see on TV cop shows back in the 1960, sadly I could not find a suitable clip but this Robbie Coltraine spoof does the trick

Tags: art deco, classic cars, Dorset, travel, Weymoth, Wolseleys

Swanning Around in Dorset

Intending to take full advantage of the glorious weather forecast for the weekend, we packed the car and set off for the Dorset coast on Saturday morning. Windows down with a bit of Headcat, Imelda May and Ian Drury on the stereo we made good time around the M25, boggling at the tree skimming approach of a BA 747 on its way into Heathrow, before we hit the M3 on our way south.

Our destination was the town of Abbotsbury and it’s famous swannery.

The Swans at Abbotsbury

The swannery is home to a huge colony of nesting mute swans (Britain’s only resident species of swan) and was established by the Benedictine monks of the local St Peter’s Monastery, in the 1140s. Don’t get any ideas about the monks thinking the swans were pretty, they were on the menu. In fact because they spent a lot of time on the water and the flesh of the young birds tasted a bit fishy, they could be by the twisted logic of medieval theological thinking be counted as fish and eaten of Fridays. It reminds of the scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail where Carol Cleveland confesses to being a witch when she weighs the same as a duck.

After the dissolution of the monasteries in 1539 the swannery passed into the hands of the Ilchester family and to this day the swans here are some of the few in the UK’s open waters that do not belong to the Queen.

At this time of year the swans are busy breeding.

Mute Swan Egg

These soon become these.

Mute Swan Cygnet

And before too long they are in the water with mum and dad,

Two day old cygnets

looking for eel grass and other delicacies.

The swans are not the only creatures with family I saw this little fellow in the marshland.

Moorhen chick

And there were plenty of these little cuties on the pasture.

Where’s Baa Baa Ra?

And not all of the swans are mute, there are a few Australian immigrants.

Feral Black Swan, an ornamental breed gone wild.

And then there are always folk on the lookout for a free meal

A Rook discovers there is such a thing as a free lunch, so long as you know where to eat

About a ten minute walk from the Swannery is Abbotsbury Children’s Farm, it’s based around Abbotsbury’s old tithe barn that the monks built-in the  1390s. The price of admission was included in out Abbotsbury Passport (£11.50 adult, £8.50 under 16s) aside from some kind of pirate activity centre for the younger children, there were plenty of animals to see, including ponies, pigs, chickens,

Cock a doodle doo

alpacas, guinea pigs, rabbits, tortoises, goats, sheep and ducks. Although as we were there during the hottest part of the day most of the animals were wisely taking shelter inside.

Tufted Ducks, Abbotsbury Children’s Farm

Also included on our passport was Abbotsbury Subtropical Gardens, which was a short drive away. Established in 1765 by the Countess of Ilchester, her descendents have filled the gardens with exotic plants like camellias, rhododendrons and azaleas from all over the world. I was lucky enough to spot one of the more exotic feathered inhabitants too,

Lady Amherst Pheasant

before it was time for an Orchard Pig cider in the Colonial Restaurant and then on to out hotel in Weymouth for the night.

Tags: Abbotsbury Children's Farm, Abbotsbury Subtropical Gardens, Abbotsbury Swannery, birds, Dorset, nature, swans, travel

My Top Ten Horror Movies – No 8 The Thing From Another World

Back in the dim and distant past, when we only had three TV channels, the highlight of BBC2′s Saturday night programming wasn’t a repeat of Dad’s Army, but the Midnight Movie. Nine times out of ten it would be a 1950′s gangster or war film but occasionally a little gem like this would turn up.

We didn’t get much science fiction on the telly back in the 1970s aside from Dr Who and other wobbly setted and woodenly acted home-grown shows like Blake’s 7, so seeing a proper Hollywood Sci-fi movie like The Thing that had what seemed like, quite sophisticated effects, even if it was made in 1951, was really quite exciting. Mind you I was only eleven at the time! I won’t bother describing the plot but here is a little summary that I found on You Tube.

The film owes a lot to producer Howard Hawk’s Rio Bravo only with a bunch of US Airman and scientists holed up in the Arctic station replacing John Wayne and Ricky Nelson holed up in a western jail and a blood sucking alien trying to get in instead of a bunch of hoodlums. Curious that, because John Carpenter’s Assault on Precint 13 was inspired by Rio Bravo and he went on to remake The Thing too.  It also owes a lot to American paranoia about the Communist Russians, but then it was a product of the Cold War.

I still love this film today; it’s a tautly paced thriller pitting men against not just a rampaging alien vampire plant, but also their environment. Added to that the atmospheric cinematography and Dimitri Tiomkin’s score construct a sense of imminent menace whenever the alien threatens to make an appearance. And yes it has a hopeful if not exactly happy ending

Tags: aliens, horror films, Howard Hawks, Science fiction, The Thing from another world

Hugo, George Melies, Son of Frankenstein and Allo Allo

Thinking about Horror movies reminded me seeing Martin Scorsese’s Hugo a couple of weeks ago. I really enjoyed the tale of the orphan who discovers that the toy stall holder (Ben Kingsley) is in fact cinema pioneer Georges Melies.

However I did think that Sacha Baron Cohen’s Station Inspector owed a lot to both Lionel Atwill’s Inspector Krogh in Son of Frankenstein, even though it was a leg caliper he kept adjusting rather than the prosthetic arm that replaced the original ripped off by the monster,

and perhaps more unfortunately Allo Allo‘s Officer Crabtree.

Somehow even Hugo‘s 3D effects though were not as magical as Melies original movies like Le Voyage dans la Lune,

such a shame so many of them were recycled into army boot heels during the First World War.

Tags: Allo Allo, Georges Melies, Good Moaning, Hugo, Martin Scorsese

My Horror Movie Top 10 – No.9 Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde

No Horror Top Ten would be complete without at least one glorious Technicolor Hammer Horror. In my opinion forget about kitchen sink drama and the odd worthy epic, Hammer Horrors and Carry Ons were the British films that put bums on seats in your local Odeon or ABC throughout the late 50s, 60s and early 70s. Hammer even got a Queen’s Award For Industry!

As the permissive era of the 1960s morphed into the 1970s, Hammer ramped up the sex and nudity content of films like The Vampire Lovers (1970).

Although pretty mild by contemporary standards these films hit the late night cinema circuit as I hit puberty and an early growth spurt that got me safely past cinema ushers. Roy Ward Baker directed The Vampire Lovers and the following year he returned with a Dr Jekyll remake with a twist. Rumour has it that screen writer Brian Clemans, who cut his teeth writing for quirky but stylish TV shows like The Avengers and Adam Adamant Lives! in the 1960s, conceived the title Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde as a joke, but given the new-found sexual ambiguity of a decade when homosexuality was at last legal and glam-rock musicians were experimenting with make up it was soon in production.

Clemens screenplay sees Jekyll (Ralph Bates) discovering that his hoped for elixir of life has the effect of turning a male fly into a female. Well it isn’t long before dear old Henry tries it on himself and turns into his “sister” Mrs Edwina Hyde (Martine Beswick who’s previousfilm credits include one of the scrapping gypsy girls in From Russia with Love). Naturally there are a few problems; it isn’t long before Hyde becomes the dominant of the two personalities, the elixir just happens to be made from the reproductive organs of female cadavers, the supply of cadavers pretty quickly runs out and Jekyll is forced to harvest his own by murdering Whitechapel’s prostitutes as Jack the Ripper.

The uncanny resemblance of Martine Beswick to Ralph Bates certainly aids the transformation scenes beautifully shot by Norman Warwick, with David Whitaker’s wonderful musical score.

Aside from the Ripper (who was busy in 1880s London) we also get a couple of James Bond movie style gags thrown in, a comedy turn by the brilliant Philip Madoc as the mortuary attendant and the grave robbing duo of Burke and Hare (who in reality never robbed a grave preferring to take the easy option of murder) Burke and Hare somehow transplanted from 1820s Edinburgh. In fact the London of Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde is a Dickensian theme park complete with pea-soupers, gin palaces, ‘cockernee rossers’,  knife grinders and town criers. In fact about the only thinsg missing are Sherlock Holmes and the Artful Dodger! However to anyone quibbling about historical accuracy, it’s worth remembering that you can’t actually change gender overnight by drinking a potion.

Tags: Brian Clemans, Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde, Hammer films, horror films, Marinie Beswick, Ralph Bates, Roy Ward Baker, The Vampire Lovers

My Horror Movie Top Ten – The Abominable Dr Phibes

Anyone who has read my ‘About’ page will know that I love Horror movies of a certain vintage. These ten are probably my favourite ten Horror movies of all time. Yes they were all made between 1930 and 1971 and I am not for one moment going to apologise for that. These films are all part of my own personal cultural heritage as much as Black Sabbath, Van der Graaf Generator or Hawkwind, and in their own way these films have a certain fantastical innocence that I feel the horror movie lost with The Exorcist in the mid 70s, much as music did with punk at around the same time.

Choosing my Top Ten was quite difficult, but I think I have the right mixture of monsters, actors and directors; Dracula, Frankenstein, Dr Jekyll, the Mummy, Vincent Price, Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Boris Karloff, Terence Fisher, James Whale, Jacques Tourneur, are all there along with hopefully one or two surprises.

,As a teenager in the 1970s, so I suppose it was inevitable that I should love the stylish British made Horror movies of companies like Hammer, Amicus, Tigon and American International. They were as much a part of the period as T.Rex, Loon Pants and Ziggy Stardust. Released in 1971  The Abominable Dr Phibes starred Vincent Price as the disfigured car crash survivor who bumps off the medical team he holds responsible for his wife’s death. For an added dash of macabre fun the murders are themed upon the Plagues of Egypt  (even if some like the Plague of Lice are replaced by a Plague of Bats because bats just work better than lice) . An idea that recurs in the later Price chiller Theatre of Blood when the much mocked actor Edward Lionheart (Price) murders his critics according to William Shakespeare.

Set in 1925 the film was noted for it’s very stylish art deco set design, which is perfectly complemented by Basil Kirchin’s musical score. The director, Robert Fuest, had in the 1960s worked as a production designer on TV shows like The Avengers and his love of visual styling was clearly evident in the way he lovingly shot production designer Brian Eatwell’s sumptuous colour coordinated sets.

Aside from the stunning visual imagery what I like about the film is Price’s exuberantly camp performance as the murdering concert organist, which he pulls off without having to talk to camera. There is also a fine support cast of familiar British faces like Terry Thomas, Hugh Griffiths, Peter Gilmore and an uncredited Caroline Munro as Phibes’s embalmed wife Victoria. Phibes is part Bond villain and part Phantom of the Opera, I can’t help but think what fun could be had pitting him against David Suchet’s Poirot.

Tags: Dr Phibes, horror films, Vincent Price