Clapham lies on the ancient Roman road from London to Chichester. It began to grow in size and popularity during the eighteenth century and by the Regency was a well established and affluent community.

A view of Clapham

It  was largely inhabited by wealthy merchants and the like, who built spacious, gracious villas for comfort and for status , finding the area convenient for travelling to the City, yet far enough out to offer semi-rural pleasures and delights. The Common was an ancient space and Georgian mansions and substantial houses were built around it to take advantage of the views. Holy Trinity, Clapham, can be seen in the middle distance of our picture. This famous church was opened in 1776, the year which saw the American Declaration of Independence, and had strong links to the Clapham Sect or Saints and its most prominent member, William Wilberforce; it was there that he and like-minded men proposed and discussed the abolition of slavery. These upper-middle class evangelical Anglicans embodied the moral conscience of the nation in the early nineteenth century, and Clapham was the village where they talked about the great issues of the day.

This edited article about Victorian country life originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 209 published on 15 January 1966.

Sunday Morning, a typically sentimental painting of the Victorian countryside, probably  in Surrey, by Myles Birket Foster

London and the great provincial cities went on from strength to strength during the Victorian Era, but it was otherwise with the countryside. When Queen Victoria died it was a sorry spectacle, particularly in the South of England, for apart from certain favoured neighbourhoods, the countryside was hastening to decay.

No one stayed there who could possibly find work elsewhere, and all the young people with energy and initiative turned their backs on the life of the villages and fields for that of the towns.

It had not been like this in the early part of the Queen’s reign. Somewhere about the time of the Great Exhibition the urban population of England began to exceed the rural, but agriculture remained the great central productive industry of the country, employing more than two million skilled men. They might be underpaid but there were compensating advantages, and their lot was infinitely happier than that of the operative in the new towns. The agricultural labourer had his garden, a wife who could bake his bread, and many small perquisites such as harvest money, beer or cider in the field, occasional firewood, and gleanings. So long as he was healthy – and his life kept him so, he was happy.

H. Harman in his Sketches Of The Bucks Countryside has described such a one in Old Jas Dagley of Gawcott, Bucks, who, with his low forehead, eagle eyes, powerful nose and jaw, and stern trap mouth, looked like Gladstone, the great Liberal statesman: he paid £2 a year rent for his cottage, and was never short of good wholesome food in all his long life of thrift and labour – “plenty a vegetables the whool yeeur round and a flitch a beacon . . . alwiz hangin’ up in the kitchen and plenty a rabbuts round the meddurs.” He worked on his allotment every night when his day’s work was done, while his two main boasts were that he had never missed a feast in any of the neighbouring villages, and that he had once carried a nine-gallon cask of ale in a sack on his shoulders for three miles.

What may be termed the golden age of British agriculture continued until the seventies. In spite of the steady rise in population not more than a quarter of the country’s wheat, and very little of its oats and barley, came in from abroad. The urban worker had more in his pocket, and he spent it on the produce of the English farmer. During the Crimean War of 1854-6 wheat rose to a price which it did not reach again until 1917, and although it did not long remain as high as this, for many years it kept at a figure which was two shillings a quarter more than in the middle of the century.

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This edited article about English popular song originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 200 published on 13 November 1965.

John Peel and Mary White elope to Gretna Green by Pat Nicolle

D’ye ken John Peel with his coat so gay?
D’ye ken John Peel at the break of day?
D’ye ken John Peel when he’s far, far away,
With his hounds and his horn in the morning?

CHORUS
For the sound of his horn brought me from my bed,
And the cry of his hounds, which he oft-times led.
Peel’s “View halloo” would waken the dead,
Or a fox from his lair in the morning.

D’ye ken John Peel is probably the most famous of all our hunting songs and comes from the village of Caldbeck in Cumberland. John Peel had been born there.

He grew up to be a hard-living young man, who rode admirably, and bred excellent hounds. Men said that he rode like the devil and was a master of horses. But he was for ever in financial troubles, and behind with his rent to the Squire, the master of the Hounds.

At twenty years of age he got into serious trouble for hunting in a coat of grey, was sent for by the M.F.H. and told he must hunt in pink or not at all. John Peel could not afford a pink coat, so for him it was not at all, a great blow to his pride.

“Who are you anyhow?” the Squire had thundered at him.

“I’m John Peel, sir,” said the young man.

“And who ever heard of John Peel?” asked the fiery old squire, red with anger.

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This edited article about the wheatear originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 162 published on 20 February 1965.

Wheatear

Bringing a cheery touch of colour to moors and hillsides, the wheatear is one of the most attractive summer visitors to England. It arrives from Africa about the middle of March and does not migrate back again until early in October.

There is a common story that the wheatear gets its name because it raids the growing crops of wheat. That is not at all true. The wheatear is an insect eater and is a good friend of the farmer, as it lives on grubs, snails and other pests.

Actually, the name “wheatear” is a corruption of white rear, and comes from the bird’s habit of showing its white rump as it flies close to the ground and then suddenly perching on a stone or other object, dipping its head, and raising its tail.

Wheatears are small members of the thrush family, seldom being more than 5 and a half inches long. The male bird’s plumage is pale grey above with a yellowish cream breast, while the cheeks, wings and tail are black with some splashes of white.

The female is more generally buff in colour, but with black cheeks and tail and white rump.

The wheatear is seldom seen on trees. Its favourite haunts are downs, moors, hillsides and open country, particularly in the north and west of the British Isles. In the south of England they are often seen on the seashore.

About the end of April or early in May the wheatear builds its nest. The favourite place is a hollow in the ground, under a large stone, or in a hole low down in a stone wall. Sometimes a pair of wheatears will set up house in a deserted rabbit hole.

The nest consists of dry grass and roots, and is lined with hair, wool and feathers industriously collected by both birds from nearby farmland. When the nest is finished, the hen bird lays in it four to six eggs of a pale turquoise-blue colour.

During their summer stay in Britain, wheatears usually raise two broods of chicks. The young birds are at first speckled like our own thrushes but in a few weeks they adopt their parents’ distinctive plumage and white rumps.

Wheatears are constantly bowing and bobbing on the ground, and then making sudden darts to catch flies and other insects on the wing.

You will very seldom see wheatears perching on trees except in the autumn, when they are collecting in great flocks to begin the long flight back to Africa. These flocks include all the birds hatched from the eggs laid during the summer visit.

The wheatear is rather a silent bird and its song is seldom heard except between April and June when it is breeding. The song is a squeaky little chat-like warble. The call note is a rather grating chack, chack or weet, chack chack. The wheatear often imitates the calls of other birds.

In late April you may occasionally spot a somewhat larger wheatear with a reddish tinge on the breast. This is the Greenland Wheatear on its way from Africa to nest in Greenland. It is sometimes seen in September making the return flight to Africa.

This edited article about Banffshire originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 138 published on 5 September1964.

General view, Banff, c. 1890

In the gathering darkness a string of ponies made their way southwards from the rugged and almost inaccessible glens of Glenlivet in Banffshire.

One of the men leading the ponies cursed as he stumbled over a dry twig. The crack split the silent air and the man cursed again. This small convoy making its way through the Scottish highlands was strictly illegal. Strapped to the backs of the ponies were casks filled with whisky brewed on illicit stills.

Suddenly the night air was filled with running feet and shouting. The preventive men – the agents of the government in enforcing the law – had ambushed the smugglers. A brief struggle – and then it was over. One or two of the smugglers managed to escape, the rest were captured, their whisky confiscated.

The late eighteenth century saw many such encounters and by 1823 it was estimated that in the area around Glenlivet there were over 200 illegal stills operating. At one time, of course, every man in this part of Scotland had made his own whisky, but private stills were banned in the middle of the eighteenth century.

Today, Banffshire is still a centre of whisky-making, all of it now, of course, on a legal basis. What has made it so? The three necessary ingredients for distilling have always been present in abundance: barley, peat and water.

Yet any Scotsman will tell you that there is more to it than that. For have not the Americans, in desperate attempts to produce the same Scotch whisky in their own country, taken highland water, peat and barley across the Atlantic to brew whisky in the States; and have they not failed to reproduce that particular flavour that makes it renowned throughout the world?

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This edited article about Kincardineshire originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 136 published on 22 August 1964.

Dunnottar Castle by Henry Sutton Palmer

Dr. Barbara Moore and the Aldermaston marchers pale to comparative insignificance beside the pride of Kincardineshire, the one and only Captain Robert Barclay from Ury.

What a walker he was! In tight-fitting suit, top hat and cravat his exploits at the turn of the nineteenth century are nothing short of remarkable.

In 1809 he covered 1,000 miles in as many hours around a measured track at Newmarket. This was probably his finest and most footsore hour, although in 1801 he covered 110 miles in 19 hours 20 minutes around a muddy park and a year later managed sixty-four miles in ten hours.

Captain Barclay could lift huge weights as well as walk. When he was twenty it is said he raised an eighteen-stone man standing on his right hand from the floor to a table.

In Stonehaven, Kincardineshire’s county town, many streets are named after members of his family, but they do not see these days such feats of endurance. Violent physical activity in Kincardineshire is now confined mainly to Hogmanay, the celebrations of the New Year.

Stonehaven has a distillery, though its chief industry is fishing. In the old days every Highland laird had his own simple still but in 1814 stills of less than 500 gallon capacity were prohibited. Now the distillation of whisky – no “e” for the Scots’ brand – is of course a very carefully regulated and controlled industry.

Kincardine itself is a rugged, beautiful county, with the Grampians arching their lofty backs across it, and the sea leaping into its coves and caves along a dourly magnificent coastline.

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This edited article about Clackmannanshire originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 134 published on 8 August 1964.

Castle Campbell is perched on a pinnacle at the head of Dollar Glen

What a story-book county is Clackmannanshire, the smallest shire in Scotland and filled to the very brim with tradition and legend. Why, there is even a tale told about how the county came by its name.

One day King Robert the Bruce was out riding and stopped for a while to rest upon a large blue stone.

He continued his journey and had gone a little way when he found he was missing one of his gloves and ordered one of his men, Sir James Douglas “to the ‘clack’ (stone) to fetch my ‘mannan’ ” (Gaelic for glove).

The soldier replied: “Sire, if ye’ll just look about ye here I’ll come back wi’ it directly.”

So, it is said, did the county get its name and also its motto “Look About Ye.” An ingenious story – but one lacking in authenticity for the name is certainly older than the fourteenth century in which this incident is said to have taken place.

Although Scotland’s smallest shire, Clackmannanshire is also one of the wealthiest, having a wide variety of industries.

Coal-mining is a major source of Clackmannan’s wealth, and until the early eighteenth century silver was also mined on the Erskine estate near Alva. It was an extremely rich lode when the precious metal was first mined but eventually the amount of silver found became less and less until the owner, Sir John Erskine, lost nearly all of the £50,000 fortune he had acquired from it through sinking another useless mine in the hope of finding more silver.

In those days mines were a favourite place for consigning criminals serving life sentences, and one such unfortunate was sent to work for Erskine, complete with a metal collar round his neck on which was inscribed his name, his crime, and the name of his owner.

It was a grim fate to be condemned to perpetual slavery.

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This edited article about Nairnshire originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 126 published on 13 June 1964.

The fearsome Picts came from Nairnshire and attacked Britain relentlessly, by Peter Jackson

On days when thunder and lightning beats and whips the skies over Hardmuir Heath in the Scottish county of Nairnshire you can almost imagine the three witches of Shakespeare’s Macbeth croaking and cackling there.

For this heath, between Brodie and Nairn, is reputedly the spot where Macbeth met the witches, and six miles away at Cawdor Castle, Shakespeare tells us that Macbeth murdered Duncan. The murder is supposed to have taken place in 1040, and as the earliest part of the castle dates only from 1236, and as there is no sign that a building stood there previously, the Bard’s story is clearly not very accurate!

Neverthless Shakespeare’s Macbeth has invested Cawdor Castle with a rich glamour which it may not entirely deserve from the historical viewpoint, but which it certainly does merit from its sheer physical appearance.

It is a full-blooded “real” castle, complete with drawbridge, portcullis and dungeons, and is inhabited to this day. Standing on the rocky bank of Cawdor Burn, a tributary of the River Nairn, it is sometimes open to the public, and visitors pass eagerly beneath the portcullis.

These days all who go in come out again – but it was not always so!

The town of Nairn – it has a harbour constructed in 1820 by that great Scots engineer Thomas Telford – was at one time also protected by a castle, but the course of the Nairn has altered and the sea has eaten into the land so that it has gradually disappeared beneath the waters.

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This edited article about Berwickshire originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 124 published on 30 May 1964.

Dryburgh Abbey where Sir Walter Scott and Earl Haig are buried, by A F Lydon

The wind that blew damp and cold off the North Sea howled and swirled round the stone battlements of Dunbar Castle on the coast of East Lothian. The gate sentry, who had propped his spear against a wall and was now desperately trying to keep warm in the shelter of the postern gate, suddenly saw a stranger, his cloak folded close about him, hurrying towards the castle.

The soldier seized his spear hastily, and came to attention. The stranger spoke to him in a low voice, and was escorted inside.

In the castle courtyard a manservant hurried forward to relieve the visitor of his cloak. “Ye may tell your earl that Thomas Rhymour is here,” said the stranger as he unbuckled his short sword.

In the Great Hall, Patrick, Earl of Dunbar, rose to greet his guest.

“You are welcome, Thomas of Erceldoune,” said the nobleman as the man they called Thomas the Rhymer, the poet, the prophet from Berwickshire, moved to warm himself at the fire.

The conversation ebbed and flowed like the tide of the North Sea on the foreshore of Dunbar. Then the Earl, who could no longer contain his curiosity (and his disbelief) about Thomas’s prophecies, said with a sly smile, “Today is the eleventh day of March, in the year of Our Lord twelve hundred and eighty six. Tell me, Thomas from Berwickshire – what will tomorrow bring forth?”

“Alas for future days!” replied True Thomas. “Alas for the day of calamity and woe! Before the hour of twelve has struck will be heard such a violent wind in Scotland as will not be seen for many a year to come!”

Ask for a prophecy, ask for a sign, and all you get is a treatise on the weather, thought the Earl glumly.

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This edited article about Cambridgeshire originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 123 published on 23 May 1964.

A picture history of Cambridge by C L Doughty

What connection can there be between a Royal princess called Etheldreda, who lived thirteen hundred years ago, and an atomic power station?

Perhaps there is no connection; but it is possible that if Etheldreda had not defied her husband, Egfrid of Northumbria, taken refuge on the Isle of Ely, in northern Cambridgeshire, and there founded a monastery, the world as we know it would not exist.

It was monks from Ely who established a nucleus of learning in the town of Cambridge, and in 1284 it was the Bishop of Ely, Hugh de Balsham, who founded Peterhouse, the first college of Cambridge University.

It was in Cambridge, in first floor chambers north of the great gate of Trinity College, that Sir Isaac Newton formulated his Laws of Motion, interpreted gravity, revolutionized scientific thought and paved the way for the modern world.

It was in Cambridge, in the Cavendish laboratories, that in 1918 a scientist from New Zealand, Lord Rutherford, the atom scientist, became the first man to transmute one element, nitrogen, into another, hydrogen.

Conceivably Rutherford would still have ushered in the atomic age, Newton still have made his great deductions, if Cambridge University had never existed. Equally it is possible that both would have missed the mental stimulation that Cambridge provides.

The finest view in south Cambridgeshire is gained from the GogMagog hills. Although they rise no more than 300 feet they are veritable mountains in this flat land, and it is an interesting fact that there is nothing higher, due east of them, until the great European plain merges with Asia.

From their summits can be seen the colleges of Cambridge, the spires of many village churches telling of a deeply religious, Puritan past, and to the north on a clear day the massive towers of Ely Cathedral. There is also to be seen an impressive network of natural and man-made waterways, reminders that much of Cambridgeshire once was flooded. All but the southern part of the county still is a very few feet above sea level.

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