S is for Shamefully Ignorant!

King John's castle was a stone's throw away, for the whole of my childhood, and most of my Adulthood, and I only discovered the fact in April, at the grand old age of sixty-one! No school trips, no trips with the parents, and not me, having walked various other sections of the Basingstoke canal, had revealed its existence, or whereabouts?

 

Eventually I did notice it on one of the information boards along the canal, whilst on another walk, and determined to go and have a look, and on a balmy, summer's day (in April!), I walked the section down to the Graywell tunnel, and paused to inspect the castle ruin, from whence King John (the Boris of his day) is believed to have set out for Runnymede, to sign the Magna Carta, and begin the slow march to the Western Democracy we were vaguely enjoying, until recently, when it all started to go a bit wobbly! 

 

I took a video of the interior walls, but having rather forgotten how to do videos, it being a while since the last one, I've ended-up with a slide show, that has the video embedded toward the end, but it's all only a couple of minutes, and then all the stills are also below, so it might as well go first.

 

And for those who post all that anti-British shit on Quora; this was built over 800-years ago, 300 years before Columbus, it was a ruin 200 years before the American war of Independence, and yet, here it still is, anchoring any British arrogance in the history of a millennium.

 

These are taken clockwise round the castle, with one view obscured by trees, and it was, being April, a low, bright sun, so I had a few problems, but you get the idea! Originally eight sided, two walls have totally gone.

 

Indeed, what you can see in these photographs, is actually only the flint infill of the walls, all the dressed stone and masonry, inside and out has long-since disappeared, purloined for the buildings of the area, in later centuries - think Churches, farms, inns, bridges &etc! As I dare say, were any usable timbers!

 

Information boards on site.

 

One of the fireplace chimney flues.

 

The smaller holes are for the old floor joist timbers, the larger hole . . . ? Secret treasure nook/safe, larder, alcove for a religious icon, relic or statute perhaps? Cell for prisoners? Armscote? Somewhere for the ghost to hide, so Shaggy and Scooby walk past him, and he can jump-out behind them . . . Yah-yah-yah-yikes!

 

It is only infill, and in time there will be nothing left but a pile of stones.

 

This is actually reversed, it was the only way to get a clean shot! If you sit on the middle bench and move your head about, you can superimpose it on the ruins to resurrect the castle for a moment, albeit as a cutaway!

 

The castle is on the Three Castles Path/Walk/Way, which I naively, but admittedly confusedly, assumed must be either Basingstoke-Odiham-Farnham, or Odiham-Farnham-Guildford, but no, It's Winchester Hall-Odiham-Windsor Great Park & Castle! A 60-mile walk, and the other 'local' castles (orange dots, there's Highclere as well) don't get a look-in! But you can see how they form a line protecting the route to London, along the Downs.

 

For non-British readers, it's pronounced oh-dee-um, unless you're very posh, then you might get away with oh-dee'am!

S is for Shrunken Stone!

You know how it is . . . the neighbours get all the tribes together, six-summers running and build a bloody great henge-a-ma-bob down the road, and you think it would be nice to get Jeff the odd-job bloke to knock you up one between the parterre and the ha-ha? Cost is an issue - of course; you've been taxed the fuck-out-of to pay for the big-chief's one, so you go with a bit of a downsized 'replica'!

This was a charity-shop job earlier in the week, and I was trying to gauge the size of the thing from the very small box, and whether it was the same as the one I bought years ago, after another Blogger (who I'm afraid I've forgotten the name of) highlighted them on his Blog (The Works it was). I reckoned it couldn't be the same; in addition it was only 95p, so I figured it was worth a punt?

Once I'd shot the pictures for Friday's 'News, Views . . . ' I began to suspect it was the same, the puzzle-mat seemed the same and the stones also felt/looked familiar as they fell into place, especially the L-shaped ones in the outer circle, but once it was all in place I thought it looked too small to re-do the battle I'd done on the previous posting. Also I couldn't find the old one on the dongles!

Eventually I found it on the Airfix Dongle as I'd posted one image there (reproduced above as I still haven't found the original sample!), and it's odd, but clever . . .

. . . both sets are by the same maker/publisher; Running Press, and to the eye, the stones seem to be about the same size, but the puzzle-disc base is about 30% smaller, and the whole thing has been contracted - the inner circle are all closed up (you wouldn't get a chariot through the new gap!), while two big gaps in the outer circle have been done away with to pull the whole thing tighter.

But closer inspection reveals that the stone may be smaller too. I will dig the old one out and do a proper comparison at some point (soon'ish - I think I know where it is), and I suspect the stones will be the same 30-odd% reduced. It's hard to judge as these are in a very small box while the others were spread-out in two or three layers of blisters.

Looking at the stones they (or some) look similar but not all identical and it may be that pantographing, or a scaling down of a CAD .dwg for 3D printing was employed in the production of new masters? Their finished state, like the earlier set is poured, cold-cast, two-part epoxy 'polyresin'.

I think these are part of a range of novelty 'things' (toys, games, pastimes and executive trinkets) in little boxes, that you find in places like Waterston's in a dedicated rack-tree; we've seen a Dalek here, and [foam] paper-planes? While the other was a kiddies activity book, but between the two, I may be able to produce a better 'complete' example one day, as it wasn't in its current state when the Romans arrived!

Although for those finding this one only, there were lots of stone circles once, with none of them the size or scale of Stonehenge, so imagination is the only limit and it'll make a great focus-piece of scenery in war-gaming . . . the message of the original post elsewhere I think!

W is for The Works (rant alert at the end)

I know someone else Blogged the 'Henge' the other night but in my defence I've been covering The Works and the little treats they bring us for over a year or two now and the amount of stuff useful to figure collectors they have right now is worth a whole post in itself.

Apart from the items below and The Boys Book of Arthur Ward...sorry 'Airfix'...(it's the spine you know!), they also have plenty of the Clash of Heros figures I blogged the other day (I'm picking one up every time I pass and will give them a separate post when I have a few more). Also if you remember the Woodie key-ring figure from Toy Story I got in the Pound Shop the other day - well The Works have the whole set, along with several Disney princess/fairy types, some Winnie the Pooh characters and other Disney key-rings.

So to Stonehenge, it's small and mine had two part 6's (or part 9's? it's hard to tell as they are placed next to each other on the display and read 'each-other' upside-down...does that make any sense?!), you can see the second one jammed into the larger orifice top right, this - of course - may be why it's been remaindered in the first place!

But it's not TOO small, and buying two sets will enable you to fill in the printed blanks with the spares, or make a more ordered one contemporaneous with Caesar's march across the South of England. It's £1.99 for Christ's sake...get three! There are no instructions but you don't need them as the blanks are numbered on the little puzzle-base and the 'polystone' poly-stones are also numbered, just the problem of how to deal with the two number 6/9's!

They are in the kids book section and the box is surprisingly small...

July 2015  - I bough a second one a few days later and it had different stones for No.'s 6/9, the reason there's space around the one above, some packer had miss-placed a duplicate!

The Works are also clearing the Tron Legacy stuff, most of which is as cack as the film was reported to be - I read as many reviews as I can and aggregate the result to decide whether to see a film these days and the message on this one was don't bother if you are remotely fond of the original!

Most of the the toys are silly little micro-scale flying things which bare no resemblance to the film I knew and loved and there is a second range of 4 or 5" action figures, you can tell how much time I gave them as I don't know what size they were!

But...the 'Light -cycles' are about 54mm and one (Flynn's - the white one) is very reminiscent of the original film, so I have tracked down 3 of 4 and will get the other as soon as I see it. Of interest is the pricing...Fleet - affluent London commuter dormitory...£2.99, Newbury - Rural market town with local authority overspill from Reading and the unpaid gardeners of baronets...£1.99!

Above are two of the Light-cycles from Tron, below is the booklet from the Stonehenge boxed-set and a remaindered book by James May, his is down to £1.99 from £9.99 or a four-fifths reduction, Arthur Ward's was £6.99 from £19.99 or approximately two-thirds, from this unscientific evidence we can deduce that James' book is the cackier one, and having read them both I can concur...by a long shot.

This is one of two of his titles in The Works at the moment, can I suggest he sticks to whittering-on about cars instead of giveing Hornby/Scalextric/Airfix/Humbrol Ltd.Inc.Co.Corp.Int. another three hours of free advertising on the Licence-fee payer! Bloody BBC...

It seems that eventually everything comes to The Works...all you have to do is wait (they have Airfix Spitfire kits with paint as well at the moment!), with the Hemlock & Wendel (or whatever they are called - Wynndot & Bendall?) Olympic mascot key-rings currently announced at 7 quid each and the Works' Disney ones at about a pound I wouldn't mind betting they'll have the Jemmy & Kendal key-rings for the same price in 18 months time, buckets of'em!

Right - that's Disney, the Olypics, the BBC, our biggest native toy company and James May whinged about in one rant...a fine nights work me-thinks!

S is for Southwood

All my life I've been surrounded by the military, I was an Admiral's Grandson, Soldier's 'brat' and would have been the nephew of a Navy Flier if he hadn't died, stuck to the giant-firework that is a hooked-up missile on the ranges off Lossimouth. And for some reason I then joined-up myself...must've been mad...oh! I am.

My brother and I lived on ranges, roamed training areas and were surrounded by soldiers - toy and real, we collected empty cases (sometimes not so empty!) and had Schermuly flares on Bonfire night so that we could range the heath the next morning looking for the parachutes which Action-Man then made good use of out of the bedroom window!

When our parents split-up (very fashionable at the end of the 1970's!) we left our heath and moved to the teeming metropolis [sic] of Fleet in Hampshire, were I - as one of Mrs (she's no Lady) Thatcher's long-haired victims of Tory cuts (plue les change...plus les change!) - would get out of the house for hours by taking the dog (Finn; he was a red setter - if you know your Irish tales) for long walks round Fleet Pond and the areas surrounding it. One area that bordered the pond was the woodland at Southwood, where the engineers had been based for years before the whole thing became a retail/commercial park.

One piece hadn't been developed and is still being used today, behind/to the south of what was NGTE and is now Qinetiq. There was in the woods what looked like the remains of a WWII barracks/training area, although it was probably used after the war, but it was derelict by 1980. Usual collapsed shacks in the undergrowth, concrete paths running between the floors of long gone Nissan (Quonset) huts, even a couple of Nissan huts still in situ, no doors or windows but dry enough for a surreptitious teenage cigarette out of the drizzle! However there was also a structure which fascinated me as I had a fleet of Airfix Matador artillery tractors...

...so the other day I went back (nearly 30 years later!) to see if it was still there. Vandals have sadly destroyed it since I used to scrummage about on it, but the remains are still discernible. Basically - what it was in former days was the back-end (troop compartment) of a Matador or similar 8 or 10-ton rated lorry, mounted on concrete posts, presumably as some sort of convoy air-attack/ambush drill practiser?

You can still see the concrete posts, but what remains of the rusty frame (it was still upholstered in wood when me and Finn studied it) has been taken off and dumped against an old ammo/rubbish-bin bunker.

This structure remains in a much better state of repair and the feeling is it was part of some bridging/obstacle exercise, or even for teaching the placing of demolition charges? The reinforcing-rods suggest it was never completed, perhaps due to the wars end? Someone has had a go at the main pillars though.

These structures also hang about rather forlornly, no clue as to why man once had a desperate need to clear woodland and force his signature upon the landscape in quite such a brutalist style.

The small angle-iron barricade is interesting as compared to both modern barbed-wire pickets and the old WWII German ones all over the Channel Islands (we once collected enough still-good German pickets to pen a sheep-field!), this is a very flimsy thing of thin-gauge steel, more of a temporary road-traffic/checkpoint measure than a serious attempt to prevent enemy insertion!