18 December 1745, and a rebel Jacobite army arrives at the tiny village of Clifton, right at the top of the old county of Westmoreland in the north-west of England. Maybe four and a half thousand armed men, trudging back…
Christmas posting, 2019
Christmas post A Bit About Britain provides several seasonal ever-green offerings with which to amuse its reader (click or tap on an image below). A new topical article is planned for Christmas 2019. Meanwhile, last posting dates in the UK…
Norber Erratics
A Bit About Britain’s geomorphological expert will know that erratics are rocks that have been transported by a glacier, and left behind when the ice has melted some distance from where they started. It’s a descriptive term, because ‘erratic’ means…
Coleridge’s Cottage
We went to see Coleridge’s Cottage because it was there. Apart from driving through Bridgwater it wasn’t a painful experience, though I can’t say it was particularly exciting either. However, it does have what the National Trust accurately describes as…
Pilgrims, Pie, and Plymouth Rock: the British roots of the USA’s Thanksgiving Day
A guest post by Anne Clare The United States’ celebration of Thanksgiving might seem, at first glance, like a surprising choice for a blog dedicated to Britain. After all, modern U.S. celebrations largely focus on eating turkey (a bird native…
A Bit About Britain has switched to https
And about time too, I hear my tech-savvy reader say. My other reader (someone rather like me) says, “Que?” All we lesser mortals really need to know is that this is a security improvement and every site should have one,…
Is this Britain’s finest Baroque church?
It may come as a surprise that what might be the finest Baroque church in Britain will be found, not in some great city, but in rural Worcestershire. This is Great Witley Church. It dates from 1735, when it replaced…
The time capsule of Culross
It’s become something of a cliché, to describe a place as ‘being frozen in time’, or similar. But in the case of Culross, a small village on the north bank of Firth of Forth in Fife (try saying that after…
Tower Bridge, up close and personal
We all do it. We’re busy, things around us blend into the background. And so, for all the years I spent living and working in and around London, I had never visited Tower Bridge, one of our capital’s most iconic…
Long Meg in the afternoon
Last Updated on 10th December 2019Meg was a witch, and an exceptionally tall one. One day, she was messing about with her daughters, as witches do, trying to get them organised into a nice, neat, circle, when along came a…
The castle at Penrith
Penrith Castle doesn’t encourage the casual visitor, unless arriving by train. The railway station is conveniently opposite the castle (probably built on the top of its medieval outbuildings), but anyone driving into town who isn’t a committed castle collector could…
Touching the lost past of Ninekirks
It’s hard to beat soaking up the atmosphere of an elegant historic house, or imagining life being restored to the grim ruins of a once-mighty castle. But there’s also a special kind of magic getting off the well-beaten tourist track…