We Used To Know...

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Currently thundery and threatening, the skies above Lower Down have given us some pretty Monsoon-like rainfall this late afternoon, after a hot and humid afternoon spent first in Clun, and then Bishop's Castle. We did the usual round of Clun - it's not a big place after all - visiting the church where playwright John Osborne is buried. We mulled over the place's Saxon origins, and the reality that the Saxons were invaders themselves, rather than as supposed by so many these days to be 'the usurped natives' on the arrival of the Normans in 1066.

Never mind all the previous violent incursions that served to push Y Brython - The Britons - to the western margins of what is now Wales, over several hundred years of oppression, removing them from any prominence whatsoever, until the late twentieth century, ruled over by a succession of Norman and German - latterly completely mongrel - royal dynasties, whose familial lines are drawn from practically every part of what is now modern Europe...

But I digress: I had a nice scampi, chips and peas for lunch; washed down with a couple of pints of the estimable Clun Pale, brewed at the back of my great-great uncle Job's old hostelry [blog posts passim], The White Horse Inn, Clun...

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