Royal Staffordshire

We wandered into Staffs on Saturday and with few hours to spare got out the English Heritage and National Trust guidebooks to see that there is to laugh at.

The first and most likely place seemed to be English Heritage's Boscobel House so we started there. It is guided tours only, which I mostly dislike. One had apparently just started when we arrived so the ticket seller rushed us across the farmyard and let us in to where the guide had obviously been going a few minutes. He was quite a character - fast low voice which it was hard to get used to, but once you attuned to it he was a fluent and interesting guide with a wonderful sense of humour. He would make a good standup comic if he could work on the voice. But his political views! Margaret Thatcher and Genghis Khan, those two wellknown rightwingers, would seem tame next to his amusing but highly politically incorrect asides.

The house is really just a hunting lodge which stood in a forest in 1651 when Charles II turned up at the age of 21. He'd just lost the Battle of Worcester to Cromwell's army and was trying to flee the country via Wales. He set off from Boscobel with a local man, spent a couple of days trying to cross the River Avon and then had to come back when they found that the Parliamentary army had all the crossing points strongly guarded. It was on his return that he had to spend the night in an oak tree a couple of hundred yards from Boscobel House, then a couple of nights in a priest-hole in the lodge. The oak one sees now was grown from an acorn of the original which succumbed after the Restoration to old age and Royalist souvenir hunters. This replacement is itself on its last legs, so like George Washington's axe will itself need replacing.

The lodge is surrounded by farm buildings and looks well kept. You can see the oak from the top room, there's a knot garden and a hut on a mound to sit in and gaze at said knot garden while you read, and panelling from the house of the family that owned Boscobel in the 1650s, the Giffards.
Left is the view of the hut with the Oak behind railings in the far field.



The Giffards lived a mile down the road in a house now long vanished, at White Ladies Priory. And that is where we went next. Of the priory itself (Augustinian Canonesses till the Reformation) all that remains is some walls of the conventual church in a field. Also English Heritage, it must be one of the most neglected and disgusting properties they own. There is open access all the time and the locals obviously come and have their orgies and picnics here. Nobody wants to be stuffy about orgies - at least I don't - but these louts leave bottles and cans and plastic bags all over the field and church ruins and pathways. EH ought to either have it cleaned regularly or restrict access with some decent fences. Not that the place is very interesting. Perhaps it is best seen while drunk or stoned in the moonlight.






Having finished with the delights of English Heritage we took ourselves a few miles nearer Birmingham to Moseley Old Hall, a National Trust property. This we managed despite the new satnav which wanted us to do a right turn off the M54 into the lane that the hall is in. This would be fine if there were an exit there, but there isn't, so we ignored it and found our own way.

This is the place that Charles II visited next after Boscobel on his attempt to escape after the Worcester fiasco. Inside it is a delightful halftimbered Elizabethan house, with, of course several priest holes. Though they do show you the actual bed Charles slept in, a few yards away from the nearest priest hole.

Normally you have to go round with a guide but because there was a seventeenth century re-enactment society in possession on Saturday this was waived and you could wander around the house freely. They did try and persuade people to listen to a talk outside before they went into the house, but I politely refused that as well and did my own thing. Inside one had to watch the the re-enactors guzzling large quantities of period food as one passed through the rooms. They were very good at it, very informative, and did not, like the re-enactors of Kentwell Hall in Suffolk used to, try to put on cod seventeenth century speech, thank goodness.

The best was a man in a little room in the roof who had Nuremberg Counters and an exchequer board and who patiently explained to visitors how our ancestors used to do money calculations. Quite fascinating. I stayed and heard his spiel through twice.

Outside there is an orchard and walled gardens. The house itself looks a little dull as the Victorians encased the half-timbered walls in brick but it is well kept and well up to the high standards the National Trust sets itself.

A re-enactor takes a rest.