• My father was a Saxon Wizard called LLyr Merini. Yes legend has it that he was Merlin.  I was an illegitimate son so was Arthur.
• Both my name in Saxon and Arthur's name in Celt mean Strongarm.
  
• My wife was Guignier, sister of Cador, Prince of Cornwall. (King Arthur married Guenevere, raised in the household of Cador Duke of Cornwall).
• I also spent 25 years in Gaul and ruled at Nantes and Vannes. (King Arthur spent 9 years subduing Gaul and held court in Paris. Reigned in Nantes in some stories)

• I was the dynastic founder of Glamorgan. (King Arthur reigned for 5 years in Glamorgan).
• Medrot was my Grandson (Arthur died fighting his nephew Modred)
• Other coincidences in the story of King Arthur is that he goes to Dunbarton and fights the Picts and Scots. There is an emphasis on Dunbarton. This may have been due to confusion of Cerdic with Ceredig of Dunbarton. Someone named Ceredig gathered a fleet and ravaged the coast of Ireland around the year 450AD . King Arthur conquered Ireland and Iceland.
• Whilst the story of King Arthur is obviously built up in legend, like that of Robin Hood, it seems that much of that legend was based on Cerdic. 
•  Wessex grew into one of Britain's largest Kingdoms ( along with Mercia and Northumbria) and Cerdic's descendant King Alfred became King of England.
  Thus Cerdic's blood line runs through to the British Royal family to this day. The last British king to also be King of Wessex was Harold.
• Now after a thousand years the Queen's Son, Prince Edward is the next Earl of Wessex.
  
• It was stated that Camelot was on the highest point between the Bristol and English Channels- this is Staple Hill in the Blackdown Hills not far from Chard.
  

• Whilst other places claim to be Camelot. We know it was supposed to be on the highest point between the English and Bristol Channels. Chard is the highest town in Somerset on the Blackstock Hills and near the highest point betwenn the Bristol and English Channels.
• So as you continue through Chard just think Sir Lancelot, Guenevere or King Arthur could have stood there before you. Just think you might even find Excalibur, my famous sword.

 

Send email to the Bagman (or phone 01258 817963 but email is easier for him).

or email to the Squire

or email to the Treasurer

Musical Director: Robert Elliott ,
Tel: 01793-853753
musical.director@wessexmalechoir.co.uk

Literary Wessex Tour

On this twelve day tour we travel through one of Europe’s oldest landscapes; a landscape that has inspired writers and artists for centuries and continues to exert its power and resonance today.

Our Literary Wessex tour will include visits to the ancient stone circle of Stonehenge, Salisbury and its Cathedral, which boasts the tallest spire in England, the rolling hills of Hardy country, the elegant city of Bath, as well as the city of Winchester, the coastal town of Lyme Regis and the picturesque Isle of Wight, lying a short ferry trip from the mainland.

All this, of course, in addition to London, where we will re-discover the locations associated with such peerless literary figures as Shakespeare, Dickens, Johnson and Pepys.

Available at any time of the year as a private tour

ITINERARY

Literary Wessex Day 1 We will rendezvous at our London hotel from where, in the afternoon, we will set out for the Charles Dickens Museum at 48 Doughty Street for a guided tour. We will then walk through Dickensian London to Fleet Street, the city’s old publishing centre, to Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, where Dr Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, David Garrick, William Makepeace Thackeray, Dickens, Oscar Wilde and W.B. Yeats Rhymers Club met to discuss their work.

Literary Wessex Day 2 In the morning we will drive to Jane Austen’s House, Chawton, where we will have tea and a guided tour by a member of the Jane Austen Society.

After lunch, we will drive on to Winchester Cathedral, the inspiration for Anthony Trollope’s Barchester novels, and visit Jane Austen’s grave. We will then visit King Arthur’s Round Table at the Great Hall and follow John Keats’ Walk, the inspiration for his ode – ‘To Autumn’.

I take a walk every day for an hour before dinner and this is generally my walk. I go out at the back gate across on street, into the Cathedral yard, along a paved path, past the beautiful front of the Cathedral, turn to the left under a stone doorway – then I am on the other side of the building – which leaving behind me I pass on through two college-like squares seemingly built for the dwelling place of deans and Prebendaries – garnished with grass and shaded with trees. Then I pass through one of the old city gates…

We will stay overnight in the historic city of Winchester.

Literary Wessex Day 3 In the morning we will drive to Southampton and take the ferry to the Isle of Wight and the Farringford Hotel, formerly the home of Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

In the afternoon we will visit Freshwater Bay, where Lord Tennyson, Julia Margaret Cameron, G.F. Watts, Annie Ritchie, Edward Lear, Virginia Woolf and others lived and wrote. Woolf’s only play, Freshwater (1935), concerns her life and friends here.

We will be given a tour of the area, Julia Margaret Cameron’s home and studio, Dimbola Lodge and Tennyson’s home. Our guide will be Dr Brian Hinton MBE, Chairman of Dimbola Lodge and an authority on Tennyson, Cameron and the literary history of The Isle of Wight.

In the evening, we will have a special reception meal with a guest speaker.

Literary Wessex Day 4 This morning we will visit Literary Bonchurch, the hotel where Charles Dickens wrote parts of David Copperfield, the house where Algernon Swinburne was raised and the grave in which he is laid to rest. We will then travel to the northern part of the Island and visit Shanklin and Colebrooke, where John Keats lived and wrote.

Keats wrote ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, ‘Lamia’ and part of his epic ‘Hyperion’ at Shanklin, which he described in a letter as:

a most beautiful place, sloping woods and meadow grounds reach around the Chine, which is a cleft between the Cliffs to a depth of nearly 300 feet at least. This cleft is filled with trees and bushes in the narrow part, and as it widens becomes bare, if not for primroses on one side, which spread to the very verge of the Sea, and some fishermen’s huts on the other, perched midway in the Balustrades of beautiful green Hedges along their steps to the sands – But the sea, Jack, the sea – the little waterfall – then the white cliff – then St Catherine’s Hill.

After some concluding remarks from Dr Brian Hinton we will take the Yarmouth ferry back to the mainland and our next hotel.

Literary Wessex Day 5 In the morning we set off on our exploration of the heart of literary Wessex - sites and landscapes associated with Thomas Hardy and the Vale of the Little Dairies. We will visit Sturminster Newton, where he wrote The Return of the Native (1878), Tess’s Cottage, and have lunch at what was The Pure Drop Inn at Marnhull.

After lunch we will visit Hardy’s Casterbridge (Dorchester) his house, Max Gate, his childhood Cottage at Higher Bockhampton and Stinsford Church, where his heart is buried.

Hardy chose to build his home at Max Gate as it looks out across open fields towards Winterborne Came and the world of his friend, the dialect poet, William Barnes who, like the musicians gallery in Stinsford church where Hardy’s father played the violin, reminded him of a rural way of life celebrated in Under The Greenwood Tree (1872). The destruction of that way of life is artfully shown in The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), where Henchard’s reliance upon weather lore, verbal agreements and rule of thumb are replaced by Farfrae’s more calculated economic methods and technical innovation.

Literary Wessex Day 6 In the morning we will visit Sherborne Abbey, where poet and statesman, Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-42), who pioneered the sonnet in England, is buried. The former lover of Anne Boleyn and favourite of Catherine Howard died of a fever whilst passing through Sherborne on the king’s business. His Songes and Sonettes (1557), translations and imitations of Petrarch’s sonnets, appeared in Tottel’s Miscellany, setting the trend for aristocratic love poetry.

In the afternoon we will visit Sherborne Castle, built by the poet, courtier and adventurer, Sir Walter Raleigh (1552-1618), who in 1594 wrote The Passionate Man’s Pilgrimage, in 1594. He developed the castle from a medieval hunting lodge after persuading Queen Elizabeth I to allow him to buy the deer park from the church.

Ralegh’s literary friends included Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson and John Donne - all of whom fell in and out of favour with court circles.

Ralegh seduced the Queen’s Maid, Elizabeth Throckmorton, and was imprisoned. He eventually married Elizabeth and moved to Sherborne. After he was beheaded in 1618, Elizabeth took his head back to Sherborne so that his friends and staff could pay their respects.

Literary Wessex Day 7 In the morning we will visit the coastal town of Lyme Regis, with its Cobb and harbour walk, inspiration to Jane Austen in Persuasion (1818) and to John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), which is set largely in 1867 Lyme Regis. Jane Austen holidayed in Lyme Regis in 1803 and 1804, and there is a Jane Austen Garden.

John Fowles (1926-2005) moved to Belmont House in 1965 and curated the Lyme Regis Museum from 1978-88. Here Fowles wrote The Ebony Tower (1974), Daniel Martin (1977), Mantissa (1982), A Maggot (1985) and The Tree (1992).

Fossils have been discovered locally since the early nineteenth century and it is believed that the tongue twister, ‘She sells seashells on the sea shore’ is derived from the exploits of Mary Anning, who found an entire marine dinosaur in 1811 and continued to find and sell fossils in Lyme Regis throughout her life.

Henry Fielding, Tennyson, Llewelyn Powys and Graham Swift have also been inspired by Lyme’s Jurassic landscape.

OUr literary Wessex tour then takes us to the Somerset levels and the Isle of Avalon, the centre of King Arthur’s Wessex.

Literary Wessex Day 8 Glastonbury, the site of the legends of King Arthur and the ancient home of Christianity in England, remains a spiritual centre and place of pilgrimage. Its history inspired medieval writers and chroniclers, such as Geoffrey of Monmouth and Thomas Malory, as well as Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (1859), John Masefield’s novel, The Badon Parchments (1948) and A Glastonbury Romance (1933) by John Cowper Powys. We will visit the Abbey ruins where monks are believed to have found the remains of Arthur and Guinevere in 1191 and the Tor where some suggest Joseph of Arimathea and his followers buried the Holy Grail.

John Cowper Powys captures the spirit of the place:

As these two slept, the shapeless moon sank down over the rim of the Polden Hills. As these two slept, little gusts of midnight air, less noticeable than any wind but breaking the absolute stillness, stirred the pale, green leaf-buds above many a half-finished hedge-sparrow’s nest between Queen’s Sedgemoor and the Lake Village flats. Here and there, unknown to Sam Dekker or any other naturalist, a few among such nests held one or two cold untimely eggs, over whose brittle blue-tinted rondure moved in stealthy motion these light-borne air stirrings pursuing their mysterious journeys from one dark horizon to another.

Literary Wessex Day 9 In the morning we travel to Bath where we will spend the day and overnight.

We will visit Jane Austen Centre for a Guided talk, the Royal Crescent, Pump Rooms and other sites associated with the wits, Congreve, Gay and Arbuthnot, Dr Johnson, Hester Thrale, Fanny Burney, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Sarah Siddons, Shelley and Mary Godwin, Dickens, Thackeray and many others.

There will also be time for relaxation and shopping in the lively city centre.

Literary Wessex Day 10 Today we visit Stonehenge, of which Henry James (who visited in 1872) wrote:

You may put a hundred questions to these rough-hewn giants as they bend in grim contemplation of their fallen companions; but your curiosity falls dead in the vast sunny stillness that enshrouds them, and the strange monument, with all its unspoken memories, becomes simply a heart-stirring picture in a land of pictures …

The centre of the stones is also, of course, where Tess, of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the Durbevilles, dies.

We will then travel to the Cathedral city of Salisbury, following in the footsteps of Samuel Pepys, who visited Salisbury in 1668.

Literary Wessex Day 11 In the morning we conclude our tour of literary Wessex proper with a visit to Salisbury Cathedral, inspiration to Anthony Trollope’s The Warden (1855) and William Golding’s The Spire (1964). Golding taught at Bishop’s Wordsworth school next to the cathedral.

The Cathedral contains a commemorative stone to Sir Philip Sidney’s sister and inspiration for The Arcadia (1590), the poet, Mary, Countess of Pembroke, inscribed with an epitaph by William Browne, and a bust of local writer and naturalist, Richard Jefferies.

In the afternoon we return to London.

Literary Wessex Day 12 On our final morning we will visit Westminster Bridge, about which Wordsworth wrote Earth has not anything to show more fair following his walk on 3rd September 1802 across the bridge, the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey and Poet’s Corner, where there are monuments to England’s most celebrated poets and writers.

Please contact us for booking or further information regarding the Literary Wessex tour