Tag Archives: Peterborough

A Tale of Two Cities

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Bear with seed packet from Kew

I touched briefly on the subject of the internet and the pitfalls of using it unquestioningly. I am, as you know, intending to move to Peterborough at the end of the year and I wanted to check up on the Peterborough Coin Club. I’m going to need to make friends when I move, and this seems as good a way as any. There’s a lot about it on the internet and it seems like a lively club with an annual Coin Fair. So far, so good. It meets monthly at the Peterborough Zoo.

Zoo? There is no zoo in Peterborough. Not in the Cambridgeshire one, at any rate. Then I realised what had happened. It’s happened before. Peterborough cropped up once before when I searched. I’m told it’s the canoe building capital of the world, which is a surprise as I hardly saw a canoe last time I lived there.

Bear in the Garden

It’s Peterborough, Ontario that grabs all the internet attention. Peterborough, Cambridgeshire is much less interesting, and its coin club, which hasn’t posted on Facebook since lockdown, meets in a Community Centre. Things aren’t looking good for this one . . .

There are three other Peterboroughs in the world – two in Australia and one in New Hampshire. One of the Australian ones was renamed in 1917 due to anti-German feeling in 1917 (it was originally Petersburg)  and one was named after someone named Peter. Peterborough NH was named after a man called Peter too and Peterborough, Ontario, was named after the New Hampshire town.

This is a bit of a blow to civic pride – I had always imagined that they were all called after the original Peterborough. Still, Peterborough was originally called Medeshampstede in Anglo-Saxon times, changing to Gildenburgh and then Peterborough by the 12th Century, so even the original Peterborough isn’t really Peterborough.

I note, reading the article on Wiki, that we are twinned with ll the other Peterboroughs and with Ballarat. I didn’t know that.

Bear in a tree

Graves and Worms and Epitaphs

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Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs

Richard II   William Shakespeare

The lump of stone in the featured image is all that remains of the masonry of Fotheringhay Castle. The hill behind it is the motte, the earthwork mound found in a motte and bailey castle.

The future Richard III was born here in 1452. A lot has been written about Richard III, so I won’t say much more. My sister has been to see his new grave, but I haven’t been yet. I have, however, visited the place where he was killed.

I always used to laugh at my fellow members of the Sealed Knot when they visited battlefields after the beer tent and came back with tales of ghostly ambiences. The clue is in the “after the beer tent”. However, when I visited Bosworth Field I experienced a feeling of loss and desolation and I began to reconsider my position on this.

New research puts the actual site of the battle a mile away, so I was clearly right: people who visit battlefields and have supernatural experiences need to get a grip.

Anyway, enough of Richard III.

The next royal visitor to Fotheringhay didn’t have much luck either. She was Mary Queen of Scots. As with Richard III, much has been written about her so I won’t say much more. She was executed in 1587. One story is that the destruction of the castle was done on the orders of her son James, when he became king of England. However, it seems more likely it was just neglected and used as a source of building materials.

Mary was buried in Peterborough Cathedral, and later reburied at Westminster Abbey in 1612. Her entrails, removed as part of the embalming process, were buried in the grounds of Fotheringhay Castle.

Mary wasn’t the only queen to be buried at Peterborough.  Katherine of Aragon  died of cancer at Kimbolton in 1536 and was buried at Peterborough, the nearest suitable place for an ex-queen. They were both buried by Old Scarlett, the famous Peterborough gravedigger.

That, as they say, is another story.

 

Where have all the Buzzards gone?

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I didn’t see a single Buzzard today on the way to Peterborough, just three Kestrels and a Red Kite.  My first thought on seeing an increase in Kestrels and a decrease in Buzzards is that the Kestrels must have eaten the Buzzards.

According to point 4 in this document I couldn’t be more wrong: it looks like Buzzards may actually be eating Kestrels. As the ones I see are mainly lurking round roadsides waiting for a car to kill something, or even walking the floor looking for worms, I’m amazed they have the energy, or the speed to take a Kestrel.

This sounds wrong to me, as I don’t really think of birds of prey eating each other. I tend to think of them eating less well-armed prey. A quick look at the diet of the Eagle Owl demonstrates that birds of prey do eat other birds of prey – one record of a nesting pair in Scandinavia tool 13 other raptors in a single breeding season. Their favoured prey is the Buzzard. If we ever start a reintroduction process for the Eagle Owl they won’t be short of food for while.

In the end I’ve been forced to conclude the Buzzards were just somewhere else, possibly sheltering from the wind. On cold, wet days I’ve often noticed that they tend to hunch down at lower levels, and are more inclined to take to the fields looking for worms. On previous windy days I’ve also noted a lack of birds. I suspect that, like me, they look for shelter when it’s windy.

After seeing my father and being soundly beaten at dominoes I went to the services on the A1 for a bean burger (for research purposes only, you understand). I took some photographs of the Roman antiquities they found whilst excavating the foundations. I’ll load them tomorrow as I can’t get them off my phone.