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BUCKINGHAMSHIRE DID YOU KNOW?

The Royal Connection

We have two royal links to Buckinghamshire but there may be more. Brill Palace was a medieval royal residence that was used by Edward the Confessor and Henry II, who visited in 1160 and 1162. Henry III was there sometime in 1224 and then the palace passed to various noble owners. During the Civil War in 1642/3 a royal garrison held the palace. It is now in ruins.

Meanwhile the unfortunate Prince Frederick, then Prince of Wales and son of George II, used Cliveden House as an escape from London after he fell out with his father. It was leased to him by the Countess of Orkney. He and his family lived there for many years as well as having homes in London and Kew. Frederick died in 1751 and the family gave up the lease of the house. It returned to the Countess of Orkney but in 1795 it burnt down. In 1824 it was sold to Sir George Warrender. He died in 1849 and the house was sold to the second Duke of Sutherland. Sadly shortly after he bought the house, it burned down again. The Duke had the place rebuilt and the present house was completed in 1851-2.

By the way, Prince Frederick was a great cricket fan, essentially playing county cricket for Surrey although county cricket hadn't really begun. It was also at Cliveden, in honour of the 3rd birthday of Frederick's daughter Augusta, that the tune Rule Britannia, written by Thomas Arne, was first performed in public in the cliff-side amphitheatre.

Not strictly royal, but the next down the list, Buckinghamshire is where you will find Chequers, the country home of whoever is the British Prime Minister. The 16th century manor house was gifted to the nation in 1921.

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Buckinghamshire Eats

Stokenchurch is a small village in Buckinghamshire which has given its name to a special kind of pie. No one is quite sure how old the recipe is but, as it makes use of macaroni and we think that type of pasta was in use in the 15th century, that would be a good guess for its origins. It uses cooked meat as a main ingredient so it seems to be a way of making left over meat go further.

The meat is cut into pieces or minced and mixed together with some cooked macaroni and some stock to make the mixture moist. This is then spread out over a layer of short crust pastry and on top of that you put a layer of sliced hard boiled egg. Add another layer of the meat and macaroni mixture and top with a second layer of pastry. Then bake it.

Stokenchurch means church made from logs. It was also on the main coaching road between London and Oxford and so the pie may have been baked to serve to travellers when they passed through.

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Buckinghamshire VIPs

Seven random people who were born in Buckinghamshire in the last 100 years:-
Steve Redgrave (Multi Olympian), Terry Pratchett (Author), Leigh-Anne Pinnock (Singer with Little Mix), Prince Michael of Kent (Royal Family Member), Dominic Raab (Foreign Secretary as at 2020), Tim Rice (Lyricist worked with Andrew Lloyd Webber) and Nick Clegg (ex Politician)

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Richard Remembers

County boundaries are not static. My father's mother and his sister, who not surprisingly were my grandmother and aunt, lived in Slough. Before I was six, and we sold our car, we would visit them quite often. Thinking about it I think I know why my father sold the car because on one such trip to Slough, in the rain, going uphill, I, who always sat in the front passenger seat, happened to mention my feet were getting very wet. Rainwater was coming in and spreading down around my feet. Anyhow Slough is now in Berkshire but the little village of Stoke Poges, which we had to drive through, is still in Buckinghamshire. I remember it because my parents told me that the village church there was famous as a man, called Thomas Gray, had, in about 1750, written a poem there which was called an elegy in a country churchyard. I have never read the poem (perhaps you might like to do so) but I did have to look up what an elegy was (and perhaps you can do that too).

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Owlbut's Birdwatch

The Red Kite can often be seen in the Buckinghamshire countryside. It is a bird of prey, like me, and will usually feed on worms or carrion. Carrion is the dead, decaying flesh of another animal. However that animal must have been killed in some way other than by the bird eating it. If you see dead birds along the road, these are carrion and other birds may feed off them. Red Kites might also feed on small mammals if I, and my family, haven't got there first.

The Red Kite has a reddish-brown body, angled wings and a forked tail. At one stage it was thought they would become extinct but there are now believed to be about 4,000 breeding pairs in the UK. They weigh between 800 to 1,300 kg, have a wingspan of around 185cm and can be up to 66cm long. Their feathers are multi-coloured with red, orange, white, grey, brown and black and they have yellow legs and a black and yellow hooked beak. Richard has seen them when driving along both the M4 and the M40. Look out for them but they also live in woodland and farmland and suburban areas.

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Two extra sections, "It Happened Here" and "Now That's Weird", will appear on 23 September 2024