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- The Royal Connection
- Hampshire Eats
- Hampshire VIPs
- Richard Remembers
- Owlbut's Birdwatch
The man who most people
agree was the very first king of all England was born in what is now Hampshire. His name was Athlestan and he would have been born in about 894AD.
This means he would have been about 5 years old when his very famous grandfather died.
That man, we know as Alfred the Great, the man who fought off the Vikings and possibly burnt some cakes. It was his eldest son, Edward
the Elder, who was Athlestan's father. Hampshire already had a royal connection because Alfred had made Winchester, the county town of Hampshire,
his capital.
About 200 years after Athlestan was born another king made his mark on the landscape of Hampshire. William the Conqueror and his Norman
barons loved to hunt and William created an area in Hampshire which became known as the New Forest where they could all hunt. To do this, William and
his men destroyed 20 small villages. Hunting was more important to the nobles than the lives of poor peasants. The New Forest is still there today.
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I found a recipe in an old regional
cook book for Hampshire which was for Rasher Pudding. The only other things that I could find that Hampshire was
famous for was the traditional Sunday Roast and watercress. These seemed suitably unexciting so Rasher Pudding it is.
Just as with quite a few dishes, Rasher Pudding could also be taken out cold into the fields, forests and
meadows by the men working there. You could make a large one during an afternoon, have it as a family dinner that evening and then take portions out for
lunch over the next few days. And it was cheap.
Basically, it is a suet-based pudding filled with bacon and onion and, if you want, chopped tomatoes and/or chopped potatoes.
Check out how successful I was by watching the video.
What's stopping you.
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Seven random people who were born in Hampshire in the last 100 years:-
Stampy (YouTuber), Charlie Dimmock (Gardener/TV Presenter), Ian McEwan (Author), Elizabeth Hurley (Actor), the late Peter Sellers (Actor/Comedian),
Clare Balding (TV Presenter) and Craig David (Singer/Songwriter).
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We're back on the coast now so
more memories from my other trips. Hampshire to me means ferry ports, to the Isle of Wight or even further as I once went from Southampton to St Malo in
France, and Portsmouth, and in particular the naval base. The ferries can be seen leaving from Lymington, west of Southampton, Southampton itself and, to
the east, from Portsmouth. The journey time to the Isle of Wight ranges from about an hour from Southampton to 45 mins from the other two ports.
Portsmouth is not only a ferry port but is also the home to one of three operating bases for the Royal Navy in the UK. The city is built on
Portsea Island, which like quite a few places so-named in England, is not an island at all. It has been a port since Roman times and can claim to have
the world's oldest surviving dry dock still in use. It was built in 1495. Portsmouth is home to about ⅔ of the Royal Navy's surface fleet.
The city is also home to a number of famous ships. Henry VIII's famous ship the Mary Rose is housed in a museum there having been lifted from
the seabed in 1982 from where it sank in 1445. The remains of the boat can be viewed but two other ships are still complete and can be boarded. HMS Warrior,
the first iron-hulled warship has been there since 1987 and Admiral Nelson's flagship, HMS Victory, is in the dry dock at the dockyard. I went on board on
one of my visits to Portsmouth and was surprised how small it was considering, at the Battle of Trafalgar at least, it had a crew of 821 men. That's an awful
lot of people in a fairly small space, all with specific jobs to do, all running around, and in the middle of a battle. I guess they were also quite short
as my recollection is that below deck the roof was low.
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Quails are the drag racers of the bird species. They can fly at up to 40 mph but only for about 100 metres. They prefer
to walk on the ground. They do have long pointed wings. The upper parts of their body are brown, streaked with buff while their underparts are orange.
They have brown legs and a short, black, curved, chunky beak.
Quails eat seeds and insects and you are far more likely to hear them than be able to see them. There are only about 500 breeding males in
England and they are on the RSPB Amber List. They usually arrive in April/May time and stay until the late summer. They can be found in farmland and grassland.
Quails are about 17 cms in length, have a wingspan of 32-35 cms and weigh between 75 and 135 grams.
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Two extra sections, "It Happened Here" and "Now That's Weird", will appear on 28 October 2024
