Wolves and Hammers

Wolverhampton Wanderers and West Ham United are two football (soccer) teams, usually just called Wolves and Hammers for short. Wolverhampton is a town in the midlands of England, and West Ham is a part of the East End (the east of London).

Gwyn ap Nudd

Usually pronounced Gwin ap Neeth, he is the old Welsh god of the dead, of dream, of storm and of the underworld. I am told that in Jungian psychological terms this means he is the god of the subconscious. There are also legends linking him with Glastonbury.

Cricket

There are two teams, one team is in and one team is out. The team that's out is out, and the team that's in is out, except for two players who are in, and when they're out they come in …

Stonehenge

Is a circle of huge standing stones near the town of Salisbury, England. Construction started on it at least 3,000 years ago, and 60 of the stones, weighing about 4 tons each, were dragged and barged from south Wales, hundreds of miles away. The inner circle of stones originally all had capstones on the top. We assume it had some sort of ritual or ceremonial purpose, but the people who built it didn't leave any notes about it, so it is basically still shrouded in mystery. It is, however, clear that it was carefully planned so that the altar stone lines up with the dawning sun on midsummer day. Stonehenge is only the most visible remainder of what was once a much wider prehistoric ritual landscape: the whole region of south England around the circle is dotted with burial mounds, stone or wood avenues, a wood henge, etc

Old Sarum

Not far from Stonehenge and just a mile or two from Salisbury is a vanished town, called Old Sarum, centred round a Norman castle and cathedral. (Salisbury was originally called New Sarum when the cathedral was built there to replace the Old Sarum one). Some hummocky ruins can still be seen, but the Norman buildings were placed on a huge, much, much older mound of an Iron Age hillfort. This mound is still there. Although the town was abandoned some time in the fifteenth century and was just rotting away, for many centuries Old Sarum still had the right to elect a Member of Parliament. So, the landowner who owned the place could basically put whoever he wanted in Parliament. In this old corrupt system, Old Sarum was one of what were called "rotten boroughs".

The Ridgeway

Is a prehistoric track which runs through southern England, keeping mainly, as its name suggests, to the ridges along the top of hills. It dates back at least to the Neolithic, so is perhaps 6,000 years old, and is called the oldest road in England.

SPOILER WARNING: you might prefer to stop here if you haven't yet read The Merlin Conspiracy, and come back when you've read the book.

Wayland's Smithy

The Ridgeway path takes you right past a dark copse of trees, through which you can just glimpse a clearing with a mound in the middle. Slotted upright at one end of the mound are large standing stones. This is a 4,000-year-old burial mound, where stone chamber tombs were covered over and a mound built on top. The entrance between the big stones is open, and you can go in if you don't mind crouching, because it's quite a small mound (there's no skeletons left there anymore!). Diana Wynne Jones describes things so powerfully that when I read the section of the book where Toby sees the people waiting in the wood, I was immediately transported in my mind to Wayland's Smithy. After all, it was by Toby's father's house, near the "Ridgeway Downs". On the other hand, the book never states that Wayland's Smithy is the powerful copse described, so I'm not saying it is, either. It's just what I thought of. Wayland, by the way, was the mythological blacksmith of faerie lore in Britain. (Infra red photos of Wayland's Smithy by Mark Biddiss)

White Horse of Uffington

This is a hill figure cut into the hillside just off the Ridgeway at Uffington, Oxfordshire, a short walk along the track from Wayland's Smithy. It's the oldest chalk figure in Britain, dating back to about 1500 BC, and was made by just cutting off the grass and soil in a pattern to reveal the white chalk underneath. This figure has a unique stylistic shape which has led many people to think it's not a horse at all, but a dragon. Of course, the mound which was built below and to one side of the chalk figure is called Dragon Hill! The Merlin Conspiracy doesn't say that this is Nick's dragon, and I'm not arguing that it is. But again, when I read about Nick stepping on the dragon, I was vividly reminded of this weird and mysterious White Horse. You can see pictures on this white horses site

Avebury

Quite close to Wayland's Smithy and, in the other direction, to Stonehenge, is another amazing stone circle, so big that a village grew up in its middle. There were originally 100 huge stones making up the outer circle about 1,300 feet across. There were two separate smaller circles within this, and nowadays you can only make out part of one them, and within that, a grouping which is believed to be the altar area. Also surviving is part of one of the 50-foot-wide avenues of stones which were built extending out of the circle. Avebury doesn't ring any bells at all in The Merlin Conspiracy, but because it is such an incredible prehistoric site close to the Ridgeway, I thought I'd include it here anyway!

Infra red photos of Avebury by Mark Biddiss