Hello listeners, welcome back to Luke's English podcast.
This is a podcast for learners of English around the world.
Are you a learner of English?
Are you around the world?
If the podcast is for you.
This is episode 902.
It's very nice to be talking to you on the podcast again.
It's nice to see that recent episodes have gone down well with everyone.
Lots of nice comments on the last couple of episodes.
The one with Amber and Paul.
The Long Rambling Conversation episode 900, where we talked about the Olympics and sneezing and all sorts of things.
People enjoyed that one.
Then there was the Sherlock Holmes episode from the previous one.
Also very popular. They're always popular, those episodes.
Plenty of people have been writing in the comments section things like this, saying, we love the Sherlock Holmes stories.
Please do more of them.
I will. I'll do some more of those.
I'll be doing other story episodes as well coming up on the podcast.
This time in this episode, this one is a conversation episode which means I'll be talking to a guest on the show.
This is your chance to listen to some free flowing English conversation.
You can practice listening to natural English as it is actually spoken.
This time I'm talking to my dad again on the podcast.
Long term listeners will know my dad, Rick Thompson.
Often he's on the show talking about politics and news in episodes of the Rick Thompson Report.
Also, as well as being a former journalist, he's also these days a writer.
In fact, he has written another book.
He's written his third book.
As you may be aware, for the previous two books, dad came on the podcast to talk about what the books are about and also to share some stories and descriptions from those two books.
The previous books were called...
The first one was called Park Life, a year in the life of an urban park.
The second one was called A River Avon Year, The Wildlife and History of Shakespeare's Avon.
This third book, this new book, which is available today, it's been published, the publication date is today, which should be the 1st of October.
If I have managed to get myself organized enough to publish this on Tuesday, the 1st of October, the book is now available.
It's called A Year on the Foss, The Wildlife and History of the Famous Roman Road.
I won't go into all the details now about what the Foss is and stuff like that.
Plenty of history, plenty of stories, plenty of descriptions of wildlife.
In this particular book, my dad is following a famous Roman road that runs right through the center of England.
In this conversation, you can just sit back, relax and enjoy listening to my dad, talking about some English history, telling some stories and also describing some nature.
So listen on, that's what you're going to get in this episode.
All right. And at the end of the conversation, I'll come back again to do a little bit of a ramble.
Okay, so without any further ado, let's now listen to the conversation, which I recorded with my dad this morning.
And here we go. Hello, dad.
Good morning. Welcome back on to the podcast.
Good morning, Luke.
It's very nice to be back on the podcast.
How are you? I'm fine.
Well, I'm just, as you can hear, I'm just kind of recovering from a bit of a cold, so it's affecting my voice a bit.
But I'm doing fine.
It's nice to talk to you.
How are you this morning?
I'm okay. Okay. We usually start with a weather report.
Well, weather at the moment is really horrible.
I mean, it's incredibly wet.
There's some flood alerts all across the center of England.
Fortunately, we live on the top of a hill, so we're okay.
But the, you know, the rain has just been relentless and there's more to come.
And it's also windy and quite cold.
Apart from that, it's lovely.
Okay, yes, this is a thing that happens in England a lot, isn't it?
That when we get these periods of heavy rain, rivers burst their banks and you get flooding in a lot of places.
Yeah, yeah. It's just that we get these things called depressions, which come across the Atlantic normally, though this one's coming in from the north, and it's low pressure.
And it's a, it means the rain goes round and round in a circle, excuse me.
And it can just get stuck over over the middle of the country.
And so it just keeps on raining and keeps on raining.
And of course, yes, as you say, the rivers sometimes overflow.
Okay, so that's meant that you haven't been able to go for your normal walk around the park this morning.
No, I haven't been out for my morning, constitutional.
There's a good word for you.
What do you mean by that?
A walk which is for your health.
For your health, it's quite nice.
Yeah. No, I haven't typed in.
I was just going to say you wrote a book about your daily constitutional walks around the local park.
That was book number one.
Then book number two came out and you've done it again.
Book number three, it's a hat trick of books.
It's becoming a series.
So you've written another book coming out right now.
Yes. And here it is.
Look at that. It's called A Year on the Foss.
That's for video viewers.
That's that's a kestrel.
He's showing the front cover of the book listeners.
You'll be able to find a picture of this if you follow the link in the description in your podcast app of choice.
But yeah, the book is called A Year Hold it up again for me.
The book is called A Year on the Foss.
What's the sort of subtitle for the book?
The Wildlife and History of the Famous Roman Road.
Okay. Foss is. Foss.
No, I don't actually.
Well, in Latin, Fossa means ditch.
And the Foss way is one of the first big Roman roads that they built after they'd invaded Britain.
And they're famously straight, particularly the Foss way.
It runs like pencil straight through the middle of the country, just near where I live, not far away.
It passes by, it's completely straight road.
And lots of people know the Foss way they signs up when you're on the Foss way, it says it's the Foss way with a little Roman soldier logo.
Everybody knows the Foss way.
It's, it's about 350 kilometers long, so it's a long road.
And it goes from Exeter down near the sea in Devon, all the way through the middle of the country to Lincoln, and the east of the country.
So that's the fourth way.
It goes in a diagonal line, doesn't it, basically from the kind of the southwest up to the northeast ish.
So the Foss is a Latin word, it's an Old Roman word, and it means a ditch.
And the road, we believe was built next to the ditch.
Hello, this is Luke from the future, just interrupting this while I'm editing it.
And because I'm an English teacher, I feel like I need to explain what a ditch is.
It's a small detail.
But you've heard the word several times now.
So you probably want to know what it is.
A ditch is something that is dug in the ground.
So you dig into the ground, people would dig into the ground.
And it's a kind of a long thing.
So it's where the ground goes down.
And it's long. So like a kind of a long trench, you might find a ditch by the side of the road.
So if you've got a long road in the countryside, there might be a ditch next to the road so that the water would go off the road and go into the ditch.
Sometimes farmers dig ditches next to their fields, again, so that water would drain off the field and go into the ditch.
Okay, the Romans dug this particular very long ditch.
They dug this deep ditch like a long trench into the ground as a form of defence against people who could attack them.
So it's this long ditch.
And as you're going to hear me say, again, in a second, the the phos is actually the road that was built next to this ditch in the ground.
That is dead right.
They they had a defensive ditch and a road alongside it.
And it was an amazing piece of engineering.
They the Romans built the road with layers of gravel and, and stone and then paved it with slabs of limestone and put a kind of cement in between, so that they could move their troops and wagons with supplies and cavalry and chariots quickly in all weathers.
And along the phos way, they built forts, which are garrisoned.
And the idea was to to protect the southeast of England that they conquered, notably from the Celtic tribes to the north and west.
And amazingly enough, the phos way is is still where a lot of towns, villages and big cities grew up.
Because the Romans built their forts where there were, you know, river crossings and intersected with other roads.
And they've turned into some of our biggest towns and cities.
So so it's an interesting journey.
And I did it as a journey, in fact, from Lincoln down to Exeter, month by month.
Looking at the wildlife as the seasons change, but also doing the stories of the towns and cities.
And there were some interesting curious tales as well.
So your book basically follows, as you said, a year along the phos way, starting up in Lincoln and traveling all the way down to Exeter in the southwest, month by month, covering the wildlife that you can find throughout the year, plus stories from the history of this historic Roman road.
And it's interesting that it goes in that diagonal line, because I understand that it represents the border of the land that the Romans had kind of captured.
And as you say, this ditch is phos, where the road was built next to was, as you said, a defensive ditch.
Because this this marks, as I said, the border of the land they'd captured, and then the land that was still sort of populated by these Celtic tribes who they had to defend themselves against, I suppose.
Yeah, okay, that's right.
I mean, tell you a little bit about, you know, the invasion of Britain.
People will know that our islands have been invaded time and time again, over the years.
If we go all the way back to pre Roman times, we are talking about a number of individual tribes and kingdoms.
They didn't always live in harmony with each other.
And they call them the ancient Britons or the Celts, Celtic civilization.
And we still hang on to some of the Celtic traditions and, and language in Welsh is based on the Celtic language.
And there's still Irish and some Scottish dialects, which are based on Celtic.
So if we if we go back to pre Roman times, that we're talking about the Celts, we're talking about people who worship the sun and their religious memory called Druids.
And they, of course, they worship the sun because we all know that that's where life comes from.
They depend on it. And civilizations around the world have worshiped the sun.
The Romans did do a certain thing, sent themselves.
Anyway, the Roman Empire built on brilliant military strength, had taken over most of mainland Europe.
In fact, that its height, it took over the whole of Europe and part of Asia, and a bit of Africa as well.
Incredible. Anyway, the I had to study Latin at school.
You do Latin, Luke?
No, I did know that I did no Latin at school.
So by the time I was at school, basically Latin had been removed from the national curriculum.
I just did some French and a bit of German.
But so you did Latin then, which is an interesting one, because obviously people don't actually use Latin these days.
Oh, no. Latin is dead as dead can be first it killed the Romans and now it's killing me.
Latin is a difficult thing to learn.
And I didn't enjoy it at all.
But I had to, I had in those days, long time ago, in those days, you had to have a Latin qualification, if you want to go to some of the better universities to study English, which is what I wanted to do.
In fact, I had to study a bit of Latin after I got to university.
Because of course, if you're looking at the English language, there is an argument that you have to understand a bit of Latin.
Otherwise, you can't understand the language because a lot of it's based on Latin.
Anyway, we were taught a little rhyme to remember the dates BC that's before Christ, BC 55, Caesar and his men arrive, BC 54, Caesar and his men once more.
So we remembered that Julius Caesar and his army arrived on these shores, 55 BC, and then he went away and came back again the next year, PC 54.
And they forged north up to, you know, the River Thames and and established some kind of authority over southeast England.
But the legions were withdrawn because of trouble back on the mainland in Gaul, where you are.
Yeah, France, France and the local sort of what what she say, asterisk and obelisk.
Yeah, that's right.
The goals, the goals.
Well, the goals are giving the Romans a lot of trouble.
So they, they, Caesar took his troops back to put down the insurrections and the guerrilla war.
But wasn't there, sorry, wasn't a kind of battle with the Celtic tribes in England, Queen Budica and Budica?
Well, that came later.
That came a bit later.
There were battles.
I mean, obviously, when this great force came across the the channel and landed on the coast, there were loads of battles with the Celts, but the Romans were too strong.
No, they so in BC 54, they they withdrew again.
And it took another 90 years before the full scale invasion of Britain.
And this was Emperor, Emperor Claudius was the Emperor at the time.
And he ordered the invasion of Britain, which they regarded as being underdeveloped and full of useful resources.
And the commander of the army was called Claudius.
And Claudius took a huge force across the channel to invade Britain.
They talk about the historians, they had 1000 ships.
Can you imagine that?
Wow. And they they had troops, but they also had supplies.
They had chariots, they had horses, cavalry, all taken over on boats and landed.
There were a number of series of battles.
But they they soon controlled what is now on the southeast side of the Fosse Way.
Well, you mentioned Budica.
She was the famous queen of one of the tribes, the Iceni.
And they had an agreement with the Romans, which the Romans broke.
It was about, you know, they can keep their dead land and so on.
And and they also, as it says in the history books, violated her daughters to humiliate them.
And they whipped Queen Budica.
And this enraged the Iceni so much.
And they linked up with a neighboring tribe and they marched on the Roman lines and went into Londinium, London, and burned it down.
The Roman troops there were outnumbered heavily, so they withdrew.
And then Budica and her her army turned around and headed for another big settlement called St.
Albans. And they were intercepted by the Romans who had brought their legions in from east and west along the Fosse Way, probably.
And it was a D that's an I dominate 60 or 61.
Nobody's quite sure.
That's after Christ.
This is the invasion was a D43.
So it was about 15 years after that.
And there was a massive battle called the Battle of Watling Street.
Watling Street is another Roman road which headed up north and crossed the Fosse Way.
And somewhere near there was where this battle took place.
And the the Britons were very heavily defeated.
And the local historians think it's Tacitus says 80 ,000 of them were killed.
Well, like it's probably an exaggeration, but it was certainly a bit of a massacre.
And after that, the Romans had secured southern Britain, and they remained in charge for 350 years until the Roman Empire collapsed, and they withdrew their legions.
So I mean, we're going back a long time here.
But the Fosse Way was was key to the the conquering of England.
They obviously went further north and basically stopped at what is now Hadrian's Wall.
The big wall dividing England from Scotland.
Because the Scots and the terrain there was too difficult.
So they decided that will do.
Yeah, it reminds me of I don't know if you've seen the film Gladiator, Dad.
Yes, I did a long time ago now.
Yeah, there's a scene at the beginning of the film where the Romans are, I guess attempting to invade Scotland.
Actually, I just checked and it's not Scotland.
It's Germania, which I suppose is somewhere in what is now Germany.
So not actually Scotland.
But you know, it doesn't really matter.
It's more or less the same, same kind of thing anyway.
And there's just a battle in a forest where they're fighting against these Scottish barbarians.
And it's very impressive, you know, of course, it's Ridley Scott directing it.
So he's very good at doing these historical battle scenes.
But it's just amazing you see the Roman soldiers in formation, and then all these barbarians in the forest running out with their big ginger beards, you know, and axes and stuff like that.
And you know, you see a big battle and so on.
It's probably the way it was.
We do have an account of the Battle of Watling Street against Boudica, where Tacitus says that Claudius addressed his troops before the battle, and Boudica addressed her troops before the battle.
And there is a famous statue outside Westminster in London of Boudica on her chariot with her daughters behind her, addressing her troops before the battle.
And what the historian says is that they were very different.
Boudica went on about honor, and how they, you know, they're fighting for their culture and traditions, and we have been offended and everything else.
And Claudius simply stuck with tactics.
And he told his troops, remember what you've learned, throw your javelins, push them over with your shields, and finish them off with your swords.
That's what he said.
And clearly that's what they did.
It's one of the reasons why the Romans were so powerful, is that they had these military tactics, and they had the technology, the armor and these great big shields.
Yeah. Yeah, and they had, you know, the engineering, going back to the roads, the way that they built their roads.
Yes, the road service on the Fosse Way was called the Aga, A -G -G -E -R, the Aga.
I'm not sure. It describes how it has layers, and drainage ditches, and a bit of a camber, and it's beautifully engineered.
There are a few little bits of it still remaining down the way, but hardly any of it.
And it was an amazing job.
They must have had lots and lots of slaves or locals pressed into service, because it was such a huge enterprise, such a long, long road.
The interesting thing is, the book is about history and wildlife.
The Romans quarried limestone from a limestone ridge, which pretty well follows the line of the road.
They quarried it. Those quarries, obviously, were exploited later, over the centuries.
For example, Bath, the city of Bath, is on the Fosse Way, and it's got magnificent stone buildings.
And the stone came from a whole number of quarries nearby.
Well, these quarries, when they were no longer used, tended to flood, and they turned into lakes and ponds.
And quite a few of them are now nature reserves.
So, near the Fosse Way, where the Romans started the quarrying, you have nature reserves, which is rather nice.
And of course, they're particularly valuable bits of wild country, well, partly wild, because they're close to population centers.
And so, having access to nature, when you live in a big city is really important, as we now know, particularly to help people with their mental health as well as their physical health.
Okay, and so, in these nature reserves, you get stretches of fresh water, and so on.
And you get all kinds of bird life and animal life that live there.
Very interesting. What changes over the year?
What are some of the highlights in terms of wildlife that you can see in these sorts of nature reserves that used to be quarries where the Romans dug out lots of stone from the ground?
Well, in the wintertime, they're very, very busy with a wild fowl, that's ducks and geese.
And the book starts in January.
And we see some of the really colorful ducks that are in large numbers on these big lakes.
And a lot of them are called whistling ducks, because they do whistle.
So, you hear them before you see them, ducks called the widget, and the teal are smallest duck.
They have a little whistle.
At the other end of the Fosse Way, I got there in December, it's an estuary, the X River, Exeter is the city on the X River, but just to the south of it, there is the X estuary, and it's a very, very wide estuary.
And estuary is where a river meets the sea, and the banks of the river become very wide, and you get this wide stretch of water where the river goes out into the sea, an estuary.
You do. And it's a long estuary and a wide estuary, and it's famous for wintering birds, wild fowl, and waders.
In the thousands, they spend winter on the X estuary.
It's quite shallow, and they can feed on the sandbanks, and it's shallow enough for them to be able to feed.
The numbers of birds there are really spectacular.
There's a bird called an avocet, which is extremely attractive, and it has a very unusual bill that curves up, and it sweeps it to and fro to get its food.
Now, they were very rare when I was a kid.
There was great excitement when avocets nested in this country the first time.
Well, on the X estuary in wintertime, you'll get 200 or 300 avocets.
And a lot of them travel quite long distances.
Some of the ducks come from Siberia, Northern Russia, to escape the harsh winters there.
They come here, and it's the same with geese.
Some of them come from northern, even the Arctic Circle, Spitsbergen, places like that, Iceland.
So, they come to the British Isles and the estuaries around the coast in particular, because it would be far too cold where they breed.
Yeah, this is one of the interesting things about the UK.
We have such a diverse bird life, because a lot of it is migratory.
A lot of birds pass through, as you say, either coming from the north to winter in the UK, or they come from Africa and other hot places during the summertime to escape the extremely hot weather.
So, we end up with this very diverse bird life, which is really interesting.
This is one of the reasons why in the UK there is a culture of bird watching.
A lot of people go out with their binoculars and like to identify different birds and have a look at them, and they're very beautiful.
That's certainly a feature of British life.
You're quite right.
And as you say, in the summer, we get all the visitors who are escaping from where it might be too hot and too arid, like swallows, of course, famously.
The book mentions the fact that numbers of these birds are declining, mainly because the number of flying insects are declining.
And there's quite a lot of scientific study going on about that.
That's the way it looks.
It's established that the number of insects are down, including butterflies as well as little flies.
And the reasons are not entirely clear, but the main culprit appears to be intensive farming, where a single crop field is not particularly helpful for insect life.
And they use pesticides to kill off the pests, but of course, it reduces the number of insects that birds feed on.
And it's a big issue and rather a depressing one.
Anyway, the book touches on what's called the biodiversity crisis.
And some of these little migratory birds travel fantastic distances.
There's one called the willow warbler, little warbler, little brown bird, very small.
And it travels here from South Africa each year.
And sometimes they go from one of them was tracked with little tracking device from Mozambique to Northern Russia and back again.
And they're tiny. So quite interesting how far birds migrate.
And as you say, lots and lots of species migrate.
I would think about 60 % of birds migrate some of them long distances, some of them short distances.
It's amazing that they know the way.
How do they know the way?
I know, it's a great mystery of migration.
How do they navigate?
And some birds of course return to the nest they were born in like swallows do.
How do they find it?
Well, no one's quite sure, but there is something in a bird's beak, which can detect the magnetic field of the earth.
So it may be that combination of following the sun, or following the magnetic field in a mysterious way, or recognizing landmarks.
But it's one of the great mysteries of ornithology is how do they find their way?
Yes, fascinating. Okay, so in the book then, as you follow the Fosse way, I suppose there are a number of different stories relating to things that have happened on that route over the years.
There certainly are.
Obviously, there are major events like battles in the English Civil War or the Wars of the Roses.
You must know, you remember about Richard III, Richard III, the king?
Richard III is, I mean, we know a lot about him through Shakespeare, because of the Shakespeare play, and a lot of other things that were written about him.
He's an interesting character, because we wonder how much of it's true, and how much of it is a sort of character assassination by the Tudors who replaced him.
But the stereotype of Richard III is that he was an evil man.
He had a hunchback, and he was ambitious, and he stole the throne from his nephews, who had a legal claim to the throne.
It's very game of thrones sort of thing.
These two young nephews were the rightful heirs to the throne, and Richard III, the uncle, the evil uncle, kind of stepped in and possibly had them killed, and then became king himself.
He was an evil man.
Then later the heroic Tudor Henry IV came in and won the Henrys.
Henry VI, I can't remember which Henry it is, but won the Henrys came in and sort of defeated him in battle.
It was basically families, the great Yorkshire family, the orchestra's, Richard's background, and the Lancastrians, the west side of northern England.
They were the ones that thought they were the rightful possessors of the throne, and we had this so -called war of the roses going on.
We were talking about islands that had been invaded.
When the Romans had pulled out, and there was a British Roman kind of administration in certain places, but it fragmented.
We were invaded from mainland Europe again, mainly from Germany.
That's the Saxons and the Anglo -Saxons were the Saxons who settled in this country.
The Anglo -Saxon kings were, again, different rivals.
They were like earls with their private armies.
The most famous of them all was Alfred the Great.
Alfred was the king of Wessex, Southwestern England, and through arranged marriages and wanting another, he submerged the Midland Kingdom, where I am, called Mercia with Wessex.
People say that was really when we'd established something you could call England.
So Alfred is regarded as being the first king of England.
We go up to 1066. I mean, he was around in the 900s.
1066. We got invaded again big time.
So we go Romans, Saxons, and then fast forward to 1066, and then we've got the Normans.
Yeah, that's right.
So that was what ushered in the Middle Ages, as we call it, which is roughly 1100 to 1400.
Then after that, it's regarded as being the start of the modern era of Britain.
Yeah, so Richard III.
Well, you're quite right.
He is characterised as being an evil murderer.
But there was a woman who was a researcher, and she lived in Leicester.
The city of Leicester is the capital of Leicestershire, and it's on the Fosse Way.
The Fosse Way runs right through the middle.
She was researching a book about Richard III, and basically was not at all convinced that he was the evil murderer that had been portrayed by the Tudors and by Shakespeare.
So she wanted to find his grave.
All we knew was that his body after the Battle of Bosworth, where he'd been killed, was brought back into Leicester, apparently slung over a horse, and that he was buried, and he was taken in by the Grey Friars, a religious order.
And that was all that was known really.
There was also a legend that his body had been thrown into the river over a bridge, and that there's actually a plaque on the bridge, which says that.
But she wasn't sure, and she had a feeling that he was buried under a car park.
She went into this car park, which is roughly where the Grey Friars monastery used to be, and had a feeling that he's here.
Well, she went away and came back a little later, and the car park people had painted an hour on one of the bays, meaning reserved.
But it also means Rex King.
It also means Richard, and she stood on this and she said, that's where he is.
Well, how did she know that he was buried under that very spot?
Just a feeling. Really?
She said, I had this feeling.
And it's funny that R was written there.
Yeah. Anyway, it took a bit of time to get the money together and get the permission from the council to dig up the car park, do an archaeological dig.
And in the end, the archaeologists supported it because they wanted to find the Grey Friars monastery.
They didn't think there was much chance of finding Richard the Third's grave.
But in the first day of the dig, they found the grave and the spine was curved, and they did DNA tests.
And they had some relatives of Richard, known relatives, and compared it.
And it was him. And he didn't have a hunchback, but he did have a condition which was curvature of the spine.
And he didn't have a withered arm, as Shakespeare portrayed him.
And it was a big moment.
And there was a huge internment in the Enlesta Cathedral.
Thousands of people came, and he paraded to the streets of people cured, Richard the Third.
And he's now buried in properly in the Enlesta Cathedral.
So an interesting little story, there's lots of stories all the way down these things.
I should say, sorry, was it a journalist who?
Philippa Langley was the next member of the media.
Philippa Langley, there's a book, she wrote a book in 2013, which tells the whole story.
It's called The King's Grave, The Search for Richard the Third.
And a film was made based on the book in 2022, directed by Stephen Frears, and starring Steve Coogan.
And it's sort of like the film of the story of the book of The Search for Richard the Third's Grave.
So, you know, that's interesting, isn't it?
Yes. It's called, is it called Searching for Richard?
Oh, the film is called The Lost King.
The Lost King? Yeah.
I haven't seen it. Anyway, so that was an interesting story for a start.
But there are some more other more bizarre stories I sort of came across.
There's a place called Marnesbury in the Cotswolds.
You know what the Cotswolds are?
Cotswolds is a series of little villages, little towns, in kind of just to the southwest of the Midlands.
I don't know what Wald means, though.
Or Cots. I don't know what the word Cotswolds actually means.
Wald, a Wald, W -O -L -D, old fashioned word, is a rolling hill.
It's a, the Wald is a pretty low hill.
Cotswold is a sheep farm on a rolling hill.
So good sheep country, very much with a lot of towns that became quite affluent through wool.
It is to the southwest of Birmingham, and it's very beautiful.
It's a sort of heritage site in itself.
The stone there is beautifully golden and the cottages are very, very attractive.
So in the Cotswolds, there's a place called Marnesbury.
And I discovered that there's a grave there of a barmaid.
And she was the first person in Britain to be killed by a tiger.
What? Yes. Sorry, what?
And I can't remember exactly what it says on her grave, but it's a little rhyme.
Here it is. She was called Hannah and she was a barmaid Hannah Twinnoy at the White Lion Inn.
Not the White Tiger, the White Lion.
Yeah. Her grave says, in bloom of life, she snatched from hence.
She had not room to make defence, for Tiger Fierce took life away.
And here she lies in a bed of clay until the resurrection day.
The local menagerie or, you know, traveling circus had come to town and they'd parked up in the car park of the pub, or the yard of the pub, it wouldn't be a car park, we're talking 17.
And we don't know the details, but the rhyme seems to suggest she was cornered.
So she's probably cornered in the bar, the tiger got out and killed the poor Hannah.
There's another story from Marnesbury involving escaped animals.
Oh my goodness. This one is about two pigs.
The pigs were being transported to the slaughterhouse to be killed.
And they managed to escape and swim across a river and disappeared into woodland.
And a lot of people, you know, were brought together to try and find the pigs.
And the press liked this story.
You know how pigs on the run and they became known as Butch and Sundance.
When was this? Oh, it was not so long ago.
I think 1960s. Okay.
So they became known as Butch and Sundance after the film, after the film, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance kid about these two outlaws who were escaping from the police.
That's exactly right.
And, you know, they kept escaping from the posse.
Sometimes they would be glimpsed, they would disappear again.
And the press liked this.
And Japanese broadcaster NHK actually flew a reporter in to give them daily updates on Butch and Sundance.
Anyway, in the end, Butch was found rooting about in somebody's back gardener.
They managed to catch Butch.
And the next day they managed to find Sundance.
But the bloke who owned them said they were still going to go for slaughter.
Well, they become personalities by now.
So the Daily Mail's newspaper decided it would save them.
And it bought exclusive rights to the pigs.
I don't think they realized they weren't going to get a very good interview with the pigs, but they went off to an animal sanctuary and lived happily ever after.
Oh, right. Well, lucky then.
So all sorts of stories along this famous road, including some other bizarre ones.
Yeah. I like the place called Chippenham.
Chippenham, that's on the edge of the Cotswolds heading towards Bath.
I mentioned King Alfred the Great, the famous Anglo -Saxon King of Wessex.
That's where he was when the Danes, and we were invaded not just by the Anglo -Saxons, but by the Scandinavians who took over the north of England.
Viking from Norway and the Danes from Denmark.
The Danes were constantly at war with the Anglo -Saxons.
And they did a launch surprise attack on Chippenham.
And Alfred and his men had to escape into the marshes at Somerset levels.
What are marshes, Dad?
Sorry? What are marshes?
Marshes are areas of wet ground, which are not particularly good for farming.
Yeah, it's a very soft wet ground.
Marshes is like a bit of a bog, really.
Like a swamp. Bit like a swamp.
Anyway, there's a legend here.
Alfred was taken in by some peasant woman in her little house, and she didn't know who he was.
And she told him to sit by the fire and watch the cakes, which she was cooking on a griddle on the fire.
Don't let them burn.
So Alfred, escaping from the Danes, escapes into this marshland and ends up finding his way into this woman's home.
He kind of hides in there.
She doesn't know who he is.
And she says, right, you just sit there and watch those cakes.
Make sure they don't burn.
Right? Okay. But he was preoccupied thinking about how was he going to defeat the Danes coming up with a plan.
And he let the cakes burn.
And she scolded him.
This is the story of Alfred and the cakes.
But whatever it was, whatever it was he was thinking worked because very shortly afterwards there was a big battle.
The Danes were defeated.
Right. When you say she scolded him, it basically means she told him off, right?
Yeah. Told him off.
Shouted at him and said, told him off for burning the cakes.
And little did she know that this was the king of England that she was scolding.
But it worked because they defeated the Danes then.
So it actually, it worked for him.
Yeah. He obviously, the plan he was hatching worked because there was a big defeat.
The Danish leader, he was another king, was forced to surrender in Chippenham.
And the deal was that he became a Christian.
Christianity. And then they had an agreement where they could go off to east of the country, Norfolk, but they could rule there under a Christian law, the Danelaw.
It's very interesting how there've been battles after battles after battles in our history.
And you think, how many people have had to die and was there any point?
But that's the way it was.
It was, it's always force of arms, which allows people to take over.
I've got another one for you in Chippenham, this place.
In the 1960s, the 50s, late 50s, I think, there was a car crash on the way.
Remember? Eddie Cochran.
Eddie Cochran. Now, younger people won't have heard of Eddie Cochran, but at the time in the 50s, he was really famous.
And he is American.
And he, he wrote and performed songs which captured teenage frustration.
So for example, summertime blues.
There ain't Europe, the summertime blues.
This guy was one of the key rock and roll artists from the 50s, sort of pre Beatles, a contemporary of Elvis Presley, one of those early rock and roll stars.
He would have been hugely popular in England around that time, because of the rock and roll boom.
He'd just come to the end of a tour, a British tour.
His last venue was in Bristol and he was in a taxi being driven by a 19 year old, along with his girlfriend and along with Jean Vincent, another rocker who was doing the same tour with Eddie Cochran.
And the car was going too fast.
It left the road and hit a concrete lamppost.
And Jean Vincent was injured.
He smashed his legs, but Eddie Cochran was thrown out and died.
And it was obviously big news at the time.
Now, there's an interesting twist to this little story because his belongings were taken to the local police station.
And one of the young police cadets picked up Eddie Cochran's rather nice guitar and started playing it.
And he spent some time playing this guitar.
Well, this this police cadet decided he wants to be a rock star.
And so he formed a band and it was called Dave D Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Titch.
And that had a number of big hits and he was Dave D.
How about that? Really?
So yeah, I've heard of Dave D Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Titch, a ridiculous name for a band, but they were really popular in the 60s.
So yeah, he he he learned to play the guitar by basically commandeering Eddie Cochran's guitar at the police station and then went on to have a successful pop career on the back of it.
Wow. Amazing, isn't it?
The weird coincidences.
Yeah. So all these stories are in your book then.
Oh, yes. And of course, that there's lots of, you know, more interesting stories, but there is a serious side to the book and it is about the need to protect our environment, which is, you know, has faces multiple threats.
I mentioned our biodiversity crisis.
Well, it is one, the number of species is declining.
The other one, of course, is connected is the is the climate crisis.
And that also affects wildlife quite significantly.
And then there's a pollution crisis that the rivers are polluted, the air in cities is polluted.
And all these things are, of course, connected, but there are things people can do to help combat the degradation of our natural environment.
And, and there's quite a strong movement, particularly amongst young people, saying, we have to take action to, to reverse the decline of the natural world.
We're in a quite heavily populated country.
And that, of course, puts pressure on on the natural world.
Interesting talk about road.
One of the things I talk about is roadkill.
Roadkill is wild creatures that are hit by vehicles.
About 70 years ago, there were around three and a half million vehicles on roads in Britain.
Yeah. According to the registrations, there are now about 45 million vehicle Wow, three million to 45 million in a generation basically.
And, of course, that means that there's more of a slaughter on the roads because they're much busier than they used to be.
Right. One of the things that keeps getting killed on the roads are our deer.
We have a number of escapee deer.
There are six different kinds of deer in Britain, only two of them are natives.
The others escape from collections and zoos and bread in the wild.
Notably the muntjac.
Sorry, I should say that a deer, listeners, is, it's like Bambi, right?
That's normally if I have to explain what a deer is to my students.
Normally if I say Bambi, then people go, ah, right now I know what a deer is.
Also, reindeer. Reindeer are technically deer.
And Father Christmas, Santa Claus has reindeer.
So deer, these are deer.
You were talking about the fact there are six species of deer in England.
Muntjac deer. You were just talking about the little ones.
Yes. They're small ones about the size of a big dog, gingery.
And they have expanded a lot.
The deer society, there is one, there are over two million deer in the country, which is quite a lot.
And the muntjacs are expanding northwards quite rapidly.
And you do get them everywhere.
We used to get them in the gardener when you were a kid.
I remember, yeah. Teaching the roses.
So a lot of muntjacs get hit on the road.
I've hit a badger. You know what a badger is?
Well, I know what a badger is, but I wonder if the listeners know what a badger is.
It's kind of like a fairly large, I mean, a bit like a small dog, quite low to the ground, gray hair on its face.
It's got black and white stripes.
It's not a raccoon.
It's a badger. They live in holes in the ground.
Quite ferocious, actually, if you get on the wrong side of a badger, you got to watch out.
But yeah, very typical animal in the English countryside.
And they are hit by vehicles, particularly at night time.
I've hit a badger years ago.
Yeah. Going along at night, suddenly in the headlights, badger, bam.
Jump down from the from the hedge row right in front of the car.
Bam. Instant death.
Yeah. What it must be like to hit a deer.
I can't imagine, especially if it's a big wog.
Yeah, very dangerous.
Absolutely. Anyway, so I do do a little bit about roadkill and it does have an impact on wildlife in a positive way in many ways in the number of creatures that that live on carrion.
Carrion meaning dead creatures.
Animals that have died in one way or another.
Yeah. Not because they got killed by the animal that's eating them, but just animals that have died.
So there are, yeah, certain other animals that live on carrion.
And you think of things like crows.
Yeah. The full name of the crow is the carrion crow.
And so there are birds that feed on carrion.
And we've had quite an increase in the birds of prey that feed on carrion, buzzards and the red kite, which is an interesting story in itself.
In Shakespeare's time, kites were everywhere over London and everything else living on scraps and rubbish.
But they were almost eliminated.
They they had been shot by gamekeepers and only a small population in Wales remained.
There's been a reintroduction program.
I remember we were on holiday in Wales and we took a detour to go to this certain spot where you can see red kites and we parked the car, went out, and we spotted a couple of red kites.
And it was really special to see this birds that, you know, extremely rare.
These days, it's a totally different story, isn't it?
That's right. The reintroduction of red kites in different places has been highly successful.
And of course, they do eat a lot of roadkill, as well as trying to hunt rabbits.
But they basically they're carrion eaters.
And they cleaned things up for us.
Anyway, they're very spectacular, big bird of prey.
And the phos way goes through the East Midlands, which is one of the release areas.
And there are kites, you know, very frequently seen over the road.
There's another bird of prey that we see along our roads, which is the Kestrel.
It's the one on the cover of the book, a small gingery falcon that hovers.
And the Kestrel feeds substantially on voles and mice.
And they are quite easy to catch along the fringes of roads, because there aren't any people walking about.
And often they're banks and voles quite like banks.
And so you quite often see Kestrels along the phos way, and along our motorways as well.
It's fascinating when, you know, these stories of how animals being reintroduced into natural environments completely transform those places.
And it tells you something about the sort of delicate balance of nature and the way that animals sort of live in a state of harmony.
Yes, it is true that everything is interrelated.
And this thing about the deer population, out of control, really.
And it's very, very bad for woodland, in that they tend to eat young saplings.
And in a wood, it's what's called the understory, which is very important.
A lot of birds and animals rely on the understory.
And if you just have a bare ground, maybe with just a weeds, tree trunks, and then the trees, it's a very empty space.
There are arguments about reintroducing predators in Scotland.
But as you can imagine, the farmers are completely against the idea of wolves.
But I think there's a strong argument for the lynx.
The lynx is a big European wildcat.
And they have been reintroduced in Spain, but to some good effect.
I don't think they are likely to eat too many sheep.
I mean, the lynx is smaller, but it does eat deer, it does catch deer.
And I would be very much in favor of reintroducing the lynx.
Hmm. Okay. So dad, the book then, A Year on the Foss, it's available now.
I think this episode is being published on the 1st of October, 2024, which is the actual publication date of the book.
If people would like to read it, where can they actually get themselves a copy of it?
Well, it'll be on Amazon.
And there are well or two other online booksellers, I don't know whether you can access them from abroad or not.
Hive books, waterstones, can you?
I think that they can, but it might be the case that Amazon is perhaps the most accessible one.
It's on Amazon .com, which is probably going to be available in most places.
Yes, but if it's not available where you are, then that's going to be a bit tricky for you, isn't it?
But yeah, but anyway, have a look.
I'll probably put a link in the, I'll put a link on the episode page for this episode on my website where people can actually see and see if they can get themselves a copy.
But great. Okay. Fantastic.
Thanks a lot for telling us some of those stories that are in the book.
And it must be very satisfying to have finished, right?
To have finished a book, a third book.
Yes, it is. And I mean, I like to think that people will read it and enjoy it.
I mean, I'm not going to make a fortune by writing these books about journeys through the middle of England.
But I think that it's quite an easy book to read.
And people tell me they enjoy it.
Yeah. Well, your, you know, your way of putting things into words is great.
You know, it's so clear the way you put things, you know, you have a way with words.
And so I think it would be a great thing for people to read.
That's certainly a good model of English.
Was it difficult to write?
And this is like maybe my last question for you, was it difficult to write?
I mean, three books now you've done, you've written other things as well in the past.
But for some people, writing a book is a sort of a torturous process.
Was it very difficult to do it?
Did you ever experience writer's block or anything like that?
Not really. It did take about a year to do.
And of course, I've made a few trips to places, you know, down to Exeter, for example, to just have a look around, talk to one or two people.
But I quite enjoyed it.
And it's a real mix.
You know, history and wildlife don't necessarily go together, but I think they do.
And then the curious stories like, you know, the death of a rockstar, things like that that have happened along this route, I quite enjoyed finding them.
And of course, you've got the structure, which must help the process, the fact that you're following the road, and you're also going through the months of the year, as well, that probably provides you with a nice structure that, you know, helps you to keep progressing.
Okay, fantastic. Well, I hope that people really enjoy it, Dad.
Okay, thank you very much.
And have a good day.
Okay, listeners, that was my dad talking about his new book, A Year on the Foss, The Wildlife and History of the Famous Roman Road by Rick Thompson.
It's available now, as you heard us saying earlier, and you'll find a link in the description, which will take you to the listing for this book on Amazon .com.
You might want to check to see if it's available in your local version of Amazon or whatever, but I hope you can get your hands on a copy of the book and enjoy it.
Thanks again to my dad for being on the show for his contribution and telling us all those stories and things like that.
Always nice to hear from him.
And I think that the book will be a very pleasant read, indeed pleasant to read, not too difficult to read, and full of interesting information, stories and history, and so on.
Actually, on that point, the word history and the word story, this is something that I see learners of English getting wrong all the time.
So for example, in an episode where I tell a story, for example, if it's a Sherlock Holmes story, or maybe something like The Simulation from a few months ago, that is a story.
Okay, that's a narrative where you're describing what happened to someone, right?
There's a beginning, a middle and an end.
This is a story. Okay, and history is something else.
History means things that happened in the past.
So when you're talking about England, it would typically be the kings and queens of England.
This is history. Okay, the mistake that I often notice learners of English making is that they will use the word history when they should be using the word story.
For example, Luke, that was a really interesting history is what people might say or write.
And it should be Luke, that was a really interesting story.
Okay, so watch out, don't mix up the word story and the word history.
History is an account of things that actually happened in the past written by historians, written in history books, and you study history at school or at university.
Okay, story is a narrative.
For example, it could even just be a story about how you, you know, how you met your wife or girlfriend, how you met your boyfriend or husband, you know, how you met your best friend.
This is a story. For example, I was working in a shop and she came into the shop as my customer.
And I got talking to her and you know, that's a story.
Okay. All right, then.
So I thought that I would have just a little bit of a ramble at the end of this episode here.
So this is Episode 902.
And as you can hear from my voice, I haven't been very well this month.
I mean, I've just had a bit of a cold, but it's been enough for me not to be able to record as much as I wanted to.
In fact, September, this month I've been a bit under the weather, I have to say having kind of come back from holiday, recovered from jet lag and all that, and then sort of like the weather went all terrible.
And I've just been sort of suffering or struggling.
And as a result, I haven't been able to record podcast episodes as much as I wanted to.
I was lucky that my dad was available to do this particular episode today, which allowed me to publish something this week.
Without him, I don't know what I would have done actually.
And also this is true for premium content as well.
I've been writing premium stuff for September, but I haven't had a chance to record anything.
There was my sore throat, also other things which basically have meant that I haven't been able to record for one reason or another.
But there's premium content coming, and I've got plenty of other content which is planned, but just recording has been a bit delayed recently.
So I tell you what, I do have one thing which I recorded just after I got back from holiday, just at the beginning of this month, but the thing is though, I'm not sure about publishing it.
So you can tell me what you think, all right.
You can tell me what you think about this idea.
At the moment, I'm sort of reluctant to publish this episode because after having recorded it, I'm not entirely sure.
So I'll tell you what the episode is.
So not long ago, I was going through some of my old stuff, and I came across a couple of old diaries that I wrote about 23 years ago.
So notepads full of my writing from a long time ago before I ever started doing this podcast.
And there were diaries which I wrote while I was in hospital in Japan.
Now, long term listeners will know about this story that I ended up in a hospital when I was living in Japan.
I got really, really ill and had to go to hospital for two weeks.
And it was a sort of really horrible and frightening experience, especially at the beginning, because I didn't really know what was wrong with me.
And I was really, really anxious and very scared.
And I kind of misunderstood my reasons for being in the hospital.
I thought they were going to give me an operation.
I thought I was seriously ill.
And one of the things I did during the time that I spent in the hospital was actually to write in a diary almost every day.
And so I thought it might be interesting to read out the diaries that I wrote and make a podcast episode out of them.
I thought that could be interesting.
And I did it, as I said, I did that I recorded this episode, and it turned into quite a long episode, like a lot of my episodes do these days, ended up being quite long.
But then afterwards, I thought to myself, I'm not sure I'm going to publish that because you know what, it's pretty much the same story that I've told twice, at least twice before on this podcast.
There was the original Sick in Japan episode, from it was like episode 118, 120, something like that, from I guess 2012.
And then I did Sick in Japan live in front of an audience at the British Council, where I told the story in front of a live audience and recorded it for the podcast.
And that was published a couple of years ago.
And I thought that reading out my diary would be an interesting, like different approach to telling that story.
I thought that maybe there'd be some things in the diary that would be kind of funny or different or that you hadn't heard before.
And I think there are, I think there are some little anecdotes and other other moments that happened that I wrote down that I hadn't that I've never talked about before.
But for the most part, it's basically the same story that I've told twice before on this podcast.
And this is why I'm a little bit reluctant to publish it because I don't want to just, I don't want to repeat myself, you know, I don't want to just kind of put out an episode that feels a bit like just a recycled story that I've told twice before.
But anyway, you can tell me what do you think I should do?
Should I publish the episode where I'm reading from my Japanese hospital diaries, would that be interesting?
Or, or what, I don't know really, I mean, I'm gonna I'm asking you, but the thing is, though, what's going to happen now is that some of you will say, Yeah, that would be interesting.
And some of you might say, you know what, no, it's not really worth it.
Or some of you might think that you might think, no, we could probably live without it, Luke, we'd prefer something else.
Instead, you might be thinking that but you might be just too nice and too polite to actually write that to me.
You know, so I probably will get responses, if any, maybe I won't get any responses to this at all.
But I suppose the responses I will get will probably be nice, because most of the people who listen to my podcast are nice.
And you want to be nice and encouraging.
And so you'll probably say, Yeah, Luke, please publish that.
I don't know what I'm going to do.
But actually, I might have to publish it anyway, if I if I'm not able to record anything else in time for next week's episode, maybe I'll just put that up.
Because to be fair, it's already recorded.
Half of it's been edited.
I just I'm in the middle of editing it now.
So that might be that might come soon.
But it's, you know, I'm curious to know what you what you will think anyway.
I've got other stuff lined up.
I've got stories. I've got joke episodes.
I've got all sorts of stuff that I've just been working on while I can't really record.
I'm going to stop talking now because I do want to rest my voice because you can hear it's a bit strained.
It's a bit hoarse. So I'm going to rest my voice drink some green tea.
And and work work on podcast content, including premium stuff, which is in the pipeline, I realized I haven't published any premium stuff in September.
But you know, I haven't really been able to do it, but it's coming.
All right. Okay, anyway, I hope you've enjoyed this episode and that you know, if you got this far, what could you what could you say you know, what could be the code word for for this part, you could, okay, your code word could just be the word diary.
Okay, that will prove that you've got to this part of the episode, you could do hashtag diary, or simply mention something about my Japanese hospital diary in the in the comment, or something about maybe my dad's diaries, you know, because in a way, you know, going through the year and talking about the nature
and history from this famous road throughout here is a bit like a diary, isn't it?
I should also I also wanted to say that in in my dad's book, you'll see if you get a copy of it, you'll see lots of illustrations, including the illustration on the front cover.
And his books all have the same kind of cover.
It's an illustration of a bird with underneath a little illustration of the thing that's being described a park, a river, in this case, a Roman road.
And particularly an illustration of a bird and my dad as well as all the other things he does, he's an excellent illustrator, an artist, and all the illustrations of birds and nature in his books are all done by him.
My brother helped my dad to arrange the covers of all of his books.
But that's just another nice thing you can get.
If you get a copy of the book, you can also enjoy my dad's lovely illustrations of birds.
Very good. He's a really good artist.
But anyway, you can write the word diary in your comment if you got this far.
And I'll speak to you in the next episode.
It might be the Japanese hospital diary, it might be something else, we'll see how my voice is over the next few days.
But otherwise, in any case, I will speak to you soon.
Thank you so much for listening to my podcast.
Hope you enjoyed the episode.
Look forward to reading your comments.
But for now, it's just time for me to say goodbye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye.
Thanks for listening to Luke's English podcast.
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