FROME Family History Group recently welcomed a return visit from Tony Painter with a talk entitled “West Country myths and legends from the Alan Godfrey map series” on Tuesday 26th September.
Tony replaced our advertised speaker, Elisa Amor, who was unable to come. Tony began by explaining what the Godfrey maps covered – most of the maps are highly detailed, taken from the 1/2500 plans and reprinted at about 14 inches to the mile.
According to their website they cover towns in great detail, showing individual houses, railway tracks, factories, churches, mills, canals, tramways and even minutiae such as dockside cranes, fountains, signal posts, pathways, sheds, wells and more. Each map includes historical notes on the area concerned. They also publish a series of smaller scale inch to the mile maps.
There were several examples of myths and legends covered by the historical notes from the maps, some of which Tony had researched and written himself for Godfrey maps. One such example was the war time activities of Box Hill. It is understood that a secret store of steam engines was kept there in case of a nuclear attack when other fuels may not be available. We also heard about the underground war time facility at Corsham known by several different names, one of those was Burlington. This was the Central Government War Headquarters.
We learned of ancient myths including the Somerset tsunami. An event in 1606 where 22 people drowned. Was it a tsunami or just a storm surge? Tony thinks the latter. Our next example was John Hampden from Swindon who believed the earth was flat. He was so convinced that he placed a bet with scientist Alfred Russell Wallace that he could prove his theory. Wallace won the bet, but Hampden refused to pay up. A long -term feud ensued.
Tony was thanked for a remarkable talk much enjoyed by the audience. Our next event will be on October 31st when our former MP David Heath will tell the stories of some of the men and one woman sent from Frome to Westminster. Everyone welcome.
