Friday, 14 February 2025

A Broch Blog by Susan Price

 

The broch of Mousa: by kind permission of David Simpson.

Mousa is a small island off the coast of mainland Shetland with a Norse name. The 'a' at the end, as in many British place-names, means 'island.' 'Mous' means 'mossy.'

The 'Mousa boat' ferries you across to the moss. It's a nature reserve now, and well worth visiting for the birds and seals alone. But what I wanted to see -- what I'd wanted to see for years -- was the Broch of Mousa. It did not disappoint.

The first glimpse of the broch is a striking: a monumental tower, against sky and sea, its walls gently curving like those of a modern cooling tower.

Amazement only grows from there.

Towers in the North by Armit

To consider place-names again, the word ‘broch’ is the same as the ‘borough’ or ‘bury’. It means ‘fortified place’ or ‘castle.’ Archaeologists adopted the Scottish form ‘broch’ as a name for the towers in the north,’ the dry-stone, ancient towers found all over Scotland and only in Scotland.

It’s impossible to accurately date these mysterious towers though it’s broadly agreed that they are ‘Iron Age’ and the oldest may be as much as three thousand years old— but Maeshowe, in Orkney, shows that there was a strong tradition of building dry-stone corbelled structures, going back five thousand years. (A corbelled roof is where dry-stone slabs are skilfully overlapped to form a smooth, inward curving roof sealed with a single cap-stone.)

 

The interior of Maeshowe, Orkney: Islandhopper, wikimedia 

Above, the interior of the passage-grave, Maeshowe, on Orkney, showing its smooth, inward curving, corbelled ceiling. It is acknowledged as 'the finest Neolithic building surviving in north-west Europe.' The main building is estimated to be at least 5000 years old, making it older than the pyramids. Its entrance is aligned to the setting sun at the midwinter solstice.

The immense, upright stone slabs at the corners have no constructive purpose at all. They are not holding up the roof or supporting the walls as you might think. They were already in place before Maeshowe was built. The grave was built around them, as if to preserve or honour them. Possibly they were standing stones. Perhaps the remains of another house or grave. I don't know about you, but this makes my brain boggle.

Mousa’s broch is the most complete of all brochs, still standing 13m (42/43 feet) high. Its twin, the broch of Burraland, which stood on the other side of the strait between Mousa and mainland Shetland, was ‘robbed out’ for building stone and is now only 2-5 metres (8 feet) high. It's sometimes suggested that Mousa's broch was protected from destruction by its position on a small island -- even though Mousa was home to stone-hungry crofters until the 19th century.

Mousa’s excellent preservation tempts us to take it as a model for all brochs but archaeology shows that Mousa is very untypical. It’s quite small, underwent considerable alteration in antiquity and, overall, is much better built than your average broch. Its superior construction may have been its salvation: it was simply harder to dismantle than other brochs. Whatever preserved it, there’s no doubt it deserves its status as a World Heritage Site.

To give a simple account of the broch’s interior:

 

Inside the broch of Mousa: copyright: David Simpson.

There are no windows in the outer wall and only one entrance, facing the sea. This entrance is 1-5 metres (5 ft) high and the passage behind it is 5 metres (16ft) long. At the end of the passage a ‘bar-hole’ can be seen in the wall. This is where a solid wooden 'bar' would have been put in place, to prevent the door being opened from outside. Whoever lived -- or took shelter -- within these massive walls was keen on some other people staying outside.

The entrance passage opens into a roughly circular space. At its centre is a hearth and a stone water-tank, reminiscent of the five thousand year old neolithic houses at Orkney’s Skara Brae. 

Although the outer circumference of Mousa Broch is 15m (45ft), the interior is only 6m (19-20ft) in diameter. Built into the massive base of the broch are three large corbelled cells, differing slightly in size. The largest is about 1-5 metres (5ft) wide, 4 meters (13ft) long and 3 metres (11 ft) high. The doors into these cells are raised above the floor of the broch, perhaps to keep out draughts. Each also has a built-in shelf— again, like Skara Brae, where the bed-spaces had shelves built into the walls beside them.

The walls above the cell-doors have gaps or windows constructed into them, possibly to lighten the load each lintel has to bear and to allow light into the cells.

Modern houses can have rooms smaller than these without the storage.

Mousa's tower is double-skinned, with a ring of outer wall, a ring of inner wall and a gap between them. The outer and inner walls are pinned together with slabs of slate. In this way ‘galleries’ were formed between the walls. It's possible, with some stooping and squeezing, to walk along these galleries to their blind ends. At other brochs, at least where enough of these galleries remain to judge, it isn't. They are too low and too much stone protrudes into them.

These galleries are due to Mousa broch's method of construction: the twin walls were built up to a certain height, then slates were used to bridge the gap between them; and then the walls were built higher and 'pinned' again. The galleries weren't intended to be lived in, or to be used as storage -- but all the same, I'd guess that they were so used, at least to some extent.


The broch's builders used the gap between the walls and the pinning slabs to make an interior stair which winds inside the walls right to the top of the tower. (The hand-rail is modern.)


Mousa's stairs: Wikimedia: Nicholas Mutton 

 Beyond this, much is conjecture.

Wikimedia
For instance, the inner wall was constructed with tall rows of gaps, (giving ancient Mousa a startlingly modern ‘architectural’ look.) It’s often argued that these were to ‘light the stairwell’ and the corbelled cells, which they certainly do today because now the tower is roofless. Perhaps it was roofed somehow, in the past, and the purpose of the 'gaps' was to reduce weight on the walls?

 

 

Roofed or Open?

 There are endless arguments about what the summit of the broch was originally like. The top was somewhat reconstructed -- with guesswork -- in the 1960s and '80s, so that now you can walk around on top, admiring the view. But no one knows for certain what the top of the broch was like when first built.

Some argue that there was no walkway and that the broch was always open to the weather, as now, allowing the rain and snow to fall down between the concentric walls.

Another argument insists that the broch was roofed somehow, though no one can quite figure out how. Maybe the gap between the walls was turfed or thatched, leaving the courtyard open... Maybe the whole top of the broch was covered by a conical thatch, making the broch look like a very tall Iron Age roundhouse.

 

Photo: wikimedia 

 Stretch!

 The Open-to-the-Sky mob reply that the weight of the supporting timbers, plus thatch, pressing outward against the walls would make this unlikely. Also, it would make the broch's interior impenetrably dark. (True, but many houses in the past were windowless and dark. Viking longhouses, for instance. Inhabitants spent much of the day outside and, at night, there was fire and lamplight.)

It's a conundrum. About the roof, I'm neutral but think there must have been some kind of platform up the top there. Why go to the enormous effort of building a dry-stone tower that may, originally,
have been more than fifteen metres high (49 ft) , with a stair climbing all the way to the top, if not to stand up there and see further than from ground level?

More Conjecture

At some point in antiquity, a stone wheelhouse was built inside the stone tower. The hearthstone and water tank belong to this wheelhouse, as does the wide stone ‘bench’ that runs around the inside of the tower. (You can see the 'bench' or wall in the photo of the interior above, running around the wall towards the left,)

The builders of the stone wheelhouse continued to use the broch's corbelled cells, because they left gaps in their own stone wall, to allow them entrance. But they built across the entrance to the broch's stairs and galleries, blocking them off. Obviously, they had no love of a sea-view or a need to know who was approaching.

It was possibly around the time this inner wheelhouse was built that the broch’s entrance was altered, making it much larger. This also meant breaking through the floor of a corbelled cell built above the entrance. (This cell must originally have been entered via the stairs and some kind of upper floor. There are also endless arguments about how this upper floor may have been built into the broch.)

 

Dun Carloway, Lewis: by permission of David Simpson
By making Mousa's entrance larger, it was also made less defensive
than the entrances of other brochs, such as Dun Carloway on Lewis, where the doorway is much smaller and narrower.

Why were the brochs built? The theory favoured in the 19th Century was that they were defensive ‘castles.’ Hence their name: 'broch, a fortified place.' Then, in the 'Peace and Love' of the 1960s and 70s, it became fashionable to say that they weren’t defensive because they couldn’t have withstood a determined attack. No, they were merely the prestigious houses of a ruling elite.

Brochs have tall, thick walls, entirely windowless on the outside. Most brochs, unlike Mousa, have low narrow doors, that make you stoop double to enter. Yet the builders could make corbelled ‘cells’ 3 metres high, so the entrances weren’t low for ease of building. They could construct windows too, so the outer walls were deliberately made without openings.

Behind the entrance, brochs have long, low, easily defended passages with doors which could be strongly barred. None of this speaks to me of an elite’s comfort. It positively screams ‘defensive’.

If a broch couldn’t have withstood a determined attack, neither could the later pele towers of the Borders but no one doubts they were defensive. Rather than withstand ‘determined attack' the peles were meant to discourage attack from largely opportunistic bands of reivers. They said: 'We're ready for you and you won't have it easy.'

The reivers were some three thousand years later but human nature stays much the same. Why invest so much time and effort into building a broch unless there’s somebody around who scares you? People capable of building a broch could, if they'd wished, have built something equally impressive and much more comfortable.

Who were the scary people? Unruly neighbours or passing armies, as with the reivers? Other commentators favour the idea that it was the Romans— but some brochs were probably built long before any possible appearance of any Roman ships off the Scottish coast.

Again, the truth is, no one knows -- which leads to many more fun arguments? Castles? Manor-houses? Cathedrals?

Many brochs seem to have had clusters of much smaller wheelhouses around them -- there are faint traces at Mousa. This might support the manor-house theory or make the broch a place of refuge during raids. Did they, like the peles, have a signalling beacon on top? Or were they look-out towers, watching for danger approaching from land or sea?

The majority of brochs are near the sea. Mousa, and the Burraland broch had views up and down the Shetland coast. Dun Carloway stands near a natural harbour on Lewis. During the time they were built, we know there was trade between Ireland and the islands -- and with what was then not yet England.

A natural harbour often becomes a market-place. Prosperous markets attract thieves and ‘trade’ easily turns into ‘raid’ and slave-taking. If a market town wants to keep its trade, it has to provide protection. Were the brochs garrisons and look-out towers, protecting a market?

In reality, the brochs may have had several purposes: defensive, if need be, but also providing advance warning of the approach of ships, for good or ill. They discouraged attacks by loudly declaring in stone: ‘We’re ready for you.’

All of which may be nonsense. Perhaps they were very expensive and uncomfortable prestige homes for the Iron Age plutocrat. What is without question is that they are astonishing feats of ancient ingenuity and engineering. Anyone who thinks the pre-Roman inhabitants of these islands were 'unsophisticated' should visit the Broch of Mousa.

And Maeshowe.

And Skara Brae.


Follow this link for a short video tour of Mousa Broch.

And if you're interested in more discussion about how, or if, the broch was roofed and what exactly it was used for, follow this link

 Susan Price's website

Friday, 7 February 2025

Tom Lehrer is Still Alive - Joan Lennon


Tom Lehrer in 1960 (wiki commons)

We live in insane times. And the Cold War was an insane time. And so I guess it's not surprising I've been thinking a lot about what it was like growing up during that craziness and now being old in this craziness.

The Berlin Wall did come down, though it was impossible to imagine it ever would. What will be our symbol of a new and better time? Whatever it'll be, we can't stop working towards it.

And meanwhile, please spend some time with the inimitable Tom Lehrer here. I wrote about him back in 2020. He's 96 now, still alive, and still my hero.


Joan Lennon website
Joan Lennon Instagram

Friday, 31 January 2025

The Lesser Key of Solomon ... by Susan Stokes-Chapman


During the 18th century, Europe witnessed a growing fascination with the occult, fuelled by a mix of Renaissance magic, medieval mysticism, and Enlightenment-era curiosity. Among the most infamous grimoires of this period was The Lesser Key of Solomon, also known as Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis. The grimoire was a compilation of earlier magical texts, attributed to King Solomon, and believed to contain powerful knowledge on summoning spirits, commanding demons, and seeking divine wisdom. While its origins trace back to the 17th century (mostly from materials that were written two centuries earlier), its influence remained strong well into the 1700s as secret societies and individual scholars sought out 'forbidden' knowledge.


The Secret Seal of Solomon

The Lesser Key of Solomon is divided into five books: Ars Goetia, Ars Theurgia-Goetia, Ars Paulina, Ars Almadel, Ars Notoria. Each detail different aspects of spiritual and supernatural interactions which reflect a blend of medieval demonology, Renaissance angelology, and astrological influences, all of which remained relevant in 18th-century esoteric circles.

The most famous part of The Lesser Key of Solomon, the Ars Goetia, describes 72 demons, their ranks, abilities, and the rituals needed to summon and control them. Each demon, from powerful kings to lesser-ranked spirits, could grant knowledge, wealth, or other supernatural favours ... if properly compelled. The practice of Goetic magic, though condemned by religious authorities, persisted underground, with some scholars* believing that these spirits could be harnessed for both good and evil.


The 72 Demon Sigils

Ars Theurgia-Goetia deals with a different class of spirits, often regarded as more neutral than those in the Ars Goetia. The spirits of the Ars Theurgia-Goetia were believed to inhabit the elements and could be summoned for guidance and assistance. While demonologists of the time such as Antoine Augustin Calmet (1672-1757) debated their exact nature, many viewed them as intermediaries between angels and demons.

The Ars Paulina was named after the apostle Paul. It divides spiritual beings according to planetary hours and the zodiac, with the first part describing angels governing different hours of the day, and the second describing zodiacal angels, each associated with specific astrological influences. Astrology played a crucial role in 18th-century mysticism, and this section provided a structured method for summoning the celestial forces.

In Ars Almadel, the magician is instructed on how to create the “Almadel,” a wax tablet used to communicate with angels from the four cardinal directions. These angels were believed to grant divine wisdom and guidance, making this part of The Lesser Key of Solomon more closely aligned with religious mysticism than with demonic magic.

Finally, the Ars Notoria, unlike previous sections, focused on prayers, meditations, and sacred orations meant to enhance memory, wisdom, and eloquence. Many scholars in the 18th century viewed this book as a way to access divine knowledge without engaging in dangerous spirit summoning. It was particularly popular among those who sought intellectual enlightenment rather than supernatural power.




Due to the secretive nature of such studies, and the stigma around demonology, direct citations from these aforementioned scholars are rare. However, it is widely assumed that The Lesser Key of Solomon was a text referred to or at the very least known by *18th century figures such as Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), Alessandro di Cagliostro (1743-1795), Ebenezer Sibly (1751-1799), Martinez de Pasqually (1727-1774), and Francis Barrett (1774-unknown).



It was Francis Barrett who became my first occultist inspiration for my sophomore novel THE SHADOW KEY, an idea I'd harboured since 2006. While Francis himself ultimately did not end up in the novel, his own occult text The Magus, (London, 1801) and his references to The Lesser Key of Solomon became imperative to the recasting of the occult aspects of my novel. It led me to creating an 18th century scholar of my own named Julian Tresilian, who has a copy of The Lesser Key of Solomon in his extensive bookcase, and though THE SHADOW KEY is of course fiction, collectors such as he typically had no qualms in keeping the Solomonic volume close at hand. Despite being viewed as a dangerous book of black magic or as a misunderstood spiritual text, its legacy endured throughout the 18th century and beyond; even today, this grimoire continues to inspire literature, art, and popular culture. In the 1700s, as now, the quest for hidden knowledge - whether divine or demonic - remained a powerful force in human history.

~~~~~~

I explore 18th century occult thinking in my second historical novel The Shadow Key, publishing in paperback in February 2025. You can order a copy by clicking the image below:

Social Media: @SStokesChapman

Friday, 24 January 2025

Rethinking history with the help of K-drama by Gillian Polack

 

I started watching K-drama because I realised that, when I watched US, UK, or Australian television or read most books, I sympathised with the hero. This was not because I had anything in common with the hero, or because the hero had earned my sympathies through their charming personality or sad circumstances. Even when the hero was intensely dislikable, I cheered them on. This is one of the results of the cultural acceptance of the chief protagonist as being someone who requires that level of audience support in our society. Because I live in a culture that looks for a hero to be the core of so many stories, I have been trained to support anyone who is positioned in a story as a hero.

My personal likes and dislikes were less important than where the character stood in the narrative. This centrality of the hero and the audience need to cheer them on, and our tendency to (also culturally) only allow some kinds of people – white and male, often young – to take that hero role are two of the reasons I have, myself, written heroes are are not male and white, and who manage illness or disability. Knowing that, why was I unable to stand back and decide, early on in a story, that this hero was hurting everyone around him or that hero should be replaced by another? Why did I fall into the path of cheering these heroes on, regardless?

I knew the theory: that it was the place in the story path the hero took. That I wasn't cheering that hero on, but accepting the validity of that narrative path. Given that the hero was seldom from any background resembling my own, it meant that I gave a privilege to that hero (normally, as I said, white and male and quite young but in many types of story also someone who would celebrate Christmas and who had a British or US accent) that I never give myself. I wanted to know what I was not seeing when I followed the hero’s path and cheered him along.

The hero path in K-drama is very similar to that in US television of related kinds. The stories use similar beats and plot points. The main difference is that the hero in K-drama is Korean, not from particular English-speaking countries. This is not a vast difference, but I did not need a vast difference to start to grapple with why I simply accepted heroes – I just needed to see that whenever I watched a TV show I automatically sympathised with the hero, regardless of whether this was a good idea or not. I needed to be able to choose when I cheered the hero on, and that small cultural distancing (Korean heroes rather than American or British) opened that choice up to me. 

Right now, I’m working on both fiction and non-fiction that includes Jewish history in ways we are not used to including them. We have structures for putting Jews in novels, and… I’m breaking those structures. When I began my research (as an historian, initially, and about the same time I started watching K-drama) I saw the use of a set of simple structures informing us that, historically, Jews were mainly money lenders, or were only recent part of European history, or were never fully settled in this place or that, or had earned expulsions, or didn’t exist for hundreds of years in places where they had clearly lived for hundreds before. There were set dates and event by which most popular accounts of Jews in Europe swore as accurate… and very little evidence used to back those opinions. I saw many amazingly good historians simply ignoring European Jews, or giving the same descriptions of European Jewish history and that these same descriptions could be traced back to a single author who themselves had not done any significant research. I saw vast amounts of nineteenth century research ignored. I saw, also, that hate rested comfortably on these same ‘facts’ and narratives. I also saw that most novels reflected this and that Jews were seldom in the novels at all, much less acting as protagonists. The big exception to this was Holocaust novels. It was OK for Jews to be protagonists if they suffered more than any human should have to suffer. This, the fiction and the non-fiction alike, informed the way we see Jews discussed in the press, and in cafes. For me, because I’m Jewish, it’s affected my whole life. Right now, it’s a bit scary to be Jewish in Australia. For twenty-five years I worked with other people to help a whole range of folks to emerge from discrimination and to be treated fairly. I had to leave that environment because of Molotov cocktails and related events. I wrote a little of my experience into The Wizardry of Jewish Women – I was living the history at that point. It’s ironic that what I spent twenty-five years working with others to improve is the exact knowledge I need for my own everyday.  This is why I decided to use fraction of my work for the non-fiction book here (with a few modifications, like this sentence) and share it with all of you. 

Fiction writers and historians have useful perspectives at times like this and I count myself very fortunate to be both. When I realised that I needed to know why all this was so and what wood we were missing by looking at three trees out of an entire forest ,I had the tools to work it out. At that point K-drama merged with popular history. I went to Germany and, thanks to Deakin University and Heinrich Heine University, was able to spend five weeks asking all the questions. I began climbing out of a deep and unhappy hole.

What did I find out? Some of it was blindingly obvious. For instance, the patterns others see or fail to see rest on certain historical understandings, for instance, which gave Christian dominance over interpretations of the past, or that did not see how who knew whom and how dominates the evidence we have and whose past it actually reveals. For some aspects of history this Christian dominance lay at the heart of how a given historian might interpret Jewish history. In these cases, often the focus is on what happened to Christians, without any questions about whether this applied only to Christians or whether minority cultures and religions were also considered. Then the explanation talked about “history of the Rhineland” for example, when it really should have said “Christian culture in the Rhineland” or “Christian history in the Rhineland.”

Other historians focus on written sources (which is most certainly the simplest approach to our complex pasts) without considering who had access to the culture in these sources. Close-knit Jewish communities were influenced by the work of the rabbis and Talmud scholars. But what of Jewish farmers? What of those working in trade or craft who traveled to other countries and even hallway across the world? What of those Jews who were not literate or who turned up to synagogue but led an everyday life where they did not connect with the learned who give us most of our sources? What of those Jews who do not appear in records of customs and tariffs, of law and of politics?

What I learned from this was bleedingly obvious: knowledge is not universal and it is fairer to track it from its source and to see how it spread than to assume a universal similarity of all lives. The concept of a ‘universal Jew’ blinds too many people from seeing the uniqueness and interest in the personal lives of historical Jews. Just as there is no single model for a hero in real life, Jews are as diverse as other humans. They are simply not often depicted this way in historical fiction.

Inherent in this ‘universal Jew’ and other constructs that blind us from seeing the bleedingly obvious is how culture and knowledge are shared. Who we know matters to how we share culture and how we live our lives now, but it mattered far more before the intense communication we assume is standard today. Even printing and affordable books were not available prior to the latter part of the fifteenth century. K-drama was not available in Australia until the rise of streaming services. If we look at broadsheets and chapbooks from the early sixteenth century we can begin to see shared culture and know that it cut across more boundaries, but even then, most people lived in small communities and only some of these communities are visible to twenty-first century folks. Sharing of knowledge usually operated more like chatrooms that contain a few friends than like social media.

Christian-based sources are those most commonly used to interpret western European history. They influence how we describe Europe’s past in general. The fact that only a part of society had been explained is missing from so much of what we think we know. Did you know, for instance, that Charlemagne’s confessor converted to Judaism but still remained close to Charlemagne? Jews are usually invisible unless there is a pogrom, persecution, or a particularly notable individual that not even Christian-origin sources can ignore. It’s a bit like histories that are all about the doings of the good and great and forget that without peasants, most of the Medieval good and great do not have the income or even the food to do the things they do.Peasants also have interesting lives and also are difficult to find out about.

In some regions of Germany, where the Christian majority excluded the Jewish minority from everything important, it may be that the overall stories we tell of those places are as we read them. However… we cannot assume that this is the case. We cannot assume that the story of any majority culture or dominant gender in any place or time is the story of that place and time.

To return to my hero metaphor, heroes may follow similar paths in story, but that is the path of that type of story. It does not reflect other kinds of stories. 

What’s more, the hero’s journey has a very curious and strange relationship to both history and to how we see history.Once upon a time, I attended a workshop at an Arthurian conference: it introduced the hero’s journey. All the key elements of Joseph Campbell’s theory of the hero’s journey were explained in detail. The participants were then given a list of the main attributes of the hero, and the core elements of their journey. The presenter walked us through major heroic characters (King Arthur was his favourite example) and ticked off all the places where the hero’s journey matched the story of Arthur as told by Mallory.

Quietly, I kept my own list. I checked the story of the medieval romance of Alexander, and what we know about the life of Queen Elizabeth I, the life of a famous saint, and two other major historical figures. Between the lecturer’s examples and my own, Elizabeth’s most closely followed the hero’s journey.This is, I suspect, one of the reasons she is so treasured in popular memory. We recognise the path her life followed and transcribe it into popular story. 

It’s very difficult to do this for Jewish history, because very few Jewish lives are explained using that standard story. Even when, as with Elizabeth, the way we see a life might match the hero-journey narrative, very few writers or historians choose it for Jewish history or for the lives of historical Jews. We assume that Jewish stories should be told differently, in other words. Our most common stories about Jews are those of Shylock and Fagin and of victims murdered by hate. We carry these stories into our thoughts about the history of Jews. Every time Oliver! is played in Australia, I see an upsurge in antisemitism.

When friends of mine began to explore Jewish everyday life through looking at accounts and charters and many documents that have never been invisible but that were not looked at closely as sources of Jewish history for those places, I began to wonder about whether I needed to challenge my own view of Europe the way I’d challenged my own view of TV heroes. 

And so we come full circle. I’m almost at the stage where I can look for a publisher for this book. I have a bunch more understanding of why we’re in such a mess right now, politically and socially. Thank you, K-drama, historical novels and Charlemagne’s confessor.

Friday, 17 January 2025

January Floods by Maggie Brookes

On Boxing Day it was 20 years since the terrible tsunami in the Indian ocean. Remembering our shock on hearing about that disaster, which killed 230,000 people, started me thinking about floods which have happened nearer to home, all of which occurred in January. 


'A true report of certaine wonderfull ouerflowings of waters, now lately in Summerset-shire, Norfolke, and other places of England : destroying many thousands of men, women, and children, ouerthrowing and bearing downe whole townes and villages, and drowning infinite numbers of sheepe and other cattle' William Jaggard, 1607.

It was hardly an exaggeration. The great flood of the 20th Jan 1606 (or 30th January 1607 using the modern calendar) is thought by some to have been a tsunami, though others argue that it was a storm surge. At mid-day, a 'massive hill of sea'  swept up the Bristol channel and poured into the low-lying farmland of Somerset and Wales, killing an estimated 2,000 people. About 200 square miles of farmland were destroyed. Whole villages and much livestock (perhaps 'infinite numbers!') were swept away. Puritan pamphleteer William Jones described the scene:  'so violent and swift were the outragiouse waves, that ... in lesse then five houres ... many hundreds of people both men women, and children were then quite devoured.'  


Where they could, people climbed trees, ' Many there were which fled into the tops of high trees, and there were inforced to abide some three daies, some more, and some lesse, without any victuals at all, there suffring much colde besides many other calamities, and...through ever much hunger and cold, some of them fell down againe out of the Trees, and so were like to perish for want of succour...'


 '... Othersame, sate in the tops of high Trees as aforesaid, beholding their wives, children, and servants, swimming (remediles of all succour) in the Waters. Other some sitting in the tops of Trees might behold their houses overflowne with the waters. some their houses caryed quite away: and no signe or token left there of them.'

Plaque in Kingston Seamore Church, Somerset.

William Jones was certain that the flood was God's warning to his people of England to mend their ways, but the flood which carried away the Devon village of Hallsands on January 26th 1917 was a wholly man-made disaster.

Hallsands in 1885, before the flood

In the 1890's dredging for gravel and sand began off-shore to provide building materials for a new naval dockyard in Plymouth. By 1900 the level of the beach had fallen considerably, and the villagers petitioned their MP to get the dredging stopped. But the damage had been done, and when a great storm raged on the night of January 26th. Waves broke through doors and windows, waking the inhabitants. Imagine their terror as they leapt from their beds, gathered up their children, and set out to climb the cliffs behind the village in pitch darkness.

The remains of Hallsands village

Four houses had been swallowed by the sea by midnight. And the next day brought no respite, as another high tide washed away a further 25 houses, leaving only one standing. Nobody died, but 128 villagers were left homeless and without means of earning a living. Their claim for compensation took seven years.

The ruined village of Hallsands (sea level) 

It isn't only rural and coastal areas which have suffered from January floods. On 7 January 1928, thousands were made homeless when the Thames flooded in central London, pouring over the embankments, flooding the city from Greenwich and Woolwich right up to Hammersmith and Putney. This was caused by a mixture of nature and man-made interventions: a sudden thaw, a high spring tide, a storm surge and heavy rain all combined with dredging which had been carried out to deepen the Thames which created a funnel effect for the surging tide.

Tide level at Tate gallery.

Tube stations along the river filled up with water, the House of Commons was flooded, Turner paintings were damaged at the Tate gallery and the Tower of London moat filled up with water. 4,000 people were made homeless, though only 14 died. In a typically British way, mobile animal hospitals were set up for pets which had been injured in the floods. The slums and warehouses of Millbank were worst hit, and many were demolished and later replaced by office blocks.

Mobile animal hospital.

The worst January flood of modern times happened during the night of the 31st of January 1953 when the north sea storm tide killed more than 300 people down the East coast of England and Scotland, plus 224 lost at sea. This terrifying night-time flood was caused by a combination of a high tide with a storm, said to be the worst storm to hit Scotland for 500 years. It hit between Orkney and Shetland, then surged south, flowing over sea walls in 1,200 places, forcing 30,000 people from their homes. 58 people died when Canvey Island in Essex was flooded, 37 died at the seaside village of Jaywick, and 41 more at Felixstowe in Suffolk, where wooden prefab homes were washed away. As the tide overspilled the Royal Docks in London's East End, 200 people were made homeless and sheltered in Canning Town Town hall.


Part of the problem was a lack of communication. When a high tide occurred at Kings Lynn, killing 36 people, it was assumed to be a local event, and no warnings were issued down the coast and more than 60 people died some hours later on Canvey Island. If they'd been warned, there would have been enough time to evacuate them. More than 900 miles of coastline were damaged at a total cost estimated at £50 million. But there was incredible bravery too. Four men were given the George medal for their courage in wading into the waters and rescuing people.


Following the 1953 storm, coastal defences were improved right along our North Sea coasts and a Storm Tide Warning service was created. But some people remained homeless for a long time. In March 1953 108 families were moved into these caravans in Harwich, where they lived until December 1954.


Floods have already happened this January around the country, and no doubt there will be more, partly because of human-caused global warming, and building on river flood-plains, but also just because it's winter. Let's hope we get adequate warning.




Maggie Brookes, novelist and poet. Author of  historical novels The Prisoner's Wife and Acts of Love and War. As Maggie Brookes-Butt: Wish, New and Selected Poems, published January 27th 2025.

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