The world from my window

On a balmy summer night, we pootle down to Lyme Regis and manage to find a space in the car park near the Cobb. We don't want to be late because we understand a certain gentleman is due to arrive, along with a small band of supporters. We're here to see Monmouth , the Lyme Regis community play and we want to be in on the action, right at the start. You see it was here, in June 1685, that the Duke of Monmouth landed, intent on gathering a rebel army along the way to seize the throne from his unpopular uncle, James II. The Monmouth Rebellion, which I've written about before , led to the last battle on English soil, some thirty four years after the English Civil War.  It could have worked but, for many reasons, it didn't. It was a sad episode in our history. And the bloody aftermath was shocking, with the notorious Judge Jeffreys ordering men to be hanged, drawn and quartered, left, right and centre, their remains displayed around villages and towns to act as a war...

Thanks to my mother, I have a pretty good idea who's sitting up there in the branches of my family tree. Up until now, there's been nobody famous, although she discovered I am directly descended from a man who fought in the last battle on English soil, the Monmouth Rebellion, in 1685.  I'm rather proud of that, and the fact that he was on the ill-fated Rebel side. It's something I plan to explore further when I have more time. Mr Grigg thinks he has a link to Archie Leach, better known as that suave and most debonair of English-born actors, Cary Grant . He knows this because he found a Leach in his family tree who lived in Bristol, which was where Archie was born. I got very excited and suggested it could be the same family as Archie's. When Mr Grigg has more time, he's going to look into it further. In the meantime, I had nobody famous in my tree and always felt a little bit of a Billy No-Mates. And then, this week, I had a message via my Maddie Gri...

Some 330 years ago, ancestors of mine were on a battlefield in Somerset, engaged in a hopeless fight. It became known as The Monmouth Rebellion . At least five members of the Herring family (to whom I'm related on my father's side) from Pitminster, Somerset, were fighting for the Duke of Monmouth. William Crabb, a 'gentleman from Ashill', from whom I'm directly descended on my mother's side, was also at Sedgemoor on 6 July 1685. It was the last battle on English soil. It was an heroic but hopeless attempt to overthrow an unpopular king, the Duke's uncle, James II. Monmouth, the oldest of King Charles II's illegitimate children, landed at Lyme Regis on 11 June 1685 with a party of eighty men. He gathered a significant proportion of the population of West Dorset, East Devon and Somerset along the way. He was handsome, a proven hero on the battlefield and popular with Westcountry folk who had met him on a charm offensive of the region a few year...

The mist swirls down from Dorset's highest point as I drive along dark country lanes into town. It is appropriate weather for the Bridport Ghost Walk  just two days before Halloween. Clouds dip and dive around a slip of a crescent moon in a black sky. And there they all are, waiting in Bucky Doo Square for the walk to begin. We'd hoped our guide would be dressed, Ripper-style, in a top hat and cloak. But he makes up for this lack of drama by his detailed knowledge of Bridport and its history. It's a town I know well, really well, but tonight I'm seeing it from a totally different perspective. Who would think, when sitting on a bench in the square enjoying a sandwich in the daytime and listening to the town band, that executions and disembowelling took place here centuries ago? And that women were made to wear terrible  scold's bridle s and pelted with rotten food and human waste. The town has a dark past. Playing a starring role in our ghost walk...

And at eleven o'clock on the eleventh of the eleventh of the eleventh, Mr Grigg and I stood in silence outside the church. I could hear the cawing of rooks overhead, the sound of gunfire in the towns beyond the hills as everyone else's two-minute silence began and ended at different times. And I thought of my grandfathers, brave old souls, giving it all in the war to end all wars, with my maternal grandfather stopping every now and then to write a poem about it. I thought of my paternal grandfather's best friend, killed in France and lying in the British ceremony at Courcelette, a fact we discovered only through the marvels of internet research a year or so ago. And I thought of Mr Grigg's uncle, killed on HMS Glorious by the German battleship Scharnhorst in World War II, never to know his nephews, one of whom was named after him. Similar stories repeated to this day,widows and orphans made from the Falklands, Northern Ireland, Iraq and Afghanistan. And I th...