Spicing up local history —with a giant, a dragon and an ancient yew

How interesting is local history? The history of my Cotswold village — recently celebrating the centenary of the Armistice with a well-researched exhibition and booklet on events in the Sibfords in the first world war — fascinates me, but I am not sure that people from other parts of Oxfordshire, let alone further afield, would agree.  This is the perennial problem of the local: unless it offers, in microcosm, insight into larger themes and topics, an element of ‘so-whatness’ colours the reader’s response.

Christopher Hadley’s Hollow Places takes its inspiration from a mysterious stone let into the wall in his Hertfordshire village. The carvings on it are somewhat indistinct, but they show a dragon, a floriated cross, symbols of the Evangelists and an angel bearing a tiny soul heavenwards in a napkin. The tomb-cover, for that is what it is, is made of grey-black Purbeck marble and commemorates one Piers Shonks. Local legend — and a now-vanished inscription recorded in Latin and English — has it that Piers slew a dragon. And, in the early 19th century when a mighty yew was felled in the parish, a cave, or at least a great hollow, was revealed at its roots. The lair of the dragon had been uncovered.

Hadley describes the book as ‘a historical detective story and a meditation on memory, belief, the stories we used to tell — and why they still matter’. He begins with the yew tree, brilliantly bringing to life the sharp winter morning on which the tree was felled, with much information about the many ancient yews of Britain, the reasons why they may have been planted, and the secret ways in which they continue to live on, even when apparent decrepitude sets in.