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 Head To Head The Modern Antiquarian Wapley Hill Forum | Start a topic | Search |
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| I was just reading thesweetcheat's notes about Wapley Hill and its mysterious shaft. Then I properly noticed it was 33m?? That's totally insane. I mean say one storey in a building is worth about 3m - that's the depth of an 11 storey building they dug, with no modern equipment, no flashlights, no modern ropes, no radio. Just a person with a diggy thing being lowered into a hole on a bit of rope made of (something or other), busily scooping dirt into a bag or a basket or something. Until they'd dug down 33m. It's like the depth of a tower block isn't it. now you've got to have some serious motivation behind that. Even if it's a simple 'I'm going to dig down as far as I can, the deepest hole in the world ever'. But if it's got motivations to do with Things That Dwell Underground... Oh please just count me out. I can feel a severe bout of cowardice coming on. (TSC, I was also reading an article by Margaret Gelling about 'the landscape of beowulf' and she says that where Beowulf keeps getting into bother, these tend to be places ending in 'hlith' and in place names 'hlith' seems to often go with hills with a hollow in them. She gives the examples of Pontesford Hill (Ponteslith) and Gatley Park (Gattelyth) and numerous others around Herefordshire and Shropshire - and Wapley Hill (Wappelyth). So that's right is it - that Wapley Hill has a marked chunk out of it? She suggests that hills-with-a-concave-slope would therefore be recognised in the poem as menacing places. I know, I've got absolutely no right to take something like that out of context completely and suggest that the spot already had some kind of peculiar reputation hence the uncommon and ridiculously deep hole that was already in it. But anyway.) Don't worry about that really. I was just marvelling at the logistics and general awesomeness and curiousness of such a feat of engineering. Mad stuff. Reply | with quote |  29th February 2012ce 17:08 |
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