Caves and Hermitages of the Severn Valley

The rock-cut Hermitage at Bridgnorth lies on a steep hill just south of the Wolverhampton road and less than a mile east of the town. The Hermitage lies in ruins now, destroyed by the passage of time and, it is said, by the fires of its temporary occupants, the homeless poor.

However what remains is still impressive. The Chapel is still extant, although the front end is now gone, and the stairs, which used to ascent to the upper chamber, are still there, but go nowhere as the upper chamber has disappeared.

The Hermitage was so-called because it was here that Aethelward or Aethelard, a Mercian prince, retired here for a short time as a hermit before his brief reign. In 924ce he came here to reside in solitude and contemplation. He was interested in literary matters as well as ancient customs and was a grandson of Alfred the Great, which meant that he had Welsh blood as this royal line had intermarried with the Welsh and Cornish royal families. Three of his sisters became nuns and his aunt was none other than Queen Ethelfleda, whose ability to repel the fearsome Danes renders impotent many a modern male ego! Indeed it was Ethelfleda who established a Burgh at Bridgnorth with a castle at Old-Bury on Panpudding Hill (Panpunten in Welsh). the Hermitage therefore has strong royal links and, given Aethelward’s study of traditional lore, it would seem that it attracted someone with an interest in the main study of all folklore, that is magic.

The rest of this article by Chris Jenkins, which was published in White Dragon at Beltane 1997, can be read on the White Dragon website.

Caves and Hermitages of the Severn Valley

A fair wind and a bottle of Primitivo

The book reviews have been categorised. It was in the end a much quicker and more painless process than I dared imagine as all but a small handful fell firmly into one category or another rather than into 2, 3 or 4 as the articles had.

I suppose this is not surprising: an academic study of the Lancashire witches was only ever going to fit into the academic history category, and a Llewellyn mass market paperback almost invariably fell into Wicca – Popular and nowhere else. The main crossover sections proved to be Folklore and Mythology, since there’s a rather fuzzy border between the two, and Sacred Landscapes. I seem to have ended up with 42 categories, some with only one or two books in them. While this means that those one or two books can be readily identified rather than being lost in a larger category, it will no doubt play havoc with the design of the menus and will need to be discussed with Alexa.

While working through them it struck me that some of the reviews can be culled as no longer relevant; in particular a handful of small press booklets and pamphlets, as it’s incredibly unlikely that the reader will ever come across them, and one or two rather strange works of fiction (essentially self-published) that probably shouldn’t have been reviewed in the first place. On the other hand, there are upwards of 40 or more reviews which were never added to the site in the first place and which will need to be incorporated into the redesign work.