.... Not a station but a church. The church at Widecombe-in-the-Moor, known familiarly as 'The Cathedral of the Moor, is dedicated to St Pancras, patron saint, it says here, of '...children, jobs, and health':
When Saint Pancras was born toward the end of the third-century, Diocletian was the emperor of the Roman Empire, sharing ruling authority with three others. In the years prior to Diocletian’s reign, Christianity began to be tolerated within the empire. Emperor Diocletian slowly reversed that trend, beginning the final wide-reaching persecution of Christians before Emperor Constantine the Great legalized Christianity.
One tradition states that around the year 299, Emperor Diocletian and one of his co-rulers, Galerius, took part in a pagan divinization ceremony.... In 303, after Diocletian and Galerius consulted an oracle, they published an edict that began a great persecution of Christians. Churches were destroyed, Scriptures were burned, and Christians who failed to offer sacrifice to the Roman gods were killed. A fourteen-year-old boy named Pancras was among them.
<autobiographical-note>
At the same age I remember being impressed by the words of "Faith of our fathers":How sweet would be their children's fate,
If they like them [HD: our fathers] could die for Thee!Unfortunately the opportunities for juvenile martyrdom weren't great in London W.5 at the time.
</autobiographical-note>
On a holiday I am just back from, in the West country, I was reminded of a piece I wrote a while ago, which mentioned (tangentially, of course) the odd-looking symbols applied to some chemical elements., for example Hg (mercury, or quicksilver):
This sort of "quick" [2023 clarification: the "living" sense, as in "the quick and the dead"] is the basis for an aperçu that I've recently had about an anomaly I met in the school chemistry lab. Some elements have seemingly random symbols, like K and Sn and Hg. As a schoolboy I was content to just learn them; some of them, anyway, had mnemonic value – tin and Sn shared an n; and s is close to t both alphabetically and with regard to where the tongue goes in forming it. But Hg?
Well the alchemists (or whoever) who first named mercury chose a different metaphor for its fluid behaviour; not alive-silver, but watery-silver, not quicksilver but hydrargyrum.
And my stay near Widecombe has led to an explanation of Sn (slightly more persuasive than the ones I gave back then).
Tin-mining was overseen in Dartmoor by four stannary towns (from Latin stannum). Wikipedia says:
Devon's stannaries are usually referred to by the names of stannary towns which were the locations where white tin was assessed, coined, and sold. They were also the location for some of the institutions associated with the operation of the stannary.
King Edward I's 1305 Stannary Charter established Tavistock, Ashburton and Chagford as Devon's stannary towns, with a monopoly on all tin mining in Devon, a right to representation in the Stannary Parliament and a right to the jurisdiction of the Stannary Courts. Plympton became the fourth Devon stannary town in 1328 after a powerful lobby persuaded the Sheriff of Devon that it was nearer the sea and therefore had better access for merchants.[2]
The Devon stannary towns are all on the fringes of Dartmoor, which is the granite upland which bore the tin. No definition of the boundaries of the Devon stannaries is known, if indeed one ever existed.
<autobiographical-note>
In the late 1980s I worked with [more under than with, as he was a bit of a silverback] a west-countryman with the (to me) unusual name 'Stannard'. I'm sure he had a tin-mining background.
<tangent>
He flew to the USA (in those pre-facetime days) to spread the word about X.25...<meta-tangent>
Wikipedia hasn't heard of VAX PSI, the product he was king of (Google has, but with only scrappy links to odd books, because what was once a free-standing product is now a part of DECnet/OSI. Don't ask.).
</meta-tangent>.... Just before his flight he realized he needed a pointer [pre-infrared of course]. I had just acquired a telescopic one and added it to my professional writer's kit. I lent it to him (well, gave it, as it turned out).
While abroad he had a heart attack, and (a mark of his eminence - I did say he was a king) DEC laid on a wake and invited his widow.
Remembering a story told by Tommy Cooper...
<just-like-that>
A man rings at a front door, which is opened by a lady who has obviously been crying."Can I speak to Eddie?' he asks, and she bursts into tears again. 'Eddie's dead' she wails.
'Did he say anything about a pot of paint?"
</just-like-that>...(or maybe it was Frankie Howerd), I didn't mention my pointer. I'd never have used it anyway, but it was a bargain at a car-boot sale, and a treasured possession.
</tangent></autobiographical-note>
Where was I? Oh yes, Widecombe
.
In the church there was a... Is that the time? Stay tuned for an update.
In St Pancras church there is an automaton depicting the grey mare lent unwisely by Tom Pearce in the song Widecombe Fair. It was originally made in 1959, and after many years in pieces in a box several miles away from its home, it has been lovingly and expertly restored.
<tangent subject="schedule?">
Unless Tom Pearce was very patient (as well as naïve) - I'm thinking of 'Friday soon or Sarurday noon' - the fair must have been rescheduled since the song was first sung (it was first published in 1890, but must have predated that. Widecombe and District Local History Group have tra Dartmoor ced it to an actual occurrence in 1802:We found a sign at the Tom Cobley Tavern at Spreyton, which says all these characters left from outside that pub in 1802 to go to Widecombe."That's the earliest date we've been able to find."Source</tangent>
In another Dartmoor church, at Chagford ...
<inline-pps>
(home of my spare rubber ferrule...
<etymological-peccadillo>... – dropped in Chagford car.park less than an hour after I bought it. Until I replaced the old worn one I had sounded like Blind Pew delivering the Black Spot.)
(interesting expression, that. The -ule suffix says it's small, and the ferr- bit says it's made of iron; a small iron bit. But a rubber one? This is another example of the workings of the etymological clock (mentioned on this blog all over the place [here's an early case]. There's nothing salty, for example, about a salary, and a companion shares more than bread. The sal- and the -pan- had relevance at an early stage in the words' development, but language moves on. Show me someone who insists on decimation involving a penalty of one tenth, and I'll show you a pedant.)
</etymological-peccadillo></inline-pps>
...(one of the four stannary towns), lies the body of Mary Whiddon, whose ghost...
<spectral-background>...haunts the nearby Whiddon Park, and the possibly connected Three Crowns Inn. A rather breathless webpage has it that
(she was shot by a jealous former lover on her wedding day in the seventeenth century, in the church, just as the ceremony was starting)
</spectral-background>
Whiddon Park is where Mary lived and in 1971 a daughter of the house was to be married in Chagford church. On the morning of the wedding a guest awoke to find the apparition of a young woman dressed in a period wedding gown standing in the doorway of his room. Luckily the bride of 1971 did not take this to be an omen and went ahead with the wedding. It is said that she placed her bridal bouquet on the grave of Mary Whiddon as a mark of respect. Locally it is also said that Mary’s ghost also haunts the Bishop’s Room and corridors of Chagford’s Three Crowns Inn. This is also substantiated by the belief that an ancient tunnel once linked Whiddon Park with the inn? (HD: sic. Perhaps the ? reflects some doubt in the writer, or maybe it was just a reminder, not meant for publication, to check. Why, I wonder, would a ghost need a tunnel [however ancient]?)I wonder if she was related to the Dan'l Whiidon mentiomed as one seventh of the improbable load on Tom Pearce's grey mare. But perhaps Whiddon is just a common surname thereabouts .
