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| | | From Shetland to the Scilly Isles, Open Country travels the UK in search of the stories, the people and the wildlife that make our countryside such a vibrant place. Each week we visit a new area to hear how local people are growing the crops, protecting the environment, maintaining the traditions and cooking the food that makes their corner of rural Britain unique.
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Nottinghamshire
A piece of fabric used by a king to declare war on his own people gives this week's Open Country its starting point. Helen Mark looks out from the roof of Nottingham Castle towards the mound, later christened Standard Hill, to which Charles I rode in great ceremony to raise the Royal Standard in August 1642. Historian Dr Trevor Foulds explains the huge significance (and ultimate farcical quality) of the act which effectively began the Civil War, and also of the flag itself, which represented the power of the king over his subjects, the old order which was itself, of course, soon to become history in its turn. The royalist symbols on the flag told anyone who saw it that this was a king quite separate from, and infinitely superior to, his subjects.
Those symbols - a shorthand form of communicating power - find an echo on the walls of Church Hole, part of the Creswell Crags cave complex where Britain's earliest examples of Ice Age art have been found by Sheffield University's Dr Paul Pettitt and colleagues in the field. Overlooked by generations of archaeologists, these drawings, which include etchings of what are thought to be reindeer and bison, give an insight into why early man created such works of art. For the most part incomplete and so hidden away that they were not apparently drawn to be viewed, it seems that the artists were expressing a sense of belonging to a group of fellow hunter-gatherers, and fulfilling a spiritual need in evoking the animal on which they so heavily relied for life.
This sense of belonging to a group finds very clear expression in miners' banners and Paul Whetton, a lifelong NUM member, tells Helen how his colliery colleagues at Bevercotes saved to pay for their own, and what it meant to be chosen to carry that banner at the miners' gala in Mansfield. On strike for 12 months in the 1980s, Paul feels that the solidarity felt by miners gathered behind a banner is similar to family feeling - gathering below a banner provides a sense of support, of belonging, of unity, of strength and of working class power. Holding up a banner, he says, is like holding up pride in yourself, in your industry and in your community.
Just down the road from Paul's home, at St Paulinus' Church in Ollerton, Reg Pritchard and his wife Dorothy have created a stained glass window in memory of the miners who worked, lived and died in the Nottinghamshire pits. Reg's father, uncles and grandfather were miners and, seeing what it had done to them, he chose to leave Ollerton and escape the industry. But he is, he says, imbued with the mine and put into the window his emotions about his family and his pride in what miners gave for the community. Now that most evidence of the industry has been erased from the landscape, Reg - and people like Joan Seger, whose idea the window was - wanted to make sure that the work, so integral to the community, was never forgotten. And anyone looking at the window, with its two miners and Christ each carrying a lamp, should know instantly what story is being told. It's as simple, as symbolic and as easily understood as that royal standard raised by Charles over his people in Nottingham.
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