Thursday, March 24, 2005

thoughts

A door. Heavy, lichened, carved away by hands and time. If I touch it a small filminess come from it, a little bit of it, onto me. Is it absorbed by my skin? Does it eek through me slowly in my blood: will it carry its memories to my own?

Each time we remember, a memory becomes polluted by the moment we remember it in. So things we have remembered many times have changed and shifted in each remembering. Like a chinese whisper. Facts infused by fiction, memory floods like hot water onto the leaves of our understanding. Our age.

Tuesday, February 08, 2005

The History Bit

Name Origin: Old English Pondestock monastry with a pound

From the Doomsday Book

The Land of the King

St KewTwo manors, PODESTOT and St Gennys, have been taken from the manor. 1½ hides. Land for 12 ploughs.Lovin holds them from the Count of Mortain. Formerly 60s; value now 40s.

Land of the Count of Mortain

Lovin holds PONDESTOCH. Gytha held it before 1066, and paid tax for 1 virgate of land; 1 hide there, however. Land for 6 ploughs; 1½ ploughs there, with 1 slave and 1 villager and 5 smallholders. Woodland, 10 acres; pastures, 40 acres. Value formerly and now 20s. [10 cattle; 50 sheep Exon]This land is of St Kews.

From A Topographical Dictionary of England, Samuel Lewis, 1831

POUNDSTOCK, a parish in the hundred of LESNEWTH, county of CORNWALL, 4¾ miles (S.S.W.) from Stratton, containing 744 inhabitants. The living is a discharged vicarage, in the archdeaconry of Cornwall, and diocese of Exeter, rated in the kings's books at £13. 6. 5., and in the patronage of John Dayman, Esq. The church is dedicated to St. Neot. The parish is bounded on the west by Widemouth bay, in the Bristol channel. A fair is held on the Monday before Ascension-day.

Poundstock, three miles north-west of Week St. Mary is the site of Penfound Manor, the oldest inhabited manor house in Britain. Part Saxon, part Norman with Elizabethan and Stuart additions: it was mentioned in the Domesday Book. The 14th century Guildhouse, restored in 1919, is the only one still in use in Cornwall; the upper floor of the two storey cob and stone building has a lofty timbered roof and medieval doorway.

The Gildhouse Posted by Hello