(no subject)

[skygiants]

While in Wales we stayed at the Baskerville Hall Hotel, which proudly claimed that yes! indeed! Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had been great friends of the Welsh Lords Baskerville, and only moved the action of the novel to Devon out of respect for his friends' privacy so they would not be hounded by Sherlock-seeking tourists!

I of course immediately had to find a copy of The Hound of the Baskervilles to reread to see if the house of the cursed Baskervilles as described bore any resemblance to our hotel and I can honestly report: it absolutely does not in any way.

To be clear, we would not have been at all surprised to stumble across a murder in Baskerville Hall Hotel; it very much was a converted old manor house with a big sweeping grand staircase and we definitely were staying in former servant's quarters on the fourth floor with a cheery sign warning us that the hot water had a long way to travel and we should expect to run the tap for about several minutes before we got it: "This house was built in 1839 [...] when it rains, you are able to hear the results of this Victorian system - remember it was only designed to impress!" The night we arrived there were a bevy of local barflies being served by the World's Oldest Bartender at ye olde pub counter and a troupe of local amateur musicians and their dog jamming in ye olde study and Beth valiantly went down for a bit and played Visiting Yank at all of them while I took a phone meeting and then came back and told me that she felt like one of the jovial 'lady companions' in an Agatha Christie novel. However all of these murder mystery vibes were intensely mid-century and about sixty or seventy years too late for our friend Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

... and also the introduction to my copy made no mention of the Welsh Lords Baskerville and instead posited that Doyle had gotten the name from his friend's butler. Perhaps We'll Simply Never Know.

Hound actually ended up being relevant to our trip in more ways than one: I'd completely forgotten that part of the Spooky Vibes of the book include characters sheltering in Neolithic huts on the Devon moor! Having now seen many a historic Neolithic site over the course of the past two weeks, I can confidently say that the huts represented in Hound of the Baskervilles do not bear any more resemblance to actual Neolithic ruins than the fictional Baskerville Hall did to our hotel; for one thing, the ruins of Neolithic homes do not have such things remaining as 'roofs'. (In fact we asked several questions about the roofing materials chosen for replica homes at both Stonehenge and Skara Brae and were told that archaeologists have no idea how Neolithic roofs worked and everyone doing replica huts just kind of makes their best guess.)

Fortunately I do not go to Sherlock Holmes for archeological or architectural accuracy, and all this aside it was simply nice to return to the canon for a bit and spend some time with Holmes and Watson and some extremely convoluted murder plots. Can't argue with the classics!

Comments

[sovay]

(In fact we asked several questions about the roofing materials chosen for replica homes at both Stonehenge and Skara Brae and were told that archaeologists have no idea how Neolithic roofs worked and everyone doing replica huts just kind of makes their best guess.)

That's great.

P.S. I'm so glad genarti had the chance to pass through an Agathie Christie novel without either becoming the victim or having to do the work of solving the mystery.

[skygiants]

At Stonehenge the replica huts had some reasonably fancy thatching on them, and innerbrat who'd come to hang out with us there squinted at them and said "do we have any indication that they used thatching or is that just there because we-the-English are traditionally pretty good at thatching?" and the guides shrugged and were like 'the latter.'

PS: me too on both counts tbh, we were very sleepy that night and not particularly up for deductive puzzles!

[genarti]

It was hilarious, although I did feel I was lacking in tweed and quirky accountrements! I was, however, secretly glad we successfully got on the road the next morning (after the World's Oldest Bartender slooooowly and methodically added up our tab longhand while I tried not to laugh and Becca vibrated with gotta-catch-a-train stress) without being detained by any amateur detectives intent on asking us what we had witnessed during our stay. It did seem a very real risk.

[starlady]

Ooh, did you go to Stonehenge? Would you recommend it? My brother and I are debating it as a day trip from London in August.

Also this sounds hilarious. Playing the Visiting Yank has its charms.

[genarti]

We really enjoyed it! I wasn't at all sure if it would end up being very cool or if it'd be "yep, those sure are some big stones," but in the end I was really glad we went. I recommend looking at the Exhibition first, which is a permanent exhibit that does a lot to situate Stonehenge as part of a landscape that was sacred for hundreds of years and underwent various monument and usage permutations that we of course only barely understand anything of, this many thousands of years later; it also does its best to help you wrap your brain around how long ago this was, which of course is mindblowing and the more so the more you wrap your brain around it. Then there's a cluster of reconstructed huts (with, as stated, some best guesses on various fronts, and we were lucky enough to encounter some volunteers doing various ancient crafts in one of the huts who were happy to talk about that). You can take a shuttle bus from there to the actual monument, or you can walk across the fields, and we were glad we did the latter; even with the roads and tourists and all, it gave its own kind of sense of the shape of the landscape to approach on foot, and to look around and see the humps of ancient barrows and the paths through the buttercups where other people had walked too. And then the stones, of course, are just huge, and really cool, but that part I'd seen in a million pictures, of course. It was getting all the context to prepare me to see them in context, as best a modern person can try to, that really made the experience for me.

[skygiants]

yeah, as Beth said, I'd definitely recommend -- we'd heard people say things like 'lol they don't tell you they stones are right next to the highway' and were braced for it to feel very brief and anticlimactic, but they've really done a fantastic job with exhibit design on a broad scale both spatially and temporally. You do the exhibit and then you get the mile-plus walk through fields that get increasingly more Visibly Human Modified as you get closer to The Henge; it was a sunny day when we went and everything was covered in yellow flowers and as the sunlight hitting different parts of the site around the shaped ground it really made certain areas stand out and glow with numinous golden light, just incredibly cool.

(though I personally was also lucky to go with genarti and innerbrat who really got an A+ in History Interaction, they had so many intelligent questions to ask the hut volunteers about textile production etc while I just listened and looked at the various things that they'd made and said "wow!" and "amazing!" at appropriate intervals.)

[asakiyume]

Has your visit to Great Britain and neolithic remains included hill forts? What I really mean to ask is, did you visit Maiden Castle in Dorset?

I laughed at "it absolutely does not in any way."

And good on Beth for treating everyone to a performance of Yank tourist ;-) People enjoy these encounters.

[asakiyume]

Now I'm laughing at the gotta-catch-a-train stress vibrations. Hurray, all's well that ends well!

Hound theater this fall

[hermionesviolin]

Possibly relevant to your interests:

Bedlam is doing The Hound of the Baskervilles at Central Square Theater Sept 12 - Oct 6 -- "Enter the world of deductive reasoning and elementary logic, absurd accents and ridiculous puns as the inclusive, gender bending cast of three actors inhabit more than a dozen roles in this Central Square Theater favorite. Helmed by Artistic Director Lee Mikeska Gardner, leave your cares at home and join us this fall for a laugh out loud farce!"
https://www.centralsquaretheater.org/shows/the-hound-of-the-baskervilles/

[starlady]

Thank you! It sounds pretty cool.

And hey at least they won the battle to not put the highway through the Henge?

[starlady]

Thank you! And noted on walking rather than taking the shuttle.

[skygiants]

alas, we didn't get to Dorset! on a future trip, hopefully, but this time around our neolithic experiences were limited to Stonehenge and various sites in the Orkneys.

Re: Hound theater this fall

[skygiants]

THIS IS INDEED DEEPLY RELEVANT TO MY INTERESTS THANK YOU

[chestnut_pod]

What a delightful post to read!

[sophia_sol]

I really want that skill in History Interaction, I always want the living history volunteers/workers to tell me everything in detail but I am so bad at saying more than "wow that's so cool I love it!!" to actually elicit the continued infodumping!

also the visit to stonehenge and devon in general sounds super cool

Re: Hound theater this fall

[hermionesviolin]

Central Square Theater's Early Bird prices for next year's season subscriptions end today. I'm gonna get the First Look (aka, opening weekend) subscription for me and my partner. Happy to coordinate going to Hound together as we get closer to the date if you'd like.