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Secrets of the pyramids
There's a word for it – Pyramidiot. It was coined by the archaeologist Sir Flinders Petrie for men with equally exotic names, like Charles Piazzi Smyth and Melanchthon William Henry Lombe Brooke. The latter believed that the secrets of the universe are found in the measurements and construction of Egypt's Great Pyramid.
For the past six years I, too, have been a pyramidiot, criss-crossing the British Isles, from northern Scotland to Scilly, from Norfolk to County Mayo. My researcher, driver, navigator, B&B-booker (and wife) Sheila and I have met eccentric landowners, climbed hills and waded rivers in search of the pyramids of Britain and Ireland.
It's all Piazzi Smyth's fault. The Astronomer Royal for Scotland from the age of 26, he was a respected scientist who pioneered placing telescopes on mountains and did advanced work in spectroscopy.
But he also had a mania about the Great Pyramid, becoming convinced that it was built using the "pyramid inch" – virtually identical to a British inch. Unsurprisingly, the Royal Society rejected a paper on the subject. Shunned by his fellows, Smyth retired to Ripon and was eventually buried under his own little pyramid in the churchyard at nearby Sharow.
I've known Piazzi's pyramid since I was at school in Ripon and later had the notion of writing about it and what I thought must be the few other British pyramids. A little book, I thought. Six years on, the finished work runs to 400 pages and deals with about 200 pyramids.
Yorkshire has more than any other county. The most prominent are at Castle Howard. The Pyramid Gate welcomes visitors to the estate. There's a smaller pyramid in Pretty Wood. The largest is Castle Howard's Great Pyramid, opposite the south front of the house; one of the highlights of the research was a visit to its interior to come face-to-face with a huge bust of Lord William Howard, Elizabethan founder of the family's fortunes.
We chalked up other Yorkshire pyramids – at Nostell Priory, Wentworth Woodhouse, Bolton-on-Swale and Terrington, for example. We were invited to the unveiling of the new pyramid to the Battle of Towton in Saxton churchyard, and reminded Professor Derek Linstrum of his now-hidden pyramid at Bretton Hall. But we ranged far wider than Yorkshire's borders.
At Attleborough in Norfolk, Melanchthon Brooke has his own little pyramid – his will laid down its exact specifications, as well as containing other unusual clauses – he gave 50 to his housekeeper; she would have had 100 if she had "continued to wear for service the white cap and apron which became her so well". Further south, at Orsett in Essex, is a pyramid to slave trader Samuel Bonham, an ancestor of the Duchess of Cornwall.
The journeys went on; to Porthcurno in Cornwall, where a pyramid marks the 19th-century Transatlantic communications cables; to Brightling in Sussex to the famous pyramid to eccentric MP Mad Jack Fuller; to Carmel College, near Wallingford in Oxfordshire to see a concrete one – a boathouse and art gallery designed by Coventry Cathedral's architect Sir Basil Spence.
Even more eccentric is Britain's only cast-iron pyramid, at Hampstead Norreys in Berkshire. It commemorates the Lowsley family, who went in for the oddest first names – Barzillai, Oded, and Warin Ashbel, Vashti and Adah. Nether Wallop offered a fine pyramid to physician Dr Douce, who was interested in embalming, gave strict instructions for the building and upkeep of his pyramid and left money to educate the village children – "but they must not go too far least it makes them saucy and the Girls all want to be Chamber Maids and in a few years you will be in want of cooks".
The oldest British pyramid we found is Compton Pike in Warwickshire – a beacon built in 1588 to warn of the Armada. More naval history is remembered at Perlethorpe in Nottinghamshire, where a slate-covered pyramid marks Nelson's victory at the Battle of the Nile. Two more victories have pyramids – one at Great Torrington in Devon, paid for by the ladies of the town, celebrates Waterloo ("Peace to the souls of the heroes!!!" it proclaims) and, nearby in Winkleigh, a pyramidal village pump to a political success – the passing of the Great Reform Bill in 1832.
Scotland has lots of pyramids to the Covenanters, many of them martyrs who died in the Killing Time of the late 17th century. The most difficult to find was at Auchencloy in the Galloway Forest Park. We had to wade knee-deep across the fast-flowing Black Water of Dee to reach it. Then we had to wade back...
Dundee has the only Formica pyramid, above a disused gents' toilet. Near Dunvegan on Skye is a pyramid to the last man to be executed on Tower Hill. In Duddingston kirkyard in Edinburgh the pyramid has a carving of a shipwreck on the Isles of Scilly that drowned a scandalous actress, her lover and their baby.
Much more august is the Balmoral pyramid to Prince Albert, with some of the unmortared stones carved with the initials of Queen Victoria and her fatherless children.
Wales has relatively few pyramids. The most unusual is an artwork on a Cardiff roundabout, made of triangular road-signs. Ireland, though, is a pyramidal treasure house – and has its fair share of eccentrics, too. At Kilcooley Abbey in Co Tipperary we were warned away from the house (despite having an appointment) by an angry woman gesticulating from a cobwebbed window.
The pyramid at Baltinglass in Co Wicklow has links to four brothers who in turn became Earl of Aldborough and who hated each other.
The Swifte family at Castlerickard in Co Meath (author Jonathan Swift was a member) has a three-sided pyramid in a neglected churchyard. Other pyramidal Irish highlights were in Cork, where the local lads in Boyne Crescent used their modern pyramid as goalpost and hanging-out place, and at Sneem in Co Kerry, where a whole collection of pyramids
by artist James Scanlon is collectively and whimsically known as "The Way the Fairies Went."
These pyramid journeys have taken us to many unexpected places, like the magical Myross in Co Cork, where the O'Donovan pyramid is wonderfully sited beside the sea, or to Bishop's Wood in Staffordshire, where a pyramid pigsty is inscribed: "They please the pigs" (there's a pyramidal henhouse nearby in Tong).
They've encompassed modern office blocks, like the huge Co-operative Bank building beside the M60 in Stockport and The Inspire in Harrogate, swimming pools in Bedford and Bletchley – and even a sofa shop in Watford.
We've been to Aberlady, where at Gosford House we met the Earl of Wemyss, born in 1912; to Stanway where the Earl's son Lord Neidpath (who succeeded his father as Earl in January this year) showed us the pyramid at the heart of his revived garden with its 300-foot fountain; to Kinkell Castle, north-west of Inverness, to see artist Gerald Laing's ivy-covered pyramid, and to Spettisbury in Dorset, where we
mingled with wedding guests to photograph the three-sided pyramid to
a former vicar.
Wherever we went, it was to Ripon we returned, within a mile of Piazzi Smyth's pyramid in Sharow that began it all. Pyramidiots both he and I may be; but like him, I was fascinated by just how much influence pyramids have had, and continue to have.
David Winpenny's Up to a Point – in search of pyramids in Britain and Ireland is published by Sessions of York at 24.95. To order from the Yorkshire Post Bookshop, call free on 0800 0153232 or go online at www.yorkshirepostbookshop.co.uk. Postage and packing is 2.75.
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Friday 10 February 2012
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