I spent a very pleasant evening with my new found cousin K, and his son, N, in Lincoln. Although, it seems, my late uncle Eric, my Father’s brother, had known of their existence, and kept in touch, my Father, then 91, did not know about them at all until about 4 years ago, and he was astonished, because K’s father, a well loved cousin of Father’s, had died during the early part of the second world war and he never knew that he had a son, born after his death. K moved to the USA about 30 years ago and is a research professor in Massachusetts. He is astonishing for his age, being some 5 years older than me, but, certainly looks about 5 years younger He is still working, loves his job and seems to want to continue for as long as he can. Perhaps he too would have felt less enthusiastic had he worked for the British National Health Service! He kindly treated me to a meal out at a very nice Italian restaurant on the edge of Concord, and afterwards, despite it being dark, drove me quickly around the areas to see in the town. Rather stupidly, I had not realised that Concord was only a few miles outside Boston. There are so many places in the States with the same name, that I had assumed that the Concord, where Paul Revere reputedly rode out to was the Concord, where I had had the Harley fixed (or not!), in New Hampshire. I had thought, all the way down, what a hell of a ride it was, but then thought that it was rather like the one supposedly ridden, in similar times, by Dick Turpin from London to York on Black Bess. Here, in the beautiful wooded garden outside Lincoln that evening, I first saw fireflies. I thought for a minute that it was my eyes, when I noticed small flashes of light against the dark foliage of the trees. Then, soon, they were more apparent, and I watched fascinated as the small sparks illuminated all round to my accustomising sight. The following day I now resolved to visit Concord, and then to move on to Hartford. I slept well and well breakfasted, and read up from The Rough Guide, I said goodbye and left for Concord a few miles up the road.
In actual fact, Paul Revere did not ride alone, as Longfellow tells in his poem, and neither did he make it into Concord, because he himself was captured after warning Lexington, but before he arrived in Concord. He must have spun a heck of a good yarn though, because he was later released. Nowadays, he would probably have been slung into Guantanamo Bay indefinitely! Neither did he cry the reputed immortal words ”The British are coming”. It seems that some of the locals told him to stop making such a noise, and his actual response was “Noise? What noise? This is not such a noise as is coming!” His friend managed to ride on to warn Concord and to warn the Barrett Farmstead where the patriots has weapons stored.. By the time the Brits were on the way, they were long since gone. It seems we learned nothing much from this experience, even up to the more recent times of the hoarding of weapons in Northern Ireland. I parked up in the town centre and walked the mile out to The Old Manse, alongside which stands Minuteman Bridge, which is where the first shots of the war itself started. The wooden bridge, actually about the fifth since the event, crosses the river from town and leads to the
Barrett Farm on the hillside. The Minutemen, the now well organised underground patriot army, whose soldiers could be “ready in a minute” had assembled about 70 troops on the far side, and the frontline emergency detachment of 700 British infanteers, sent ahead from Lexington marched four abreast over a hundred yard length, in their heavy red uniform to cross the bridge where they were confronted. It is not known who fired first, but it seems likely that, in British tradition, the commander would probably 
have read the equivalent of “the Riot Act” expecting the militia to disperse, but when they did not, firing started, and at the Bridge, 8 patriot militia and five British soldiers died, after what was know later as “The shot that was heard around the world” The British beat retreat and marched back down the country lane, now known as Battle Road, to wards Boston. All the way, patriots, arming from all the neighbouring townships and settlements followed them along the walls and woods engaging them in a constant running battle in which 73 British and 49 colonials died. The death toll apparently being relatively so small because the accuracy of the “Brown Bess” musket was very limited, the range being no more than about 100 yards, and for any great effect, it had to be fired in a volley into a crowd. Bayonets were fixed, but close contact was not easy and so the troops simply marched and tried to defend themselves. Seems almost like the similar story of the charge of the Light Brigade, really a 20 mile ambush, brilliantly executed by the colonial forces.
I walked on from the Minuteman Bridge up the fields to the Visitor Centre where I looked at the maps and documents and sat in the sun overlooking the bridge for a coffee. There were some beautiful trees in the grounds, and I summoned the cheek to ask a couple of ladies sat at the table next to me whether they knew what one was. They didn’t, but then we got to talking a little. I couldn’t work out the relationship, one seemed slightly in awe of the other, and they were both very polite and friendly. I gave them my touring card. The “leader” of the two returned me hers; Elaine Waidelich, National President of the National League of American Pen Women, (encouraging creative women in Art, Letters, and Music), from Washington DC. She invited me to call on her when I was in Washington, which I shall try to do. As they departed, her colleague, held back, and came close to my side.. “She’s a very influential woman”, she confided! Wow! Am I impressed? Well, yes, I suppose I am, but having realised who she represented, I was rather wishing I had not informed her that I am writing a blog! But then, neither of them could recognise a native tree, so I guess I’m not feeling too phased by our encounter after all. I wrote an e-mail to her later to say thank you for spending the time to talk, but the e-mail address was incorrect and it was returned undelivered! Maybe her spelling was wrong?
I returned to the Battle road and walked along the trail through the wooded landscape of the National Heritage site. In a field behind the walls, I spotted what I think was probably a wild turkey and chicks, and further down, sat on the top of the stones, a chipmunk! This was a really fun day! A bit further along the path, in a clearing, was a beautiful old wooden inn, The Hartwell
Tavern, closed because it was now past visiting hours, but through the windows, a wonderful bare wooden scene with open hearths, wooden bar and tables and chairs, just as they might have been in the mid 18th century. It was silent all around the clearing and I could almost feel the Minutemen in the woods. A rather dull portrait of Paul Revere swung in the breeze on the signpost outside. A bit unlikely this, since it was not until Paul Revere himself publicised his part in the War and Henry Longfellow wrote about it that he was particularly well known. Much 
more likely that a portrait of Mr Hartwell was there, if any sign at all! But still, go with the flow here! Nearby, a sign directed to Major John Hancock's house and I walked the 200 yards to what looked like a wooden pagoda over a big chimney. Well, you just have to laugh, don’t you or you’d cry! As I said before, it has really been only in fairly recent times that the American seem to have realised they had any heritage to preserve. Now they push it everywhere, but here, sadly it was too late, destroyed by the American desire for huge amounts of tacky food, this wonderful wooden 18th century historical site had been leased to a fast food restaurant and had burned to the ground in the early 1960’s, totally destroyed, except for the central brick chimney. The interest to me, however, after seeing the slightly sick but amusing side of the disaster, was the way the house had been 
constructed. It was really quite an immense procedure for its time, with a ten foot deep cellar being dug and then shored up all the way around with massive stonework. In one corner were steps leading down into it with what would have been a flat cellar door over the top on the outside of the threshold. In the centre was the huge stone chimney, but over a full through archway, with nooks and niches all around, a place for storage of food and brink and dry timber and then from the first floor, numerous fireplaces on each side which would have provide, not only individual fires in each room, but a central hot flue which would have been able to store heat and keep the interior warm in the winter. The pagoda structure had been put together to give an idea of how the timber frame of the building might have been erected on the stone walls of the cellar, all walls and floor and ceilings being made from the colonialists 23” planks of wood, anything over 24” being reserved for the King and for the manufacture of war ships for the British Navy. This house, if any good can be found out of its tragic destruction, in conjunction with the views of the outsides of others, enables a better understanding of the design and engineering skills with wood that they used. Indeed, it may be that with superior insulation, the central heating core is a good foundation to consider for modern ecological housing.
I walked from the back of the Hartwell House through the woods trail to the back of the Smith House. It was easy to see how the Colonists, with their superior backwoods skills managed to
constantly outflank the regular soldiers and stay very well concealed. They were constantly within 50 to 100 yards of the Battle Road, yet able to stay quiet and concealed in the thickness of the trees and ground cover. The outside of the Smith House
was again of interest, the back and sides being clad in wide heavy planks and the front decorated with fine overlap cladding. The heavy hand made iron nails with their beaten heads were still obvious.
It was lovely to be able to explore this area, out of visiting hours, with nobody bar the occasional mountain biker or jogger passing and non of the guided tours from the pantomime Colonialists which range the area. None of that was needed. It was a simple time warp, a travel back two and half centuries by myself into the wooded clearings, with the welcoming ghosts of the old boys enabling me to feel the atmosphere in the quiet. I felt quite sad inside for pointless loss of life that is war, and for the stupidity that our old Imperial past had shown both here and in other parts of the Empire. Had they treated everyone, both at home and abroad, with the human rights and dignity and freedoms that we have now come to expect, might not the world now have been a great deal closer and better place? Was it the greed of the monarchy, or would it have happened because every government is greedy and corruptible? Would our government of today have taxed them ‘til they bled dry? I guess so, human nature never changes.
After I had finished my personal tour and contemplations along Battle Road, I returned into town and was just in time to visit on the last tour of the day at the house of Louisa May Allcott, Orchard House. I was so pleased to see this place and to hear the story of her family and how closely related they all were to the great story she then wrote around them, Little Women.
Much of her life was really quite sad, but they seemed to have had a loving and very close family and her father, a great reformer in terms of his thought about the rights of women, encouraged all his girls in things that they were accomplished at, Art, Literature and Music. They were, as girls, allowed a very free life for her time, and she was certainly a very accomplished emancipated and free-thinking woman. She based Jo on herself, always a slight rebel and perhaps in her way a bit of a tomboy, but she remained a spinster and it was only pressure from her publishers to get the girls married off that she finally turned the tables on them and married her heroine off to a much older man, who in reality was probably based on her Father. In the story, the girls Father was away at the War, but in truth this was not the case. Her Father was Amos Bronson Alcott, who together with many other philosophical thinkers of the day, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau, founded an Adult summer school, called the Concord School of Philosophy, based in a small sort of wooden chapel built in the hillside adjoining Orchard House. Here, he and his colleagues taught a sort of Platoism to adults at a summer school. It became a renowned school of philosophical thought, and no doubt, Louisa herself would have been influenced by it too. Inside, the rooms are preserved very much as they were with family portraits and many paintings by Louisa’s talented artist sister, May, who sadly died young, although her Father had sent her to study art in Europe and she exhibited as one of the first American women artists in European salons. 
I must read Little Women again, perhaps not a book that would immediately appear to be a man’s story, but I am a big romantic inside and loved it when I read it as a teenager and even more so when it was wonderfully dramatised by the BBC sometime, I believe, in the late 1960’s. It is a book to make you laugh and make you cry, and one which I now think I would have deeper insight about for being in the author’s house and town.
From my trip to Concord, I went on to Lexington Green, although it was late, but I did not see very much here and the emotive feelings of Concord had gone.
I set the Satnav for Hartford. Now, rather stupidly, knowing that my next major destination was to be Niagara Falls, and that is in New York State, when the Satnav asked me to choose Hartford, I made the same sort of error I had with Concord. There’s a lot of Hartfords, and I hit on Hartford New York. It was not until I had done some 80 miles and found myself back in Brattleborough New Hampshire, that I released that I was travelling to Hartford which is near the western edge of Vermont and had travelled north west, rather than going to Hartford in Connecticut and travelled south west. I turned around sharpish (and sheepish!) and headed south on the 91, finally, at about 11.00p.m., camping out behind a church in the churchyard, somewhere about 30 miles north of Hartford. Churchyards seem a good place to sleep rough because nobody goes there at night! I feel safe there too because they are usually on the edge of a township, and unless there is movement underneath you, there is no need to get worried there!
I had hoped to see K’s other son in Hartford. He works as an emergency doctor at the hospital, but I was a day past the one he may have expected me and by the time I arrived there at about noon on Saturday afternoon, 14th July, it was a bit late to get in contact if I wanted to see Mark Twain’s House as I did. Perhaps I will make contact on the route back.
Well, I survived my visit to Colonial parts, but they need not have feared if it had been this Brit coming. The story would have had to be rewritten. I would almost certainly have marched my troops to Concord New Hampshire and they would probably have been picked off in similar fashion by Indians.
Best wishes,
Doc
In actual fact, Paul Revere did not ride alone, as Longfellow tells in his poem, and neither did he make it into Concord, because he himself was captured after warning Lexington, but before he arrived in Concord. He must have spun a heck of a good yarn though, because he was later released. Nowadays, he would probably have been slung into Guantanamo Bay indefinitely! Neither did he cry the reputed immortal words ”The British are coming”. It seems that some of the locals told him to stop making such a noise, and his actual response was “Noise? What noise? This is not such a noise as is coming!” His friend managed to ride on to warn Concord and to warn the Barrett Farmstead where the patriots has weapons stored.. By the time the Brits were on the way, they were long since gone. It seems we learned nothing much from this experience, even up to the more recent times of the hoarding of weapons in Northern Ireland. I parked up in the town centre and walked the mile out to The Old Manse, alongside which stands Minuteman Bridge, which is where the first shots of the war itself started. The wooden bridge, actually about the fifth since the event, crosses the river from town and leads to the
Barrett Farm on the hillside. The Minutemen, the now well organised underground patriot army, whose soldiers could be “ready in a minute” had assembled about 70 troops on the far side, and the frontline emergency detachment of 700 British infanteers, sent ahead from Lexington marched four abreast over a hundred yard length, in their heavy red uniform to cross the bridge where they were confronted. It is not known who fired first, but it seems likely that, in British tradition, the commander would probably 
have read the equivalent of “the Riot Act” expecting the militia to disperse, but when they did not, firing started, and at the Bridge, 8 patriot militia and five British soldiers died, after what was know later as “The shot that was heard around the world” The British beat retreat and marched back down the country lane, now known as Battle Road, to wards Boston. All the way, patriots, arming from all the neighbouring townships and settlements followed them along the walls and woods engaging them in a constant running battle in which 73 British and 49 colonials died. The death toll apparently being relatively so small because the accuracy of the “Brown Bess” musket was very limited, the range being no more than about 100 yards, and for any great effect, it had to be fired in a volley into a crowd. Bayonets were fixed, but close contact was not easy and so the troops simply marched and tried to defend themselves. Seems almost like the similar story of the charge of the Light Brigade, really a 20 mile ambush, brilliantly executed by the colonial forces.I walked on from the Minuteman Bridge up the fields to the Visitor Centre where I looked at the maps and documents and sat in the sun overlooking the bridge for a coffee. There were some beautiful trees in the grounds, and I summoned the cheek to ask a couple of ladies sat at the table next to me whether they knew what one was. They didn’t, but then we got to talking a little. I couldn’t work out the relationship, one seemed slightly in awe of the other, and they were both very polite and friendly. I gave them my touring card. The “leader” of the two returned me hers; Elaine Waidelich, National President of the National League of American Pen Women, (encouraging creative women in Art, Letters, and Music), from Washington DC. She invited me to call on her when I was in Washington, which I shall try to do. As they departed, her colleague, held back, and came close to my side.. “She’s a very influential woman”, she confided! Wow! Am I impressed? Well, yes, I suppose I am, but having realised who she represented, I was rather wishing I had not informed her that I am writing a blog! But then, neither of them could recognise a native tree, so I guess I’m not feeling too phased by our encounter after all. I wrote an e-mail to her later to say thank you for spending the time to talk, but the e-mail address was incorrect and it was returned undelivered! Maybe her spelling was wrong?
I returned to the Battle road and walked along the trail through the wooded landscape of the National Heritage site. In a field behind the walls, I spotted what I think was probably a wild turkey and chicks, and further down, sat on the top of the stones, a chipmunk! This was a really fun day! A bit further along the path, in a clearing, was a beautiful old wooden inn, The Hartwell
Tavern, closed because it was now past visiting hours, but through the windows, a wonderful bare wooden scene with open hearths, wooden bar and tables and chairs, just as they might have been in the mid 18th century. It was silent all around the clearing and I could almost feel the Minutemen in the woods. A rather dull portrait of Paul Revere swung in the breeze on the signpost outside. A bit unlikely this, since it was not until Paul Revere himself publicised his part in the War and Henry Longfellow wrote about it that he was particularly well known. Much 
more likely that a portrait of Mr Hartwell was there, if any sign at all! But still, go with the flow here! Nearby, a sign directed to Major John Hancock's house and I walked the 200 yards to what looked like a wooden pagoda over a big chimney. Well, you just have to laugh, don’t you or you’d cry! As I said before, it has really been only in fairly recent times that the American seem to have realised they had any heritage to preserve. Now they push it everywhere, but here, sadly it was too late, destroyed by the American desire for huge amounts of tacky food, this wonderful wooden 18th century historical site had been leased to a fast food restaurant and had burned to the ground in the early 1960’s, totally destroyed, except for the central brick chimney. The interest to me, however, after seeing the slightly sick but amusing side of the disaster, was the way the house had been 
constructed. It was really quite an immense procedure for its time, with a ten foot deep cellar being dug and then shored up all the way around with massive stonework. In one corner were steps leading down into it with what would have been a flat cellar door over the top on the outside of the threshold. In the centre was the huge stone chimney, but over a full through archway, with nooks and niches all around, a place for storage of food and brink and dry timber and then from the first floor, numerous fireplaces on each side which would have provide, not only individual fires in each room, but a central hot flue which would have been able to store heat and keep the interior warm in the winter. The pagoda structure had been put together to give an idea of how the timber frame of the building might have been erected on the stone walls of the cellar, all walls and floor and ceilings being made from the colonialists 23” planks of wood, anything over 24” being reserved for the King and for the manufacture of war ships for the British Navy. This house, if any good can be found out of its tragic destruction, in conjunction with the views of the outsides of others, enables a better understanding of the design and engineering skills with wood that they used. Indeed, it may be that with superior insulation, the central heating core is a good foundation to consider for modern ecological housing.I walked from the back of the Hartwell House through the woods trail to the back of the Smith House. It was easy to see how the Colonists, with their superior backwoods skills managed to
constantly outflank the regular soldiers and stay very well concealed. They were constantly within 50 to 100 yards of the Battle Road, yet able to stay quiet and concealed in the thickness of the trees and ground cover. The outside of the Smith House
was again of interest, the back and sides being clad in wide heavy planks and the front decorated with fine overlap cladding. The heavy hand made iron nails with their beaten heads were still obvious.It was lovely to be able to explore this area, out of visiting hours, with nobody bar the occasional mountain biker or jogger passing and non of the guided tours from the pantomime Colonialists which range the area. None of that was needed. It was a simple time warp, a travel back two and half centuries by myself into the wooded clearings, with the welcoming ghosts of the old boys enabling me to feel the atmosphere in the quiet. I felt quite sad inside for pointless loss of life that is war, and for the stupidity that our old Imperial past had shown both here and in other parts of the Empire. Had they treated everyone, both at home and abroad, with the human rights and dignity and freedoms that we have now come to expect, might not the world now have been a great deal closer and better place? Was it the greed of the monarchy, or would it have happened because every government is greedy and corruptible? Would our government of today have taxed them ‘til they bled dry? I guess so, human nature never changes.
After I had finished my personal tour and contemplations along Battle Road, I returned into town and was just in time to visit on the last tour of the day at the house of Louisa May Allcott, Orchard House. I was so pleased to see this place and to hear the story of her family and how closely related they all were to the great story she then wrote around them, Little Women.
Much of her life was really quite sad, but they seemed to have had a loving and very close family and her father, a great reformer in terms of his thought about the rights of women, encouraged all his girls in things that they were accomplished at, Art, Literature and Music. They were, as girls, allowed a very free life for her time, and she was certainly a very accomplished emancipated and free-thinking woman. She based Jo on herself, always a slight rebel and perhaps in her way a bit of a tomboy, but she remained a spinster and it was only pressure from her publishers to get the girls married off that she finally turned the tables on them and married her heroine off to a much older man, who in reality was probably based on her Father. In the story, the girls Father was away at the War, but in truth this was not the case. Her Father was Amos Bronson Alcott, who together with many other philosophical thinkers of the day, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau, founded an Adult summer school, called the Concord School of Philosophy, based in a small sort of wooden chapel built in the hillside adjoining Orchard House. Here, he and his colleagues taught a sort of Platoism to adults at a summer school. It became a renowned school of philosophical thought, and no doubt, Louisa herself would have been influenced by it too. Inside, the rooms are preserved very much as they were with family portraits and many paintings by Louisa’s talented artist sister, May, who sadly died young, although her Father had sent her to study art in Europe and she exhibited as one of the first American women artists in European salons. 
I must read Little Women again, perhaps not a book that would immediately appear to be a man’s story, but I am a big romantic inside and loved it when I read it as a teenager and even more so when it was wonderfully dramatised by the BBC sometime, I believe, in the late 1960’s. It is a book to make you laugh and make you cry, and one which I now think I would have deeper insight about for being in the author’s house and town.
From my trip to Concord, I went on to Lexington Green, although it was late, but I did not see very much here and the emotive feelings of Concord had gone.
I set the Satnav for Hartford. Now, rather stupidly, knowing that my next major destination was to be Niagara Falls, and that is in New York State, when the Satnav asked me to choose Hartford, I made the same sort of error I had with Concord. There’s a lot of Hartfords, and I hit on Hartford New York. It was not until I had done some 80 miles and found myself back in Brattleborough New Hampshire, that I released that I was travelling to Hartford which is near the western edge of Vermont and had travelled north west, rather than going to Hartford in Connecticut and travelled south west. I turned around sharpish (and sheepish!) and headed south on the 91, finally, at about 11.00p.m., camping out behind a church in the churchyard, somewhere about 30 miles north of Hartford. Churchyards seem a good place to sleep rough because nobody goes there at night! I feel safe there too because they are usually on the edge of a township, and unless there is movement underneath you, there is no need to get worried there!
I had hoped to see K’s other son in Hartford. He works as an emergency doctor at the hospital, but I was a day past the one he may have expected me and by the time I arrived there at about noon on Saturday afternoon, 14th July, it was a bit late to get in contact if I wanted to see Mark Twain’s House as I did. Perhaps I will make contact on the route back.
Well, I survived my visit to Colonial parts, but they need not have feared if it had been this Brit coming. The story would have had to be rewritten. I would almost certainly have marched my troops to Concord New Hampshire and they would probably have been picked off in similar fashion by Indians.
Best wishes,
Doc
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