Back off Silchester - if you know whats good for you! (From Gazette)

Back off Silchester - if you know whats good for you!

10:55am Friday 31st July 2009

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NOTHING is sacred, is it? First we are told Colchester’s patron saint, Helena, was a Greek lass and never came near the place.

Now, in the latest blow to our heritage, we learn Colchester might not be England’s oldest town.

Apparently, archaeologists (what are the odds they have beards?) say they have discovered evidence around Silchester, in Hampshire, of a structured Iron Age town which would lay ruin to Colchester’s historic claims.

I am always a little sceptical about archaeology from watching Time Team on Channel 4.

Regular viewers will know they spend days digging up a field and find nothing but two bits of stone and a bit of old pottery.

Suddenly one of the bearded experts (and that is not being sexist, they could be male or female) shouts excitedly and holds aloft a bit of wood.

Before you can say “wake me up when this finishes”, suddenly that bloke from Blackadder is far too excited and they have turned this muddy plank into a computer image on the screen of a massive town with ramparts, flags and wandering peasants.

Silchester is a quiet Hampshire village which has some noticeable Roman ruins.

It looks a lovely place with a school and a parish council. Last year it was even voted Hampshire village of the year. As limited as my rudimentary studies are, however, I am almost certain it is not home to an Air Assault Brigade including thousands of paratropers, so if it wants to stay leafy and lovely it had better wind its neck in and stop stealing our heritage.

Obviously, in the modern British Armed Forces, we don’t actually have the planes for them to parachute into Silchester, but we could still get them to yomp there to prove we are not only the oldest town, but also the hardest.

Admittedly, our claim is not actually that we are the oldest town, simply the oldest recorded, because Pliny the Elder wrote it down.

There may have been hundreds of major towns before, it’s just pencils had not been invented by then.

And old Pliny could have been wrong. He can’t have been that bright, as he died after insisting the explosion of Mount Vesuvius was not that dangerous and sailed over there to take a closer look.

Still, in terms of spurious claims, it could be worse.

We could claim to be “the birthplace of radio” like Chelmsford, due to its links with Marconi.

In fact, Marconi (who was a renowned fascist, which is not mentioned on signs in the town), did not discover radio waves, people had been studying them for 50 years.

He just developed the machinery a little, even though commentators remarked his new equipment looked remarkably like that of earlier pioneer AE Dolbear.

He made his first broadcasts in Italy and then, having moved to the UK, at Salisbury Plain.

Chelmsford’s claim to be the birthplace of radio is solely based on the fact he built factories there, which is a bit like saying Melton Mowbray invented the pork pie, and because the town was the location for the first entertainment broadcasts in the United Kingdom.

Nowadays of course, the best entertainment to be broadcast from Chelmsford comes from County Hall.

Of course, Colchester has other claims to fame, everything from being the home of three nursery rhymes, Old King Cole, Humpty Dumpty and Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, to being the only town named in George Orwell’s 1984 as somewhere a nuclear bomb was dropped, which is nice. Apparently, the town also lost a higher proportion of its residents to the Great Plague of 1665 than most, which is a pleasant thought with swine flu rampaging across the country.

Of course, we also have had some famous residents, from pioneering scientist William Gilbert to Damon Albarn and Jeremy Spake from Airport, who is now doing the speech circuit promising “a fun packed night of laughter, tears and joy will engulf your venue as Jeremy chuckles his way through the madness that is his life”. He sounds a sure-fire chuckling hit!

So before we start to take the “Oldest Town” signs down, Silchster had better produce some written evidence. Until then, jog on Hampshire.