True story of an evil priest behind the legend of a Devon serial killer

A rowan tree near the footpath on Little Haldon Hill, near Teignmouth, Devon

The rowan berries stood out bright blood-red against the blue sky. It was early September and baking hot as I trudged along the footpath high above Teignmouth.

In the distance on my left, the sea beyond the south Devon hills shimmered deep blue in the distance.

Young rowan trees were scattered among the gorse as the ground fell away to my left into a deep valley. 

I was on the high ground of Little Haldon, searching for the ruined Lidwell Chapel said to have been the hideout of a reputed serial killer priest called Robert de Middelcote.

To be fair to the man, the official record tells only that the holy man ended up in prison for a gruesome assault on a woman, burglary and theft.

Local legends say he robbed and murdered his victims then threw their bodies into the chapel well.

Their ghosts are said to still haunt the area.

It’s hard to imagine extreme violence on these hills on a sunny afternoon as cars rumble past on the main road.

But 700 years ago, it was a much lonelier place.

Shedding light on the dark mysteries of the Iron Age druids

We know little about the people living in Britain before the arrival of the Romans. What we do know about the Iron Age tribes is mostly from the accounts left by the invaders. When the conquerors write history, it is always from their worldview. And it served the Romans to portray the natives as savages and barbarians.

The tribes spread across the land were farmers and chariot-riding warriors with a class of priests and judges known as druids. They left no written records about their beliefs and rituals and are believed to have learned all their rites and ceremonies by heart, passing them on to the next generation by the spoken word only.

The Green Man is all around us, but who is he and where did he come from?

The Green Man caught my imagination years ago. I believe the figure probably dates back to pre-Christian times, and his origin is lost in the mists of our pagan past. Others put a Christian interpretation on the symbolism of the figure which appears in churches across Europe.

Is this the face of Christ worshipped by the Knights Templar?

The Templecombe Head

Traces of the once powerful medieval order of warrior monks known as the Knights Templar remain across the Westcountry. And it was curiosity about a holy relic linking the order and the mysterious Turin Shroud that took me to a small church in Somerset.

Are books more than stories, and what does that mean now?

One of the themes of George Orwell’s novel 1984 is the constant monitoring of society by ‘Big Brother’

I read today about a couple who sold up to sail around the world with their three-year-old daughter. They got rid of everything except for two antique chairs and their books. That got me to wondering why they kept their books. When Zara and I down-sized two years ago, we had to empty a big old Edwardian terrace to squeeze into a mid-1800s stone cottage in the old town centre of Exmouth. So a lot of our stuff had to go, including our books, amassed from our teenage years onwards. It was a tough decision. But when we analysed why we want to keep books, we  came up with some interesting ideas.

My two great uncles died on the Western Front, but they are still remembered

Walter, left, and Arthur Willoughby in uniform, probably 1916

It had been raining for five days before Private Walter Willoughby and his pals packed up their tents and trudged two-and-a-half miles in darkness through boggy fields in Flanders, Belgium, with German shells exploding around them. It was the early hours of Tuesday, October 9, 1917, the first day of the Battle of Poellcapelle, another day of carnage in the First World War.

What is Google doing to the English language?

Durdle Dor, on the Dorset coast. Picture by slimmer_jimmer on Flickr

Don’t get me wrong, I think the internet is generally a wonderful thing and Google has created some great products to navigate its highways and byways. But I believe there is a danger lurking in the algorithms.

What are the odds on life being just a set of coincidences?

One of the standing stones in the neolithic Ring of Brodgar on Orkney. Were these ancient sites centres of religious ritual activity?

In the TV series Touch, Kiefer Sutherland plays a disillusioned dad finding it impossible to communicate with his gifted but apparently autistic 11-year-old son Jake, who has never spoken. The boy is obsessed with numbers and mobile phones and uses his mathematical gift to uncover a series of unlikely connections between people across the globe, revealing how lives intersect in remarkable and often moving ways. The idea seems to be that somehow we are all connected, via an unseen grid of cause and effect, which, tantalisingly, can be predicted by people with a special gift like Jake, to remarkable effect.

Tarnished image of the regional ‘churnalist’

If you’re a journalist working in the regional media, what do you think people think of you? A trusted guardian of local democracy, educating, informing and entertaining, exposing wrongdoing and holding the powerful to account? Well think again. When I had a look at a government advice document to schools on how to deal with the media, it was interesting to see the perception of working life in the 2011 local media newsroom.

How Facebook is at the heart of a communications revolution

A news story last week struck me as providing proof of how far Facebook has been at the forefront of the global revolution in how we communicate. The prosecutor general in Eygpt announced on his department’s Facebook page that former president Hosni Mubarak and his two sons would be detained for 15 days for questioning over corruption in the former regime. Apparently the Facebook page was set up to promote communication between the new government and families of the people killed or injured during the political turmoil which led up to the ousting of Mubarak. Much has been written about how social media like Facebook and Twitter have been used by protesters to organise the movements for political change which have swept through the Middle East in recent months. Now in Egypt the authorities are using Facebook to communicate directly with people.