As cold as charity, and charity's chilly...

In Pieter and Rita Boogaart's superb travel book about the A272, which is a famous East/West route from East Sussex to Winchester, there are so many unheard facts, that it's difficult to keep up, and it all needs reading again!

I used to travel that route regularly from about 1975, as I had a lot of work in Hampshire, and much of the motorway network hadn't been built. It would always take me three hours to get to Winchester, however fast I drove, because all the traffic would meet up again in the lovely towns like Petworth and Midhurst, so an average of 40 mph was the order of the day, and it hardly ever changed.

Of the snippets which pepper every page, there's a couple which I was interested to learn about. One is that the origin of a lychgate on a church wall, was originally to accept a dead body at a funeral, and hopefully the vicar stayed in the dry! The funeral service started at that point.

I told this to a good friend who hails from the North, and she told me that the particular ritual also applied to weddings - mostly in Yorkshire! I always thought they were a sort of folly or just a plain architectural addition, but the idea originally was that once at the church gates, one either went on to be spliced, with no escape, or finished up 6ft under, ditto...

But another item caught my imagination. The author covers some detail on The Cokelers.

http://scm.pastfinders.org/cokelers_1.htm

Reading between the lines, it seems that they were a slighly odd sect, and didn't really seem to want to enjoy themselves either, but they did a lot for charity, and I suppose their pious intent never did anyone any harm, apart from discouraging marriage, which may well have turned out a bit tiresome at the local dance hall...

I've started several chums on ths book, and we all compare notes - it's well worth a read...