Spicing up local history —with a giant, a dragon and an ancient yew

How interesting is local history? The history of my Cotswold village — recently celebrating the centenary of the Armistice with a well-researched exhibition and booklet on events in the Sibfords in the first world war — fascinates me, but I am not sure that people from other parts of Oxfordshire, let alone further afield, would agree.  This is the perennial problem of the local: unless it offers, in microcosm, insight into larger themes and topics, an element of ‘so-whatness’ colours the reader’s response.

Christopher Hadley’s Hollow Places takes its inspiration from a mysterious stone let into the wall in his Hertfordshire village. The carvings on it are somewhat indistinct, but they show a dragon, a floriated cross, symbols of the Evangelists and an angel bearing a tiny soul heavenwards in a napkin. The tomb-cover, for that is what it is, is made of grey-black Purbeck marble and commemorates one Piers Shonks.