Author name: Richard Clarke

Camden’s name not only survives in the context of his authorship but also in the name of a society and in the name of a London borough. William Camden’s two best remembered publications are Brittania and Annals (short version of the full title). The former was first published in 1586, then written in latin, and […]

William Camden, 1551 – 1623, is the second travelogue writer quoted in Descriptions of East Yorkshire: Leland to Defoe (E.Y.L.H.S., 1985) and surely the only one to have a London borough named after him (see later). A friend and supporter of Elizabeth I, Camden published a history of her reign in the later years of

The ‘tours’ (towers) Leland refers to may have been simply showy pieces of domestic architecture, after all what could have been more ‘showy’ than an eye-catching tower rising well above the general roofline. However, there may have more prosaic purposes. For example, they would have enabled the ‘Old Harbour’ and the middle Humber Estuary to

An intriguing feature of Leland’s description of Hull in the early 1540s is his reference to various ‘tours’ (towers and s.p.b.). The photo above of St. Mary, Lowgate shows a tower he would not have seen because this one wasn’t constructed until 1697 (the passageway through its ground floor section came later). At the time

John Leland’s description of Hull in the 1540s is thorough for the time and, indeed, later travelogue writers may have used his information as much as discovering new stuff for themselves. As well as noting the points made in blog 2 he described the town walls in considerable detail, including the section along the Humber

Just off the coast and at the north end of Whitley Bay is St. Mary’s Island and lighthouse (technically not an island as it is linked to the mainland by a causeway crossable at low tide, see above). The lighthouse and lighthouse keeper’s cottage have been a tourist attraction since the early 1990s, the lighthouse