Bring on the spooks and ghosts

Heath House is an old Victorian-Gothic pile at Tean, where the family that live there have had to think up new and interesting ways to preserve the building. Nowadays it's well-known for hosting grand wedding events and the like.

One new wheeze is Ghost Tours. As of next week, there will be regular 'entertainment experiences' featuring whatever may be haunting the house's less brightly-lit locations.
Hmm. 

Related link:  Haunted Secrets Of The Heath House

Tiny rock festivals rock

The smallest rock festivals are the best (IMHO).
For example, the 'Night Of The Dog' festival in the tiny village of Tean only attracts five hundred peple or so, but the young (mostly local) bands play there with real enthusiasm in front of their own fans - and neighbours!
This photo, from last year's festival, is one of my favourites, as it expresses the feeling of a local rock fest pretty well. The young lad clearly finds the noise from the stage a little cacophonous...

NOD is not on this year, but the next best is the Milwich Village Rock Festival, which takes place next weekend. Don't miss it.

Black's Head

I was surprised to see The Blacks Head in Tean still sporting its long-time name.  A lot of these kinds of pub-names are now deemed politically incorrect, as they hark back to a time of widespread racial prejudice.
For example: ‘The Black Boy’ at Cobridge, whose sign showed a young black lad in servant’s livery, closed for economic reasons some time ago, but had had issues with the community…

The story of the ‘Labour in Vain’ pub in mid-Staffordshire is the daftest, as its sign related to a folk-tale of two ignorant peasants trying to wash clean the first African lad they ever came across. The sign was taken down in 2003 as politically incorrect, but put up again in 2009 (as it was re-interpreted: as ‘part of local tradition’).

It’s all very confusing, and is part of the problem that anyone has in trying to ‘correct history’.  (Should we leave statues up of Oliver Cromwell – whose troops massacred so many in Ireland?  It’s a moot question).

But I do notice that the pub-owners here in Tean have not attempted to put up a pictorial pub-sign.  Neither has another ‘Blacks Head’ – the one in Stoke.
It’s probably for the best.

Link:  Labour In Vain sign restored

A milestone for Tean

You still see milestones like this one (in the village of Tean) all over Staffordshire - I think the local parish councils maintain them.
I guess they refer back to the days when people walked... and walked. When the eighteenth century writer Samuel Johnson decided to move to London from Lichfield, he walked it. Wouldn't have thought of a carriage.

View from the roof

At Heath House, you can climb up to the top of the central turret - and this is the view looking back. It's not often you get to see down on to roofs of the house one is actually in - it gives quite an unexpected dizzy feeling!
I gained this photo (on a tour of the Heath House stately home at Tean);  the narrow little turret we were in sticks up like a pin out of the top of the building. The view looking forward shows the whole valley.

The family which owns the mansion, a Victorian-Gothic pile which sits in its own grounds, wasn't sure what to do with it... but it's now available for weddings, bar-mitzvahs, ghost-tours etc.
I quite like the old place's quirkiness.

Check out the HH tours here.

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