![There Be Dragons](https://magarticles.magzter.com/articles/10290/377578/5daad76a100ea/There-BeDragons.jpg)
This story of the lost yew and its links to the beautiful and mysterious tomb of Piers Shonks in the wall of St Mary’s in Brent Pelham would eventually send me on a dragon hunt across the centuries. The result of that quest is my 400 page non-fiction history book, Hollow Places, published by William Collins this autumn. It is a historical detective story, a homage to the magical legends that used to belong to every village and a journey along some of the more obscure byways of British and, especially, Hertfordshire history.
Hollow Places begins with my hunt for the yew tree which had stood on the edge of a field known as Great Pepsells. To find it, I had to study the wonderful old names of Hertfordshire’s fields. In the late 1930s, the English Place-Name Society asked schoolchildren to save the names of fields before they were forgotten forever and across the county children set off to interview farmers and farmhands.
‘We have been able in this county, possibly with more success than in any other that we have hitherto attempted, to get a lively picture of the field names as they still survive,’ wrote the editors of the Hertfordshire placename survey.
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة November 2019 من Hertfordshire Life.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك ? تسجيل الدخول
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة November 2019 من Hertfordshire Life.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
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