Apparently any commemoration of the battle of Evesham, which raged 748 years ago this day, will find the area around Battlewell nicely razed of the intense underbrush I spoke of last month. In fact, a member of the Simon de Montfort Society, based in Evesham, took exception to my description and offered a few points of clarification below. Personally, all the growth had allowed me to experience the condition of the field as it would have been on that fateful day. Moreover, it gave me a legitimate reason to hack away with me nephew’s sword, as opposed to giving in to mere campy temptation.
1. When you visited I was waiting for the contractor who does the mowing to turn up & had been waiting for several weeks. In fact the mowing was done about a week later, together with trimming of some smaller & more sensitive areas, where the tractor-drawn mower is not desirable. If you visited today it would look very different.
2. It is nothing to do with English Heritage. They have no involvement in the maintenance regime.
3. Following detailed professional archaeological excavation the ‘battlewell’ was cleaned out & partially re-modelled for prescribed wildlife conservation reasons, For further maintenance & refurbishment reasons we have subsequently attempted to drain it but only partially successfully so far.
4. That archaeology was carried out last February (as a continuation of that carried out in 2011). The excavation would have been done about 2/3 weeks after I met you in London! The definite opinion of the professional archaeologists is that the pond is not of medieval date. From such artefacts & construction materials that have been found their opinion is that it is relatively modern – probably late Victorian/Edwardian. The conclusion therefore has to be that the existing pond is not the ‘battlewell’, which is what I have suspected for a long time. Of course our problem now is to identify where the ‘real’ battlewell is! We suspect it is very nearby but quite likely to be outside our field.
