Cusop
| Cusop | |
 Cussop Dingle in both Wales and England. |
|
  Cusop Cusop shown within Herefordshire | |
| Population | 300 (approx.) |
|---|---|
| OS grid reference | SO239415 |
| Unitary authority | Herefordshire |
| Ceremonial county | Herefordshire |
| Region | West Midlands |
| Country | England |
| Sovereign state | United Kingdom |
| Post town | HEREFORD |
| Postcode district | HR3 |
| Dialling code | 01497 |
| Police | West Mercia |
| Fire | Hereford and Worcester |
| Ambulance | West Midlands |
| EU Parliament | West Midlands |
| UK Parliament | Hereford and South Herefordshire |
| |
Cusop is a village and civil parish in Herefordshire, England that lies next to the town of Hay-on-Wye in Wales. It is a short walk from Hay, the distance between bus stops, it can reached by walking or driving out of Hay towards Bredwardine, and turning right into Cusop Dingle.
The writer L.T.C. Rolt lived here between 1914 and 1922, in a house then known as Radnor View, in a development locally called "Thirty Acres". Spending his early boyhood here, he went on to co-found the Inland Waterways Association and the Talyllyn Railway Preservation Society, and to write many books on transport, engineering biography and industrial archaeology.
The village is recorded in Domesday Book as "Cheweshope".[1]
The Manor of Cusop formed part of the Ewyas Lacy Hundred and was once owned by the Clanowe Family, Edward III, Henry ap Griffith, Vaughans of Moccas and the Cornewall Family, lastly George Cornewall.[2]
Castles
There are two castles associated with the village. Cusop Castle and Mouse Castle, or Llygad.[3]
Cusop Castle is 200 yards from the church, formerly a fortified residence.[3][4]
Mouse Castle is an unfinished motte-and-bailey earthwork,[4] consisting of a rock boss with an artificially scarped vertical side.[5] The castle was held by the de Clanowe family in the 14th century.[2]
Cusop Dingle
Cusop Dingle is a wooded valley near the village. It is notable in entomological history as the place where the species Platypeza hirticeps was discovered in 1899.[6][7]
In the Dingle is a single track road, locally known as 'Millionaire's Row', because of the large, Victorian houses which line the route up to Offa's Dyke Path, one of the popular walking tracks in the West of England. It runs alongside the Dulas Brook (forming the border between Wales and England) into the foothills of the Black Mountains. With a multitude of waterfalls, the Dulas Brook is home to trout, otter and kingfishers.
Cusop Dingle was home to the poisoner Herbert Rowse Armstrong, the only English solicitor ever hanged for murder, and the grave of his wife Katharine is in the parish churchyard. His former home, originally Mayfield but now The Mantles, was owned by Martin Beales, a solicitor working in Armstrong's old office in Hay. Beales believed that Armstrong was innocent and published a book arguing his case.[8][9]
Geology
The bedrock is known as the Old Red Sandstone. The rock beds consist of the Upper Silurian followed by the Lower Devonian. In the upper reaches of Cusop will be found a notable geological horizon known as the Townsend Tuff Bed, which is a volcanic air fall ash band. Today this is a marker used in the Anglo-Welsh ORS area to divide the Silurian from the Devonian. Previously the calcrete zone "often quarried for limestone" was considered as the boundary between the Silurian and Devonian. These inorganically formed calcrete limestones were formerly known as the Psammosteous Limestones but now known as the Bishop Frome limestone.
The rock sequences have been studied by many geologists in the 19th and 20th century. Perhaps one of the first was Roderick Murchison who travelled this way in the early 1830s in search of material for his book The Silurian System. He notes the quarrying and even an attempt to find coal in the side of Cusop Hill near 'The Criggy' circa 1800 by a tenant of Sir George Cornewalle. The rocks hereabouts do have blackish colourings in places of very early plant life and even primitive fishes have been found but mostly as disarticulated remains. Fish Scales, boney plates and scales are usually found in pellety gritty beds.
Errol White and Harry Toombs of the Natural History Museum in London looked over the area in the 1930/40s for fossil fishes; many now reside in that museum. Although Murchison was one of the first to make notes of fossils here other geologists past and present have looked over the area.
References
- ↑ H. C. Darby; G. R. Versey (2008). Domesday Gazetteer. Domesday Geography of England. Cambridge University Press. p. 176. ISBN 0-521-07858-X.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Revd Charles John Robinson (1869). A history of the castles of Herefordshire and their lords. Longman and co. pp. 40–41.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 John Duncumb (1812). Collections towards the history and antiquities of the county of Hereford 2 (1). Wright. pp. 236–237.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Pevsner, Nikolaus (1963). The Buildings of England - Herefordshire. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. pp. 109–110. ISBN 978-0-300-09609-5.
- ↑ David James Cathcart King (1988). The castle in England and Wales: an interpretive history. Routledge. p. 53. ISBN 0-918400-08-2.
- ↑ Radnorshire. Cambridge County Geographies. Cambridge University Press. p. 56.
- ↑ Peter J. Chandler (2001). The flat-footed flies (Diptera: Opetiidae and Platypezidae) of Europe. Fauna entomologica Scandinavica 36. Brill. pp. 223–225. ISBN 90-04-12023-8.
- ↑ Beales, Martin (1997) The Hay Poisoner, London: Robert Hale Ltd, ISBN 0-7090-6123-4
- ↑ Beales' obituary in The Daily Telegraph
External links
Media related to Cusop at Wikimedia Commons