Cruck construction dates back at least to the 13th century and refers to the use of naturally curved timber split in two to form an arch which supports the structure....
Meadowcroft, 59, a carpenter by trade, originally from Birmingham, has spent more than two decades erecting Angelcynn Heall west of the state capital Cheyenne for the “preservation of my culture.”
He likened his long-running project to historical resistance by the English to various invading forces: “If you’re locked up, if you’re dead, you haven’t beaten a system. But if you survive and you have something to leave behind, you’ve beaten it.”...
Before reinventing himself in the American West, Meadowcroft was a founder of the Campaign for an English Parliament.... Every Wednesday, Meadowcroft would drive to the Houses of Parliament to unfurl the English flag and a banner reading “Parliament for England!”....
But the build has been painstaking, with Meadowcroft doing all the work himself....
“I drove a school bus for ten years because you get five hours off a day,” he said.
Imagine leaving your homeland because it did not fit you idea of that homeland anymore and finding a place in America build some semblance of that idea. Maybe your homeland is here in America and you'd just be moving to another place in America. Where would you go? What would you build? How long would it take — 10 years? Could you do the work yourself? Would you, like Cyning Meadowcroft use 60 oak trees?
I love the name Cyning Meadowcroft. I see that Cyning is pronounced "Kooning" and that it means "king."
Maybe you're paywalled out of the London Time. I also found this in the Cowboy State Daily: "Cheyenne Man Builds His Dream House: Throwback Medieval English Mead Hall/Cyning Meadowcroft built his dream home in Happy Valley near Cheyenne using a near-extinct construction method called a 'cruck' to build it. The former Brit built the medieval English mead hall home by himself and trucked two old-growth oak trees 2,000 miles round-trip to begin the project."
Now, I don't know if it was 2 oak trees or 60.
I like that he built a mead hall and his name is Meadowcroft.
पोस्ट्स
३४ टिप्पण्या:
Speaking of banquet halls, there is a video of a Ramadan banquet at Windsor Castle. If authentic, more evidence that the UK is Muslim toast.
"Imagine leaving your homeland because it did not fit you idea of that homeland anymore and finding a place in America build some semblance of that idea." Isn't that what many U.S. immigrants have done? And not always in a bad way. We have some great stuff because of it. The pepperoni roll comes to mind.
That is fantastic.
The words ‘mead hall’ are meant to be together…
The greatest concentration of British ancestry in the US is to be found in the rural Mountain West, where the wave of westward expansion crested.
My grandma's people were cattle ranchers who were among the first settlers of Arizona, and every drop of her blood for as far as we can trace it (which turned out to be surprisingly far) is pure English or Scottish, apart from one putative Indian.
Wonder where the Cowboy State Daily reporter in the video is from. That can't be a Wyoming accent. Sounds like Philadelphia.
I'm not a big fan of Tudor architecture... but that is so cool.
I love that he found a place without restrictions. Very difficult to do in hyper-constricted USA.
I also love his last name. "Meadowcroft"
I'm imagining the grandchild trying to get the roof fixed in 50 years.
His achievement will be celebrated by the folks of Wyoming.
In England these days, anyone voicing a desire to preserve the culture of the indigenous people of the British Isles would almost certainly lose his job and social connections, and risk being sent to prison for racism.
Quite lovely. I am reminded of a place I stayed at here in Virginia. A couple of retired Navy Captains had restored an old, large barn near a river into a gigantic country house. The center was open, like this hall, with the upper floors surrounding the open central area, but it was easily twice the size.
"Medieval banqueting hall."
At his joint address, Trump was like the sharp-tongued king in one of those "Medieval Manor" themed theater-restaurants that used to be popular in the 1980s.
The Democrats were his fools.
I need not imagine leaving my homeland. I’ve done it. Seven years in Ukraine ended in February of 2022. I’ve moved on to Southeast Asia. I have a wonderful life here.
Archived here, no paywall: https://archive.ph/0TnJw
Good for him, I say. His passion has kept him young.
I lived in a two-story a frame in a redwood rainforest.
Amazing, but ugly.
"Imagine leaving your homeland because it did not fit your idea of that homeland anymore..."
Since 2016 and the political ambiguity it's caused in the US, my wife and I have discussed many times what the 'trigger' would be for us to leave the US. I would probably never leave as I would consider it my duty to fight till the last for whatever was left, but my wife would go back to Brazil with my children. Under very specific conditions I might join her.
My wife and her family are from Santa Catarina, Florianopolis specifically, and I love it down there. I could foresee myself buying a big rancho and doing the city/country mouse thing for the rest of my life. Funny thing is that's not a specifically American thing to do there...everybody wants to do that there. I'd blend in perfectly lol.
"Amazing, but ugly."
Ha ha. Yeah, I was imagining encountering that interior in a Zillow display and thinking oh, no.
Wyoming is Wyoming..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_Mansion_(Wyoming)
The mansion can be easily spotted if traveling down the North Fork Highway towards Yellowstone National Park, due to its towering, dark and intimidating architectural style. It takes the form of a large log tower, with sections seemingly tacked on haphazardly
Must be a bitch to heat.
It makes him happy - so who cares.
At least the place is not cowardly submission to the gutless trend-cult - with gray with white cabinets.
Can we get Cyning to comment here? He could be the Cruck MC!
JSM
Good luck in keeping that warm during a Wyoming winter
I recall that when Buckingham Castle had a fire a few years back, Queen Elizabeth allowed trees from a royal preserve to be harvested for the repairs, as they were just about the only trees in the entire British Isles old enough and big enough to use to restore the building with historical accuracy. So yeah, big old oak trees are useful in architecture, from a recreated mead hall to a famous castle.
Is a tree cruck a literal, physical example of a crux, as in the crux of the problem? Or does crux, which derives from Latin for cross or cruciform, mean something entirely different from a forked/bent tree?
Isn't London Bridge in the US now too?
Very nice, but at the beginning there was a mention that he came here from England because of health related reasons.
I’m going to need to have that unpacked.
mikee:
Crux in philology means a place in a manuscript where the wording is very much in doubt. Editors of (e.g.) Greek and Latin texts will put a crux sign on a word, or two crux signs around a series of words, to show that the text is probably wrong and they don't know how to fix it. The crux sign is usually called a dagger and looks like this: † (hope the HTML works). It's also called an obelus (plural obeli) which is Latinized Greek for 'spit' (the kind you roast a pig on, not the kind that comes out of your mouth). An 'obelisk' is a little spit, which is weird, since it's generally much larger than a spit. How's that for pedantry?
Isn't London Bridge in the US now too?
One of the five or six London Bridges that have existed since Roman times, yes. The one in Lake Havasu, Arizona, was built during the Industrial Revolution about two hundred years ago, and dismantled and shipped to the Arizona desert in the 1970's. It is rather drab, but an Englishman of my acquaintance visited the place and says it looks much better there than it ever did in London.
The real estate developer who bought it supposedly thought he was buying the world-renowned and much more architecturally and mechanically interesting Tower Bridge. But he made the best of it, and there are now ten thousand or more homes in the community he built from scratch.
On hot summer evenings the bridge is a great place to watch the parade of boats. Most of them are owned by successful blue-collar guys from Riverside and El Cajon, showing off their retired-stripper wives and girlfriends. Lots of fake tans, fake blonde hair, fake tits, too many tattoos, and mostly naked except for nipple pasties and the smallest possible butt-floss micro-bikini bottoms. I may sound disdainful, but they are loving life, and I love them.
The dagger came out OK, but in most fonts they are tapered and look less like a Christian cross, more like a dagger or spit. The one in Word's Times New Romans font looks much better, and has a shortcut code of Alt+134.
"...use of naturally curved timber...."
**********
Carpenters know you can find those by the hundreds at Home Depot...
There are little bits of England all around the world from Hong Kong to Singapore to Simla to Dubai to Cairo to Nairobi to Harare to Cape Town to Lisbon to Buenos Aires to Victoria BC. There may even be a few in the UK. If I were Cyning, I'd avoid Spain though. The Brits there may be the ones he's trying to avoid.
Is it very far from Windsor to Wyoming? Malcolm Wallop, the former Senator from Wyoming, was the grandson of the 8th Earl of Portsmouth. His sister married the 7th Earl of Carnarvon and lived in the real Downton Abbey (Highclere Castle). Before becoming Earl, Carnarvon was Lord Porchester, the "Porchie" in "The Crown."
Hassayamper said, "On hot summer evenings the bridge is a great place to watch the parade of boats. Most of them are owned by successful blue-collar guys from Riverside and El Cajon, showing off their retired-stripper wives and girlfriends. Lots of fake tans, fake blonde hair, fake tits, too many tattoos, and mostly naked except for nipple pasties and the smallest possible butt-floss micro-bikini bottoms. I may sound disdainful, but they are loving life, and I love them."
Good for them, the only feathers rustled would be from people like you know who.
How many men yearn to venture into the wild or open country to construct their own shelter and live free? This is an elaborate spin on that driven by nostalgia for home, but the fundamental drive is the same.
Peachy said...
I'm not a big fan of Tudor architecture... but that is so cool.
I love that he found a place without restrictions. Very difficult to do in hyper-constricted USA.
But there are places. With a little whimsy there's Bishop Castle. Which I made a several hour trip to when visiting family in Colorado Springs. Would be totally impossible with any existing building code to build. Because I'm me, looking at the 120V wiring was somewhat frightening... Overall, a fascinating place.
After finding the website to share- I found the original builder/dreamer died in November. Going to be interesting to see if the constant castle expansion continues.
The website gallery of pictures:
https://www.bishopcastle.org/about/gallery/
As chance would have it, after my tour through the usual YouTube channels this morning, I stumbled across this one, @gesithasgewissa: at the opposite end of the spectrum from King Meadowcroft, he built inter alia an 'Anglo-Saxon pit house' (7th century perhaps irl). I only watched briefly but I'm thinking tonight how grateful I am for electricity and running water.
टिप्पणी पोस्ट करा
Comments older than 2 days are always moderated. Newer comments may be unmoderated, but are still subject to a spam filter and may take a few hours to get released. Thanks for your contributions and your patience.