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- Feb 26, 2002
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The Mount Pond on Clapham Common is supposed to be the site of a plague pit (so I was told as a lad).
not to doubt you, but isn't there an underground car park beneath the bowling green?
cherryhinton said:I'm sure I'm posting this in the wrong section (please be gentle with me), but many stories about plague pits have a strong, er, whiff of UL to me. It's the way that, depending on who you ask, you'll be told that virtually any open space in Greater London has a plague pit beneath. For example, I've heard this about Trafalgar Square
It's hard to imagine today, but 400,000 years ago woolly mammoths, wild cats, bears, wolves, lions, horses and elephants roamed freely throughout London - all perfectly adapted to life in the Ice Age. The fossil evidence found so far includes:
* Hippopotamus and elephant remains beneath Trafalgar Square
* Woolly mammoth fossils down The Strand
* Reindeer fossils at South Kensington station
* Woolly rhinoceros remains under Battersea Power Station
Just remembered another one along similar lines - I was told that in the early nineties, on Upper Street at Angel in North London, bodies were unearthed during building work.
Really? Did the Black Death of the middle ages at one time strike Oxford? First time I've heard of that - so do you know exactly whereabouts the pit is in the meadows?H_James said:A bit OT, but in Oxford there's one lining the outside of the city walls in Christchurch meadows.
Stormkhan said:It'd be unusual for human skulls, once unearthed just to be measured and lobbed back in.
Normally, the county (or local) coroner has to be notified and a pathologist on hand - after all, not all of the skulls might be old! The remains (skulls, bones etc.) are preserved and, even after a lip-service inquest, reburied ... in an Anglican ceremony in the nearest Anglican graveyard.
If the remains can be identified as being of a particular religion (such as digging up a Catholic burial site) then the coroner must contact and arrange with the local representative of that religious group to have a "re-burial" ... but never on the original site.
escargot1 said:So, what we think of as 'plague', the bubonic plague (rats, hooded doctors, bring out your dead etc) is not dangerous after the death of the patient, whereas certain other diseases may be, especially anthrax and smallpox.
:shock:
cherryhinton said:I just can't believe there are as many as local gossip would have it, given the smaller population of London in those days, and the fact that much of what we think of as London now would then have been widely-spaced rural villages.