Oswestry Heritage Comics – week 3. Click on image for larger view.
War is – unhappily – an inevitable part of the human experience. Just as we have them raging around us today, impacting our country, our friends, our families and our daily lives, so people in the past were rocked and buffeted by the same forces of violence and conflict. We celebrate these conflicts as important part of our heritage not for their violence and their destruction, but because they have profoundly shaped who we are and the place where we live. If it wasn’t for the carnage of the battle of Maserfield, Oswestry might have a different name; if it hadn’t been for the parliamentary siege of 1644, the town might still have its walls.
But military heritage isn’t just about the history of battles and the archaeology of battlefields. Much of it is about the histories of families and individuals, and the way big, world-scale upheavals can have significant influence on local events. The “Men on the Gates” project shows how conflicts such as the first World War leaves a very particular kind of footprint in Oswestry’s history by shaping the fortunes and fates of the people who lived here.
Interestingly, while the impact of wars can be enormous, their physical traces are often pretty slight. The battlefield on which King Oswald was killed is hard to identify; apart from the much-restored remains of the walls on Oswestry Castle, very little trace of the destruction wrought by the Civil War siege remains. What does remain is fragile and easily erased – and so worth investigating and preserving all the more.
It is often memory that best preserves the true impact of wars. Memories that are written down in the form of letters and cards tell us a lot about older conflicts such as the First World War – and memories in the form of oral histories told by grandparents tell us a lot about the impact of more recent conflicts, such as WWII. Of course, memory can be captured by monuments – and the war memorial that is Cae Glas park gates is a good example of this – but it is through stories and story-telling that memories can be made to live again.
We have wars going on around us all the time – the Gulf War, the war in Afghanistan, the wars in Libya and Syria. Sometimes we encounter the physical traces of those wars – veterans with missing limbs, poppies worn on Armistice Day, photographs in the newspapers of refugees. But behind each of these physical traces is a story, a story which is part of the ongoing military heritage of Oswestry – and we should be collecting, preserving and celebrating these stories as well.
john g. swogger 