When I was a teenager, a lad from a Lancashire village told me that Oliver Cromwell was staying at a farmhouse in nearby Winwick parish. This was introduced like a big deal, but I wasn’t taught about the Civil War in school and had no background on the local brag. Later, while traveling through the British Isles, I heard that Cromwell lodged at this inn, and that he camped on the top of that moor, and stayed in the lord’s castle over there. He seems to have gone all over the place.
The thing is, he did. The Civil War unfolded in his 1638-1653 years in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, with dozens of places where serious battles, skirmishes and standoffs took place.as much as you want 200,000 deadwith about 1 in 20 of the population being the deadliest conflict to unfold on this coast.
Britain is home to countless monuments, royal parks and ducal palaces to deceased monarchs. Coronation Meadows, accredited art collections, ballet, opera and more. But too often we push the Civil War aside, simplistically frame it as a Puritan event, or, in Ireland, a genocide. But it was a class war, a fight for freedom, a revolution of thought and ideology.