Location revealed

I say!

Thank you very much to everyone who took a stab at guessing the location of last week's quiz question (see below). No one was correct, but the closest was Hotboy, who suggested Stirling, so three cheers for His Holiness, even though Stirling is far inland, and therefore a ludicrous guess. In fact, it was from Stromness, in the Orkney Islands, that Cook, Frankin, and others ventured forth in their quest for new sources of wood from which to sculpt cricket bats.

In the time since they were keen cricketers, the inhabitants of Stromness have gone downhill rather, as can be seen from the snap below, taken outside the Stromness Hotel, on my visit there earlier this year. With his height, the gentleman in the white might have made an excellent fast bowler. His bowling arm would certainly appear from above the sightscreen. Unfortunately, when I spoke to him, he had no interest in the game, and no-one else in the vicinity seemed to, either. As can also be seen, there are suggestions of cross-breeding in those parts.

In a future post, I shall show, irrefutably, how Neolithic Orcadians exported the game of cricket to the Ancient Egyptians, in about 4,000 BC. How the game thrived in Egypt for many centuries, until climate change led to a deterioration of pitches to such an extent that it became impossible to play on even prepared surfaces and 'drop-in' wickets. And how, in the late eighteenth century, Napoleon sailed there in an attempt to discover the origins of the Englishmen's prowess on the cricket playing fields and their consequential strength on the battlefields of Europe.

MM III