Talk:Ightham Mote
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I was fortunate enough to work at this beautiful house a few years ago. It therefore falls to me to challenge the idea that the skeleton of a woman was found at the house.
It turns out that the skeleton was found by builders carrying out work in the Great Hall, one of the most important and often-used rooms in the house. While unbricking a cupboard to the right of the fireplace they discovered a skeleton of a young woman, believed to be Dame Dorothy Selby, a 17th Century owner of the house, who was murdered as punishment for uncovering the Gunpowder Plot.
Sadly, there are holes in the story.
1) Dame Dorothy Selby died an old woman some 36 years after the plot was disclosed, and is buried in a nearby churchyard (in fact, a rubbing of her tombstone is hanging in the hallway just beyond the Great Hall).
2) If you are going to wall someone up, here's a tip- use a room people are unlikely to use.
3) If the rumours are to be believed, the skeleton was found on Boxing Day. Boxing Day was a traditional day for playing practical jokes in Victorian times. And two of the gentlemen staying in the house that year were medical students....
4) Dame Dorothy was a notoriously prolific seamstress. Her memorial says that she was a woman 'whose art disclosed that Plot' which might have started the whole "walling-up" story, but in 17th Century English it means simply that it was depicted in her needlework.
5) The skeleton was found seated in a chair. If you were walled up, would you sit calmly, waiting for the end, or would you claw desperately at the walls, trying to loosen a brick?
6)It has also been suggested that she was found in the dungeon in the base of the tower. Well, there ISN'T a dungeon in the tower, but there IS a really spooky cell-type room accessible only through a trapdoor... Sadly, it's just a building void left after work done on the tower in the 19th Century, a little after Dame Dorothy's day!
The prosecution rests.
(But there are plenty of other ghosts at Ightham Mote... go and visit this summer. It is a breathtakingly beautiful house!)
http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/places/ighthammote/
[edit] Ightham Mote Picture Link Continually Removed
Why are editors continually removing this link and calling it spam?(diff) The pictures are relevant to the article. There's no reason to remove them. Drumpler 11:28, 7 June 2007 (UTC)
- I'd suggest several reasons why it might be being removed. One is the extra sentence added to the "Description" section. I don't think it's necessary. People are perfectly capable of finding this link and all the others in the "External links" section.
- Secondly, the linked page contains no information about the subject apart from 5 pictures - from the guideline WP:EL#Links normally to be avoided, 1: "Any site that does not provide a unique resource beyond what the article would contain if it became a Featured article.".
- Thirdly, most of the photos on the linked page have nothing to do with Ightham Mote. If it was a page dedicated to the house, it would be different. See WP:EL#Links normally to be avoided, 13: "A general site that has information about a variety of subjects should usually not be linked to from an article on a more specific subject." --David Edgar 19:06, 7 June 2007 (UTC)
