The Battle of Neville's Cross

This stump is all that remains of a magnificent cross

English prowess on the field of battle with the long-bow is well known - names such as Agincourt, Crecy and Poitiers resonate! Less well-known is the fact that the long-bow came in equally useful when dealing with our Scottish neighbours, who regularly sided with the French and as regularly came unstuck as a result.

Just as Crecy was the first demonstration of the long-bow on the continent, so the Battle of Neville's Cross was the first demonstration of that weapon on home soil when a Scottish army 20,000 strong was soundly trounced by the bowmen of England. (Well, almost the first; the Battle of Halidon Hill some forty years before was also won by archery.)

Visually, this film is not one of my best. The battlefield is now a housing estate with a primary school on the site of the Scottish headquarters and rows of terraced houses obscuring the place where the flower of Scotland died. To make any sort of a story of it, I had to climb up onto a footbridge - well, two footbridges, to be precise - over a busy road.

Still, I think the story is interesting enough to be worth watching.