25/06/2026
If any of my lovely American friends are imagining England as a land of drizzle, mist and people carrying umbrellas, allow me to provide an update from Stephen Hopkins’ birthplace today.
It’s hot.
Ridiculously hot 🔥
The heat has been relentless all day. My car cheerfully informed me it was 40°C (104°F), which seemed rather unnecessary given that sweat was already pouring off me simply from standing still. The ice cream aisles in the shops have been stripped bare and I heard there were long queues stretching outside one store that had managed to get hold of just eight portable air-conditioning units. Eight! In this weather, they might as well have been handing out gold bars.
Now, though, evening has finally arrived. I’m sitting in my front garden on a cushioned swing seat, bowl of fresh fruit beside me, feeling wonderfully content. In the next field, our beautiful chalk stream is alive with the sounds of summer. Excited Children’s laughter echoes across the water, happy splashes, squeals and delighted shrieks as they cool themselves in its gin clear waters (..and splashing anyone else standing near them). It’s impossible not to smile.
So I’m sitting here trying to find inspiration to write something to you….and then it comes to me…
Years ago, before the Mayflower, before Plymouth Colony, before history remembered his name, Stephen was just another village boy growing up here beside this same chalk stream. On a hot summer evening like this one but maybe not so hot, it’s easy to imagine him seeking out the cool water just as local children do today.
The stream wasn’t just a place for fun. In Stephen’s day, it powered Upper Clatford’s fulling mills, where water-driven machinery helped process woollen cloth. The sound of splashing children would have been mixed with the creaking of mill wheels and the bustle of village industry.
Stephen Hopkins would go on to live one of the most remarkable lives of any Mayflower passenger as you already know, surviving a shipwreck in Bermuda, spending time in Jamestown, crossing the Atlantic aboard the Mayflower, and helping establish Plymouth Colony.
Yet tonight, sitting here listening to the water and the laughter, I’m reminded that before all of that fame, he was simply a local lad enjoying the same Hampshire countryside.
The world has changed probably beyond his imagination.
But the chalk stream still flows. ❤️
