KING OFFA'S HA-HA

Well, well, well. After 1200 years, archaeologists decide that Offa's Dyke was a misnomer.

The mistake, of course, was due to the capitalisation and misapplication of the word dyke.

The media puts a rather biased anti-monarchy slant* on it . According to them, it's nothing to do with King Offa. After all,  a King wouldn't demean himself to do building work, they say; he simply claimed credit for what was already there. Nor was it intended as border control. If it had been, the EU would have filled it in by now

What has long been known in Mercia's  LGBT** community is that, in fact, it had been built by  a tribe of statuesque women to keep out men.

King Offa was a hairy, burly chap of manly appetites; he and  his court liked nothing better than a bit of a romp in the ha-ha (see?)

The dykes of Mercia, led by Offa's unyielding missus, Cynethryth (legend has it that he'd agreed to take her off her father's hands in exchange for a plot of fertile  land at Highgrove), were having none of that sort of thing and in a grand uprising, the likes of which we wouldn't see again until Greenham Common, they set to with their shovels, extending and deepening the King's ha-ha, thus  creating this monument of gigantic proportions.

So you see, what started out as King Offa's  ha- ha where he and his mates liked a bit of a laugh after a few meads, became this enormous trench thanks to some well-built females, and the court scribes, in what may be the only Anglo-Saxon pun to survive into modern language, named it after the King's consort, Offa's Dyke.

Disclaimers:
*The author points out that there are no persons of  Far Eastern origin in this tale
** If you are offended by anything in this tale, please take your woossiness elsewhere.

© Avril King