In the spring of 1643 William Lithgow, a Scot born in Lanark in 1582, who had spent most of his life travellingaround Europe, often on foot and having many fantastic adventures, decided to return to Britain. Having just turned sixty, he was obviously feeling pretty gloomy. ‘After long 40 years wandering since my first launching abroad to survey the spacious bounds ... of the ancient world ... and in neighbouring regions', I am now (he wrote) ‘fallen into the bosom of declining age, the sun being set on the winter day of mine elaborate age'. In April 1643 he arrived in London, the capital of a country that was being torn apart by civil war. What he found there both excited and depressed him. He saw a capital preparing itself for a siege by royalist armies as Londoners turned out to build a massive line of fortifications around the city. ‘The daily musters of shows of all sorts of Londoners here were wondrous commendable (he wrote) in marching to the fields and outworks; as merchants, silk men, ... shopkeepers etc with great alacrity, carrying on their shoulders iron mattocks and wooden shovels, with roaring drums, flying colours and girded swords, most companies being also interlarded with ladies, women and girls , two and two carrying baskets for to advance the labour' i.e. by digging and carrying soil to build earthwork defences.