Tours and Dubious Facts

not just in Wales but in England too, spices 400 years ago certainly had three purposes - taste, preservation and masking of odours. Not a made up story

It is most certainly a made up story. Right, Europe's scramble in the age of exploration and colonization to get a cut of India is all about cutting out the middleman for those very expensive spices just to hide rotten meat. Right because their is no ability to store and preserve. One key feature of the use of spices in the 17th century boiled down to a conspicuous display of wealth.

It depends on the type of tour, the more academic ones tend to stick to facts and information, the ones that entertain, well, tend to be filled with entertainment, if enough people say it, then it must be true. To a degree you have to try to figure out what type of tour you are taking.

The only time I get a bit miffed on a tour is if the guide gets off telling dubious stories, and fails to relate many facts or actual history, or gets way off the rails and goes on a personal rant (Like the walking tour I took of New Orleans cemeteries, all the guide talked about was the politics around hurricane Katrina recovery)

I agree with Nigel, the use of spices in that way definitely happened.

Also you can choose any of a wide range of numbers you want for the deaths in the Irish Civil War. Firstly no-one counted at the time, and secondly there is much piecing together of facts and data now, a century on. It feels like revisionist history.

Some sources give a starkly higher figure than the guide. If the author of that piece had been leading the tour and told me 1450 deaths I would have openly questioned him. Equally the guide IMO should have qualified his figure with the word "estimated".

Do you mean just the Civil War, or the events of the linked War of Independence and the Civil War? One source I am seeing cites 806 deaths in County Cork alone between the two conflicts. The number of UK troops said to be lost looks very low to me. The figures are heavily masked because even the CWGC counts the troops killed in the War of Independence among WW1 losses. Just from my own very, very detailed research into WW1 in Cumbria where I have tried to split out Ireland from foreign losses (as well as attempting to sub divide Palestine and other 'side conflicts' including Colonial India) I am deeply sceptical of the cited figures in the research I can see. That is before we consider the fact that the IWM has a definition of the Irish conflicts as throughout the time of British Colonial rule- 1801 to 1923. 'The Troubles' are detailed separately.

The free tours are definitely doing this. Especially those run by folks who don’t have to be licensed. I see and hear many in my own city, spouting facts as to titillate or frighten people.

It’s not my money but if I’m on a tour I will sometimes ask about something I know is wrong.

in Colonial times nails were so expensive that they would burn down the houses to recover their nails. Pure bunk.

You might be interested to read a Virginia law in the 1640s that forbade the burning of buildings for the nails ...
Read Act VII here https://books.google.com/books?id=ykIVAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA291&dq=%22to%20burne%20any%20necessary%20houseing%20%20that%20are%20scituated%20therevpon%22

Yes, 1644-45 General Assembly's Act VII. It was a about law about the abandonment of property. The issue in the colony mid-century was the general poor construction of houses, the shortage of housing for new arrivals into the colony and an effort to solve that problem making it illegal to burn structures when abandoning property and paying in nails for structures in nails -- the little tiny grain of truth within the myth was colonial authorities paying off in nails. This was also a period where house construction evolved in the colony from a low nail consumption to high volume of nail consumption construction with wattle and daub infill going over to clapboard cladded houses. Also burnt houses are not going to render very many useable nails many twisted and mangled. Those nails used in the construction of doors and shutters also were clinched over.

As far as an actual price a historian at UC Davis settled on 4d for the price of a pound of nails in the first half of the 17th century. The principle cost being the material over that of labor.

It is worth considering the poor laws, poor relief and the ability to put children of poor families into workshops... like naileries. Then jump to the future and Adam Smith's comparison of blacksmiths and nailers.
Book 1 Chapter 1 of The Wealth of Nations --
"A common smith, who, though accustomed to handle the hammer, has never been used to make nails, if upon some particular occasion he is obliged to attempt it, will scarce, I am assured, be able to make above two or three hundred nails in a day, and those too very bad ones. A smith who has been accustomed to make nails, but whose sole or principal business has not been that of a nailer, can seldom with his utmost diligence make more than eight hundred or a thousand nails in a day. I have seen several boys under twenty years of age who had never exercised any other trade but that of making nails, and who, when they exerted themselves, could make, each of them, upwards of two thousand three hundred nails in a day. The making of a nail, however, is by no means one of the simplest operations. The same person blows the bellows, stirs or mends the fire as there is occasion, heats the iron, and forges every part of the nail: In forging the head too he is obliged to change his tools."

King James liked a steak so much that he knighted it "Sir Loin".

What is wrong with a guide occasionally adding a bad pun in his spiel to elicit a groan.