IN Saturday's magnificent Memories, there is a story about an obelisk. Obelisk, I thought as I wrote it, is a curious-looking word, and yet there is no mistake about what it is. Everyone knows an obelisk is a tall, slender pointy thing, which is usually a monument to someone or something.

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Memories' obelisk, which has a strange story attached to it, is at Wynyard Hall. It stands 127ft tall and commemorates the Duke of Wellington who, 200 years ago, defeated Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo.

“Obelisk” is an ancient Greek word, which originally meant “a little spit, or nail” – its partner word was “asterisk”, which is “a little star”.

The word was applied to the tall monoliths (ie: they were made of a single piece of stone) with pyramids on top that the ancient Egyptians erected in pairs at the entrance to their temples. The temples with the tallest obelisks were dedicated to the sun god Ra, and it may be that the first obelisks were designed to fit into a significant celestial alignment that we no longer understand (those who believe this also point out that at midday, with the sun over head, the obelisk casts no shadow).

The Romans really liked the Egyptian obelisks – sometimes called Cleopatra’s Needles – and transported them home on large barges so that now there are more Egyptian obelisks in Rome than there are in Egypt.

The British, though, were not so keen on obelisks. They were expensive to erect and they had no working function.

But in1702, John Aislabie, the mayor and MP for Ripon, decided he wanted to replace an old market cross in the city centre with a classical-looking obelisk. Mr Aislabie was a remarkable fellow – his father died in a duel, his wife died in a fire set by a servant trying to conceal a jewel theft, and Parliament found him guilty of a “most notorious, dangerous, and infamous corruption” when he led the promotion of the South Sea Bubble.

He was also remarkably wealthy – he paid for the beautiful Studley Royal water gardens to be created.

He also paid half of the cost of Ripon’s 80ft obelisk, which he asked renowned architect Nicholas Hawksmoor – the man behind Castle Howard – to design.

More than 300 years later, the obelisk still stands proud: it is one of the city’s great landmarks; it is where, each evening at 9pm, the hornblower blows his horn “to set the watch”, and it has a brilliantly pointless place in history as Britain’s first free-standing monumental obelisk.

A FINAL note on samphire, which as regular readers will know, was a salty salad plant that once grew so prolifically on the banks of the Tees that the area where Port Clarence was built was formerly known as Samphire Batts.

The industry of Port Clarence seems to have prevented it still growing there, but Eric Gendle in Nunthorpe reports: “Samphire still grows on the North Gare sands, not in profusion but scattered about the sand. Having sampled it, I would say it was an acquired taste.”

I ALWAYS thought Prince Phillip was a boorish racist, but I may have been wrong. A book, I Know I Am Rude But I Like It, of his sayings was featured opposite on Tuesday, and it contains the insightful piece of wisdom: “When a man opens a car door for his wife, it is either a new car or a new wife." Perhaps he’s a philosopher.