North Stoke

Primroses

2012-01-28T02:37:00.000-08:00

Gold laced polyanthus

Yesterday the weather was at its best, so we decided to go out, and ended up in a garden centre, at this time of the year the plants with flowers on offer are very limited but primroses and polythanthus deck the stands. My eye is caught by the pale lemon of the wild primrose and a gold laced polythanus, which has the label of a wilding, not too sure about that. But it reminds me of the Barnhaven strains of primrose. I must have planted so many of these plants over the year, the little dark 'Wanda' that interbred with the pale primrose and threw up insipid pink plants. Cowslips I planted round the walnut tree, and of course in the wild they breed with the wild primrose to produce the common oxlip. The double petalled Barnhaven primroses, lavender coloured for preference are beautiful, but expensive to buy if you lose them.

Rather empty late afternoon

The leat that always floods in winter, gypsy horses grazing in the background

So we finished the day at the Fox and Raven for a meal, which we did not actually enjoy, but the ambience is pleasant enough, and as dusk came my love spied a heron coming in to land by the old leat to the mill.

Spider weaving

2012-01-25T01:46:00.000-08:00

Detail

Well I have to record this, spinning from the Madagascar golden orb spider, to produce a beautiful fine yellow thread from which was woven a decorated piece of cloth, the following Youtube shows the process. There is an exhibition in the V&A Museum at the moment with a golden cape made of the stuff, it takes years to gather the thread and then weave it - true craft.

Of course it is priceless but the workmanship is exquisite.......

long live Little Chef!

2012-01-22T03:04:00.000-08:00

A Little Chef near Doncaster. Courtesy of Wikipedia

This is a meander into nothing in particular but yesterday I read some news about wind turbines being put up on the Brecon Beacons, but it had been delayed by the finding of some prehistoric stones, and here I am not going to go into the good or bad faults of wind turbines. The mayor along with many people were against the wind turbines, and he had made mention of 'ley lines' meeting at a local church ( the existence of leylines do not win the argument any day of course) and he also said that this particular area was like the M4 road in prehistory. Well we will see what comes of the situation, but it reminded me of the journey we take to Whitby part along a motorway and other A roads.

The footprint of most motorways are the stopping places you pull in for coffee, etc, expensive and usually horrible, these bright lit places full of useless goods to tempt you are just one of the horrors you have to go through on long journeys. But the road up North we travel along has a whole stream of 'Little Chef' a dying emporium at the moment as they close down various restaurants. Again expensive, (always remember to ask for one pot of tea and two cups) but if you watch your fellow diners, mostly the large breakfast is eaten. There is something very old fashioned about Little Chef, you have to wait to be shown to your table, always bright red the paintwork but clean and friendly and the tea and coffee is good. The only other road I know with a cluster of Little Chef is the one in the South-West, over Salisbury Plain to Kent, etc.

It would be a pity if the whole chain was to shut as it was innovative in its day, 67 units were closed recently, a couple of years ago they had hired the services of Hestor Blumenthal to upgrade the food but obviously it had not worked. It is LS's favourite stopping place of course, though we never have the full breakfast, I have also been promised a 'greasy spoon' breakfast one day at a transport cafe near Chelmsford, though the offer has never been fulfilled yet......

Greenery, or how I wish the world was at the moment!

The link between Little Chef and prehistoric motorways is of course what would the local 'eating place' be like for Neolithic people as they traversed the high dry ridgeways of the country, probably of course the nearest settlements, it was the Romans who had 'stop off' points for refreshments and a change of horses.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Chef

And of course long live Wikipedia as well, which has been threatened by legal action this week...

First attempts

2012-01-20T07:15:00.000-08:00

My first attempt, this cushion is supposed to match the quilt my granddaughter received this Xmas from her great aunt. I had three pieces of material from Blonay, so a couple more were added from the Whitby shop. Quite pleased with it, but it has a mistake basically because I do not plan ahead....... but the strips idea was taken from the surround of the quilt....

I have been engrossed in some books my daughter sent me, not my type of reading, very rarely read fiction, but this was the trilogy of the Swedish author Stieg Larsson - The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. It is an extraordinary tale of complicity and violence, though as my daughter says you can skip those bits.... Once you get used to a couple of dozen characters with Swedish names the twists and turns of the complicated plot lines are fascinating, a step up from Agatha Christie anyway...

Patchwork

2012-01-16T01:39:00.000-08:00

The photos of Whitby are coming to an end, so a couple of the partly furnished cottage with patchwork on the beds,the pale turquoise one is from Laura Ashley fabrics at least 30 years old. So that was one of the reasons to take up patchwork again, it is not very good, but there are such a lot of books on the market that perhaps I can do better this time round.....Reading one and it said it's better to start simply with two colours, so I did 3 patchwork squares and decided on the blue one for the main affect, unfortunately the material shop is in Whitby and I realise I need more of everything to finish it.......

Patchwork squares

Attic bedroom

Middle bedroom

The clutter of Whitby tiny back lanes

http://bathquilters.weebly.com/exhibition-2011.html

Esk

2012-01-13T02:19:00.000-08:00

This photo by Sutcliffe is of fishing folk in Robin Hoods Bay

Though we did not do any walks by the River Esk, it is so much part of the local geography, as lanes bend and wind down to the valleys where the river runs through, these rather dull photos do capture some of its spirit. The pub we stopped at down by the river had a large stuffed fish in the bar, caught in the 1960's by a young female, cannot remember what sort of fish it was, think it was a trout. There were fisherman in the bar talking about the river and fishing, a timeless occupation.The top photo was taken by Francis Sutcliffe a Victorian photographer and with what must have been very clumsy equipment took many photographs of Whitby. There is a gallery in Flowergate selling reproductions, very beautiful and reminiscent of the old fishing port.

River Esk viewed from the car

Esk is a slightly muddy river

Pretty little bridge with stepping stones in the background

Pub but may have been a mill at one stage in its history.

January and summer

2012-01-09T00:13:00.000-08:00

Nigella Damascena; courtesey of Commons Wikipedia

This is the time of year when I miss the garden flowers and wildflowers, my mind trails over roses and bluebells and I expect if I was a prisoner the rich hoard of the mind would compensate for the lack of flowers, but no it is winter, albeit a warm one, my geraniums have not even succumbed to the frost yet.Nigella Damascena or love-in-the-mist, favourite words of mine has been going through my head the last two days, it is such a pretty colour the pale blue of the petal surrounded by the green ruff. It came to mind the other day when I noticed that the Bishop of Damascuse had consecrated the Egton Chapel in the 14th century, seemed strange a Bishop coming from an exotic land to the cold North Yorkshire moors.

Margery Blamey says of Nigella -"short, erect branched hairless annual, with soft finely divided feathery leaves, bluish without a ruff of green leaves below" so it is a wild flower of cultivated arable fields but of course strays into gardens, scattering its seeds year after year.

Well last year for my birthday this January I asked for an orchid, I have never been quite at home with exotic indoor flowers but there is always a first time, so I experimented with my camera..... candlelight gives it a lovely warm shade of yellow, the multiple burst is something I had never clicked on before, the white proper flash is the true colour.

Well for the moment blogger is working for me, I have given up on the multi browsers, they sit like little devils at the bottom of my screen waiting to pounce - we'll see.

Photos

2012-01-07T00:12:00.000-08:00

Lille caught unaware just about to play hearing aids with wine glasses

Row of Georgian Houses

Cobbled alleyway down to small cottage

West Pier with placid seas

There are so many shapes on the skyline

Whitby early morning

A belated Matilda birthday party.

testing

2012-01-07T00:00:00.000-08:00

The rain in spain stays mainly on the plain hopefully......
Still testing sadly

Christmas trees at St.Mary's Church, Whitby

2012-01-05T09:36:00.000-08:00

This is the church that stands next to the ruined Whitby Abbey, and I do not find it particularly pleasing though Jarmara defends and likes it, its not exactly beautiful or churchlike in its proportions but nevertheless it is striking and very impressive. It is very unusual in design, this part of old Whitby had been given the name of Prestibi by the Danes and it is said in the handbook that this represented the 200 years between Saxon and Norman times, and its unusual proportion lies in the fact of the earlier church at this particular time dictated the layout of the present church The church itself is aiseless and has been so for its 876 years to date, it was first mentioned by name in 1120 AD, the galleries were put in at a later date to provide more accomodation for seating, and there is a great central iron stove with its iron pipe running right up to the roof in the centre of the church.

The Christomas trees are decorated and donated by local businesses, the high boxed pews and gallery are the show pieces that stand out, barley twist pillars at the beginning of the chancel which is an old part of the church, and I managed to capture another old set of pillars, not easy amongst the decorated trees.

Those two black paddle like things (hearing aid) were for the vicar's wife in the 19th C as she was deaf. Can't actually believe that because they are enormous but that is what is said on the plaque.

http://www.fortuneskippers.co.uk/history/fortunes_history_a.html

Egton Village and St Hilda's mortuary chapel

2012-01-05T04:48:00.000-08:00

This will be a ramble through my photos;

I have, since childhood in fact, played the game of where would I like to be buried, my love thinks it is morbid, but as death is our ultimate end I think we should have a say in it, it is a bit like ghost stories and sci-fi, all of which I am interested in.

So this expeditionary drive took us through some villages outside Whitby, I think we were heading for Guisborough. Egton village was small and neat, typical for the area, but we turned down a lane following a large hedge cutting machine and then spied on the right along a grassy lane this small mortuary chapel. Grey and bleak it was, as was the weather, but interesting to note on the notice board that the mortuary had replaced an earlier church. The gravestones had that weathered mossy look beloved of all graveyard fans;) and it was very peaceful with views over the moors. It captures times past a place of peace and rest, and no its not on the lists of 'would be', I am not sufficiently acclimatised to Yorkshire. But it also captures for me the grey rugged air of Yorkshire, you see it in the farms you pass on the moors; stout stone walls, small windows huddling away from the prevailing winds, a hard life in the depths of winter but beautiful at times.

East Pier - Whitby

2012-01-05T03:47:00.000-08:00

Well this is the East Pier which lies under Whitby Abbey, a storm thrashed sea on the 18th December, LS's birthday wish for an early morning walk. The streets are empty and the sea is magnificient, the pier itself has great slabs of pavement stone in shades of browns and creams. We had gone down Henrietta Street to find the smoke house for kippers a small shop with the smokehouse behind and a very strong smell of kippers, they are delicious but do tend to smell the house out. Jugged kippers with bread and butter is the way to eat them. Edie the butcher who has a small shop down from where my daughter lives also smokes his bacon here - completely different from supermarket 'smoked'.

Storms seem to be the flavour of the weather at the moment, we delayed our journey back on tuesday, came back wednesday, and now another storm has raged through the night in Essex.

Henrietta Street is mostly cottage holiday homes, smartish and expensive, though I must admit would not like a great crumbly cliff at the back of our cottage.... It was a memorable walk on the pier, as waves washed across the path and the early morning sun which rises behind the Abbey tinged the world. The two piers make a very safe harbour for the boats, the water so still on one side and the great thrashings of the sea on the other. Whitby has this gift of showing what life was like for the hundreds nay thousands of sailors that sailed into this safe harbour and those that did not make it. There is a photo in St.Mary's, of a sailor wearing the first cork safety life jacket, the sailor was the only one to survive out of a crew of 12 when they went out to rescue a boat that had come aground.

Henrietta Street leading to the East Pier

Rough Seas off the Pier

Again

It seems an age since I wrote anything on the computer, mostly because the small netbook we took up did not work most of the time and I must admit a holiday from the computer screen is well worth taking, especially when this computer UPDATES, which this one has and has now lost all my old settings though apparently I can restore back but it is all a bit of a worry.

Christmas Greeting

2011-12-14T23:26:00.000-08:00

A Happy Christmas to everyone who reads my blog and let's hope the New Year will not be too bad. X

Lemon balm

2011-12-12T01:16:00.000-08:00

Melissa Officinalis - Bee Balm

Geoffrey Grigson writes in The Englishman's Flora "The rain may long ago have washed out a chalk cottage in Wiltshire, a cob cottage in Devon or Cornwall, but as likely as not a thick thicket of bee balm will survive"

Morning Minion mentions it in her blog, and it reminded me of my old garden, lots of lemon balm everywhere not only did it travel happily around but I also planted it in bare spaces. I have a love affair with plants and trailing and bruising the leaves through one's fingers of this particular plant was a joy on a summers day.

Many years ago I kept angora rabbits of different hues, and they also enjoyed eating the young leaves, especially my first rabbit Daisy who would savour the various plants like a connoisseur and showed a remarkable intelligence for a rabbit!

So what else does Grigson say; it comes from Southern Europe, early botanists identified it with melissophyllon 'bee leaf' of Dioscorides and the apiastrum of Pliny. You can drink it as a tea, though there is no real taste to it and Grigson says it was by no means as nice as the smell of the leaves, I haven't got any here in Essex, have not seen in the nursery centres..

Pliny's words; It is profiterablie planted in gardens about places where bees are kept, because they are delighted with this herbe above all others.. for when they are straied away they do finde their way home again by it..

Gerarde added that you should rub the hives with the leaves to attract more bees and also which causes the bees 'to keepe togither'

Plasauduon, Carno, Powys

2011-12-11T01:35:00.000-08:00

An animation of a typical 17th century 'Severn Valley' house in Powys, Wales, might even contemplate doing a miniature of one of the rooms....... it's so pretty.

Ted Hughes

2011-12-08T02:05:00.000-08:00

Curlews in April

Hang their harps over the misty valleys

A wobbling water-call

A wet-footed god of the horizons

New moons sink into the heather

And full golden moons

Bulge over spent walls

Ted Hughes has the final honour of being immortalised at Westminster in Poet's Corner this week, not sure how he would have felt about it, Thomas Hardy did not want it after all but there we are great men get remembered for past deeds. Two of my favourites of his poems are Hawk Roosting and the other Pike.

He is a favourite poet of mine, just love his incisive gloomy words, have a taste for morbid poets such as, Hardy, R.S.Thomas and Hughes. When we travel up North we pass through, or at least go by a sign for Elmet, the old British Celtic kingdom in West Yorkshire or though it probably stretched out over the vale of York in its heyday. Its particular geological situation makes it a hard place. One of his book of poems is called 'The Remains of Elmet' and we have a copy illustrated by Fay Godwin's black and white photographs bleakly and darkly sitting side by side with Hughes poems. It was a gift from an Irish friend a couple of years ago over here for a meeting at Avebury, he had crossed over to Wales and stopped off at Hay-on-Wye to look at the book shops there. So when ever I take down the book I think of the meal we all had at a little pub near Avebury;
I suppose his love of fishing echoes some of my childhood exploits fishing for trout on the farm near Pumpsaint in Wales, accompanied by the farm's friendly pig who snuffled around whilst we fished and then wandering home through the fields with the farmer, on one occasion with a very bouncy live eel in his knapsack that was fried when we got back. This farm was the place my grandfather would come down to at weekends and catch salmon when they were around, these salmons would fill the fridge at home... I once ate some pike as a child, it is supposed to be muddy to eat, but I'm sure I can only remember its teeth, it was caught from a murky lake if I remember rightly.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-16055750

The River Ter

2011-12-04T05:13:00.000-08:00

Finished

2011-11-30T00:05:00.000-08:00

The Cottage; It is finished, at least my son-in-law's hard work, various photos arrive through the day of the carpet as it is laid, him sprawling on the newly arrived sofa, waiting for his lunch at the garden table we carted down last time. Emails, phone calls, funny texts and photos have arrived daily so I'm going to miss them and I expect he is going to miss going down to the cottage as well. Sad times ;)

Yesterday I wrote something else but news flys by at the moment interceded by migrainal headaches which seem to cluster in that familar pattern the last few days. One of the things i wrote about was Layman P'ang, so I will carry it forward.....

So what I had decided on writing back there at the top of the page before I deviated, was the problem that I have began to acquire 'stuff', if you put a carpet down you need a vacuum cleaner, beds need sheets, kitchen china and pans, so there I was complaining and then learnt of a 9th century Chinese monk called Layman Pang getting rid of his worldly goods. The book was found in the study, and the story goes that this monk decided to turn his house into a temple, he filled his boat with all his worldly goods (and his wife and daughter but I learnt later they survived this clearout) rowed out into the middle of the lake and threw everything overboard. And then with his daughter wandered round the countryside, all his sayings and poetry collected into a book. I must say mostly the sayings are too cryptic and of its time in history but he was instrumental for being a Zen 'ancestor'.

The book is called The Recorded Sayings of Layman P'ang (a Ninth Century Zen Classic) and is translated from the Chinese by Ruth Fuller Sasaki, Yokita Iriya and Dana R.Fraser. Given as a present to my partner in 1971 with a warm dedication for help in choosing the illustrationa of the book. Ruth Fuller Sasaki, an American who intrigues me and I shall go on to explore her character eventually, she was the person who invited LS to Japan and I wrote about her here.

One verse of P'angs musings

To preserve your life you must destroy it;

Having completely destroyed it you dwell at ease,

When you attain the inmost meaning of this,

An iron boat floats upon water.

Funnily enough it brings to mind 'Jesus' of Whitby who wanders around wrapped in a cloak completely oblivious to the world around him, muttering to himself and homeless he manages to get looked after by the community, another personality that needs exploring may be.

Photos

2011-11-25T03:03:00.000-08:00

Today a parcel arrived with the new blue enamel coffee pot that is going down to Whitby,a sort of house present for the house. It is a lovely deep blue, and not very well taken by me the photographer, but in gathering some of the photos taken over time, came up with a beautiful white capped blue sea at Skinninggrove, and the wool roving I am spinning at the moment, pale shades of blue, two greens and a pink.

This idea of combining wool colours with what you see around is beautifully photographed in Alison Daykin and Jane Deane's book of Creative Spinning. Taking the seasons of the year and the colours you see around in nature.
My external drive with all my photos refuses to work at the moment, and I'm not sure how to get the photos back except inviting a computer expert to extract them - costs money so its been put on the back burner at the moment.

This is a photo from the roof when the great plan was hatched to put up a camera there

These are the gypsy ponies taken late summer, gently snoozing at midday

Tuesday photos show them sleepy once more

her mane is a tangle of burrs, a good groom would not come amiss

The Cottage

2011-11-22T01:31:00.000-08:00

Not sure if I should think of as 'the house that Jack built', or perhaps I see it more like a pyramid being built from the top downward - impossible I know! Everything depended really on the chimney being fixed from leaking into the attic bedroom, this was done a couple of weeks ago (after the much waited arrival of the scaffolding), so now guttering and chimney fixed, the plastering was finished off last week and final painting is almost done. Then after all that, the carpeting will go down and the SOFA will arrive on the 29th of this month, so hopefully we will spend some time in Whitby in comfort this Xmas.

A tv bought a week ago, a satellite dish has already been fixed discreetly on the roof which means I lose two aerials on the front of the house (one belonged to my neighbour) and all my neighbours are getting excellent reception because their tvs are feeding off my dish (I think) any way reception in the yard was pretty bad apparently especially the little cottage in the corner. Did I get threatened by the tv licensing people, for not buying a license this year (£1000 fines for goodness sake) till I negotiated a stand-off period as the cottage was empty but I got one this month so I'm legal in that department. One idea that had been mooted was to have a camera fixed to the chimney so that you could see over the rooftops to the harbour, I have photos somewhere its pretty spectacular the view but that idea has fallen by the wayside.

Lots of things we have all learnt along the way, firstly vegetative growth on the roof, the birds must bring seeds which they generously drop in the gutter which then sprouts and blocks the water going down the drain- yikes an ongoing thing. Now as I walk round Whitby my eye is always caught by plants growing on roof tops. Dampness; now apparently old cottages always have this, no damp barrier as in new houses, but it is not that serious, after all the cottage has been standing for 300 years. The builder said cottages were kept fairly dry in the past by the fire in the main room which was kept going all the time. One of the things that made me fall in love with Pottery Cottage was the narrow tiny twisting staircases (bit dangerous though) and the door to the stairs down below. It reminded me of my grandma's door to the stairs covered with its thick chenille curtain.

The other thing is of course living in close conjunction with the neighbours and sharing a communal space, the delicate play of what we can and cannot do. My son-in-law has been in charge of all the work and I'm very proud of him, his attention to detail is marvellous, even to the point of telling me off for shoddy work! Though it really doesn't worry me my love is also meticulously tidy and puts up with my untidiness without a complaint slipping from his lips and I really do believe we need a subtle blend of people in this world, those that are untidy and and those that are tidy......

Problems still to work out in a tiny space is there is no space for a washing machine, and various bits of furniture to fill in, though there is an auction house in the lane behind, plus of course a fish and chip shop, and Indian restaurant, food will never be a problem. My daughter suggested going down from early December so that we could be there for Matilda who has a birthday on the 10th. She has asked that as a birthday treat she spends a whole day alone with her mum without her sister, they are going shopping in York. LS remembered something funny this morning about our ever curious Matilda, she had asked him did Japanese ladies keep their chopsticks in their hair? funnily enough he did not know the answer...

Mirror images

2011-11-20T01:27:00.000-08:00

For years I have gone walks often following the paths by rivers, the small shallow Welsh tumbling rivers, the deep, large river Avon that snakes its way through Bath (often in a more sinister fashion taking a life here and there as someone slips drunkenly in at night) and now Essex rivers. Essex rivers flow placidly along the flat landscape, sinuously curving through the fields you only know they are there by the long lines of upright willows that trace their path through the fields. Sometimes I think they occupy my soul, their peace and tranquillity for ever flowing on, they are a source of comfort in a world that whooshes by.

Yesterday we went a walk from Paper Mill Lock, the weather is unnaturally warm, worryingly warm, and it has been very dry here in the East, blue skies, no wind and the trees reflected sharply in the still waters, the only time I had seen such clear transparency was on a cold winter day with snow around and the river trees were an exact replication of the real trees.

Friday

2011-11-18T02:45:00.000-08:00

Every morning we wake up to the 'crisis', where are we going, what is going to happen, the end of the world is nigh, etc, etc. Try tackling climate change for a time for relief of Europe (and the world) going belly-up, there really is no peace from this continuing saga. But..... there are people out there being positive as well.

Below is a statement from the Quakers in Bristol (a stronghold of Quakerism), though I have no creed to believe in, their strong simplistic moral approach always appeals, and I'm glad that they have thrown their weight behind the Occupy movement which has set up in various parts of the world. After the closure of the Wall Street protest yesterday and today St.Pauls protest group we need people to at least highlight the problems.

“Quakers in Britain share the concern for global economic justice and sustainability expressed by the Occupy movement. We agree with the statement of Occupy London Stock Exchange that our current economic system is unsustainable. It is undemocratic and unjust. We need alternatives. We, too, “want structural change towards authentic global equality. The world’s resources must go towards caring for people and the planet, not the military, corporate profits or the rich,” (as stated in Occupy LSX initial statement). We are grateful to the various Occupy groups for raising these issues so passionately and respond to the deep spiritual significance that we recognise in the movement.

“Those of us who have visited have been welcomed, and found the Occupy sites an exceptional learning experience. We honour the values and positive ways of working within Occupy communities: without hierarchy, based on care for others, open to the contributions of all and searching for the truth. These are in harmony with our Quaker practice and business methods.

“The idea that another world is possible is crucial for us too. We cannot accept the injustice and destructiveness of our economic system as it is. At the annual meeting of Quakers in Britain in August 2011 we wrote: “We need to ask the question whether this system is so broken that we must urgently work with others of faith and good will to put in its place a different system in which our testimonies can flourish”. We support the process initiated by the Occupy movement to create a path towards a different future, and to develop it democratically.

http://www.quaker.org.uk/news/news-release-quakers-express-support-occupy-london

On Facebook my choice of organisations to follow are few, even fewer friends because I think it is a silly business, but I can keep in touch with family and friends I know from long ago, but I'm meandering away from my point, Transition Bath has also been added, though I no longer live in that city. There is always hope when the young band together to create city gardens and plant trees, mostly useful trees with edible fruits, around the city of Bath. Transition Towns are slowly being set up around England, the latest sustainable idea that has taken hold. Reading Bill Mckibben's Eaarth book also gives hope of community and localism taking hold in America as well.

His optimistic argument being that we will not descend into anarchy and civil disobedience but that the neighbourness of most people will prevail and each will help those nearest to them. So we are moving away from that word globalisation to localism, the need for all of us to live in that immediate space that surrounds us and not to go hiking to the ends of the world to find our pleasures and sustenance.
So to two books I pulled out for future reading, Wendell Berry, another back-to-the-land person, I don't know how much I agree with him, but a strong philosophy by its nature dictates a moral and ethical stance......

more mushrooms

2011-11-14T01:24:00.000-08:00

A walk in Blake's Wood to look for mushrooms, we did'nt really turn up as many as last year though it could be due to the fact we were later in the year. The sweet chestnuts had mostly gone, lots eaten by the squirrels, they lay scattered around shells broken under the thick mulch of the fallen leaves. Fly agaric was in the same place as last year, more earth balls around but no puff balls. There seems to be a type of milk cap which is prolific also, and I think the dark brown one is a shaggy parasol one.

A ploughman's lunch

Fly agaric

Earth balls (poisonous)

the woods

Shaggy parasol

Having studied the mushroom book once more I have decided that there is more poisonous mushrooms out there than edible ones. Quite a few seem to give your stomach ache and others of course are fatal.

Words

2011-11-09T00:55:00.000-08:00

Greyness, the vegetation sinking into wetness and death

Old Grumpy, disdainful as ever in his smart tartan coat

When we walked back by the river yesterday, the word that came to mind was dank - clammy, misty, damp and dark also follows. The weather is miserable in the sense that the sun is missing from the sky and we are covered by heavy clouds that leak a fine misty rain. Pansies hang their heads in misery, fallen leaves lose their colour, is it depressing? not really this is British weather you become accustomed to it.

Dank is a Scandinavian word, middle english, wet, marshy ground, a pool, it flows as a word through the Scandinavian language in its wet form. Our language follows the many times in history when we have been attacked by outside forces, the Romans, Saxons, Angles, Vikings and then the Normans, our language is a reminder of the mongrel nature of being British.

It is in evidence when we drive through villages with strange names, latin will denote Norman overlordship, the manorial system; Saxon etmyology has a simplicity and more often or not is the name of a specific person's land.

This morning I came across an article by A.D. Mills, he has written a Dictionary of British Place Names, so if you were to look up Whitby his explanation would be thus; "White farmstead or village, or of a man called Hviti. OScand. hviti" 1086.

In actual fact Whitby had an earlier name The earliest record of a permanent settlement is in 656, when Streonshal, was the place where Oswy the Christian king of Northumbria, founded the first abbey, under the abbess, Hilda. The Synod of Whitby was held there in 664. Wiki entry.....

The sea mists at Whitby are called frets, or so my daughter informs me

Scandinavian heritage in Essex, http://northstoke.blogspot.com/2009/05/great-canfield-church.html
British (Celtic) /Saxon heritage; http://northstoke.blogspot.com/2009/03/greensted-church-essex.html

News

2011-11-05T04:30:00.000-07:00

Global recession grows closer as G20 summit fails; Front page Guardian news this morning, and no I'm not going to speculate where we are going, though we had a serious discussion over the price of the coffee beans this morning over said beverage! The week has been a fiasco of self-important heads of mostly European states trying to address a problem that is insoluble - we've spent too much and there isn't any more to go round. But my eye was taken by this on Facebook, capturing human progress.

Ken Cangi
Evolution of stupidity.

What else to capture my indignation? Well this is the rather terrifying prospect of hydro fracturing, we have already seen the fire lit water coming from the taps in the US. Well 'fracking' as it is subversively called in this country is also here as well. We were told last week that minor earthquakes round Blackpool were actually caused by the nearby blasting of one of these (experimental) gas wells. No problem the company said, a one off occurence, yes well we all know what oil drilling does to our seas, so maybe we should be a little more sceptical like this video 'Ironic News Report'. What is worse there are plans afoot to sink wells in the Mendip Hills, source of a great deal of water around Someset, including Bristol and Bath. The hot springs of Bath would also be contaminated should anything happen.

We are led by greed and stupidity but blighting the earth on which we all live by these idiots who only see profits in their companies and bank accounts does take the biscuit........

Ending on biscuits was what I was going to talk about anyway, but indignation got in the way, at least the rising cost of food and going to shop at Lidl's.....

Early morning musings

2011-11-01T01:09:00.000-07:00

It is early morning, I am listening to the quacking of a duck, someone has a pet duck a couple of houses away, perhaps its lonely as it welcomes the daylight. As the light has grown, the sky had those beautiful colourways of a rising sun, but now it is dull, the rainbow I spied over the green has vanished, the brilliant coppers, yellows and burnt bronze of the leaves have dulled and rain spatters on the ground. Sometimes I get heartsick for my walks up on the downs with Moss early morning. At this time of the year, the moon would still be in the sky, and I could see the sun rising over the downs at Avebury a good 30 miles away. Yesterday I was thinking about the golden plovers that spent the night on the downs, I once crept up to them nestled in the grass and took a photo of them, Moss was implacably well behaved and followed on my heel, I do miss him so.. But to the plovers, they rise in a great swoop, and their synchronised movement as they take to the air is something marvellous to behold, wings tipped down and a lovely musical note as they climb higher and higher into the sky.

The duck is welcoming the rain now, quacking away to himself, always wanted to keep ducks, Indian runners to be precise, along with a variety of hens but I doubt if I shall. There is always a sad note to this time of the year, Samhain has gone with little celebration, and I must think of xmas presents, for Lillie I have made a miniature bed and bedding and bought her two children dolls. Matilda has fossil books, and fossils from LS (they share the same interest) and a flower press for her birthday early December, so I have to think of something else, she likes crafts but has little patience for stitching, but she is enormously curious about everything.

The boys are always easy, it will be on their Amazon wishlists, either computer games, books or something to do with football. Tom (age 17) was reading John Grisham by the time he was 10, and now James Patterson, one who wrote about the law, the other about the police. It seems this may have influenced his career choice as he wants to work in the CID/police force.

An article on dogs From The Cave to the Kennel, which just shows how long dogs/wolves have been with us.

Changing the clocks

2011-10-29T23:55:00.000-07:00

Well the clocks are back, some of ours went back yesterday, so that going from room to room disorientation took place as you slipped from one time zone to another. In this household we also have another clock in the kitchen telling Japanese time as well - so be it, the artificial telling of time as the earth spins round. Tomorrow it will be Halloween, time for the 'Wild Hunt' to take place, and I've written about it elsewhere but I came across it in Alan Garner's Moon of Gomrath which I read last night. I love children's books, and of course Garner's telling of tales round Alderley Edge are classics, but slightly disappointed with the writing, Tolkien does it better (who can beat him) with his breadth and expanse of other worlds, Garner has raided several Celtic books for his character's name, mostly Irish, the Children of Danu comes to mind. Perhaps I'm a bit of a trainspotter when it comes to reading books, or perhaps I should'nt read children's book.

So my next book is the more sombre Bill Mckibben's Eaarth, back to my green reading which I have neglected the past few months.

http://northstoke.blogspot.com/2009/10/wild-hunt-at-halloween.html

Halloween has actually gone downhill as an event, the 'youf' round here tend to throw eggs at the windows of people's houses, and the girls in Whitby desperate to go 'trick and treating' are not allowed of course in case they frighten old ladies, etc. Bring back the 'Wild Hunt' ;)

Not commenting on other blogs

2011-10-27T07:53:00.000-07:00

This is not rudeness on my part, only I find it impossible to do! It started when google demanded of me a gmail account, so I filled it in, but this blog has always been through my yahoo account. So what happens, when I go to answer on someone's blog, press the appropiate 'send', the message comes up that I must sign out and come back under my other account....I do, but get the same message on the other account. I suspect if I was cleverer would be able to overcome the problem, but then sadly I'm not.
So apologies to everyone, but I do come and read your blogs!!

Whitby

2011-10-27T00:18:00.000-07:00

Sheep of course everywhere on the moors

Back in Essex, after a comfortable drive back, the last couple of days have been taken up with washing,etc.

The cottage is in the hands of the plasterers now, chimney mended and hopefully the roof will not display any other problems, though there is mutterings about rotten wood under the guttering!

It was cold in Whitby and gale force winds for a couple of days but the cottage was warm, if somewhat unfurnished and bare of carpets, but carpets and a sofa will arrive soon, and the beds have already arrived.

My son-in-law D has beautifully painted all the old stripped paint surfaces, and done a thousand and one jobs in the process.

holcrum Hole

We came over the moors from York to Whitby, and they are bleak if the sun isn't out, a palette of browns and greys, with blackened surfaces where the heather has been deliberately burnt back. Passing the Hole of Holcrum, a great bowl of greenery, caused not by a meteorite from outer space but the steady drip of water, drop by drop over the millenia.

Whitby is as crowded as ever, fish and chip shops abound, it's like a northern Southend but of course much prettier. We do the usual rounds with the children, tea and chocolate cake at Sherlocks, a very Victorian teashop, with books everywhere and LS and I go to the Magpie Restaurant, not for fish and chips but they do a great range of other fish like squid, turbot and halibut. The restaurant is so popular that people queue for hours to get in, and it has a deserved reputation. The 'proper' way to eat fish and chips is with mushy peas, white buttered bread and a pot of tea and most people seemed to be eating this when we were there.

The sofa was, at last, found in Middlesborough, which is about 35 miles from Whitby, and you have to drive through Teesside, etc. We also took the coastal road, that took us past Skinninggrove, a small village set by the sea, now having a somewhat derelict air as the steel industry that employed so many people has gone. Each year they have a great bonfire display, a couple of years ago it was a Viking ship burnt, last year I think it was a dragon.

But to Middlesborough, an enormous shopping complex/mall, the first person we see there is 'Jesus' from Whitby standing by a hot dog stall, and D says he has probably walked all the way. A strange thin man, who does indeed look like Jesus, thin face, long hair and beard, probably Italian he mutters unintelligibly to himself, but is well looked after in Whitby, showering at the sports centre, and collecting his daily allowance of money from the bank, where he lives I do not know.

The problem with shopping with three other people, is that everyone has an opinion on what they like, and I cannot choose too well, but Laura Ashley had a sale on, so we eventually find one at half price which seemed to suit everyone.

A view down Brunswick road, just off Flowergate

Brunswick Road with its three churches clustered together

Whitby at night

Going down the valley to Beck Hole,

Yorkshire farm house up on the moors

Skinninggrove -Teesside

Skinninggrove

The girls

Books

2011-10-09T05:08:00.000-07:00

Of late, my reading has fallen by the wayside, not sure why but probably age, but I have determined to rectify this omission, giving up certain duties elsewhere, LS is also starting a new blog on conservation as well, which should be interesting when it is finished.......

Recently I read an article on a blog Musings from the Bike Shed about the new phase of 'wild or wilderness' writers, and it sent me back to my books and reading Amazon reviews about these writers. Well this is not a critique of those books, but a general reshuffling in my mind of what is good and what I find bad.

Firstly I have always enjoyed the early 20th century writers, Susan Hartley, Edward Thomas, Massingham and Richard Jefferies come to mind and their approach to country writing, the thought of wildness had not crept into their imaginings although Jefferies novel "After London or Wild England" touches upon the word. The English countryside was as perfectly utilised in their time as it is today, the wild places that modern day writers allude to are the bleak mountain ranges of Scotland or maybe Wales, land that is unfarmable (if such a word exists), so we have moors such as Exmoor, Dartmoor or the Yorkshire moors, tourist havens for the walker or seeker of history or plants. Nothing is wild, none of these places has ever escaped the tramp of feet in this small island. And what of the mass of little islands that cling to our coasts, Scotland with its Shetland and Orkney, tiny islands like the one I came across the other day with its dozen feral cattle left behind by the last inhabitants of the island, or even St.Kilda, again an island emptied of its people, small stone houses set in line on one small street now falling into decay after the evacuation of its tiny population.

But I'm starting to move away from the subject of books, which are part of the background of my reading . So first of all Gary Snyder, an American writer, who loved his countryside and evolved a philosophy that embraces such a wide canvas of nature writing, that the damage we do as humans is sometimes missed in his writng. At the bottom by the way I shall print his Smokey the Bear Sutra, which always make me laugh, but in his introduction to the sutra ( A Place in Space) to the concept of a bear god he says this,,"The twisting strata of the great mountains and the pulsating of great volcanoes are my love burning deep in the earth. My obstinate compassion is schist and basalt and granite, to be mountains, to bring down the rain" part of the sutra and somehow very different to the concept that people like Robert Macfarlane brings to the subject, sometimes I think of certain people as the Munro gatherers, see nature as in need of taming, Macfarlane does'nt do this fully but its the male streak of 'macho' man sleeping out in the cold on the highest mountain, proving his toughness that sometime underpin some modern writing.

I'm not sure that Snyder's reference to Fudo Myoo as a bear god in Japan is a true one, but he says that the statues are found by waterfalls and deep in the wildest mountains of Japan. Fudo has surpassing power, the power to quell all lesser violence. Snyder of course spent time in Japan in the 60s as a monk as did LS, so my late introduction to all things Japanese is kindled in this household. Not altogether happily as demons and all kind of terrible depictions can be found in the scrolls and Japanese artwork around.!

This sutra brings to mind what I have been looking at today the protest in Wall Street, the turmoil that the rich and greedy have bought down on our world, wonder where it will all end?

SMOKEY THE BEAR

A handsome smokey-colored brown bear standing on his hind legs, showing that he is aroused and watchful.
Bearing in his right paw the Shovel that digs to the truth beneath appearances; cuts the roots of useless attachments, and flings damp sand on the fires of greed and war;

His left paw in the mudra of Comradely Display--indicating that all creatures have the full right to live to their limits and that of deer, rabbits, chipmunks, snakes, dandelions, and lizards all grow in the realm of the Dharma;

Wearing the blue work overalls symbolic of slaves and laborers, the countless men oppressed by a civilization that claims to save but often destroys;

Wearing the broad-brimmed hat of the west, symbolic of the forces that guard the wilderness, which is the Natural State of the Dharma and the true path of man on Earth:

all true paths lead through mountains--

With a halo of smoke and flame behind, the forest fires of the kali-yuga, fires caused by the stupidity of those who think things can be gained and lost whereas in truth all is contained vast and free in the Blue Sky and Green Earth of One Mind;
Round-bellied to show his kind nature and that the great earth has food enough for everyone who loves her and trusts her;

Trampling underfoot wasteful freeways and needless suburbs, smashing the worms of capitalism and totalitarianism;

Indicating the task: his followers, becoming free of cars, houses, canned foods, universities, and shoes, master the Three Mysteries of their own Body, Speech, and Mind; and fearlessly chop down the rotten trees and prune out the sick limbs of this country America and then burn the leftover trash.

Wrathful but calm. Austere but Comic. Smokey the Bear will Illuminate those who would help him; but for those who would hinder or slander him...
HE WILL PUT THEM OUT.

Thus his great Mantra:
Namah samanta vajranam chanda maharoshana Sphataya hum traka ham mam

"I DEDICATE MYSELF TO THE UNIVERSAL DIAMOND BE THIS RAGING FURY BE DESTROYED"

And he will protect those who love the woods and rivers, Gods and animals, hobos and madmen, prisoners and sick people, musicians, playful women, and hopeful children:

And if anyone is threatened by advertising, air pollution, television, or the police, they should chant SMOKEY THE BEAR'S WAR SPELL:

DROWN THEIR BUTTS
CRUSH THEIR BUTTS
DROWN THEIR BUTTS
CRUSH THEIR BUTTS

And SMOKEY THE BEAR will surely appear to put the enemy out with his vajra-shovel.
Now those who recite this Sutra and then try to put it in practice will accumulate merit as countless as the sands of Arizona and Nevada.

Will help save the planet Earth from total oil slick.
Will enter the age of harmony of man and nature.
Will win the tender love and caresses of men, women, and beasts.
Will always have ripened blackberries to eat and a sunny spot under a pine tree to sit at.

AND IN THE END WILL WIN HIGHEST PERFECT ENLIGHTENMENT
...thus we have heard...
(may be reproduced free forever)

To be continued; These thoughts on books will probably meander on indefinitely ;)

After London, Wild England
http://northstoke.blogspot.com/2007/12/christmas-reading.html

Bevis
http://northstoke.blogspot.com/2008/05/bevis-by-richard-jefferies.html

The cottage

2011-10-07T03:46:00.000-07:00

Wonders of technology, or at least phones that take photos;
The scaffolding is up after all this time!!

Blogs can be about anything, political viewpoints, personal viewpoints, mine seems a weekly record of what is happening in my life. For instance no mention has been made of the Whitby cottage for ages, but it is part of my day to day thinking (and getting things) as it is slowly refurbished by my son-in-law. Painting is almost finished, so we, LS and I will be going down in a few days to take down some stuff, which I buy slowly in anticipation. Bedlinen, plates, a rug from Middle Mill, towels and that is just the light stuff! A painting for the wall occupies my mind, there is a modern artist's work - Nicki Corker in the Reading Room in Whitby which sort of takes my fancy, rather than the brown tinted old worlde photographs that are quite attractive for old cottages.
Today, friday, a text message brought the news that the scaffolding was actually going up to mend the chimney, my joy knows no bound, 6 months I have waited for this, water leaks from the chimney down into the top bedroom and it has worried me all this time, though it could be blocked drain pipe - there are plants growing out on the back wall drain pipe which is inches from another wall.... Carpet for the middle bedroom so we shall have somewhere to sleep (air beds) the real beds are coming at the end of the month.
My beloved hasn't even seen the cottage, so I regale him with tales about our neighbours in the small yard, not sure that he will appreciate living in such close company but at least it will more interesting than suburbia I tell him - hopefully.
I have furnished, in my mind at least, past ownership of the cottage with a captain, think its to do with the Georgian influence, an upgrade so to speak. He might have sailed one of the whaling boats that feature in the Whitby Museum prints and models, rooms full of that delicious 'junk' from past ages. Whaling was one of the past industries, something that is not condoned at all nowadays thank goodness. I remember reading a lot of books when I was a child about the North which must have featured whaling in it somewhere, Captain Marryat comes to mind but I'm not sure he went up North...

Clear brown amber of Abbot's beer at the Cat's pub.

This looks like the dreaded honey fungus, (we did not take a speciman to our knowledgable fungi expert!) in the garden

Hunting mushrooms

2011-10-02T01:20:00.000-07:00

The wood

Hanningfield Reservoir

Yesterday we went on a mushroom foray, lecture perhaps would be a better term. The weather was beautiful, and the woods almost had a magical air to them. The unseasonal hot weather is a boon, though tomorrow winds from the west will arrive but we have had a few classical Indian summer September days. We wandered round the edges of fields, bullocks and sheep grazed calmly, the grass in many places was still covered in dew and was thick and rich. Our guide was an expert, and of course did not talk about which was an edible mushroom, its just too tricky in this quick trigger world of compensation. One man did collect the Amethyst Deceiver for the stew pot, these were my favourite coloured mushrooms, delicate hues of lavender buried deep in the coppery-brown undergrowth. We came across one of the stink horns, a rather small example but there was also a creamy 'egg' from which they emerge, this was found by a small girl called Fern, who happily hunted and tackled the brambles to bring out the mushrooms buried deep in the woodland floor.

Bracket fungi, common earth balls (got excited about these), apparently though they are poisonous, very inconspicuously buried in the leaves.

We eventually made our way back to the centre, it was a three hour session, and he laid all our trophies out must have been about 60 or 70 different species on the table, and we wandered round looking at them. The ones I remembered are the spindle mushroom (being a spinner of course), the milk cap, apparently as there are so many of them, if you nibble them gently and the lactose is extruded (the ones you are sure about of course) the different tastes will tell of their potency, there is a peppery one out much fancied by gormandising mushroomers! Shaggy parasol is another I can now identify but to be honest it would take a whole lifetime to really learn about these strange creatures called fungi, I think he said they are fauna more than flora, because they eat everything, in microscopic form anyway.

LS took a photo of our guide dressed in his green camouflage jacket, he was an expert in his subject and if he could not identify something he would say so. Pottering around old woods looking for fungi is not a bad occupation my only worry about it all was the actual picking of them. were they rare....

Bracket fungus and the black blobs above are 'King Alfred's Cakes' fungi

Closer view

Not sure

Spindle mushroom

Shaggy parasol

half full

earth balls

Amethyst deceiver

Another one

Autumnal Equinox 21st to 23rd September

2011-09-23T00:40:00.000-07:00

Slightly late but the soft warmth of September is still here and as I wonder whether to buy some winter primroses for the garden, there is also the added bonus of log fires and candles as days turn to long nights. Pagans call it Mabon, after a god, but the more important festival is of course Halloween at the end of October.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease,

For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cell

John Keats - Autumn

Moss at Wayland's Smithy, waiting patiently for me to get up and go

Wayland's Smithy tomb in Autumn

And something I wrote a couple of years ago......
http://heritageaction.wordpress.com/2009/09/29/waylands-smithy-restoration-in-the-1960s/

Expeditions

2011-09-22T01:10:00.000-07:00

Travelling to London yesterday from Chelmsford our train goes through Stratford and past the Olympic's shindig, and also of course the newly opened Westfield Shopping Centre, featured in some pretty bad advertising on TV. I doubt that we shall stop one day in Stratford to go round the mall even though it has 70 restaurants, it looks terrible and I DO NOT windowshop, preferring (when I need clothes) to shop online. But it looks pretty ugly from the outside as well.

We had gone in to see an old box that needed repairing, the box housed 6 beautiful 15th books, so it took us to the area around Christies and the antique shops there displaying their wares.

London terrifies me, when I have to travel on the tubes, the packed density could easily turn me into a gibbering wreck and the press of people is terrible. Of course when you emerge the same thing happens humanity everywhere, different languages and noise of traffic.

So we made an early retreat and ended up the good old Fox and Raven back home for a pot of tea and a meal, the relief was tangible, sitting next to the big table that the family always sit round when they come down and the old magnolia tree outside, a climbing frame for children.

Piccadilly Circus

Olympics Stadium

Westfield Shopping centre

Old pub with modern buildings on either side

Calmer photos from the weekend, we went back to Ulting church, our first visit had been in the cold of winter a couple of years ago, and though we often see it from the other side of the river, there is no walking path on the left hand side. Two fisherman with enormous lines were fishing on the other bank, apparently there used to be eels in the river as well at one time. The church is locked and was restored in the 19th century, so inside it must be typical Victorian, but it is a very peaceful and tranquil place at the end of a green lane. I have written of it elsewhere, there is a lot of pudding stone in the fabric of the church, the 'living rock' of pagan times....

Ulting Church

Long forgotten and stacked neatly

Pudding stone rock, conglomerate pebbles

Ulting Church previous article

Saturday, 17th September 2011

2011-09-17T03:50:00.000-07:00

Another week passes and not much happens, we've been for walks and I did set myself the task of naming some of the yellow flowers that appear at this time of the year. Ragwort of course, and fleabane maybe and also yellow chamomile which I never took a photo of but reading Grigson on the subject of these flowers rather took me away from identifying them ....

This time we went to Sandford Brook, you park by the ford, and go into the Reserve there, slightly spooky place, because there is always a few cars with single men hanging around, for what reason I don't know but I can make a pretty good guess...

The brook has the choked weed appearance of the little river Ter, pretty, but dying, policeman's helmet flowers line the banks along with reeds and it feels that someone should come and clean the brook out.

We also went a long walk at Paper Mill, met up with some Greek dogs, rescued and sent over to this country for rehoming, they were all bounding along quite happily. Further on Jack, a labrador who spent a lot of time leaping into the river after his stick, his owner sat by the bank as Jack tore up the grass at his feet whilst excitedly chewing a very long branch he had found. Dogs seem to have the gift of play and his owner commented that the walk along the river path was the most peaceful one can find.

What else, we crossed over a little concrete bridge built 1951, to see what was on the other side, and discovered a field full I think of mangolds, something I had never come across before, I'm sure it was Mangolds that Tess of the D'Urbervilles was cutting in Hardy's book. Anyway I purloined a photo from the Creative Commons, apparently the plant was only introduced in the 18th century, and what was so obvious was the spinach like leaves (you can eat them) and the large bulbous root.

This video is funny it was put on F/B by Rupert Soskin, he and Michael Bott created the very good Standing With Stones CD, this other video is funny but scary, its called "World Collapse Explained in 3 Minutes" and as the last week we lived through doom and gloom on the news, puts it neatly in place....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOzR3UAyXao&sns=fb

Marina Hyde also cleverly gives a slightly different interpretation on the term 'rogue trader' in the Guardian, so you only become a rogue trader if you lose money? so what are you called when making money in the same business? makes you think when the police take him away to be tried, still you should'nt gamble with other peoples money!....

Jack trying to get out of the water

You can see I've fallen in love with him

The brook

Mangold from Creative commons

Autumn appears

2011-09-07T00:24:00.000-07:00

What is the first sign of autumn I wonder, the answer for me is those large spiders that scuttle across the carpet, you catch the movement out of the corner of your eye as they head for the skirting board and then the sofa. They come in from the cold to the dry, too hibernate or maybe too die?

Could of course be the torrential rain and winds that whipped through the trees yesterday, the first autumn storms, or maybe even the starlings who seem to have departed elsewhere a few days ago. There are hundreds round here, feeding on the green in front of the house, bright plumages gleaming in the sun. Perhaps they have flown to France to see if the weather is better there. The little sparrows are still around, soft brown furry balls hopping around, squabbling at the seed holder for first place. And in the last few days a couple of young collared doves have come down to the lawn. Feeding on the lawn the other day, one of the young magpies came down and marched up slightly belligerently to the young doves, mother and father doves immediately flew down furiously to protect their two and the young magpie squawked and flew away. Young magpies do not grow their tails for quite a while so it has been a bit strange watching our two hop around practically tailess.

I note friends are harvesting the wild fruits, we haven't been yet, but it reminded me to look up the time of the sweet chestnut harvest, for there is a wood not too far away with plenty of old trees and of course mushrooms - too record not eat, though we have signed up for a mushroom lecture/walk in October.

It seems I should find an Autumn poem but there is sometimes a tinge of sentimentality that I dislike in 19th century English poetry, shall have to find my Welsh poet - R.S.Thomas out for real misery, so skirting past Tennyson and Shelley, two short snatches from the Geoffrey Grigson's anthology Cherry Garden; The following poem sounds almost Saxon with its reference to wolves...

Slieve Gua - from the Old

Slieve Gua, craggy and black wolf den;
In its cleft the wind howls,
In its denes the wolves wail

Autumn on Slieve Gua; and the angry
Brown deer bells, and herons
Croak across Slieve Gua's crags

Rushes in a Watery Place - Christina Rossetti

Rushes in a watery place,
and reeds in a hollow;
A soaring skylark in the sky,
A darting swallow;
And where pale blossoms used to hang
Ripe fruit to follow.

http://northstoke.blogspot.com/2010/10/fungi-in-blake-wood.html

A walk to the pub

2011-09-04T02:17:00.000-07:00

Walking down to the pub - The Fox and Raven (the old Barnes Farm) and capturing bits and pieces, so much yellow of the flowers in the fields that it would be impossible to record it all.

But the borage stood out, though strangely the pale pink of the mallows dragged the colour out of the vivid blue. Tall teasels illustrating the complex world of plants. Great dragon flies hawked (describes them so accurately) up and down the river, rising noisily from the vegetation when disturbed. I've written about Barnes farm elsewhere, but the gardens of the pub still reflect its old history, the tennis courts now turned into a car park, the large old magnolia tree, glorious in the spring, and which always calls the children to climb it when we go there. We were there last weekend, large table for the family lunch, steaks for the carnivores, and fish/chips for the girls.

I expect you would call this interface between town and countryside, or even suburbia and countryside, a very ordinary typical brown site going into green belt, the wearing away of the edges of the green belt as new houses appear but the tranquillity of the river still captures the essence of the past, the intergration of mill and old farm buildings still there but changed into homes and restaurants...

Clash of cultures

It calls to mind the other news that is going on in another part of Essex - the Dale Farm gypsy encounter where the council is trying to evict part of the camping site. Joan Bakewell writes in the Telegraph - Why can we never abide gipsies and those with no fixed abode? . There is no answer of course, prejudice is often deep-seated, and the gypsies's traditional values clash with modern values that espouse bricks and mortar as a safe bet for one's money; education as a way to gainful employment. But its funny that in our society that makes so much of our history, think of all those 'great' houses that we pay to visit, that we can't find a solution to this problem of allowing the gypsies a safe haven somewhere.

Lord Eric Avebury (champion of many causes) has said this.....

In the afternoon I had a visit from Sean Risdale and Matthew Brindley of the Irish Travellers movement in Britain. In spite of all the excellent work done by the ITMB, and their success in lobbying the UN Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), it looks as though Dale Farm is at the end of the road and the evictions will be going ahead some time in the next few weeks. The CERD issued a statement yesterday criticising the evictions, see below.

The really sad thing about this disaster is that if there hadn't been a change of Government last year, there was a good chance that the Dale Farm question would have been solved, with some of the residents going to sites in other Districts within the county. As soon as Secretary of State Pickles announced the end of regionalism just after polling day, scrapping the target number of pitches for which planning permission was to be granted in every local authority area following a laborious process which had been accepted grudgingly throughout England, the rest of Essex said either that they weren't going to provide any land at all for Travellers, or that they were going to take some time to make up their minds what to do. So the families in the 51 pitches to be evicted, including pregnant women, the elderly, disabled and small children, are going to be homeless when their dwellings are carted away on low loaders and put into a store somewhere. Its an £18 million caastrophe, causing immense and unnecessary suffering.

And just as a note; a government e-petition on the eviction has only 6 signatures so far...

Borage and mallow

Face masks to keep the flies away

Roses round the gate

Borage, not captured well by the camera but the blues reflect a beautiful sunny day

Queen bee amongst the lavender at the pub

Lavender hedgerow always full of honey and bumble bees

Corner of the mill down the cul-de sac to the river

Should be two large reddish brown dragonfly flying down the river but of course the camera missed them!

Teasels

Carn Meini

2011-09-02T01:03:00.000-07:00

One of the things I do each day is go though the news online on a particular feed, well yesterday it came up with the news that the archaeologists Wainwright and Darvill had found a neolithic tomb by the Carn Meini rock outcrop - the supposed site of the bluestones used for Stonehenge. The tomb, with what looks like two upstanding stones is sited on top of an earlier henge, and the two archaeologists have put forward the theory that this may be the grave of the high ranking person who had the bluestones transported. Well there are always theories, weird or otherwise that revolve round prehistoric tombs, stone circles etc, and as there is no proof one way or the other there is a 'state of unknowing' as to what has happened in prehistory.

Even Wainwright says in the Guardian article that....it was a "jump" to claim the person buried there was an architect of Stonehenge. "It's a hypothesis but it could well be true. There is certainly something very significant about the grave."

There is a photo of the passage grave in the BBC news here, and perhaps one of my favourite links for the Preselis is the S.P.A.C.E. Landscape & Perception Project, which treats the subject in a more esoteric manner, and also has some good photos of the area.

They are back safely - thank goodness

2011-08-29T05:05:00.000-07:00

The beginning of the journey

the car loaded to the gunwales on the way back to Whitby - 2200 miles all told

The land rover arrived early saturday morning, they had travelled from Vevey to England without staying overnight in France, so everyone was tired. Apparently they sat outside our house from 4.30 onwards and then went and found breakfast at McDonalds. The fridge was temporarily completely filled with chocolate and cheese, my daughter having raided Migros in Switzerland, she has a fascination with supermarkets, Whitby only having the Co-op.

Switzerland is lovely but expensive, you need to earn quite a few thousand each month to pay the bills; from their flat balcony they watched the house over the road which had an electric lawn mower which came out at 6 every morning and mowed the lawn all by itself, something I've never seen in England, but my son in law was captivated by the country, especially the town of Gruyere, and the children did eat the many dishes of a raclette their great aunts had cooked for them, cooking one's food at the table was a great treat.

And just to add to the weekend my son and his friend showed up from a wedding they had been to in London, and I was given another side of the story about Gadaffi from an African point of view - interesting, in that what we take for granted in our propaganda is seen very differently in the African states where his money has helped.
They also did a tour of the sushi factory that my daughter's cousin owns, the funniest photo of them all dressed in plastic, even little Lillie who had to have parts of her overalls chopped off. Sushi was tasted but not I think by the children, though Tom the eldest is always adventurous in food, sushi is of course always a source of topic in this household, and it looks like we maybe be going to Kyoto in November, though sushi is not exactly my favourite but the temples and moss garden are on my list of things to do..

Matilda trying her hand at woodwork

Crashed out whilst watching a video

Cockle Spit - Bradwell on Sea

2011-08-23T03:12:00.000-07:00

poppies

Cockle Spit salt marshes

St.Peter's church; The altar lit up by the sun falling from the window

The grass verges on the Roman road to the church

Cockles piled thickly everywhere on the mudflats

Musings

2011-08-19T03:08:00.000-07:00

Whitchurch, near to Solva

19th Century well down the lane from the church

Old settlement above the well

wall through the woods showing old field layout

If I had more time on this earth, I would solve some of the puzzles that irk my curiosity, one of them is the history of the area around Middle Mill, two places come to mind King's Heriot just up the lane, and Whitchurch - the white church, which is also on one of the lanes leading away from the pack horse bridge at the mill. Welsh history is a self-sufficient tale of small communities, reading as I have been this morning on a survey done on church/chapel attendance on a single day in the 19th century and you will find that chapel attendance was well attended the church not so. The church above was on the pilgrim trail to St.David's Cathedral, and if you were to follow the lane past the church to that small city you would find on your right an old airfield as shown on this map.
http://www.old-maps.co.uk/maps.html?coords=179900,225500

The photos above show the church, it is supposed to have a cross-stone by the gate but I have never found it, walking down the lane from the church to Middle Mill, there is a small footpath on your right into the woods, just opposite some cottages. Taking this footpath you come to the rather pretty 19th century well deep in the wood, to your right there is the wall of an old field and above you can trace the outline of an old settlement. What the old settlement is I can find no information on, Magic Map (Scheduled Ancient Monuments) gives no clue; it could be Iron Age or medieval, but its distinct narrow pattern plus the bank, points to I/A.

But the reason one falls in love with Wales is because so many parts are neglected, overgrown and beautiful, sadly because there is literally no way of earning a living in the more remote parts. Life had always been hard, the brutal force of Norman castles bears testimony to overlordship, the topography of the land difficult for farming. Solva and St.Davids rely on tourism, but they are protected from the worst influxes of the tourist trade by the fact that it is a protected National Park along this particular part of the coastline.

But if you wander around the area as I have done for many years, mostly looking for prehistoric stuff, you chance on other stuff. One of them is old airfields, the defence of the Atlantic coast in WW2, meant that this part of the coastline seems to have a disproportionate amount of airfields. Brawdy for one, still occupied just outside Solva; the disused airfield that borders Whitchurch and Solva, and another disused airfield out of Upper Solva which lies just above Nine Wells.

The photos below are of somewhere on the Presceli's; parking further along the road from Waldo William's stone, from here is one of the places you can walk to Carn Meini and the Bluestones. Several years ago meandering along on a long walk that way I happened to come across the remains of a plane and a dedication to the men who had lost their lives in the crash. As you can see it must have been one of the planes coming in to land on one of the coast airfields. 70 odd years later, traces still remain, though I have no history of this for the moment, my partner wrote a small article on The Journal entitled Battle of the Prescelis , which shows the interest the War Office had after the Second World War to turn Prescilis into a permanent military training area, similar to Salisbury Plain by Stonehenge, which is ironic given the Bluestone connection.

Refs; Trevor Bloom - History of Solva

Note; The Heritage Journal is run by a small group of people, ostensibly for prehistoric stones protection, but we have been running other articles as well....

The Trip

2011-08-16T05:21:00.000-07:00

Part of the 99 steps down from the abbey

Lillie happy amongst her toys

At least 6 layers of paintings to be scrapped off by my SIL, though I did my bit as well!

Family on the old viaduct

the church of St.Mary, arrived too early to look inside. It opens at 10

The multitude of roofs and buildings that make Whitby such an exciting place

The Great Trip; or how the machinations of one's family produces spots before the eyes.

Loading the land rover; all the following could be headlined as each separate event took place, for instance packing consisted of 6 large black bags that fit into the carrier strapped onto the roof.

So the children laid out what they thought was needed for the holiday and this was reduced or added to, various technical pieces of wire and recharging equipment for the various game boxes they own, plus of course the three scooters had to be packed as well. Sleeping bags for the flat in Vevey, a constant reminder to the children that they would eat Sylvia's minestrone soup, they are all very rigid in what they like, so no pulled faces or outright refusals to eat what was put before them..

My son-in-law's bike perched perilously on the top, (he did 3 hours cycling by the lake in Switzerland on sunday morning), completed the loading, various replacements car documents arrived in the post the day before we started off, in all it was a bit nerve wracking.

Currency, a great deal of it, was bought as world markets swayed on the brink of disaster, the children keyed into the currency calculator on the computer just to keep check of their small sums. Too many euros bought by mistake will have to be used up in petrol across France, Swiss francs got suspended at one time but luckily they were already bought. Ollie the cat delivered to the cattery, the house vacuumed through and then the fitting of children into the car surrounded by bags of 'stuff'.

First part of their journey bought them to our house, and I did literally climb out of the car with those dreaded migrainal wavy lines in front of my eyes, luckily I took a pill before it could take affect. Fish and chips in the newly opened restaurant followed by a walk for the children. Then the next day they crossed to France and I received texts of their various stops and then their safe arrival in Switzerland....

continuation with photos as soon as Eblogger rights itself..

Waiting for tomorrow

2011-08-11T05:08:00.000-07:00

The children have vacuumed the house, the clothes are waiting to be packed and I have a headache, mostly from Lillie screaming I suspect. 7 of us will travel down to Chelmsford tomorrow in the land rover, with the luggage in a carrier on the top and a bicycle atop that. Currency is bought, even amongst the up and down of swiss francs and euros and falling markets, and this little family will hit Switzerland on Sunday and stay in a flat, luckily I will be left in Chelmsford!

Their great aunts will have a handful on their hands, and I can only hope the children will eat what is put in front of them without screwing their noses up. The final work in the cottage, and there is a lot of it, will be finished in September, Jason the builder says the scaffolding will go up for the chimney when everyone comes back from holiday, the electrician will do the electrics, and then the final painting, which we will go down to help with, and then carpets and furniture - joy..

Riots have subsided everywhere, though a neighbour apparently ordered his daughter to get back from London. to the relative safety of Whitby yesterday.

And why relative safety?, well because though the looting moved up North and Whitby would hardly be affected being a very quiet place, we witnessed yesterday an altercation between three youths which was pretty scary, someone got punched on the nose in town and a lot of foul language filled the air. I suspect though with all the people that have been arrested and going through the courts, there will be less looting come the weekend.

The world is quite a weird place at the moment, if you have green leanings, there is a feeling of 'well I told you so' the greed displayed in our society has brought it all on their own heads but of course it runs through society like the silver thread through a fiver, the bankers, footballers, celebrities and Uncle Tom Cobley and all, took as much as they could get and look where it has got us, its going to be a long hard road to some sort of viability in the system.

Whitby

2011-08-05T04:46:00.000-07:00

Grabbing the computerr when it is free can be quite difficult, but 3 members of the family have departed to the business centre to do some work, Lillie being amongst them, Matilda off to the park with her friend and the boys elsewhere in the house.

The weather is gorgeous, Whitby full of tourists, we did Boyse this morning, the shop which sells everything but the kitchen sink, but I bet you could find one if you looked hard enough. Children love it, trashy toys, even I love it for its cheap wool! Today 2 more scooters were bought for Switzerland, dvds for the car journey, goodness knows how everything is going to fit, I have also cadged a ride back to Chelmsford as well just to add to the capacity of the land rover; my son in law is also debating putting his bike on top of the carrier thing as well.

So general excitement in the house about the big trip abroad, strange pieces of technology have arrived for tolls across France plus satnav maps and sticker for the car in Switzerland, said car has just been to the garage for a new radiator.

The cottage, which I have visited is in a state of 'mess' but boiler and radiators are in, and the bathroom suite all working. Piles of stripped wall stuff everywhere, and my son in law, is taking paintwork back to original surfaces which is hard, and I would not have had the courage to do. Though small this cottage, and three hundred years old, it must have been renovated in the Georgian period, because the plastering on the front is mock. The windows are original, the downstairs still has shutter hinges on the outside. A small cupboard has been found under layers of paint, the only clue, butterfly hinges showing faintly through. Lots of cupboards everwhere, under the stairs, next to the large fireplace in the top bedroom, all fascinating, but the standard of workmanship from the 1970s was botch work, so when it has been done over, at least we shall have added to the housing stock and given it a proper lease of life. The chimney still waits to be done, flashing is letting water in but once done it should be cosy.

It is situated in a 'yard', so you have to live with neighbours, the outlook for instance is not too good, but it cosy, safe and quiet right in the middle of town, and my SIL has managed somehow to have the keys to two other 'holiday cottages' one of which is sharing the bill on scaffolding. My next door neighbours are quite sweet and helpful, and on the other side is a holiday cottage I think. Rescued a great grey seagull chick the other day which had become trapped in her entrance, all in all its an exciting period of life...

poems and photos

2011-08-01T04:51:00.000-07:00

I seem to have difficulty today in uploading photos, but the river bank is becoming overgrown, tons of pond weed has been skimmed off the river and rots gently in the water meadow field. All sizes of fish are at the edge of the mill water. And then some poetry from Edward Thomas and Robert Frost, an interesting article in the Guardian about 'The Road Not Taken'...
which probably tells us not to take words or ourselves too seriously, poor Thomas took the poem to heart and went off to war to be killed in a few weeks, or perhaps there was another story there...
Off to Whitby tomorrow on a long train journey..
Frost's poem is a favourite of mine, I'm sure he wrote another 'cottage' one too.

The pretty but unwelcome policeman's helmet

teasels

An acre of land between the shore and the hills,
Upon a ledge that shows my kingdoms three,
The lovely visible earth and sky and sea
Where what the curlew needs not, the farmer tills:

A house that shall love me as I love it,
Well-hedged, and honoured by a few ash trees
That linnets, greenfinches, and goldfinches
Shall often visit and make love in and flit:

A garden I need never go beyond,
Broken but neat, whose sunflowers every one
Are fit to be the sign of the Rising Sun:
A spring, a brook's bend, or at least a pond:

For these I ask not, but, neither too late
Nor yet too early, for what men call content,
And also that something may be sent
To be contented with, I ask of Fate.

Edward Thomas

hundreds of little fish

The Chelmer

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping hear
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep

Robert Frost

Waldo Williams - Two Fields

2011-07-31T03:38:00.000-07:00

The only thing I have to say about this plaque, why is it so ugly?

The Bluestone that was brought down from Carn Meyn in 1989 by helicopter is opposite this stone on the other side of the road.

More discreet

'Wall of my childhood, Foel Drigarn, Carn Gyfrwy, Tal Mynydd, My support in all independent thinking'

Again I have written about Waldo elsewhere, he is supposed to be be one of Wales finest language poet, and I suspect his poetry rhythm lies in the Welsh language. He grew up in the village of, Mynachlog-ddu which lies under the Presili range of hills. He was a pacificist and was part of the group that fought off the land around the Prescelis hills being taken over by the government for military exercises, hopefully my other half will write about it elsewhere but it is an interesting facet of history. It would have been similar to other military land such as Salisbury Plain and Dartmoor, a place for tank training, etc.

Whilst the battle was fought and won, it is interesting to remember that W.F.Grimes in the 1940s, an archaeologists who wrote about this area, and also the prehistory on the downs in Somerset, was employed by the war office to sort out way out airfields for WW2, Lansdown had one, also Charmy Down which lies on the opposite down to Lansdown outside Bath. Also, there is an airfield just outside Solva (by Nine Wells) now disused, all of which had prehistoric barrows and cromlechs on them, The RAF station of Brawdy still remains, though I'm not sure it comes from the second World War.

Somewhere in my photos I have taken photos of the remains of a burnt out plane on the flanks of the Preseli going towards Carn Meyn, from what I can remember 6 men died when the plane came down, strange that bits should still remain from such a long time ago, but a plaque remembers them and a few pieces of burnt out metal are there in this remote part.

Those fields – I’ve walked across them - they are
Extraordinary fields, though inaccessible to the seeker
After transcendence this is no loss for the page
Holds them in view and they extend into the margins
Between field hedges and the nets of the Hunter

In many places and times where time
Is arrested and held captive by a tether
Of stillness long enough to feel chastened by silence.
Sunlight touches a wall on a summer afternoon,
Shadows enclose a moment which passes from forever

To forever: Such blessings are felt to be precious.
But hearing beyond them voices calling in a common
Tongue of work and worship echoing through centuries,
And knowing that they witness this moment
When all is still, so that being alone

Is to be with them, resonates beyond solitude.
Voices heard in the echoes of whistling lapwings
Tremble to life over empty meadows; each hand,
Each tongue unique in the passing of time yet fused
In a moment making one of many things.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldo_Williams

The Presceli Hills

2011-07-31T02:18:00.000-07:00

Foel Drygarn rock with one of the stone cairns behind, and on the skyline an American couple from Seattle.

A walk up to Foel Drygarn, three enormous stone cairns and Iron age settlement, this walk is quite steep. But from its summit you can get views of the 'bluestones' Carn Meyn and this time I located Carn Alws in the landscape (a chevaux de frise) which we must walk to because it looks so interesting sometime in the future; either a defended hillfort location or a place where you drove your livestock in in the Iron age, it has upright stones along the entrance lane.

The walk is slightly exhausting up hill, but is not too far, this part of the Prescelis is pure sheep country, and we witnessed the same sheep herding I had witnessed several years ago bringing the sheep down to the farm yard. The first sign was a sheepdog running on to the road, there really is not much traffic around in this part of the world, so sheepdogs are often found to be asleep on the road or territorially guarding the farm.... a couple of hundred were being rounded up on the higher fields by a tractor blaring out his horn and a couple of nifty dogs, all done at quite a high speed as the sheep were tightly circled and then brought down into the yard - noisy but interesting to watch.

The top of Foel Drygarn is difficult to describe but similar I would think to the Carn Meyn ridge top. Austere and awesome are words that come to mind, the thin crust of greenery broken by the massive rocks that expand upward out of the earth - prehistory still writ, and the reason why this poor land is sheep country. And why some of us believe that the magical aspect of the bluestones were transported back to Stonehenge from this prehistoric ridgeway.

views from the top

walking up the path with Carn Meyn in the distance

Carn Alw in the misty distance

Gors Fawr small stone circle on the moor below the Preseli Hills

Gors Fawr stone stone circle, Bronze Age and rather small, some blue stone dolerite, dwarfed by sheep and gorse, a very peaceful place and near the road, it also has two stones some two hundred yards away, which may have formed part of an avenue.

New arrivals

2011-07-29T00:02:00.000-07:00

This little frog in the bowl we keep for the birds to drink from, suddenly arrived whilst we were away. Whence he came from is a mystery, no ponds around here, I have given him a piece of piping to sit on so that he can presumably eat the gnats and suchlike that lay their larvae in water. He is now added to the fauna of the garden with the hedgehog who lives under the shed and the squirrel who patiently goes through the bread (looking for sunflower seeds) thrown out for the birds.

Though I don't 'own' any creatures at the moment, do feed a cat occasionally that comes looking for food, and of course the birds, so the garden is getting quite full.

The Avebury megameet, which happens each year, its a gathering of people interested in old prehistoric stones, and for us all to meet up from different parts of the country, though with the price of petrol it is getting more difficult. Well as I also belong to a Heritage action group, had to take photos of these miscreant sheep rubbing themselves against the stones and producing a 'lanolin line' on the stones. Still they were no worse than some German cyclists who were climbing the stones but they did climb down after someone remonstrated with them....

St.Non and her chapel

2011-07-28T03:37:00.000-07:00

The ruined chapel inside the stone circle

St.Non is the mother of St.David, Wales most important saint, it is said that St.David was born in the centre of a stone circle one wild and stormy night, well myth or legend, this is the place that it happened.

There are stones scattered around in a large circle, though very incomplete, and in the centre a ruined medieval chapel set on this gently sloping ground looking out to sea.

Above the ruined chapel is a retreat house, which can be used by any denomination of religion. It is not exactly attractive, and must have been built in the 1930s, and alongside a smaller chapel which was finished in 1934 and is dedicated to three saints, St.Non, St.Bridget, and St.Winifred all female celtic saints, or at least, belonging to that time when the Romans had left Britain in the 5th century and the 'British Celtic' church had come into being with slightly different teachings to the 'Roman Catholic' writings.

At St.Non's it is said that when St.David was born, a spring rose miraculously from the ground, this well is dedicated to 'Our Lady' a catholic dedication. So a place of mystery and strong religious feelings, the well of course seen as a healing well. What of course makes the place interesting is the overlay of paganism by christianity.

Winifred or Gwen-Frewi 6th-7th century has an interesting history, she follows in the tradition of young rich female seduced by a prince (Caradog ab Alan), she fled from him but he caught up with before she could reach the safety of the church and sanctuary. He cut off her head but her uncle St.Beuno restored her head and she became a nun at Gywtherin in Denbighshire. The 'head' motif is characteristic of the pagan celtic cults.

Bridget/Bride - Ffraid 450 - 525 century - patron saint of blacksmiths, poets, brewers, cooking and kitchens and healers. She seems a patron of many things, she is of course also acknowledged in the bay called St.Brides Bay which the chapel looks over, she is more famous as the Irish saint, St.Bridget, second only to St.Patrick, in Wales she was called Ffraid Santes. Bridget of course belongs to the cult of the Celtic Fire Goddess, which kept an 'eternal' fire going at Kildare, and belongs to the festival of St.Imbolc on 2nd February.

Fascinating histories of these Welsh saints can be found in T.D.Breverton's book The Book of Welsh Saints, a book if I was stranded on a Desert Island would be my book of choice!

St.Non's Well with spots of rain

The Retreat

The shrine

The 20th century chapel

http://www.stnonsretreat.org.uk/history.htm

Porthgain and Abereiddi

2011-07-26T00:41:00.000-07:00

Abereiddi Blue lagoon, the original slate quarry, the entrance of which was blown up to let the sea in

I have already written about Porthgain and Abereiddi which are roughly a mile apart, so there is not much to add, the first thing you notice about the photos is how bleak this part of the coast is, the stone and slate that has been hewn away in the quarries tells of back breaking work and what is left now at Abereiddi are the slate houses slowly crumbling away, the round powder house, a safe place for the dynamite to be kept and of course the manager's house set slightly apart higher up the hill.

Today the blue lagoon is used for fun, scuba diving and jumping off rocks, which seemed rather dangerous for the youngsters taking part but they wore hard hats as they swam from rock to rock and then jumped spreadeagled into the deep waters.

Porthgain stone quarry

Porthgain 'street' the end two cottages belong to an artist and every year that I have been there is an enormous Pyreanean Mountain dog asleep outside.

http://northstoke.blogspot.com/2007/10/porthgain-and-abereiddi-quarries.html

Warriors Dyke - St.Davids Head

2011-07-24T03:49:00.000-07:00

Warriors Dyke

Warriors Dyke is a promontory fort, ie it is a small defended settlement built on a long jutting out rock from the mainland. Both Porth y Rhaw and the above fort are Iron Age, though they could probably have been earlier. I read somewhere that if you did'nt find a promontory fort every half mile along the Pembrokeshire coastline something must be wrong.

Warriors Dyke was named by Sabine Baring Gould a vicar of the 19th Century, who also wrote hymns, beside books on antiquities, mostly of Europe. He excavated here and found the usual bits of pottery, charcoal and faience beads, plus to my joy, spinning whorls. Sadly any 19th C excavation messes up the site so that any future more valuable excavation has all the evidence destroyed.

Getting there involves a walk from the popular Whitesand beach, up the side of the cliffs and through the gate onto the moor. You will be faced with a shallow valley to cross with a stream running through it.

To your right is Carn Llidi with its double cromlech, which we did'nt visit this year; the tomb is hidden, or huddles, against the rock face and in front of it is an old WW2 platform, it takes some finding.

But to return to the settlement, fort is not quite the right word, over in the distance on St.Davids Head you will see another cromlech this is Coetan Arthur, again hidden in a jumble of rocks, but its capstone stands clearly against the sky. Coetan Arthur is framed between two outcrops, the westward is the settlement, and you can find it either by taking the path that goes along the cliff edge, or by heading for the outcrops and walking along the top - a much safer option.

Coetan Arthur cromlech

Warriors Dyke -hut stone circle

another one

I photographed five but they are all very similar.

The settlement is defended by three banks of stones, two very small, whilst the inner one is massive, and tumbles down in a dramatic manner. Go inside and you will find a small grassy enclosure covered in stones. There are six stone hut circles here, we found five, the stones haphazardly arranged in circles, presumably the huts would have been thatched with the reeds you find in the boggy marsh valley, but trees around the coast are usually non-existent due to storms, only gorse and heather survive the weather and quite a few wild flowers of course. Sabine Gould says the huts were co-joined but in will need another trip to confirm this!

wood sage

Toadflax lots of it around

Devil's bit scabious

Porth-Y- Rhaw promontory fort.

2011-07-23T10:39:00.000-07:00

Porth-y-Rhaw cove

Stopping at Nine Wells just outside of Upper Solva, park in the little NT car park, admire the wells on the right, and then take the path down to the sea on the left. It traces a watery way through lichen covered hawthorns, so twisted and bent it is as if time stood still. Old trees lie fallen to your left whilst on the right of the path, the cliff/hill stretches upward. You come to a gate, and a small cove is some distance in front of you. The path meanders down to the sea, there are still reminders of an old medieval mill, stones glimpsed through the meadowsweet flowers that inhabit the marshy ground, the pond for the mill stands higher up.

marshy ground

Taking the coast path to the left and you are immediately confronted with Porth-y-Rhaw promontory fort the defensive banks falling down to the path. Middle Iron Age, there was a small excavation in 1999, and 8 roundhouses were uncovered on the tip of the promontory, the following explanation shows how they were arranged.

The promontory fort

Unknown flowers

Solva

2011-07-23T05:09:00.000-07:00

Solva Harbour

Four days, and a host of memories. Lower Solva is my spiritual home, to which I return nearly every year. Its the sheer calmness that appeals, hardly changing, cottages locked in by tall cliffs, and the harbour with its boats riding the endless green of the sea. Tiny fish swim in the shallow lapping waves, the duck with her young losing several daily to the predations of the seagulls. Crab and lobster advertised everywhere from bungalow to cottage, I even caught a tiny one, no bigger than my thumbnail as I went shell picking.
A Welsh rug from Middle Mill bought plus some alpaca fleece for spinning, the alpacas live along the lane below, my 200 grams comes from Tiffany.

The lane to Middle Mill

We did a helluva lot, Aberridy, Porthgain, St.Davids Head and the Prescelis, (and of course seeing Jennie though not for very long sadly as we had to drive a long way back) the weather quite often dull, but we seemed to miss the showers. It has given my photos a slightly grey dull edge, quarries were photographed, the beautiful brown-creamy coloured stone that you see in the cottages, and then there is the great deserted quarry of Porthgain grey coloured and used for roads and brickmaking, and the more dramatic dark slate quarry of Aberridy. Industries long gone in the early 20th century, hope and aspiration built on the blood and sweat of underpaid labourers; sloops that sailed in, loaded their heavy cargoes and then sailed to Bristol and London. All gone leaving behind an industrial wasteland being overgrown by the wildflowers and mosses, so that in a couple of hundred years there will be nothing left but the great brick shutes that are built against the cliff at Porthgain.
On St.Davids Head we saw Coetan Arthur megalithic tomb, plus the Bronze Age promontory fort Warriors Dyke with its 6 stone huts. Prescelis was Gors Fawr stone circle, plus an exhausting climb up Foel Drygarn, to to see the three great stone Bronze Age cairns, plus of course the view to Carn Meyn, the source, or so it is said, of the bluestones of Stonehenge, and I also noted the position of Carn Alw, which is supposedly a chevaux de frise - defended by upright stones along the entrance, could have been an iron age holding pen for horses and cattle... somewhere I want to go, but it was quite a walk.
Each monument will be gone into detail eventually as I always get muddled with all the various Welsh names.

keeping up;

2011-07-15T01:27:00.000-07:00

(Actually now I come to think of it, this morning the obstreperous tones of John Humphries and the more gentler speech of Evan Davies did not greet my ears at 6 , thought that the Murdoch regime had spiked the BBC, but no, it was strike action by BBC staff, probably to do with pensions and pay, but of course that is a continuing saga across the country....)

Friday, not much has happened this week apart from the great scandal, Murdoch and company. Politicians have been falling over themselves to denounce the terrible three, mmmm were these the same people who wined and dined with them all these years, fawning at the feet of the great media tyrant .. Rebeckah Brookes and James Murdoch, plus Rupert are to give testimony at the hearing which is a bit of a surprise but fleeing the country is not really on I suppose, especially as more hacking is appearing in America. As more scandals emerge daily, I suspect the notorious three will distance themselves away but the empire seems 'broke' at the moment - hurrah. Now for the debt crisis which lurks like a pike underwater waiting to rise to the surface, how can countries owe so much money?

Packing for going away to Wales, the house is scented right through with the smell of lilies, it must float through the windows. Containers for as many plants as possible so they will remain watered. The weather changes each day, more rain now but it is still very dry. And a couple of photos of my grandchildren who obviously love living by the sea.....

Lillie as cheeky as ever, and Matilda scarred by a badly aimed tennis racket but still dragging her Ugg boots around in summer!

lilies

2011-07-13T12:37:00.000-07:00

Scented lilies, exotic, its colouring luring loads of hoverflies, that seem to get drunk on its scent and pollen.

The Chelmer

2011-07-09T23:35:00.000-07:00

the river curving its way down to the sea

Hemp Agrimony; Grigson says of this plant that it lines the highways and byways of England and is a nondescript flower, but I love it for the buzz of bees, hoverflies and butterflies it attracts, had loads in the old garden.

a family of five young swans

Common mallow; 'common wayside plant', according to Grigson, the children preferred the disks of nutlets or 'cheeses' in his time to eat. He likens it to monkey-nuts, but the roots were more used for poultices and soothing ointments.

The burdock plant- anyone who remembers dandelion and burdock pop of their childhood, will recognise the name.
Apparently around since 1265

purple loosestrife

The working lock

Eager anticipation but rather worried children as they begin to sink

Going down

Through the gates

Red Geraniums and chateaux

2011-07-09T02:42:00.000-07:00

Chateau de Chillon

Yesterday I received an email from my son-in-law with the itinerary for their trip to Switzerland in August, just under a 1000 miles from Whitby to Vevey. It will be a great experience for the children, travelling through France and they all have their passports ready. Switzerland is a lovely country, steep sided mountains whose grassy meadows are grazed by large beige coloured cows in summer, their bells clonking away. When I was there they used to bring the beasts down from the summer grazing through the villages decorated with flowers. All of this reminded me of my late father-in-law's excruciatingly bad poem he wrote, as he names the villages and towns, I remember drives he took with my daughter and myself up into the mountains for afternoon tea, the fillet de perche restaurant down by the lake, (a upmarket fish and chips) and the lake itself, often so calm but when storms arose (and they came quickly over the mountains) it would become quite dangerous, and the ferry boat across the lake to France would not be able to land its passengers.

He and my mother-in-law had lost their youngest son, and I a young husband, and the ties between my daughter and my sister-in-laws has always been very strong. So the children when they arrive will be able to follow my daughter's childhood; travel in the little train up into the mountain, passing Leni's small chalet with its pretty garden in Blonay just under the chateau there. Leni is long dead, though she lived to a venerable old age, and sparred, mostly over bridge, with my mother-in- law Lotta.
Con worked for Unesco for most of his working life, it took the family to many places, but they retired in Blonay, to Lotta's house eventually. So to the poem, Territet just by Montreux had the English church where Con was a church warden, the vicar would often come to Sunday lunch and to be plagued by the ridiculous tricks Marc (Karen's cousin) and Con played on him, false cakes, false poops and jumping mustard pots are the ones I can remember, the vicar strangely enough got quite cross, but you can see Con's very 'englishness' in the way he writes, Lotta on the other hand was Dutch, and very precise in running her household. There should be a poem by Byron on the Chateau de Chillon, ther is a little island opposite which if I remember rightly was given to Queen Victoria, so is English territory...

The Tourist's Lament by C.J.Opper

A rainy evening in Vevey,
Fills me with intense dismay,
The faded splendours of Montreux
Leave me feeling rather blue;
And if we must stick to verity,
I don't go overboard on Territet.
And, I must say,
Whoever got hooked on La Tour de Peilz?
For Corsier, Blonay, Chebres and Corseaux,
I'm unequally unmoved or even more so;
If there's a place I'd rather not be on
Its the top of the tower of the Chateau de Chillon.
In Southend they would'nt have the cheek to serve,
That cupper tea we got at Villeneuve
We got fish and chips just beside the church
But you have to ask for fillet de perche.
So..... you just ask your mother why we're here,
When we might have been on Wigan Pier.

Hylands House

2011-07-04T03:22:00.000-07:00

Hyland House fell into disuse in the 1950's and was at one time to be pulled down and the grounds turned into a golf course. Luckily there was enough protest later on for it to be saved, and with the help of lottery money has been restored. So instead of being a place for a handful of people to chase a little white ball around, it has become a place for the public to enter freely, walk their dogs, children, picnic under the trees and generally a place of leisure. Stable block has a restaurant, full of people eating out in the courtyard, with their dogs parked safely under the tables and a secondhand book shop. Plus of course 'events' we went for the craft fair, but really there was only people selling food.

Humprhy Repton drew up the plans for the landscape garden in the 18th century, he did'nt actually undertake any work just handed out one of his little 'red books' with sketches inside. But was the first person to use the term landscape gardener, and he followed on in the footsteps of Capability Brown.

Humphry Repton landscape

We emerged out of the woods to be confronted by these lines of conifers with a rounded mound at the end

Pretty colouring once more on the mound

Front view of the house, just at the bottom of the photo the 'ha-ha' ditch round the garden still exists

back view of the house

Gardens as we know them don't really exist around the house, the front to have a grand drive with a sweeping front gravelled area for the carriages to stand and turn, the back steps down to the garden below which was well away from the house and had a 'lake', rather small, as the showpiece. I loved the colouring in the mounded centre but the other beds round the circular lawn were very plain.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humphry_Repton

One World Garden - Hyland House

2011-07-03T11:07:00.000-07:00

This garden was created a few years iago, the colouring is soft - greys pink ,whites and a lot of gentle lilac and purple colours.

The hand built walling that leads you into the round small spaces of the garden has no mortar, just grey colouring with the occasional brown in the stone. Tranquility must be the theme and peace of course, it was part of a Boys Scout Jamboree for boys from all over the world and plaques commemorate this and lottery money was given for the garden. The Japanese type tearoom entrance, with the water coming from a basin which in turn circles round the different areas of the garden leading you on. Bamboos vie with rhodendrom in one part, whilst the flowers have the softest palette of colour. Grasses come in all shapes and sizes, but not any of the over-coloured grasses that seem the garden centres favourite, or even that terrible 'sophisticated black grass'!

All photos can be enlarged by double clicking...

Golden grasses looking out to the wildflower meadow

this is part of a circular garden, the flower bed is divided by small hedges.
Penstemons are planted here (one of my favourite)

Look very carefully at the bottom of the photo, and you may just spot the humming bird hawk moth

Southernwood and campanulas

Astrantia

cool colours, white astilbe and grasses

This Japanese style wooden hut is the entrance from here the water flows alround the garden

Hostas complimented by the soft pink and lilac of perennial geraniums

ornamental grasses are used everywhere

nasturtiums and Middle Mill

2011-07-03T02:03:00.000-07:00

The weather is as glorious as ever, and the early morning sun picked out the true colours of the nasturtiums, though I have them tumbling out of pots all over the garden, these stripey ones do catch the eye. Our garden is small, and flowers are mostly grown in pots as well as the tomatoes, courgettes and beans, all fruiting well, the advantage of pots is of course you can move them around and replant as wanted. This year I used lobelia's vibrant blue to go with the red of geraniums, also using the pretty multi-coloured lobelias to go with pink verbenas.

But their colours remind me of John Piper's paintings, something you have to get used to, and probably I would'nt buy a print (could'nt afford them of course) for the house but in the latter part of his very prolific and creative life he painted the flowers in his garden at Fawley Cottage. He also had a small cottage in Wales, further up north then Pembrokeshire, but he obviously visited round Solva and Middle Mill for he painted a picture of it. Now he has hardly done it justice, for this area is my most favourite place on earth, the river winding its way through the little crop of houses, the small arched bridge and the quarry's tumbling rocks. I have walked alround this area, staying at a cottage in King's Heriot with I'm sure a barrow in the garden, the lane up to Whitland's church, and the small 19th century tumbling brick well now hidden deep in woodland with a what looks like an abandoned settlement site, or even a hillfort if I remember. We had thought of moving here, but at the moment the family being in Whitby dictates the choice, but we will be visiting in a couple of weeks time down to Solva, and seeing Bovey Belle on the way back tucked away in the hills, so I shall be looking forward to all that...

A blog on Middle Mill

Streaked orange and yellow of the nasturtium

John Piper's Middle Mill

The same nasturtiums, what cannot be seen are the earwigs and blackfly (that the ants so lovingly tender)

http://northstoke.blogspot.com/2010/08/middle-mill.html

Yellow hollyhock and a bee

2011-07-01T01:14:00.000-07:00

Colour and cats should be the title. Yesterday we went for a ploughman's at the Cat's pub, a favourite haunt of ours. The yellow hollyhock caught my eye, and as an added bonus a pollen covered bumblebee was obviously in love with it too. I notice on my photos little beetles as well which I did'nt spot at the time, the hanging baskets were also glorious as well, as the large plastic cats sun themselves serenely in the garden. In a large shed round the corner of the house is also a fairground steam engine a photo of which is somewhere on my blog. Picking lavender this morning to dry, I noticed again that there was shiny black beetles buried in the flowers, I caught them on camera last year, and they were in fact beautifully coloured.

latest dyeing, not too pleased with the green.

Schumacher

2011-06-29T03:19:00.000-07:00

I have been listening via BBCiplayer this morning to Jonathon Porritt on Schumacher, only to learn that Schumacher vaguely influenced our prime minister Cameron in his 'Big Society' idea. Well knock me down with a feather, can a green guru influence Cameron, doubt it given the big world of The City and banks he has to keep happy, but still a nice thought, even Thatcher had read him.

Satish Kumar was on as well, in fact in the latest Resurgence celebrates the 100th anniversary since the day of Schumacher's birth the magazine had also printed Schumacher's 'Buddhist Economics' from 1968.

While the materialist is mainly interested in goods, the Buddhist is mainly interested in liberation. But Buddhism is "The Middle Way" and therefore in no way antagonistic to physical well-being. It is not wealth that stands in the way of liberation but the attachment to wealth; not the enjoyment of pleasurable things but the craving for them. The keynote of Buddhist economics, therefore, is simplicity and non-violence. From an economist’s point of view, the marvel of the Buddhist way of life is the utter rationality of its pattern—amazingly small means leading to extraordinarily satisfactory results.

Even so, I have read all those 'green' books over the years, my sustainable credentials stem from such philosophies so it was like meeting old friends again. I was spinning at the time, yesterday dyeing and finishing a cushion cover I'd made, all rather simple things... Has the world taken the path of Right Livelihood, a very debatable question and the answer I would give is no, but if there is a coming economic storm when everything goes belly-up again, it would be wise to remember that 'Small is beautiful'.

They also touched on the Findhorn Community, this shows some of the eco-buildings on the original caravan site , and I notice they have spiritual retreats on the Isles of Iona and Erris, not sure I would want to go on a retreat where I had to share a bedroom with someone else - too much chattering.

But it did bring to mind the Retreat house at St.Non near St.David , which is set in a beautiful peaceful setting overlooking St.Bride's Bay, a small ruined chapel sits inside a presumed stone circle.

Patchwork and sewing machines

2011-06-26T02:58:00.000-07:00

This week I bought a new sewing machine, electric no less, for years I used an old Jones hand sewing machine but it was becoming too heavy to lift, so I reluctantly left it behind in Bath. It had history and belonged to my ex-sister-in law Sylvia, she had lived and studied in America and patchwork and quilting was a hobby of hers. The machine had been taken over to Blonay when she moved back to Switzerland, and she had given it to me, and I carted it to England, and it is on this machine I did a lot of patchwork. Mainly for the dogs and cats I had at one stage, Moss, Suki, Tiger and James to be precise, the last, two cats that lived to grand old ages.

Sylvia had a quilting frame, and her work was beautiful, tidy and a work of art, she still does them for the grandchildren but her eyesight is not so good now,

So I have decided to start again with the patchwork, hopefully my impatient nature will calm down and I will sew neatly but simply, small squares are the easiest for me.

The following patchwork is Sylvias', she gave it to my daughter who somehow passed it on to me, but she still 'owns' it; she has a very possessive nature. I see that the animals have been sleeping in the centre, because there are light mud marks that have'nt come off in the wash. I am not sure about the pattern, too many bits of material have been used but it must have taken her hours...

The penny has dropped about the pattern, it is based on a kaleidoscope

I can never achieve her quilting skills or patience, but the use of materials is interesting, though I said she had lived and studied in America, she went on to work in Hong Kong as a lecturer, so that materials often reflect the different places she has been in. My first introduction to patchwork had been my mother-in-laws patchwork dressing gown,(I had one to) which she had made for my 3 year old daughter, it was cute but made out of Thai batik materials.

Looking on the internet last night I came across Japanese materials for patchwork, strangely enough a bit like the silks in the studio used for the hanging scrolls

http://www.rainbowcrafts.eu/patchwork-and-quilting-596-0.html

Diary keeping

2011-06-24T22:54:00.000-07:00

Another quiet week, though on the heritage front, two shocking things, well at least for those that care, the first story we covered was a stone circle on Penwith Moors in Cornwall, the moors had been enclosed by fencing within the last couple of years, and under an agricultural scheme they were to be grazed by a local farmer's cattle (for which he gets paid). The moors are very popular, walkers, tourists and horseriders enjoy walking across it, but new 'furniture' in the shape of gates, stiles and gridded cattleways has made quite a few people unhappy. Then came the cows, no ordinary creatures but rather beautiful long horned cows who amble along rather menacingly but are probably harmless to humans. But not to the stones, and they have been using the rather small stones of the circle to rub against, something natural to cattle.

English Heritage has said that they will look into it, lets hope they do it soon, Scheduled Ancient Monuments are protected under the law.....

Not a very good photo but it was 'fastcaptured' from a video.

The second thing to happen was the revelation that part of one of the circles of the Priddy Henges had been bulldozed, this was more serious as there is no going back on bulldozing earthworks. The Priddy Circles/henges are of course unique, especially in North Somerset, aerial photography captures them best, three circles across the landscape followed by a fourth at an oblique angle. The reason why is still unclear, the field belonged to a house that is now on the market, the damage done is irreplaceable though. Again English Heritage seems to know about it but in this instance the case is still to be dealt with.

So apart from above, life is quiet, the cottage (hurrah) is in the process of being plastered, two rooms down and a third to go an email tells me this morning, plus of course some slight repair to the chimney.

Photographs in the garden show my inability to capture the bumblebees and hoverflies that feed on nectar.

Snapdragons planted for bumble bees

I planted a lot of lobelia this year just for its pretty tumbling affect, but tiny bees and hoverfly manage to land on its flowers.

The bees land on the lip of the bottom petal of the flowers, travelling further in the bee gets pollen rubbed onto its back by the stamens, when the bee comes out they 'groom' the pollen off their 'furry' backs into the little sacs by their back legs.

The two linear bronze age barrow cemeteries near to Priddy circles.....

http://northstoke.blogspot.com/2009/04/impressive-bronze-age-barrows.html

This week

2011-06-17T00:41:00.000-07:00

Lillie and Matilda (dancing around as always) in the shop*

This week I wanted to be in Whitby, firstly for the little one's birthday, and the birthday tea, but they all went for a meal to a fish and chip restaurant, which Lillie chose for the best chips, she is a connoisseur of both chocolate cake and chips. But there was no point as the cottage still is not finished, work hardly started.

After a long 6 week wait for the bathroom stuff to arrive, there were other calls on my son-in-law's time and so it stagnated. But work has started, the last of the woodchip is scraped off the wall, the plasterer is coming next monday, to plaster it smooth rather than rough, and then the central heating and bathroom will go in. After that painting, carpets and furniture, so I begin to get excited and choose the beds and sofas I need, heeding the need to measure everything and then plot it out on the floor, just like Kirsty Allsop who I've been watching on tv, she romps around full of energy, trying different skills and crafts but she is way out of my league, and I'm not sure I want to go round poking around in skips, but there are auction rooms in Whitby which I'm looking forward to.

* The shop is no longer in the family, no one is missing it at all, and though it was pretty inside, a bit like my cottage, flooding in the basement and a bad absent landlord meant that nothing was done.

2011-06-16T13:31:00.001-07:00

St.Botolph's Church puddingstone

2011-06-11T10:58:00.000-07:00

A trip out to the Rodings today to checkout a stone in Beauchamp Roding. The church sits all alone in the centre of some fields, we passed barley on one side and broad beans on the other. Following a small, almost dried out brook, but the meadowsweet was just about to come out into flower. The church setting is very tranquil it sits at the highest point of the ridge, and that is not very high in Essex!. Its Norman, details below, and in dire need of repair, the ivy growing on the outside wall is also growing inside through a great crack that is separating the nave from the chancel.

Great yew trees round the edge, with at least two badger setts at opposite ends of the graveyard, plus the ground is riddled with rabbit holes. A ditch runs all round the church, giving it the appearance of a moated grange, I don't know. There are plenty of moats round this area of Chipping Ongar, an early medieval form of defence maybe, or to keep animals at bay from straying from the common land.

We had gone to see if the stone that resides in the grave yard was prehistoric, it is again difficult to tell, it is indeed partly puddlestone, and the theory has been put forward that it is part of the Puddlestone Trail which would have carried Neolithic axes from Grimes Grave in Norfolk to Stonehenge and that area.

Could well be that there is a Saxon origin here, Greensted church is a few miles away, the stone standing on a trackway, but there is no archaeological record at SEAX.

Perfectly simple and beautiful

Meadowsweet in a rather dry brook up to the church

The Puddingstone in the grave yard

Badger hole under old yew tree

St.Botolph's Church and its bank

Clearer view

The ancient parish church of ST. BOTOLPH stands on rising ground, the churchyard being completely surrounded by fields. The dedication suggests that there was a church at Beauchamp Roding before the Norman Conquest. The building consists of nave, chancel, west tower, and south porch. The walls are of flint rubble mixed with freestone. The nave is built on an 11th- or 12th-century plan but the present structure probably dates from the 14th century. In the 15th century the tower was added and the chancel rebuilt. The porch dates from 1870.

Botwulf of Thorney (also called Botolph, Botulph or Botulf; d. c. 680) was an

English saint of travellers and the various aspects of farming...

Reflecting on the fate of these out of the way churches, decline in church attendance and you know that St.Botolph's will eventually fall into decay and ruin, there is really not enough money out there to repair all the churches that are slowly dying of neglect. What is the answer, sell them on as family dwelling places, its a bit spooky having a garden full of grave stones, there is no answer for isolated churches. Mundon church is being repaired by Friends of Friendless churches but their grants are a small drop in the ocean. Fairfield church which we visited recently has the same air of closure, St.Peter on the Wall has been restored for its link with the Roman forts, and Great Canfield will also be looked after for its pagan depictions on its doorway and painted surfaces inside.

The book I'm reading at the moment is about John Piper the painter, he lived through the last century and lived a busy and fruitful life. One of his interests were churches, some of his stained glasswork is beautiful see Coventry Cathedral, but he went round with his friends such as John Betjman and Geoffrey Grigson studying and sketching the churches and belonged strangely enough to the Friends of Friendless churches, a bit like an earlier favourite painter of mine, William Morris who was against Victorian restoration of churches.

So is the stone prehistoric in the church yard? I think yes, given that we have seen stones at Alphamstone Church and Ingatestone Church, there is often a direct association of pagan 'rememberance' at some churches, not all of course. Bartlow Church with its 'v' shaped paths, one leading up to the church, the other leading round the church to the great Romano-British barrows behind with their native Iron Age chiefs buried in state. There are fragments of the past, some strongly Saxon, Broomfield church with its rich warrior Saxon grave has pudding stone in its fabric, and so many churches we have seen have roman tile as well. These Roman villas would still have been extant when the Saxons invaded. They chose to ignore such building material and built in wood such as Greensted church, so there is very little remaining of Saxon churches, but it is still there in the later wonderful timber, lathe and plaster storied cottages to be found round Essex.

Ivy growing inside the church

view of the Essex countryside from the church

Badger sett under the yew tree

Interior

Colours

2011-06-09T01:22:00.000-07:00

Every now and then, I get obsessed by colour, this time it's orange and yellow. I have been dyeing wool with turmeric and sappanwood recently, both giving the colours of Tibetan Buddhists monk's robes. They have such clear colours very similar to the nasturtiums in the garden. Colour is fascinating to play with, if you single ply some silk then ply together with wool, interesting shading and contrasting colour will appear when dyed. You can even get obssessive about spinning and dyeing ending up with too much wool to knit. As an inspiration Alison Daykin and Jane Deane have been doing this for years.

Turmeric chips

Sappanwood

Elderflower made a couple of weeks ago

http://northstoke.blogspot.com/2010/01/japanese-dyes.html

Paper Mill Lock

2011-06-04T23:47:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I fancied carrot cake and tea at the wooden hut tea place at Paper Mill lock, its very popular, people potter along the riverbank with dogs, bicycles, children and mess around on their boats. The river itself is full, though we have hardly had any rain for months, the ducks also potter around amongst the tables cadging food.

Of the dozen or so photos I took of the large hawking dragonflies only one came out but there was emerald/turquoise demoiselles, their wings like furry eyelashes; brown and blue hawker dragonflies and the very large blue/green one with golden eyes. Of the damsel flies, groups of turquoise/blue slender insects spiralled around, landing on the great water lily pads. The colours of this large group of insects is hard to describe, metallic like the coloured beatles in the garden they have a radiance that needs capturing with paint..

Evil Hogweed unfurling rather beautifully. The square (or spotted) stems of plants tells of their poisonous habit.

Ducks and white water lilies

Barges and tea. This barge was just setting off laden with food and white balloons, probably a wedding reception will be held on board, and as it was heading upstream the little Ulting Church by the riverside would probably fit the menu nicely.

I often wonder if the boats ever go out for a sail

five minutes from the clutter of boats

Blue bodied dragonfly

The Boyd River

2011-06-04T02:41:00.000-07:00

I have'nt written in my blog for ages, writer's block perhaps, or the fact that I've been spinning furiously the Bluefaced Leicester wool I received last week. I should write an article or two for elsewhere but nothing comes, so heigh-ho.... but I did come across the following poem. My mind had been wandering down the events of this week, firstly, Marlborough Mound in Marlborough College has a prehistoric foundation, it was thought to be a Norman motte but core drilling has proved otherwise. Silbury Hill down the road in Avebury (the biggest artifical mound in Europe) has a 'sister' it seems now, though not so big but nevertheless large artifical 'hills or mounds', seem to be part of the sacred landscape scheme for this part of Wiltshire, there is also the large Hatfield barrow (now destroyed) as well.

Then on a forum people were talking about 'Springwatch' and it bought to mind another TV show which I enjoyed far more than Springwatch this was something called 'Secret River' in which husband and wife (and their two young children) team naturalists explored the river running alongside there cottage.

It was the River Boyd in South Gloucestershire, and one I had walked along. It runs through a beautiful gorge, now quarried, though a great deal of it is a nature reserve called the Golden Valley, it also at one stage had an ochre factory in it in the 19th century... but which, before I run on, has a fairly large barrow at the point where the River Boyd runs into the the larger River Avon (the mother river)..

So if we take the second line of part of the poem; The two villages now are Doddington (Deington) and Wick (Weeke) and the cliffs are of course the gorge in Wick.

And thou sweet Boyd that with thy watry sway

Dost wash the cliffes of Deington and of Weeke
And through their rocks with crooked winding way
Thy Mother Avon runnest soft to seek
In whose fair streams the speckled trout doth play
The roche the dace the gudgin and the bleeke
Teach me the skill with slender line and hook
to take each fish of river pond and brook.

John Dennys is described as the first poet to write on angling, in the early 17th century (The Secrets of Angling) three books I believe of poetry to the fish, angling and beautiful countryside round his home, Wick by the way is only a few miles from Bath and falls on the boundary between Somerset and Gloucester.

As a child, catching the little minnows that swam in the ponds in the park, was later augmented by fishing in Bovey Belle's river, though I'm sure she doesn't own it! But for the moment can't think of its name. As children we were sent away to farms in the school holidays, the one in Wales we were sent to had the river running through the bottom field. Here I learnt to 'tickle' trout, often in the company of the farm pig, who was a friendly creature and followed us children around like a dog. The only thing I can remember about this huge pink sow, was how large spidery things rushed through the dense prickly hair of the creature, cannot think what they were...

My grandfather also spent weekends fishing here for salmon, which would be brought home and would fill the old refrigerator in the scullery, these were the days when food was still restricted after the war late into the 1950's. So though I frown on the sport of angling as it is conducted today, catching and then throwing the fish back, line fishing for one's supper is the best way to go about it.

Things I like best in life

2011-05-20T02:54:00.000-07:00

Freckled white foxgloves with bumble bees for preference

Sweet williams for their ruff of green spikes

Fennel for their cloudy bronze-green colour

latest book I'm reading

Its about John Piper born somewhere near the beginning of the 20th century, and a group of artists, Vanessa Bell is also another favourite. Such carefree lives when money was'nt needed in the vast quantities as it is today. I have lost a lot of books in my move, Vanessa Bell's biography by Frances Spalding must have gone off in the Oxfam van when they cleared the Bath house, and will cost me about £30 to replace, Wm Morris had to be bought again, this time by Fiona Macarthy; both Spalding and Macarthy are two of the best female biographers of this age ;)

Two short blogs, somewhere else, reminded me of Paul Nash paintings, who was also around at the time of John Piper, they both had a common theme in painting about prehistory (it needs a whole blog on the subject) and of course the much later movement of the Brotherhood of Ruralists..
http://thelmawilcox.blogspot.com/2008/08/paul-nash-november-moon.html#uds-search-results
http://thelmawilcox.blogspot.com/2008/08/blog-post.html

This for ref; Brotherhood of the Ruralist;
http://thelmawilcox.blogspot.com/2008/09/david-inshaw.html
http://thelmawilcox.blogspot.com/2008/09/english-genius-loci.html
http://thelmawilcox.blogspot.com/2008/08/brotherhood-of-ruralists.html

Thinking about what brought all these old blogs back was the fact that the Holburne Museum in Bath has just opened its swish new glass extension, it caused a great furore the design a couple of years ago, and in the news this morning was one of their 'treasures', it was a Peter Blake painting, collage I think... A Museum for Myself

Introspection

2011-05-15T00:19:00.000-07:00

Today is sunday, I'm not too good, the cold air got to my lungs a couple of days ago, and now they ache just like they used to do when I was a child suffering from ashma. But of course it brought back memories of childhood, and today looking out on all the flowers I had planted in pots it made me remember the garden in Willenhall, a beautiful garden for us children.

I had a somewhat weird childhood, too complicated to explain, suffice it to say that I was brought up by my paternal grandfather, and 'experienced' three stepmothers. But these things passed my half-brother and I by, and we were looked after by an Italian maid called Lousia at the house.

It was a double fronted bay window Victorian house, facing onto the street, with a large wall to the side hiding the lawn behind. On the other side was a driveway, large gates blocked the yard behind.

The garden was formalised Victorian, three lawns and paths all the way around, about three-quarters of an acre.

It was looked after by a gardener, Jack I think his name was and his son helped sometimes, the garden was his domain, he loved and cherished it. Great apple and pear trees lined the sides and across the garden, so that it was always rather cool on the pebbled paths. We climbed those trees and sat in their branches, and when the fruit was ripe, Louisa would climb up to get the apples, they would be put in large golden wicker baskets below, and then would be stored down in the cellar on the shelves, their sweet smell through the winter permeating up to the corridor above.

Outside the backdoor of the house that led off from the scullery, was another small yard with steps down to the back lawn, to the side was a gaunt old monkey tree, leading off from the yard were the coal houses and outside loo, plus a greenhouse in which I kept my 'animals' fish, frogs and small mammals.

Coal houses are a thing of the past now, but the house had no central heating, a great black range in the kitchen needed fuel all the time, and though fires were hardly lit in the other rooms, one fire had to be kept going in one of the reception rooms for the family. We must eventually have had gas installed because there were gas fires in the bedrooms.

About three-quarters up the garden, there was the third lawn, not exactly a lawn, it framed a very long herbaceous border, a riot of colour in summer, tiger lilies, nemesis, delphinums, lupins and dahlias. At the end was a long sand pit, on two sides surrounded by gladiolis and flag irises. This sandpit I would retire to on weekends, with my library books and some sweets and just read books from cover to cover,

(a terrible habit I still have, not being able to put a book down) trickling the smooth silky sand through my toes..

This part of the garden also had a shrubbery, and behind the shrubbery, the last path by the high brick wall had small trees with lots of little apples, bright red, not sure what they were, quinces maybe.

A child's paradise, though we moved on by the time I was twelve, the house now has probably ended split up and the garden has half a dozen houses on it, I would'nt like to go back and check. But that garden was very formative for me, and obviously developed a great love for flowers, wild creatures and strangely enough books set as it were in the industrial heartland of the Midlands.
Childhoods are strange things, our environment dictates the way we see the rest of the world, the humans, and yes I use such an abstract term, for all those people that drifted into and out of my life then.
Louisa went and married a Polish man, I was a bridesmaid at her wedding, all I can remember was the Catholic church she was married in, sugared sweets at the reception and the men dancing in that crouched manner, which I always thought of as Hungarian. Once when I had a small collie puppy we left it with Louisa to look after whilst we went on holiday. It was sick with distemper and must have had diarrhea quite badly. Coming back to collect it, I learnt my first swear word as Louisa dramatically exclaimed succinctly what it had done all over the place. The puppy died of course and I broke my heart over its death, grandfather got me an enormous St.Bernard dog to console me, but she had to go back to the kennels after a few weeks, being a kennel dog she had the same trouble in the house!

Springfield Lyons - Late Bronze Age causewayed enclosure

2011-05-13T11:13:00.000-07:00

Today we visited Springfield Lyons just up the road. Set in the centre of business and retail centres this late Bronze Age enclosure has something of a wow factor close up. From the road you can see the large banks (spoil heaps from the excavation) that surround an inner ditch broken by 6 causeways. So a 'causewayed enclosure' maybe, but it must not be forgotten that it was also used by early Saxons as a pagan cemetery and later as a settlement.

A description of this site must begin with its half wild aspect, today you approach through thickets of blackthorn and briar roses, the banks loom large covered with similar material. The central rounded area is grass eaten down to the root, rabbits must run amok, if their pellets are anything to go by. LS also glimpsed a fox, in excellent condition, his restaurant was well stocked!. The ditches had some water in them and reeds testified to their marshyness, but of course in these drought months we are experiencing the ditches are drying out.

It has been excavated in the past several times, and the ground is full of holes in which regenerating elm tries to take hold. The explanation given for the late Bronze Age occupation, (approximately 800 bc) is that it may have been a fortified stronghold for a local chief. Excavation has shown that there is a large central hut facing the gateway with an elaborate porch, which would probably have been his home. There was also a working area and it was here that two moulds for making swords were found at the terminals of one of the causeways, of a type called Ewart Park, but no metal elsewhere.

There was also evidence of Iron Age recognition of the site, a 'broken' sword was found in the centre of the circular area in a pit and further to the west of the pit a horse skull was found with an iron bit and two studs. Presumably a ritual burial of some kind.

The banks are in fact very large spoil heaps, the actual bank would have been inside the segmented ditches. There would have been a wooden type 'verandah, all the way round the bank, giving a roofed walking/working area. Looking at the interim report on the excavation, and an artistic representation shows a very neat settlement set in an idyllic pastoral countryside. There is also an early photograph of the fields before development took place and it descended into what we see today. The area had been ploughed flat over the centuries before the excavation, so what we see now is the excavated ditches.

The pagan Saxon cremation cemetery had the usual range of intricately worked Saxon brooches also metalwork, including a funny rounded hat and of course beads, twelve strings were found, and it is though that the beads hung between pairs of the brooches; the brooches of course clasping the dress at the shoulder. There were some 225 certain or possible burials,of which 103 were certain inhumation burials but the cremation pots had been buried very close to the surface, and the surface was to a degree ploughed out.
Given its close proximity to houses, there is a lot of rubbish around, some dumped in the ditch, and the site looks distinctly uncared for. Not sure of its scheduling as far as a monument goes, but it is in grave danger of being built over.

Just down the road, and starting from the Asda car park is a Neolithic cursus, excavated about 30 years ago, when this area of surburbian houses was being built, it followed the line of the river before you reach the mill at the Fox and Raven pub. Interesting in itself but not part of this blog. Now whether this earlier monument had anything to do with the settlement at Springfield Lyons is a matter of conjecture.

ref; The Bronze Age and Saxon Settlements at Springfield Lyons, Essex. An Interim Report by David G.Buckley and John D. Hedges.

Walking

2011-05-12T01:11:00.000-07:00

There is a sharp easterly wind this morning though the sun is shining. Walking around our area, exploring the little lanes that lead off from suburbia, the wild plants start to blend with the cultivated varieties. Red Valerian is the plant of the moment alongside dog roses that fill every hedge bank, the cow parsley lines the lanes making a funnel of whiteness, and of course elderflower is beginning to blossom, elderflower champagne to be made hopefully if I can find the recipe.

Yesterday I found a small allotment site, part of a field. Today I went to photograph the bridge (art decor) that straddles the water meadows and takes the heavy traffic over the river.

Yesterday whilst out shopping in Chelmsford, we began to notice the 'art deco' buildings that decorate the town. I wondered if they were in actual fact facades over Victorian houses, but there is a lot about, could be the 'Marconi Factory influence' in the town.

To be honest I do not like the style, even as a child the Odean and Gaumont cinemas decked out in gaunt pointy decoration made my soul shudder with the bleakness and barren stark whiteness, and 'ship' type rounded bits on buildings always looked ugly. We have Poirot to thank for introducing us to the art form of that 1920-1930s period, elegant yes but also soulless.

dog rose

wigwams and lupins

clear water reflecting the lily plants beneath, photoshopped slightly to lighten water!

the viaduct bridge

Resting and watering place for the horses

Why dog-rose? according to Grigson, it goes back to Gerard's Herbal, to distinguish wild from garden roses. By way of the medieval Latin 'Rosa Canina', it goes back to Pliny's 'cynorrodon', with the root of which a dog-bitten soldier of the Praetorian Guard cured himself of hydrophobia......

...................................................

2011-05-09T04:57:00.000-07:00

Its been a quiet week, not much to write about. The birds in the garden have young fledglings which need protection from the cats around here; the blackbird anxious tutting as a youngster lands on the ground can often be heard, starlings and sparrows fly food away for their young; and a bold young magpie, no tail as yet comes down to eat the soaked bread I put out two or three times a day.

We had visitors over the weekend, one of my partner's oldest friends, a saki merchant from Haiwai, and still in touch with Gary Snyder, one of my heroes, so that has probably shut me up! My mind roving over the plains of America and his poetry, but reading Roger Deakin's 'Wildwood', which I am at the moment, would send any mind wandering over the vast marvellous natural world we live in. He had made a visit to Kazakhstan to the apple forests, where the original wild apple came into being. Russia is a vast country, with smaller satellites in it, and when reading about it you realise how beautiful it must be in some places.

I had read the book about Chernobyl, an oral history of the disaster; some of it is terrible to think about but what also came out was the beautiful landscape and the self-sufficiency of the people who lived there. The old who went back to their houses to live out the rest of their lives in the place they loved best. The wild life that thrived and increased, living in the abandoned houses and villages. Nature always succeeds where man does'nt.

So what of these apple/fruit forests, and also walnut forests, of course they are disappearing because of human expansion. In the walnut forests people leave their valley homes taking all their livestock up to the mountain forest, and camp out in old dacha's maybe, or tents, taking with them their beautiful quilts, cushions and the household utilities to live out in the open for a couple of months.

Roger Deakin great favourite was green walnuts soaked in honey which he had for breakfast, along with yoghurt, bread, chai and fruit. It seems people ate well, though we would see their lives as poverty-stricken, but who on earth wants what we have in our western culture, noise, bustle, a great rushing around to 'economically' improve our wealth all the time, so ok we have some advantages in good health care but what have we lost along the way?

The original wild apple was called malus sieversii,and must have travelled by that old trackway called the 'silk road'. We have in England a great diversity of apples, but unfortunately we don't eat them, so they also wither away into extinction, and we dine on tasteless African apples instead, grown for the supermarkets
.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/8305211.stm

Two photos that caught the eye this week; the chair is an elegant 'nursing' chair I bought to celebrate my son's birth, the hat is Chinese, made out of paper, it provides shade for when we drink morning coffee outside. The heart a xmas present from my daughter, bought at Tom's gallery in Whitby.

The second photo is part of a screen, a pleasing triptych, of mother hen, proud cock, and a rose, underneath all are scattered little yellow chicks..

chick fleeing father's bad temper

Fairstead Church, Terling

2011-05-05T06:02:00.000-07:00

the entrance looking out to more yellow

that crop is as tall as me

Hens doing what they do best in an orchard scratching around

I have written about Fairstead church before, tucked away along a small country lane, this church, like so many is slowly dying over time. The graveyard was neglected, with patches of cowslips already turning to seed. We had come for a picnic lunch behind the church, and small bumble bees flew in and out of the masonry of the church, maybe they were masonry bees.
After lunch we took the public footpath at the side of the church, heading down into an oil rape seed field. This crop is everywhere, the countryside a blanket yellow with trailing woods and lanes breaking up the colour. It is dry, very dry, we haven't had rain for weeks, the ground in the fields have that parched cracked appearance, the land and crops are desperate for water. It has brought on the wild flowers, but they are soon over.
We met a man on the path, he will, when the crop is off, look for traces of the Roman villa that must be around here somewhere. The church has roman tile in its fabric of brick and flint. It must obviously be an age old settlement here, there is a large farm next to the church, which would probably be the manor for round here, the villa could even be underneath it.

Photos

2011-05-05T01:00:00.000-07:00

mock up blacksmith shop

similar

A miscellany of all the other photos I took on the Open Day at Sandford Mill. Chelmsford is of course the home of the Marconi works, the first discovery of the radio signal, and then all the technology that has led to our televisions, aeroplanes etc today. The town is very proud of him, but to wander around valves, transistors and crystal sets is not very interesting. In the large steel barn were two very large waggons, built around the end of the nineteenth century. There great iron wheels would have played havoc with the ground. The one thing you notice is how much energy must have been needed to pull the wagon, and how many people, and horses of course, would have been needed to run the farm.
The other thing I noted was the blacksmith mock-up, today the farrier comes to the horse, but I remember riding down to the blacksmith for my pony to be shod, the strange smell as the shoe was burnt on to the foot (it did'nt hurt) and the blacksmith with his apron on, holding the leg of a horse between his legs trying to control a temperamental beast.

This is a rather elegant wagon

Old tv and radiogram

Susan

2011-05-01T01:18:00.000-07:00

Susan is not a person but a boat. I suspect she was built at the beginning of the 20th century, a large, wide bellied uncompromising boat, ugly even, but built for the Chelmer and Blackwater Navigation river. A river that I've fallen in love with, mostly for its sleepy, curving round the fields in the countryside making a slow journey down to the estuary we had visited last week. This river is an extraordinary peaceful place, dark sluggish waters meandering by, swirling small different currents chasing each other - floating lily pads, ducks and waterbirds.

Back end of the boat

front end

But the river's character lies in the fact that it was a navigational water road taking goods to and fro from the coast up to Chelmsford. A work horse in more senses than one for it serviced the corn mills along its bank. As ponds, leats and bridges were built, each thing became beautiful in its own right as nature softened and claimed the sharp edges of the built environment. We 'industrialise' our countryside, though it may looks beautiful and wild, every inch is laid down in service for us humans - forests, woods, fields and rivers.

The boat resides at Sandford Mill, now an offshoot of Chelmsford Museum, 30 acres approximately (now derelict) belonging to an industrial time of the early 1950's, it now houses part of the Marconi collection, and that delight of all museums a miscellaneous bundle of Victoriana, bikes, waggons, blacksmith tools and much more kept hidden in a old steel barn.

Susan would have brought wood up from the coast into the centre of the town to the old warehouses that once stood along its banks. In a later semi-retired life, the boat would have been filled with rows of chairs, and the upstanding citizens of Chelmsford would be drawn up the river by a barge horse as in the photograph at the top of this blog, perhaps to picnic somewhere, or to meet and have an annual ceremony at one of the bridges.

She was restored a couple of years ago, had her bottom scraped of worms and gribbles. This fascinated me at the time when I read it, did'nt quite believe it but Deakin in his book Wildwood also talks of this phenomena and to quote him from the chapter on Driftwood...

"much of the sediment in the estuaries of great rivers is actually the remains of wood. Deconstructed by gribbles and shipworms, it is a major source of food for marine animals and plants. Tuna and other fish regularly congregate round floating driftwood and logwood at sea...to go on "there are several theories to explain this. There may be the way cattle use rubbing posts, to remove external parasites. But it is likely that a food web grows up with small fish following the driftwood"

The boat wasn't the centre of the 'Open Day' yesterday, it lay in the water slightly forlorn and neglected before the great rush of the weir as the river tumbled down round the buildings, a small island of green, with a sleeping swan on the nest nestled close to the bank, another swan patrolled the calmer pool.

The female swan curled up asleep on the nest