A wander. 22nd June 2025

 

There is a Winter Solstice at Stoney Littleton, when the sun shines down the central aisle of the chamber.  Luckily this Neolithic phenomena is not well known  and Stoney Littleton remains a peaceful place.  Here below is someone capturing the moment.  I do not follow the practice of geomancy by the way.  But the layering of theories in this century reaches ever new heights and it is the curious minds of so many to find explanations for everything.  Along the way of course dubious theories arise.

My relationship with this barrow is because of the history that is wrapped in its very stones.  You will see at the entrance a fossilised ammonite stone, already giving the people who raised this barrow a name.  But where did it come from?

Well ammonites are found in the quarries around Keynsham not too far from Stoney Littleton. The name Keynsham is founded on the name of Saint Kayne who apparently lived in a forest bedeviled by snakes and she had turned these snakes into stones.  The same legend applies to Whitby Abbey as well, as Saint Hilde also turned the snakes into stone and threw them over the cliff.  A story made up for the fossilised ammonite stones.

But it was the walk down a small green lane that always started off the adventure to the barrow.  Moss happily leading the way, you would come to a point in the river and a little bridge over it opposite a cottage.  A walk up the hill and through a very, very stony patch of wildflowers, the red poppies dominant. Up to the stile, where I would struggle to lift Moss over and into the little fenced off area of the compound, what the camera or drone of the film doesn't show is the wild flowers that flower on top of the mound in this barren desert of farmland.  The sweet smelling Ladies Bedstraw covering the mound.

A fuller description. Or when I said "sod painting the utility room' and I first met Littlestone or Paul.

"Geomancy, a compound of Greek roots denoting "earth divination", was originally used to mean methods of divination that interpret geographic features, markings on the ground, or the patterns formed by soil, rocks, or sand. Its definition has expanded over time (along with the recognized definition of the suffix -mancy), to include any spiritual, metaphysical, or pseudoscientific practice that is related to the Earth. In recent times the term has been applied to a wide range of other occult and fringe activities, including Earth mysteries and the introduction of ley lines and Bau-Biologie "

The Elephant in the room

21st June 2025

 This really is miscellaneous;  Sweet cheese.  Or to be more precise Wensleydale Cranberry Cheese, which for some reason I have fallen in love with.  It is made at the cheese factory in Hayes, in North Yorkshire.  So it is the latest love in my life.

We have two cheese shops in Tod, run by the same family, one in the market and the other down town (don't start singing Petulia Clarke's Down Town).  The other cheese I picked up at the market was organic brie (a decent brie at last) manufactured up in the hills between Hebden Bridge and Todmorden.  It is called Pextenement Farm, a very strange name you can find it here.

We are a cheese family, raclette cheese melted onto new potatoes with pickles is a favourite, alongside fondue, all very Swiss.  When you are nine tenths vegetarian cheese is a must for protein.

The weekend is quiet, Karen and Andrew are off to Sheffield to watch documentaries at the Docfest.  Another event happening up North, that you will not hear much about.  Then Lillie back on Sunday.

I let the Solstice pass yesterday without comment, though I did wonder about where people were celebrating it.  Stonehenge of course with all the ramadazzle of neodruids playing their part in welcoming the longest day of summer.  And what a fine dry summer it has been up to now.

The video from Stonehenge of the actual time yesterday when people gathered to watch the sun come up through the stones, is not very good.  English Heritage do apologise for the camera work but if you start at about 12.44 inside the video you will see a gentle picture of  people just being with stones, nature and other people such a change from war talk!

Where would I have been had I the choice? Maybe Stanton Drew Stone circles or Stoney Littleton long barrow, but my heart is there for the moment anyway.

Well a little introduction Stanton Drew for it has plenty of its own folklore, firstly a talk on Youtube by Megalithomania and then a couple of blogs.

Stanton Drew and Folklore

Druidical Bath

Stanton Drew stone circles.   Wiki entry. By Rodw - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, 

  Stoney Littleton Long barrow. Wiki entry -  Photograph by Mike Peel (www.mikepeel.net).

temporary break

 I don't want to blog today, so these two photos will suffice.  Tired bees need a little pick me up now and then.  Soaked paper with water and sugar.

Lucy she had a lovely blue merle coat , which occasionally got cut.  She loved the girl who clipped her, or at least her car when Lucy got picked up, the footwell was piled high with snacking rubbish, a good place to rummage.

16th June 2025

 We have to wait for history to turn the next page.  Be thankful that amidst the horror of war people stand up for the right choice.  So for one day people in America showed what they felt and I think it worked.  So breath a sigh of relief for a moment before the next moment comes flying in.  And of course it already has in the exchange of rockets between Israel an Iran.

Trump may have to learn that people don't worship  would be kings, authoritarianism doesn't work. and as for king of all you see, that was a childhood game before we learnt how to live with others.  His humiliation (I am almost feeling sorry for him for goodness sake) is there for all the world to see, No wonder he fell asleep.

Something different. A short walk to the market down Pollination path.   

People moan about Ladies Mantle for spreading itself everywhere.
How can you? it is so beautiful.

14th June 2025 - Tod

A walk down to Morrisons via the canal. I have occasionally written of the plants and vegetables growing in my town of Todmorden, it is has been given the name of 'Incredible Edible'.  At the moment it is all looking beautiful, so on my hunting out of cat food for a very picky cat I took this half mile walk.

We seem to have missed the storms, Andrew went out early to walk up to Stoodley Pike, a very long uphill walk and just missed the few drops of rain that fell on the way back. 

Tod still tries to keep the somewhat old fashioned market both inside market and outside one and we do have vegetable boxes from the larger area of Yorkshire.  We lost internet yesterday it was a weird experience not being able to read my mail this morning.  But all is fine now, a switch off and then switch on and lo and behold - the world came into focus again.

 

13th Friday - yikes!

 Well the good news.  Singing cicadas will be reintroduced to the New Forest over the next few years. They are French! So they will have to learn the English songs.  But it is so heartwarming that people care and that these eleven little precious insects hold the key to once more cicadas singing in the New Forest again.  I am sure Heywood Sumner of who I just recently wrote about would be pleased to hear that.

Bad news.  The Israel state cannot get enough of war and so have started on Iran, once known as Persia.  A romantic name to fall in love with.  My ex-sister-in law once brought back to Switzerland Persian rugs.  Ours was a rich deep patterned brown, but my old labrador chewed a hole in it.  Has no one realised that once you kill in war, hate will proliferate and then there is a never ending war of hatred.

Then there is Lucy, who had no concept of war, reading the doggy runes of this stone.  Who has passed this way on their dog walk, who has peed on the stone, a lifetime away for me but still a comfort for that which is normal in life.

Governor Newsome

 Newsome's Full Speech: The Californian Governor speaking up against Trump.

11th June 2025 - Heywood Sumner

 Well sparked once more by a fellow blogger Debby made me remember a favourite artist.  The trigger was bee skeps and how I had written about them, I had a picture of a painting of skeps done by Heywood Sumner, friend of William Morris.  I loved the light paint wash Sumner did of the New Forest with its trees.  His black and white archaeological drawings as well.  Also, having a bit of a fight with myself about acquiring another print.  This time of Yorkshire countryside, but there is just  around the corner - the owner, he might even be the artist himself, he tried to lure me in a few weeks back but I was steadfast and refused - but his work is good.  His gallery is here.  So maybe.....

Anyway I have collected the blogs I wrote at the time when I came across his work in a library book and a few of his paintings for your.  Enjoy, pleasant England at its best, sadly he could not draw horses though.

 

And of course the bee skeps that started this train of thought.

In the blog I found this picture is a lovely poem of despair by by R.S. Thomas,  Also, one of my favourite writers, Richard Jeffries on 'Humble bees'

Funnily enough in contrast to my last blog, which showed the hard side of agriculture in England, the artwork of this time about the countryside was fairly soft and romantised.

Earlier blog

10th June - Hartley

Yesterday I was shopping in Lidl and came across these lovely white spring onions.  There was about six boxes of them.  They glowed with freshness .

They reminded me of a photograph in an old book of mine,  Dorothy Hartley - The Countryman's England, published 1935 and full of fascinating photos of old England between the two wars of course.  Ellen had said how she had imagined England and I can see how the 'pretty' picture of farming, cottages and people, of this country must still be held in people's hearts.  Well we all know what happened to those cottages, nice chunk of expensive property now, though they still might have roses round the door.  But Helen Allingham in the Victorian era would probably have turned in her grave as she wandered around painting bucolic scenes of cottage gardens.

So here is a few of the photos, slightly washed out.  That is not the fault of my camera but of pictures taken years ago.

10th June 2025

 I found a rather bad video at the end of my photos yesterday.  It is of the Asian Candelabra Primula from Jack's Garden.  A plant I am in love with.  A lot of the video has been trimmed because of the wobbliness.  I had forgotten my second trip down into the quarry by myself.  Take your phone was the command issued and off I went happily to video.  It was only at the end of my walk and meeting the family who had come to find me that I had an embarrassing collapse as I reached the very last step, luckily Andrew caught me, and Nicky and I sat in the top garden whilst I recovered.  But even though the video is bad, played loud I can listen to the birds and the wind in the trees.  I am determined to come to an amicable arrangement with my camera as to functioning as a 'seeing eye'.  It make take quite awhile though!

Primula Japonica: Taken From The English Flower Garden written by W.Robinson - 1895.

"One of the handsomest of primroses, and now too common to need description.  It is a good perennial and is not in the least tender.  It is a first rate border plant and in moist shady spots with deep loam it grows as vigorously  as a cabbage, throwing up flower stems of 2 feet or more.  And unfolding tier after tier of its beautiful crimson blossoms for several weeks in succession.  It is supposed to be rabbit proof.......the seed should not be sown in the heat and the seed will remain dormant for awhile unless it is sown immediately after the seed has been taken from the plant.  .....one must also be careful to prevent  or keep down the growth of Moss or Liverwort  in the seed pan" 

I don't expect people to really look at the video but it is there for me for one of those precious memories that we collect through out life. ;)

Words

The Wellow brook at Stoney Littleton

Yesterday I went for a talk at the Folklore Centre, it was about Antiquarian Psychogeography  the application of the mind, also emotional response, as to what you see around you.  Not quite an 'ology' but near.  As an aside I have done two 'ologies' - sociology and archaeology.  So in theory I can group people socially into their class or background or in the case of archaeology, address the history of man through the layered pancake we call history.  So be it.

But I always question words as you well know if you read my blog at all.  And rather than the pretentious word 'psycho' joined on to geography I prefer to use the term 'sense of place'.  It is the way when out walking in an urban setting or out in the open country I feel the world around me.  You will see below that I have tackled my responses to my environment, the phenomenology of things which somehow seems nearer to what sense of place means.

Funnily enough it was Andrew the other day, someone who strides ahead purposefully on his walk without taking a blind bit of notice where he is walking through (yes I nag him to see), said out of nowhere,  yes since I have got that app 'Merlin' I listen to the birds and now need to name them. ;)

Two words have trickled into my mind as I think - Anima Mundi, the World's Soul is perhaps the doctrine that sits behind all this, the everlasting strain of the human minds that seeks to explain the world and our thinking in it.

John Billingsley the lecturer had to turn skillfully on his subject because psychogeography is related to urban understanding and only recently to landscape depiction, so we would find psychography + megalithic as an outlier.

So one of the 'intellectual' (excuse my sarcastic italics) Will Self did it in his London walkabouts.  And a very much more genuine person in the form of 'The Wandering Turnip' did it in his analysis of towns and the breakdown of the closure of shops in the High street.

I of course read my sense of space through the medium of the prehistoric stones and Neolithic long barrows I have visited, Wayland Smithy's barrow lying in peace in the middle of the countryside, or Stoney Littleton Barrow, time and time again.  Places visited by those who are  enthusiastic over the old stones and the sense of times gone by.  And maybe, somewhat sort of magic that radiates from the stone, maybe of course it is just radon!

North Stoke: Phenomenology

North Stoke: Tuesday and retrospective words

North Stoke: This and that 

6th June 2025 - Newcastle

 

rabbits in Newcastle

The day I visited Newcastle;  Flicking through my photos with nothing much to do, I came across an old file, and there was absolute proof that I had seen rabbits in Newcastle.  They lived on those gardened islands surrounded by moving traffic.  I had wondered at the time how they managed to get off the traffic islands but I suppose at night when it was all quiet.

I do not like towns, they frighten me somewhat, there is this ugliness in the form of buildings everywhere with no shape or pattern.  We had gone to Newcastle to see the university for Tom, one of three.  I quite liked it but Tom was to move down to London.

Here I suffered an embarrassing moment much to the amusement of my companions, I tripped over in front of the entrance of the university and truly fell flat on my face, so I well remember Newcastle for both humiliation and rabbits.  Also the last time I have been to Ikea, we bought the table I am typing on at the moment and on the way back from a distance The Angel of the North was spied.  This great rusty figure is somewhat symbolic of man's dominance over the landscape, so thereby scores nowt in my estimation. 

Two towns I would think of being symmetrical in their appearance, Bath which is of course a city and Whitby with all its cottages.  Both have grown out of a pattern of social needs.  Whitby with its fisherman's cottages and Bath with its Georgian exteriors.

3rd June 2025 - Heartjumping

 I have been following a knitting video on Youtube - it.is.a.sarah.  She is so upbeat and has this wonderful saying 'heartjumping moment' A moment of happiness, a moment of recognition? I don't know but she is from the Nederlands and is so enthusiastic about her knitting that it is a pleasure to watch her.

So do you wake up on a high in the morning? looking forward to a new day.  Sometimes the miseries of the world overtake our natural optimism, we fall into the trap of the blackness that is happening around us.  Wars continue unceasingly, as does cruelty.  Yet we are helpless to do anything.  We must recognise the blackness around but also take pleasure in the good.  So on a high this morning I am listening to George Ezra and Pretty Shining People.

Wandering over the blogs, Steve Reed's Shadow and Light brings forth a small insect inspecting a most beautiful rose and Arctic Fox has been studying fungi, which makes me look up the fungi foraging explorations Paul and I used to go on in Essex, finding the weird and wonderful and once going round with an expert and finding a favourite of mine the Amethyst Deceiver, a pale lavender but turning bluer as time goes on.  A couple of blogs on the subject.

The Delicate and Vulnerable World of the Mushroom

Fungi Hunting

Decay in Autumn

But as Gary Snyder says........

Don't ever eat Boletus

If the tube-mouths they are red

Stay away from the amanitas

Or brother you are dead.

A far-flung friendly clan,
   For food, for fun, for poison
        They are a help to man.

1st June 2025

 Wild Folk - Tales from the Stones

I once blew a blast into the Blowing Stone, which rolled a hollow wave of sepulchral sound into the hills. The megalith builders, taking their lesson from the conch-shells of the Eastern Mediterranean, blew into this very stone to summon the gods or, more probably, the goddess of the high places. Another two miles and there is the goddess herself or rather, the celtic descendant of the goddess, stretched in white and in flight across the bald brow of Uffington Hill. The downs lift to 800 feet and by their very godliness of combe and crescent, of jutting ness and plunging spur, ordain the tie beam of White Horse Hill to be one more of the holy places of the chalk. So it was on Windover Hill.... and so it is here where the Celtic town of Uffington is flanked by the galloping horse and a Neolithic workshop on the one side, and the chambered long barrow of Wayland's Smithy with its grove of beeches on the other........

H.J.Massingham - English Downland

Owning the stones again.  There is one magical place in Wiltshire, on the dry chalk land a Neolithic long barrow that has been restored in the 20th century but has the peace and beauty so beloved of our English countryside.

 

 I had Massingham's book, Prophecy of Famine which he wrote with Edward Hyam.  The famine never happened though he worked out the amount of food that each family should eat, measuring prisoner's diets and ours as well.  He lived through the two world wars, so perhaps his book had some significance.

But these words are for Wayland's Smithy a place of stories .

Wayland, should you ride your horse past will shoe it if you leave a coin.   

Moss hoping that my meditation will end and the ball thrown again

A sad occasion.  The scattering of 'Treaclechops' ashes.

I have just found this link on Bensozia's blog (thank you) and will record it here for it gives a picture of Orkney, viewed by Londoner's of course.  Here is the link.  The photos are fabulous. There is talk by Andrew of visiting Orkney next year  and camping there.  I feel rather sad about the fact that these Scottish Isles have become awash with tourists but that is the way of life I suppose.

31st May 2025

I wasn't going to say anything today but then I thought a little praise for my member of parliament - Labour;  Josh Fenton-Glynn for the work he is doing in parliament.  Like many who feel angry and sad the Palestinians are always there in my mind and when will it all end.  So it gives me comfort that somehow the workings of parliament are addressing this terrible happening.  

josh.fentonglynn.mp@parliament.uk	May 29, 2025, 3:32 PM (2 days ago)
to me

Dear Thelma Wilcox, 

I wanted to update those of you who have previously written to me on Gaza as to the action I have been taking to escalate your concerns on this.  

Since being elected, this has been one of the issues that has come into my inbox most frequently, and I have spoken in Parliament often to raise the dire situation in Gaza.  

Just this week I spoke to once again raise the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and call for the escalation of diplomatic measures against the Israeli government, which you can watch here.

I am also writing to Hamish Falconer, Minister for the Middle East, to echo this; asking that the Government use all diplomatic efforts available to bring peace to the region.  

I was also among 75 Labour MPs and peers to write to the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary to call for the recognition of Palestinian statehood, and to emphasise the need for greater efforts to bring about a peaceful resolution to the conflict.  

The letter, attached, calls for the Government to use the UN Conference on the Two-State Solution next month as an opportunity to work with France to the recognition of Palestine as a state, as a step towards peace. 

Over recent months, I have repeatedly raised the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and called for more aid to reach those who need it there. I have also continually raised the dire medical situation, and the urgency with which we need to protect medical facilities and staff, and ensure the supplies needed reach them.  

I will continue to call for a permanent ceasefire, the release of all hostages, and a two state solution with a viable Palestinian state alongside a safe and secure Israel.  

Kind regards, 

Josh

Josh Fenton-Glynn (he/him)
Member of Parliament for Calder Valley
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Also seen yesterday.  I hope that the renewed entry of aid will go towards feeding some of the people in Palestine.  This is such a delicate matter, I have no side to uphold only the need for the people of Palestine to be treated with some respect.

How Israeli settlers profit from stolen Palestinian land – video | Palestinian territories | The Guardian