Sunday - and Rudston

 Things that keep me occupied.  Firstly, it is spinning, this rather pretty colour arrived this week, 'denim' merino..........................  

It spins up much darker, but is fairly soft.  Something I finished about a month ago was a pattern you knitted down in a circular fashion, think this is more Scandinavian style, anyway I used a Lopi yarn, which is Icelandic,  The wool is rather scratchy, but first time effort was not too bad.

My contribution to 'slow living' ;) which reminds me that there is an organisation planning our walking routes all over Britain - Slow Ways.  Always there is a fight against the law of 'trespass', and given some people's use of the countryside a great deal of education on how to treat place is needed.

I shall get back to my  love of old barrows, just read a Rowan William article on death, but for now will quote Canon Greenwell as he talks about the Rudston monument, which is a helluva stone situated in a church yard in the Wolds of Yorkshire. It stands like a beacon on its hill, slightly shrunken by the Christian upstart of a church, but once it reigned superior towering above the ground below which had four cursuses in all directions and the aptly named Gypsey Race running through. I have rather fallen in love with Greenwell, a dedication to old stones and past history and the written word, his dogged devotion to the pagan past needs some explaining.

"The position which the barrows occupy is a very striking one, and must always have been so.  The men who raised these funeral mounds looked on the one side over the swelling upland of the wold, bleak, grey, and treeless, their eye taking in on many a distant ridge the burial places of chiefs of other, though perhaps kindred, tribes: whilst upon an outcrop of rock, lifting itself out of the valley just beneath them, rose the lofty monolith which now stands in Rudstone churchyard....There it stood, telling them perchance that at its base was laid a mightier warrior than him who were they entombing on the height above; or it may have spoken to them as a symbol of belief, according to which their lives were regulated, and marked the place upon which it stood as holy ground. If they looked to the South there was nothing but a dreary tract of marsh-land, which seemed almost interminable, wherin however, amidst the coarse vegetation and brushwood, the deer and the wild swine had their haunt, and where the beaver made a habitation almost equal in point of construction to those they had themselves the skill to form.  Beyond was the sea, as yet enlivened by no sail."

Forgive him his Victorian interpretation, female equality is yet to be espied on the horizon but as Ann Woodward from 'British Barrows' I have taken this quote from, says of him he was describing what he saw at the time.

Rudston Monolith

Still dominating

https://northstoke.blogspot.com/2017/02/tuesday-or-valentines-day.html