13th and a Friday - be careful

But now 'tis Winter, child,

And bitter north winds blow,

The ways are wet and wild,

The land is laid in snow.

Taken from Robert Bridges - The Idle Flowers

Almost getting lazy, though each day I do virtual jigsaws and Wordle of course.  I have listened to Peter May' s 'Lewis' trilogy as I spin.  Must not listen to any more of his books, because I know the way his plotlines work.

It's wilderness charm of bleak crofts and Machair grass is beginning to wear off and the last book in the trilogy was a rather bleak look at the romantic life of the protagonist which got rather boring.  Sometimes one wonders whether the author's personal narrative wandered into the fiction.

 

The Ruralists 1976ish

I see I have 'The Brotherhood of Ruralists' noted for a blog.  I have written here of them some years ago.  They lived and worked in Wellow, well I can't think they all lived in the old redundant Station House.  But Wellow is a pretty village, buried somewhat in the countryside a few miles outside of Bath.

I think my question at the time was why did they not paint the marvellous Neolithic long barrow called Stoney Littleton, not the outside, for that is just a rather  lump on the surface but inside with its beautiful stones, some impregnated with fossils.  Outside of course the great fossil at the entrance.  What did those fossils signify I wonder?

I welcomed the wild flowers that grew on this grassy barrow, marooned amongst fields of 'weedless' wheat, and the tranquility of the open countryside down an old farm track that had once linked two villages together.

Odd fragments of history captured everywhere, in the village an old manor house and newish church, outside the village a prehistoric tomb, faced on the other side of the valley by a Roman villa, each noted in its own right.

Garden paintings  Finding the modern British garden in interwar paintings.