North Stoke

Thursday, January 28, 2010

The Wild Horses of Newbury

This is for Sybil and Roy, who seem to think that I might have been swallowed up by the vast metropolis of Chelmsford and not written anything on my blog of note. ;) Well I'm busy monitoring landscapes elsewhere at the moment, Ireland having undergone dramatic changes via the 'Celtic tiger' era, is still hell bent on destroying its landscapes by the building of motorways.
The motorwaythat goes under Tara through the Skryne valley is almost finished, there is now a threatened Slane bypass cutting close to the edge of one of the most famous megalithic sites - Newgrange. And to add to all that a proposed port at Bremore, again a fragile environmental habitat with important archaeological remains.
But this video I noted on a forum, is about the famous protest at the Newbury bypass road several years ago. Trees had to be cut and protestors, as they did at Solsbury Hill, Bath bypass road took to the trees. As can be seen from the video, the force of the state was employed in great numbers, police and security men stand in a straggly line protecting the men wielding the chain saws. Then on to the scene trot two black horses, seemingly unafraid they trot down the line of the security men, go up to the tree being cut, then trot up to the two police horses standing there and lash out. Very rarely do you see horses being as brave as these pair, it is a surprise and rather poignant...

http://spiritbeartribe.ning.com/video/the-wild-horses-of-newbury

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Church list

Monday, January 18, 2010

Snow melt

A brief interlude of warmer weather, snow disappears down in this part of Essex but the bottom fields by the rivers are flooding, creating moody brown/green landscapes.
The water tumbles and ripples gently in the river channel, leaching out with slow grace over the fields as it drowns the grass, was this how the first water meadows came into being?

This photo is taken through the blue tinged windscreen of the car, I love how the old trees are left and respected in the landscape, and here we see new hedges planted, and a middle line of trees that will eventually, given time, replace the graceful old 'tree ent' shaped by the prevailing wind.

Friday, January 8, 2010

Accra - Ghana

Tired of snow I started to sort the hundreds of photos on my external hard drive for putting on Flickr, they are the ones taken by my son Mark and his friend Ephraim. They are mostly taken in Accra, Ghana, and show a different way of life but what suddenly struck me was the colours - garish maybe - though I expect in the hot African sun, they become muted. The angular buildings, the general rubbish in the street tells the tale, a sad reminder of how far the country as a whole needs to move on.... Politically there are many tales to tell!

Two yellows, the car's other half is white

Elegant colours amid the rubble of a fallen wall

Ephraim

Mark consuming something, the African heat was'nt very good for his diabetes.

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Snow Scenes

Well we have all woken up to it by now acres of snow, beautiful at the moment, but causing chaos and confusion everywhere. The Guardian is full of gloomy news that we will probably have this weather for a fortnight, maybe even longer; do we have enough gas? Mandelson is not saying. Children are playing on the green with their sledges - no school today.
This morning when we went to get some supplies from the supermarket the first thing I saw was a dog happily pulling a sledge with a child on it to school, but coming back the children were also returning to spend the day at home. Upon the little artifical mound that is the only thing representing a hill round here, the children are sledging, and a large tabby cat joined in the fun, scampering up and down, till he decided that the snow was too much for him and disappeared into the hedge. It's funny how children and animals love the snow, whilst all around in the news is despair and gloom, poor people stranded in cars overnight in Hampshire

January 10th 2009; Which looks like a very similar picture for the time of the year!

Sunday, January 3, 2010

Japanese dyes

A few months ago these boxes of dyes were fetched down in the studio and I photographed them meaning to identify what was what, a difficult job considering it is all in Japanese. It seems puzzling to me that such a lot are brown but that could be due to age. The english equivalent of plant material would retain some colour, and dried material is not much good for dyeing with anyway, so in that respect these samples show the wide range of material used, their viability has probably been lost. Jill Goodwin's book of dyeing is perhaps still the best you can find in the way of dye books in this country, and it would be interesting to do the same for these Japanese dyes.

This photo is self explanatory, the poor old moths that cocoon their young in silk, only for the silkworm breeder to come along suffocate the larvae inside the cocoon and take the silk. The central silk is called a 'hankerchief' from which you can unwind the silk for spinning.

The wide variety of plants, insects and bark for dyeing

Some familars here, cochineal, the red beetle which you grind to make a lovely corally red, though of course all dyeing is dependent on the material dyed. The three top Al/A2/A3 are indigo plants (indoferas range)

Similar

Mineral dyes used for paints; though that tamamushi looks like an exotic beetle, and apparently pearls are also ground down for painting with.

minerals

Notes on minerals;

Haku means foil or gilt, so Kin (gold) Gin (silver);
Gofun = oyster shells. Ikkyu means best quality. Moriage gofun means gofun used for 'raised' white paint - eg petals. The use of gofun is unique to Japan and is found in both paintings and prints, In China and Korea lead white was used.
Karuishi = pumice stone
Matsu yani = pine resin
Konjo = prussian blue - ultramarine?
Hakkin = platinimum
Arabia goum = must be arabic gum (used in potpourri)
Chan = resin?
Mitsuda/mitsuba = bonewort?
Myoban = alum
A1 = indigo
odoko = copper pyrites, chalcopyrites
rokusho = verdigris?
saikuchi = metal or resin again?
Bauryoku?
Shika Nikawa = nikawa is glue
Shingyu kawa
Shinju = pearl
Tetsu fun = metal?
Tam

Links; with thanks to Printmaterial - A history of Sashiko in Japan

http://www.sashiko.org.uk/tpl/pdf/Sashiko%20Textiles.pdf

The York exhibition of Sashiko, ended 03/1/2010
http://www.yorkartgallery.org.uk/Page/ViewNewsArticle.aspx?ArticleId=24

Promise of the New Year

Yesterday we went out to look for logs, past Boreham and stopped off at the small garden centre at the corner with the blacksmith's workshop and the pony standing rather cold in the field. A wooden shed in the car park was filled with vegetables and fruit,honey, flour, apple juice, etc. Local produce included great sticks of sprouts, parsnips, knobbly carrots, celeriac, leeks of uneven size, local apples, purple sprouting broccoli, half a dozen different sacks of potatoes and even chestnuts. It was a cornucopia of fresh vegetables, as I had been bemoaning the fact that very morning about no greengrocers in Chelmsford it was a pleasant surprise. The man who was serving in this very cold place was for me a local hero... Doubt if he will get rich, but hopefully people will buy his stuff.

The new year has began, cold and snowy with low temperatures, further along the lane heavy farm machinery had turned the surface to a muddy river as they brought in the sugar beet harvest, the field compacted into drifts of water. Thoughts turn to gardening and raising new seed, yellow tomatoes come to mind, mixed saladini lettuces, runner and french beans, their shoots 's pushing up through the soil as the first leaf springs forth from the dark shiny bean. Courgettes their large tough leaf scratches the hand as you pick the fruit, yellow flowers almost always heralding a fruit.

Rosemary's bitter scent as you crush it, feathery purple fennel a perfect foil for the dark red rose and to nibble at for the aniseed taste, and lavender's greyness offset by sky blue flowers.

Mints, apple mint with its soft grey-green leaf, spearmint less spectacular and the dark mints that smell of perfume. There are scented geraniums as well, the flower is not so elegant but their leaves smell sweet.

Yesterday's Guardian magazine featured a garden full of tall spiky exotics, and for a while the thought appealed but it has always seemed a waste of good growing space to fill it with coloured grasses and spiky plants from New Zealand.

The morning has dawned bright and very cold with a clear moon still visible, the birds come to the garden for food, the three collared doves and starlings in the back, and on the green, sparrows and a solitary black and white wagtail, the berries in the hedge have all but disappeared having been stripped by fieldfares. Summer is a long way off at the moment, -17 degrees in a part of Scotland, and the seagulls wheeling round in the sky are ravenously hungry in this bright cold weather.

Sunday, December 27, 2009

Ulting Church

The South Side

North Side

Still reading the book A Discovery of Old Essex by Richard Pusey, I came across a church, fairly nearby, we had'nt visited. So we decided to go today, the weather was cold, but fortunately, the Cat pub is'nt too far from our point of destination.
We got to the village no church in sight, though it said on the OS that the church was by itself on the banks of the Chelmer river, after asking someone we turned and went down a muddy track, and there in the distance the most pretty little church stood, my photos don't do it justice, because I had to photograph into the sun, but we shall go back in summer, perhaps for a picnic.
The church literature says there has been a church on this site since 1150 AD, but it must go back into Saxon times as the village was called Ultingham in the Domesday book. Pusey reckons that Chelmer river could have been called Ult, which would take it back far in time, but another historian thinks that Ult maybe another name for the River Ter which joins the Chelmer half a mile away.
The materials for the stone are many, and the church underwent a restoration in the 19th century but the north wall of the church represents the oldest part of the church, and there you will see flint, coursed by thin tiles (maybe Roman) and courses of the famous black pudding stone. In the literature the stone is described thus..

The dark brown pebbly stones are a natural rock, a conglomerate known as "Puddingstone". In pagan times this was revered as 'living rock' and is often found in old churches in Essex. The brown muddy looking stones higher up the wall are a soft rock known as 'septaria' which is found in London Clay'...

The Chelmer

The Cats pub, rather quiet on this Sunday

The church sits in solitary splendour a few feet from the river, the land rising slightly from the river, and back up the trackway, the rise is quite sharp to the village.....

Solving mysteries; what does it signify a Norman church by a river can this site be pushed back earlier and how much earlier?, the latest dates on the fabric of the church go back to 1066 according to Seax, not many finds in the area just cropmarks of ditches and tracks. But studying the map and a slight picture starts to emerge, this little church has no allegiance with the village of Ulting, no trackways across the field, but if you follow the trackway from the entrance, a slightly different picture emerges. The trackway would have gone past Fieldend farm and it is here to the north of the farm that... Cropmarks of rectilinear enclosures, square enclosure, linear features - field boundaries, pits and rectilinear features appear... and given that following this road north it will eventually arrives at the A12 Roman road, perhaps there is a much earlier prehistoric trackway running through the landscape.

There is a triangle of rivers meeting here within a few miles of each other, the Ter, the Blackwater and the Chelmer, making it a good navigational route through the centuries and of course the Blackwater goes down to the sea, and it is probable that the 'Septaria' or London Clay would have been brought from Bradwell on Sea.

Saturday, December 26, 2009

The Dengie Marsh at St.Peter on the Wall

The Saxon chapel at Bradwell on Sea is a favourite, I suspect partly also because of its unique situation set on the marshes, it is a solitary space, not wild as the land is farmed almost to the chapel itself. But reading a book today about old Essex, I came across another description of this piece of land, written by Rider Haggard who quite obviously took a dislike to the bleakness he found here.....

"The view, looking over the Dengie Flats and St.Peter's Sands from the summit of the earthen bank which keeps out the sea, was very desolate and strange. Behind us lay a vast drear expanse of land won from the ocean in days bygone, bordered on the one side by the Blackwater and on the other by the Crouch River, and saved, none to well, from the mastery of the waves by the sloping earthen bank on which we stood. In front, thousands of acres of grey mud where grew dull, unwholesome looking grasses. Far, far away on this waste two tiny moving specks, men engaged in seeking for samphire or some other treasure of the ooze mud. Then, the thin, white lip of the sea, and beyond its sapphire edge in the half-distance, the gaunt skeleton of a long-wrecked ship. To the north, on the horizon, a line of trees; to the west, over the great plain, where stood one or two lonely farms, another line of trees. On the distant deep, some sails, and in the middle marsh, a barge gliding up a hidden creek, as though she moved across the solid land. Then, spread like a golden garment over the vast expanses of earth and ocean, the flood of sunshine, and in our ears the rush of the north-west gale and the thrilling songs of larks hanging high above the yellow, salt-soaked fields. Such was Dengie Marsh as i saw it in June 1901. But what must it be like when buried beneath the snows of winter, or when the howling easterly winds of spring sweep across its spaces, and the combers of the North Sea sometimes reach and batter their frail embankment? Then indeed, I should not care to be the tenant of one of those solitary steads." Rural England Rider Haggard

Boxing Day

Boxing day, and the weather is cloudy with the sun breaking out now and then. Christmas day over, every one talked to over the phone, snow still up in Yorkshire a foot deep, but the birds are happy with the warmer temperatures down here. The starlings are talking to themselves in the maple branches, and the house sparrows come and raid the seeds in the bird holders. The ring dove feeds at the seed scattered on the ground and cats make unwelcome excursions into the garden, though to be honest they finished off the bits and pieces of the partridges we had yesterday. A first, and not sure that it will be a repeatable exercise, they have a strong taste these birds though somewhat ameriolated by a red wine sauce.

We see so many pheasants, etc around on our forays into the countryside that it seemed only right to eat them or their equivalent for christmas!

A great log fire for the last two nights, with the flames licking round the logs, hissing with the gas escaping, fire is such a comforting sight, with candles burning on the mantlepiece and the ivy leaves caught in the glow, their dark berries framed against the grey of the print of Stukeley's Avebury that greets you as you enter the room. My old 'grandfather' windsor chair was brought down from my study to sit in front of the fire; its elegant turned legs and back with the initials carved into the centre WHB, reminds me of that person who must be long dead, maybe he had the chair carved so that he could sit in front of a fire and contemplate the world through the flames consuming the logs, perhaps his house/cottage was decorated with holly and ivy at christmas, all I know of the history of the chair is that I bought iit in Calne over 30 years ago so perhaps it belonged to a farm there.

My love has cleared the ashes from the fire, no more fires till New Year says he! Which of course is his right, as he makes them and then has to clear the ashes the following day. We often talk of self-sufficiency but of course modern Europeans are far removed from this idyll, our port of call some wretched supermarket like Tesco or Sainsbury, that dazzle us with their goods imported from all over the world but leave me rather exhausted trying to find one simple thing.

We tried Tesco the other day, first time for me, watching the endless repeated adverts on TV did'nt actually warm me to Tesco and I was right there! Apart from the scrum of people in the store, it felt rather dirty, the shelves stacked with horrible toys and glittery stuff for Xmas, the aisles full of people so that you could'nt see anything let alone get over people's trolleys to pick something up. The final straw for me was when I bent down to get some bread flour from a bottom shelf and this person stepped on the same shelf to get something from the top, again and again, everything suddenly seemed so unhygenic. The fish stall with a million people wandering by, the prodding and putting back of the vegetables and fruit. I cannot understand why we have reduced ourselves to this purgatory when shopping; the pretty picture on the package we are going to buy does not necessarily reflect the quality of the food - it is a great scam - perpetuated on us by those eager to make money!

Saturday, December 19, 2009

The world from a different angle

Reverse image

Seeing these trees so clearly reflected in the water set me thinking about the subterranean world of the Celts, the mythology of the underworld, which is not a place of death but of a happier life, where food, wine and song are the rewards of this mythical place called Elysium;

Reversing the photo upside down makes no change except that the water ripples through the trees and the snowy bank is above not below. This image, sometimes seen in a river, maybe in a well, would reflect back a parallel world, in which you could order the nature of all things to be beneficial. There is such a lot written in the Celtic tales, that it is difficult to know where to start when you describe this other land, maybe it was the monks when writing these tales that formed the myths of the pagan past, taking old folk tales and moulding them into shape to fit into the morality of the christian tales told, and the word Elysium was made up along the way, a bit like Utopia.

This mythical land called Elysium, has many forms and shapes, it can be found on the great plains of Ireland, or in the hills or sidhe barrows where the gods have retired, and you can enter through this 'portal' to the otherworld.. It could be a world below the waters, or a world co-existent with this and entered by through the mist. It is transitory, half-glimpsed, a place of the mind, a reward for hard service on this earth, and it has many names in Irish mythology.

The names of the Irish Elysium are sometimes of a general character--Mag Mór, "the Great Plain"; Mag Mell, "the Pleasant Plain"; Tír n'Aill, "the Other-world"; Tír na m-Beo, " the Land of the Living "; Tír na n-Og, "the Land of Youth"; and Tír Tairngiri, "the Land of Promise"--possibly of Christian origin. Local names are Tír fa Tonn, "Land under Waves "; I-Bresail and the Land of Falga, names of the island Elysium. The last denotes the Isle of Man as Elysium,

The Celtic Irish tales tell of all these different lands for their heroes to find, sometimes to be entranced for hundreds of years by fair maidens, or to shape-shift into different animals,

Amergin's poem gives a taste of this.

"I am the wind which blows over the sea,
I am the wave of the ocean,
I am the bull of seven battles,
I am the eagle on the rock . .
I am a boar for courage
I am a salmon in the water."

The 'Celtic' Desborough Mirror - British Museum

The Celts seem to be a boastful race, and probably vain as well, for the mirrors found in graves, imitation of roman mirrors, were probably used by both sexes, recent finds of bog bodies show elegant hair styles on the male corpses. So what do we have with the 'mirrored' image of these people when they looked into the glassy waters of a river and see their own reflection; a warrior knight for a start, for there have been two beautiful bronze shields found in the Thames - The Chertsey and the Battersea, and a third found called the Witham Shield in Lincolnshire. These symbolic shields were no use in battle but dedicated to the river gods maybe.

Friday, December 18, 2009

Snow, and yet more snow

That will teach me to ask for snow, not (whatever god is in the sky), on the day we are supposed to travel though...... Commonsense told us not to take to the road today to East Anglia with all the snow that has fallen, leaving some people trapped in their cars overnight and jack knifed lorries littering the place. So we have forfeited the fee for an overnight stay, and instead taken a walk down to the river this morning. My love has hardly lost out on his birthday treat, but with snow and sun, and a long walk to the pub for dinner in front of a log fire has probably enjoyed his day just as much....

No electricity cuts yet either!

Clear waters of the river and 'upside down trees' remind one of the Celtic underworld, or the centre tree of Sea henge.

The silver 'flint' statue edged with snow and a fine 'celtic' horse reflected in the sunlight.

Those lovely long straight elements in the landscape underlined by snow...

Friday, December 11, 2009

Miscellany

A walk yesterday in the afternoon reveals a dark inky river lit by low sunlight as it swirls its water in eddying currents on its way to the sea. Two boys fished at the bridge, skinny and pale of face, that tells me they need a better diet of vegetables... One boy flicks a small silver fish as bait into the mill channel that leads into the river, perhaps he thinks the fish are skulking up there. The branches of a willow have broken off and trail debris when the river must have been in flood recently.
The walk was to gather ivy for xmas, ivy wins the day with me over holly, stiff and prickly it does'nt look right in arrangements, but ivy with its black berries and curling habit twines more gracefully.
We went to the little field that is part of Sandford Mill, and one day I shall work out the mystery of this small landscape, for it reveals to me at least that some sort of industrial pollution has taken place. Perhaps it was a pond at one stage, but the range of plants that have established are mostly acid loving, and the small carpet of plants that clothe the ground seem to say we can't grow properly thats why we have become miniaturised. There are mosses, yarrow, and what looks like the leaf of the mallow flower there, a red deadnettle flowers, reeds and teazels, great looping branches of the red hips of the wild rose briar, and tangling heaps of blackberry briars...