Autumnal Equinox 21st to 23rd September

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 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

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

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

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

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

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