Poems, paintings and photos

The Combe By Edward Thomas

2009-10-15T01:21:00.000-07:00

The Combe was ever dark, ancient and dark.
Its mouth is stopped with brambles, thorn, and briar;
And no one scrambles over the sliding chalk
By beech and yew and perishing juniper
Down the half precipices of its sides, with roots
And rabbit holes for steps. The sun of Winter,
The moon of Summer, and all the singing birds
Except the missel-thrush that loves juniper,
Are quite shut out. But far more ancient and dark
The Combe looks since they killed the badger there,
Dug him out and gave him to the hounds,
That most ancient Briton of English beasts.

Landscape of the Daylight Moon by Jeremy Hooker

2009-02-12T10:00:00.000-08:00

I first saw it inland,
Suddenly, round white sides
Rose through the thin grass
And for an instant, in the heat,
It was dazzling; but afterwards
I thought mainly of darkness,
Imagining the relics of an original
Sea under the chalk, with fishes
Beneath the fields. Later,
Everywhere upon its surface
I saw the life of the dead;
Circle within circle of earthen
Shells, and in retraced curves
Like finger marks in pale sand.

The print of a primaeval lover,
Once, climbing a dusty track,
I found a sunshaped urchin,
With the sun’s rays, white
With the dust of the moon.
Fetish, flesh become stone.
I keep it near me. It is
A mouth on darkness, the one
Inexhaustible source of re-creation.

A poem written about a chalk landscape

The Mountain Poems of Hsieh Ling-yün

2009-01-08T00:20:00.000-08:00

Not a Chinese painting but one done by Heywood Sumner of the New Forest.

Climbing Green-Cliff Mountain in Yung-chia

Taking a little food, a light walking-stick,
I wander up to my home in quiet mystery,

the path along streams winding far away
onto ridgetops,no end to this wonder at

slow waters silent in their frozen beauty
and bamboo glistening at heart with frost,

cascades scattering a confusion of spray
and broad forests crowding distant cliffs.

Thinking it's moonrise I see in the west
and sunset I'm watching blaze in the east,

I hike on until dark, then linger out night
sheltered away in deep expanses of shadow.

Immune to high importance: that's renown.
Walk humbly and it's all promise in beauty

Poetry is a great healer of the soul, and reading Robert Macfarlane's, The Wild Places, I came across the Chinese poem above, to quote from the site the poem is taken...

"During the last decade of his life, living as a recluse high in the mountains of southeast China, Hsieh Ling-yün (385-433 C.E.) initiated a tradition of "rivers-and-mountains" (shan-shui) poetry that stretches across millennia in China and beyond, a tradition that represents the earliest and most extensive literary engagement with wilderness in human history."

The concept that flows through Ling-Hun poetry is of course echoed in Gary Syder's book - Mountains and Rivers Without End.

A fragment from Snyder's poetry, called "The Flowing.".

Headwaters

Head doused under the bronze

dragon -mouth jet

From a cliff

spring - headwaters, Kamo

River back of Kyoto,

Cliff-wall statue of Fudo

Blue-faced growling Fudo

Lord of the headwaters, making

Rocks of water

Water of of rocks

http://www.davidhinton.net/Pages/Hsieh%20Ling-yun.html

Earth Has the Lord-Builders.

2008-12-30T06:29:00.000-08:00

Sometimes you just pick up a book and thumb through for the joy of the words, well here is a few caught by Jacquetta Hawkes, the first is from Beowulf

With seabirds sousing in the spray,
And the hail and the snow seep down day by day.
Heavier are wounds then
For the sweet lord in his heart. And when
The sorrow of the thoughts of kin
Run through his mind and searches in,
His heart goes to find them in the hall
The warriors of old strength

And here she introduces the concept of the new Anglo-saxon invaders to the land of the Celts;
"The invasions were almost as incoherent, as empirical as those of prehistoric times, and the invaders had to fit themselves into the land as they found it before they could begin, without plan or intention, to remould it. In so doing, inevitably they were drawn to the open and still cultivated lands that encircled the decaying towns. But just as it made little difference to the Britons whether they were struggling to maintain disorganized lives in the corner of a forum or the corner of a cave, so the Anglo -Saxons accepted the relics of Roman civilisation as a natural if awe-inspiring feature of their new land"

Here she quotes a part of The Ruin, which most people believe is about Bath...

Curious is this stonework! The Fates destroyed it;
The torn buildings falter; moulder the works of giants.
The roofs are tipped down, the turrets turn over,
The barred gate is broken, white lies on mortar
The frost, and open stands the arching, cumber of lumber
Eaten under with age. Earth has the Lord-Builders.

Taken from The Land by Jacquetta Hawkes

The painting is taken from The Royal Academy pictures shown for 1897 and is called "A Corner of old England" by C.E.Johnson R.I.

Abel Cross by Ted Hughes

2008-12-15T10:31:00.000-08:00

Where the Mothers
Gallop their souls

Where the howlings of the heaven
Pour down onto earth
Looking for bodies
Of birds, animals and people

A happiness starts up, secret and wild,
Like a lark-song just out of hearing
Hidden in the wind

A silent evil joy
Like a star broken stone
Who knows nothing more can happen to it
In its cradle grave.

The Chronicles of the White Horse

2008-12-06T22:37:00.000-08:00

The Christmas season takes us back to childhood and stories, and amongst my books Peter Please's ' The Chronicles of the White Horse' is one I pick up and read again. It is a small story not in the league of great tales, but it features a boy and his adventures with a detective mole.
There is an air of mystic about it, the boy has to learn to be 'not there' invisible, to become like a stone, his mind has to become stilled so that there is 'no thinking', in this state he becomes at one with the world of nature around him.

The Great Iron age hillfort, that belonged to the people of the''White Horse'

The story rests on mystery and mists and eventually takes them to Wayland's Smithy; one night there is a full moon shining directly over the old stones and in the words of the story.."Creeping moss, whorled ferns, lichens, dead branches, grass clumps, shone on its back and side", in the party are the boy, Ben the mole detective and the White Rook. It is at this point that the drama of the story unfolds, the horror of something unseen begins to make itself felt. At first there is a low humming noise whistling through the trees, and slowly bats begin to appear dancing over the silvered moonlit meadow, but they are not quite bats they achieve sinister shapes, then they hear the padding of claws across the frozen grass. The little group have taken refuge in the longbarrow, in its cavelike interior, and they start to tremble as a great yellow-eyed monster appears in front of the stones.

Ben tells them to think marigolds, and slowly the monster disappears so that there is only a layer of leaves in front of the stones, a marigold starts to grow, and as suddenly dies. Followed by a whole host of other marigolds but they too die. The small group trapped in the cave of the barrow, start to imagine into life childhood horrors, the rook, a great eagle.
The story culminates in a shooting star falling to earth, and the great white horse, that is forever galloping across the downs, to once more take flight and gather the dead in...
"I could see it reining on a bridle of light, caught in mid gallop, halting awhile as it has always done and always will. The light barely touching the earth. I heard the sound of the star breaking. The night finished here. I was at the door of the manger. I could see its bloodstained hooves. I heard them pounding between the standing stones. Calling the night, calling the dead and all the things which have ended. Calling them home, no longer free to wander, choke and haunt the living... the night-mare had passed"

http://www.peteralfredplease.co.uk/

And a print of Jane Tomlinson's which hangs on my wall;

http://www.janetomlinson.com/image_display?url=images/paintings/ridgewayparade.jpg

Roses

2008-11-23T06:24:00.001-08:00

Some summer photos on a cold day. Roses bushes like fruit trees I collected at one time, but my garden has become neglected this year, though both the rose and the fruit trees produce their crops...... The rose for me is a beautiful flower in shape colour and form, you can even buy its scent as tea rose at our herb shop in Bath, its strong smell of crushed stem reminding you of summer, along with the scent of lavender....

Lockeridge sarsens

2008-11-21T03:51:00.000-08:00

Apple pie neat cottage with perfect thatched roof

Moss prowling around

Winterbourne Monkton

2008-11-20T01:39:00.000-08:00

The photographs above may be an extraordinary juxtaposition, but the female figure on the W/M font has certain similarities with the pose of the Indian goddess Kali, our W/M female is almost dancing.

The story of Kali is complex, in that she represents many things, she is seen as standing on her husband with a chain of skulls round her neck, she is a personification of everything, not necessarily war though her role is often depicted as such, but someone who overcomes and triumphs over the physical and spiritual aspects of life. She can also be seen as a mother goddess, a long line that stretches through the neolithic to present times, from the Willendorf figure to Gaia, she is a representation of female power.

In the Christian faith misygony set in, women's role became secondary, from the 'Fall of Adam' the stories that were to evolve round women, tend to see them as either 'good' or 'bad', and it is from here that we have the rather grotesque figure of sheela n gigs developing, a warning against the sins of the flesh.
Some would argue though that these sheelas come from the Celtic trinity goddess tradition of mother, maiden and crone and it is from this source that the figure of Kali can be seen, an all powerful female, this is possibly relevant given an Irish context.
Also it must not be forgotten that our Norman medieval overlords and sculptors came from a different background, they had seen exotic statutary abroad, and sometimes this shows in their stone carving. tThe now destroyed church of Shobdon in Herefordshire has a very eastern Christ on one of the tympanum, his slender arm raised in a blessing, the legs exaggeratedly splayed apart with the vertical folds of his robe falling between. Shobdon's imagery is seen to come from Byzantium art.
To return to our mysterious figure on the W/F, she does'nt quite fall into the sheela-n-gig fold, there are other christian stone depictions of 'dancing women' , one to be found on the Kilpeck church, though in this case it is a man and a woman dancing. The church would have probably seen dancing as a sin, and to quote Romilly Allen here;
"Let them praise his name in the dance; let them sing praises unto him with the timbrel and harp.... the extravagance of the attitude, however, suggests that dancing is intended to be symbolic of those worldy pleasures and vices against which the church has always protested"

And it is here that the interpretation must be understood, the dance is a vice, another temptation to be averted, the sculpture has been freely interpreted on the font - the descent into hell that the font represents is here pictured in this figure.
The church itself harbours another strange aspect, this is the great prehistoric stone in the churchyard, said to be a capstone from the Millbarrow, a 19th century vicar had it laid to rest on his grave, and this rather strange gesture suggests to the modern eye that paganism still lurks somewhat quietly beneath a Christian heart. Can we follow this train of thought, to the fact that the Winterbourne Monkton church is also named after Mary Magdalene, seen by some as a fallen women, though her character explored here....
http://thelmawilcox.blogspot.com/2008/11/mary-magdalene-and-winterbourne-monkton.html
gives two sides to her nature. Of course, now we can come back to the figure on the font and see a parallel with Mary Magdalene, a doctrinal misogyny carried through the centuries, or perhaps that is just in the imagination.
And what of the colouring of the font, the red stain on the ‘window’ decoration below, the blue of the Norman zig-zag, are we looking at water here, and if so is the water representative of the Winterbourne river that flows through this settlement. Are not ideas beginning to come together, do we not see the sacred nature of water reflected both in the font and the figure thereon.
The Winterbourne flowing into the Kennet, at that special spot the Swallowhead Spring, a goddess begins to reflect back to us, are we peering dimly into a Bronze age past where the goddess ruled here at the spring, fed by a 'magical' river that disappeared over the summer. Can we interpret our figure as a fertility/mother goddess, for that is one of Kali’s roles.
Imaginative stories weaving in and out of each other, the medieval brain interpreting old gospels, old bestiaries and a pagan past that lay like a thin veil over the landscape. We know that the medieval peasant never quite gave up his fascination with superstition and pagan ways, the ritual of fairs echoing the old celtic seasonal festivals, how do we trace the mindset of people many centuries ago. As the carver took up his chisel what was he thinking about, his mind awash with images of the bible, did he heark back to an earlier age, the stories of the poor people, or did he listen to his Norman overlords as they set down their wishes for the new churches......

The prehistoric stone said to have come from the Millbarrow

http://thelmawilcox.blogspot.com/2008/06/winterbourne-monkton-church.html

Japanese Mosses

2008-11-19T00:42:00.001-08:00

The Moss 'Saiho-ji ' Temple - Kokedera

http://phototravels.net/kyoto/zen-gardens-saiho-ji.html

All though this photo is beautiful and is a reminder of the soft downy nature of moss, and also the person who sent it, it needs a poem; hunting for the book Cherry Tree by Geoffrey Grigson the book has seemingly disappeared, but perhaps one by Edward Thomas will suffice, for it echoes the bleakness of autumn ...................

Up on the Downs

Up on the downs the red-eyed kestrels hover,

Eyeing the grass.

The field-mouse flits like a shadow into cover

As their shadows pass.

Men are burning the gorse on the down's shoulder;

A drift of smoke

Glitters with fire and hangs, and the skies smoulder,

And the lungs choke.

Once the tribe did thus on the downs, on these downs burning

Men in the frame,

Crying to the gods of the downs till their brains were turning

And the gods came.

And today on the downs, in the wind, the hawks, the grasses,

In blood and air,

Something passes me and cries as it passes.

On the chalk downland bare.

Mary Magdalene and Winterbourne Monkton Church

2008-11-13T09:09:00.000-08:00

This is a preamble for a later blog on the font at Winterbourne Monkton, decorated as it is in Norman style, but with an elaborate, what many think of as a 'sheela-n-gig' figure on the font, though it does not conform to what we think of as the 'standard' version of this somewhat lewd figure.

The naming of the church to St.Mary Magdalene is somewhat odd given the depiction on the font, and the fact that the church's name can only be traced back to the 18th century.

Mary Magdalene is the Mary that knelt at the foot of the cross on which Jesus hung, she is the first person to see him come from the cave tomb, and is the woman forgiven and blessed by Jesus for her 'seven sins'. She is revered by the Catholic church as a saint and also by the Eastern Orthodox Church, but she is also depicted as a 'fallen woman' and a prostitute in some later versions of the story. Medieval paintings depict her in this role, long flowing hair and an air of wantoness.

She is venerated at the church of Ste.Madeleine Basilica at Vezelay and this magnificient church is perhaps amongst the finest decorated churches in France, see here for a taste of its beautiful west door....
http://tinyurl.com/5fo2uu.

Mary Magdalen's French history, or at least myth, has it that she travelled to Provence, and became a hermit in a cave for 30 years, where she died, and her 'relics' were then transferred to the abbey at Vezelay. All this information can be found in the following Wikipedia article.....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Magdalene. It will be noted that in the churches named after this saint there are only a few in England, and therefore Winterbourne Monkton stands out, with its near proximity to prehistoric Avebury...

Preambles can get outdated, but reading round the subject has not brought me much further, though on reading Romilly Allen's The Christian Bestiary, I have come a little nearer to understanding the fertile imagination of the Norman mind in the little tales that are told round the fonts in our medieval churches. Animals play a part in the stories of the bibles, but because the bestiaries were copied again and again, the animals begin to become very whimsical and distorted in interpretation.
Both the W/M and Avebury figures have long faces, and the arms of the female on W/M almost Indian like in their gestures, reminding you of Kali. Dancing women, like dragons have been depicted in sculpture as evil, and probably point to the rather sinful pastime of dancing and enjoying that the church abhored, so maybe we have a dancing person.
A strong feeling that I get from studying the photo that the figure was added at a later date, its arms and some lines on the body correspondent with the patterning on either side.

Meanderings

2008-11-06T00:47:00.000-08:00

Is it possible to overlap Christianity against paganism, a difficult construct when so much of Christianity is overlaid on top of a pagan past. The long view of the priests that strove to overcome and subjugate the minds of their congregations, what devils were they fighting in their own minds. The fabric of the churches themselves, are adorned with all manner of frightening warnings to the people who attended them, or perhaps we should see them as works of art and drama , but what is there to make of such visual exuberance of stone sculpture to be found when the Normans conquered England and settled down to creating their castles and churches, were they looking back to the beautiful carved stones of the Saxons, who also in their graceful curvilinear designs imitated the Celtic knotwork so extraordinary complex and intricate, such design patterns can readily be ascertained in the Norman church at Kilpeck.

Visions of hell may be a more apt description, gargoyles leer down at us, occasionally grotesque sheela na gigs, worn away by time, warn of sexual sin, dragons twine decorously around in stone sculptures subdued by bishops. We have many messages reaching out to us in the stories told round a Norman doorway’s arch. There will be bible stories, angels reaching down to give a helping hand to heaven as sinners climb the ladders, and there will be those visual explicit ‘hell’ warnings should not the medieval peasant comply with the priests wishes.

One of the finest stone decorated churches in the country is Kilpeck Church built by a wealthy Norman nobleman, its workmanship attributed to The Herefordshire School of Romanesque sculpture....

"Their work draws on a variety of cultural sources for its religious and mystical images; Norman military figures, Saxon animals and Celtic abstract patterns combine to create a unique and beautiful synthesis"

http://www.herefordwebpages.co.uk/kilpeck.shtml

First of all we come to dragons and the Tree of Life, the snaking foliage that we find in the font at Avebury; a quote from the “Book of Bestiaries”

“The perindens is a tree found in India; the fruit of this tree is very sweet pleasant, and doves delight in feeding on it. The dragon which is the enemy of doves, fears the tree, because of the shade in which the doves rests, and it can approach neither the tree or its shadow. If the shadow of the tree falls to the west, the dragon flies to the east, and if the shadow is in the east, the dragon flies to the west. If it finds a dove outside the shadow of the tree it kills it. The tree is God, the shadow Jesus Christ”...

So here we have a tale told from an old 6th century book of dragons and trees translated into a Christian doctrine, and then transcribed through the storytelling of stone sculpture to an illiterate congregation of medieval worshippers. We are tracing stories of other religions through the mythology of the Christian faith. How the various sculptors interpreted them was left to individual choice one might presume, but the bishop or abbot that controlled the outlying churches would lay down the template of design.

Avebury Church font

Here we have the bishop with crozier standing on two dragons, this is the pictorial reference to the story, twining foliage echoes the curve of the dragon's wing and body. The decoration underneath is intersecting blind arcading, similar to Malmesbury Abbey ....’ It’s rare and ornate south porch which relates Bible stories in stone carving is reckoned on being the finest example in Britain. It’s graceful west face of interlaced arcading is beautifully preserved as is the entire south front, the direction from which most visitors will approach.’’

The 'bishop', stands in a short pleated skirt, no legs are on display, his body folds abruptly into the arcading below, the crozier is not held, it rests against a piece of foliage, and the figure seems to be holding a cup in the right hand with a staff in the left. The dragons are graceful creature, long and lean, with a row of dots down the body, their wings fan out and the tail curves gracefully.

The whole of the sculptured work is well executed and fine, the face of the bishop is of course missing, this presumably due to the Puritan element in the 17th century, and it is well to note that Avebury was a hive of dissenters during this century.

The fleur de ley motif can be traced in the extravagant use of foliage decoration.

Black and white detail

Dragons in the Book of Bestiaries; http://tinyurl.com/6grgjv

The Book of Beast; T.H.White; http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/HistSciTech.Bestiary

ref; The Herefordshire School of Romanesque Sculpture by Malcolm Thurlby. Logaston Press

Tailpiece; the 'alien' priory on the site of the manor house, taken from an earlier blog;

"It is recorded however that there was a small 'alien' priory at Avebury, with only two monks, though the fact that there is only two 'proper' monks there might obscure the fact that their may have been lay monks and servants, and in their accounts they seemed to have owned 750 sheep, which would mean that they had plenty of land. The priory seems to have been where the manor house is now.These monks came from Rouen, and were from the Benedictine Order, but the fascinating thing is, that their Mother house was founded on a pagan site, presumably a Gallic settlement with a temple.

"The abbey of Saint Georges de Boscherville is located in Saint Martin de Boscherville, near Rouen. Boscherville was a pagan place of worship at the end of the first century AD. Abandoned in the third century, the first temple was converted into a funeral chapel in the seventh century probably dedicated to Saint George'.....

There had been a long going dispute between the Parish church and the Priory at Avebury about tithes and land, the parish church belonging to Cirencester Abbey, and eventually the priory seems to have disappeared. It is interesting to note that Cirencester Abbey, also had a long line of continuity from Roman times, Cirencester was one of the four principal towns, and the abbey, so it is said, was founded on one the earliest Saxon churches.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Tracing the Norman connection through the two French monks from Rouen, is part of the story, but what is interesting in Avebury's case as well, is that the priest Reinbold is mentioned as holding the church at Avebury in the Domesday Book, he also held the church at Pewsey. This Norman priest seemed to have been one of the favourites in the king's court.

The font, as can be noticed in the coloured photograph has traces of cream paint which must have covered it at one stage. The Winterbourne Monkton font also had traces of paint, in this case red and blue, finely trapped in the crevices. Paint can only be dated by the experts, but the cream on the Avebury font suggests a later date, whilst the coloured W/M font seems to suggest a medieval date.

Further note; There is perhaps one more thing to be explained, and that is the baptismal use of fonts, and why they have such frightening depictions on them. To understand this you must go back to the early times of the church to the time when the Roman rite was introduced to this country in the 6th century.. Bede writes in the 8th century....

'Only the piety of the faithful knows that a sinner descends into the font, and a purified person comes up; that a child of death descends, and a child of the resurrection comes up; that a child of original sin descends and a child of god comes up'

The font is seen as a descent into hell, with the grace of immersion in cleansing water to redeem the sinner, that is why an unbaptised newborn child in the medieval period would be buried outside the graveyard as 'unshriven'.

The Last of the Bears

2008-11-05T06:17:00.000-08:00

XIII IAN. MDCCCXCII
URSORUM HOC LOCO ULTIMUS
HUIC TUMULO
UT PEPERCERUNT URSI
PARCITE ET VOS

23th of January 1892,
the last of the bears [= Behrs] at this place;
this tumulus,
just as the bears spared it,
so you spare it too!

Travelling

2008-10-30T10:35:00.000-07:00

The Tree of Life in Chelmsford Cathedral

2008-10-28T08:37:00.001-07:00

Mark Cazelet's "Tree of Life" painting in the North Transept

This painting is rather beautiful, formed of five panels. The tree is an oak, on the right hand side we find St.Cede sitting under it in a tranquil scene of golden corn but on the left, the tree is dying and depicts the environmental degradation we subject our land to. Also there is a skeleton on this side, this is Judas Iscariot, 30 pieces of silver falling from his skeletal hand, a reminder that the oil rigs that we see in the picture is the price we are paying for the destruction of the Earth; the painting has several messages, and there is a certain pagan air to it, the great tree so much a symbol of other religions stands tall and magnificent centre stage, highlighted by the gold of the sun, but up above the moon shines, a darkening sky signifying the threat of coming disaster.

A small pub called 'The Cats'

2008-10-17T08:47:00.000-07:00

Typically English, small and beamed, local people on a Sunday in for a drink, a meal of roast beef with all the trimmings or a ploughman.. Robust conversation in the small bar, friendly chatter, people greeting each other who have lived here a long time.
The Cats pub has little cats all over the place, china ones around the fireplace, chasing mice, swishing tails. A great cat outside and a little china cat on the roof, a man unloading logs for the woodstove has to pump up the flat wheel of his old open back van outside in the car park. Two old men gossip at the table in front of the window. A certain peaceful air invades the room, time well spent, of quiet happiness in the ordinariness of life.
One's soul sinks into the peace, you could sit here forever lost and faraway from the bustle of life..... but look up on the beam, and an grotesque 'green man' is hung carved in wood, a lurking creature...

The Cheesewring

2008-10-16T02:43:00.000-07:00

The Cheesewring obviously the inspiration for the Spriggan

Paul Devereux's article; Art before Art

'Before there were art galleries, art was a song of the soul.'

http://www.resurgence.org/magazine/article22.html

Tis the Time of Ghosts and Bogies

2008-10-16T00:29:00.000-07:00

This is a Spriggan, a very apt goblin for megaliths, as he seems to be made out of rocks and looks like one of the Cornish Tors. The Spriggans led humans to believe that they were the ghosts of giants, they are the guardians of hill treasures, such as that found in the old barrows.

All Hallows, when the thin veil of time is split asunder and the dead come back to visit their family or tribe, and sometimes, just sometimes, they take back the living with them to their spectral homes. Yes, All Souls/All Saints night, that time when paganism and christianity meet on the same date. Samhain it is called in the pagan world, a time of festival, of slaughtering the surplus beasts for a great feast before the famine of winter looms large. Apples gathered, the wheat safely harvested, the spirit still whirls into our modern time, a thanksgiving for the harvest of the year.
It is the time when we look back into the past and invite the dead to join in the revelry, the time when we tell our children terrible tales of ghosts, and towns under the sea such as Dunwich when the old church bell tolls beneath the sea. Of the dead walking through the streets from the graveyard to knock on our doors, don't open though, you may not like what you see, and skeleton fingers are very strong.
And what prompted this rash of words you may ask, well it was that old Faerie book with its drawings of Bogies and Spriggans, it captured those rather dreadful fairy stories I used to read as a child, not the nice fairy but wicked creatures who set out to torment you a bit like Christina Rossetti's Goblins....

This is a bogie, a shape shifting creature

The River Dart by Alice Oswald

2008-10-09T22:50:00.000-07:00

The River Dart

I read this poem years ago, a long epithany to a love affair with a particular river, following its early beginnings, its history winding through the moors, its usuage by people, an old man walking listening to the very sounds of his own body.

The liquid, flowing, winding nature of water sensuously felt, endlessly flowing through time.....

just the beginning.....

What I love is one foot in front of another. South south west and down the contours. I go slipping
between Black Ridge and White Horse Hill into a bowl of the moor where echoes can't get out.

Listen,
a
lark
spinning
around
one
note
splitting
and
mending
it

and I find you in the reeds, a trickle coming out of a bank, a foal of a river

one step-width water
of linked stones
trills in the stones
glides in the trills
eels in the glides
in each eel a fingerwidth of sea

It also reminded me of of another famous poem Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti, another weird sensuous poem written by a rather staid Victorian woman, sister to Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In my book the poem is illustrated by Martin Ware, but in another book on Faeries I have, the illustration is more fulsome and dark.

We must not look at goblin men,
We must not buy their fruits;
Who knows upon what soil they fed,
Their hungry thirsty roots.

At the top of this blog I have shown an illustration from the book of Faeries by Alan Lee and Brian Froud, it is of a landscape under the sea. But in actual fact it accompanies another celtic Irish poem about Bran, he of the famous head that travelled to London carried there by his friends. The following is a 12th century poem sung by Manannan Mac Lir to Bran who journeys through, what to him is the sea, but for Manannan is the sky....

"What is a clear sea

For the prowed skiff in which Bran is,

That is a happy plain with profusion of flowers

To me from the chariot of two wheels.

Along the top of the wood has swum

Thy coracle across ridges,

There is a wood of beautiful fruit

Under the prow of thy little skiff.

A wood with blossom and fruit,

On which is the vine's veritable fragrance;

A wood without decay, without defect,

On which are leaves of a golden hue.

Pastoral Landscapes

2008-09-28T04:54:00.000-07:00

The second part of the Victoria Gallery exhibition of The Ruralist paintings has been around for a couple of weeks now. I have visited it twice, mooching around trying to find out if I actually like the paintings. There are several Silbury ones, my favourite is of Silbury Hill with the moon behind and the river curving its way towards it, moonlight sparkling on the river. The large owl with a tiny Silbury behind is also good, as is Inshaw's Pussy Willow painting, (a puss sprawled on the table beneath) and May tree painting as well. So on reflection I am happy with Inshaw's paintings.

Portrait of Silbury Hill - David Inshaw, to quote from the catalogue. "that beauty of association is far superior to the beauty of the aspect" Thomas Hardy

Silbury Hill on a Starry Night - David Inshaw...pretty, butdoes it look like a green pyramid?

May Tree with Grey Sky - David Inshaw

David Inshaw not in the exhibition, but another favourite of the sarsens on the downs

The other painter to catch one's eye is of course Graham Ovenden, "All Hallows (The Sea Cathedral), and this rather strange painting takes its story, or at least its symbolism from a tale told by Walter del la Mare of a demonic restoration happening unseen in the cathedral of All Hallows. It also of course recalls to mind the church of Dunwich under the sea off the Norfolk Coast. The real colours are much more vivid, and it's large canvas does have an eerie feel to it, echoed of course by the other large canvas of Ovenden, the Tower of Babel, a spookily frightening straight edge jagged rock in a very flat landscape.

All Hallows (The Sea Cathedral) - Graham Ovenden

The Red Field - Graham Ovenden

This our Life, exempt from Public Haunt,

Find tongues in tree, books in ye running brooks,

Sermon in stones, and good in everything" Taken from 'As You like It - Shakespeare

There is a striking collage by Graham Arnold, that illustrates a favourite piece of writing of mine by Jefferies ('the grass-grown tumuli 'at Liddington Hill). It is a cabinet of secrets, and you have to study it to see the detail, the bulk of the painting is rows of 'bar coded' colours, but underneath, the cabinet colour reflects the white chalky dust of the Wiltshire Downs, with odd writings scribbled here and there. And again I would like to quote from the catalogue "The abstract personality of the dead seemed as existent as thought. In effect memory collapses time and the soul lives beyond time. " A graceful explanation of what Jefferies must have felt as he mused by that overgrown tumulus - the actual essence of life, and the dead from the past still throbbing in the air, the moment when we push past time and experience the eternal.

Late 19th Century photos

2008-09-28T03:28:00.000-07:00

Varallo

St.Ursula with her father - Carpaccio - Academia Venice

Florentine Boar - Vestibule Uffizi Gallery

the Birth of Venus - Sandro Botticelli

the dancing fawn -Uffizi Gallery

Autumn photos

2008-09-28T01:37:00.000-07:00

Boxing hares in March - Inshaw

2008-09-27T10:43:00.001-07:00

English Genius Loci

2008-09-26T09:39:00.000-07:00

Today I went for a quick tour of the second part of The Ancient Landscapes Pastoral Vision at the Victoria Gallery Bath. This second part covers more of David Inshaw, Graham Arnold, and Graham Ovenden paintings, The Brotherhood of the Ruralists.
There were about dozen David Inshaw's painting of Silbury, two with owls, and my favourite of a Night Silbury with stars and the glittering river winding its way towards its. His May Tree paintings were also fine, a flavour of spring and fresh greeness against the myriad white blossoms of the may flower.

Laurie Lee ("Their work shows an acute recognition of that mysterious world that still holds its kingdom a few yards from the motorways, a world of spirits, shapes and ancient voices that reverberate back to the caves").

There is nevertheless an unmistakeably modern edge of alienation to some of their work. This is most evident in the dreamscapes of Graham Ovenden, with their otherworldly trees and rocks, and indistinct horizons. Some of these evoke an ineffably English, timeless landscape, but some, with their use of bright reds and Mediterranean blues, do not suggest any recognisable place at all, leaving the viewer feeling adrift and disconnected. Overall, however, Ruralist paintings are usually identifiable with distinct places, and expressive of a particular kind of English genius loci.

Awbury

2008-09-05T00:23:00.000-07:00

From western lands beyond the foam,

We sought our English fathers' home

By few or known or sung.

Which 'neath the quiet English skies,

far from all busy haunts it lies

The wide chalk downs among.

Huge druid stones surround the spot,

Which else had almost been forgot

By the great world without.

The mystic ring now scarcely traced

Is by a grassy dike embraced,

Circling the whole about.

Deep hangs the thatch on cottage eaves,

And buried deep in ivy leaves

The cottage window gleam.

There little birds fly to and fro,

And happy children come and go

With rosy cheek and rustic walk,

They curtsy for the gentle folk,

As they the strangers deem.

With pinks and stocks the beds are gay

,And box and yew their shapes display

Fantastically trimmed.

And each small garden overflows

With scent of woodbine and of rose

Above the borders trim.

The ancient little Norman church,

With quaintly medieval porch,

Stands 'neath the elm tree tall

Sunk in the graveyard plot around,

The moss-grown headstones scarce are found

Few stoop the lettering to trace

Which time's rude hand will soon efface.

Some there may be of highborn race,

But none the names recall.

The many gabled manor house,

With winking casement sheen,

Seem in the summer light to drowse

And dream of what has been

And we may dream of earlier days

,When the old convent marked the place,

When nuns in gown and coif complete,

Paced the green paths with quiet feet,

And gather herbs and simples small

Beneath the high brick garden wall,

Finding a safe retreat.

Like some small nest securely placed,

With ferns and grass interlaced,

But open to the light,

The hamlets seem to lie at rest

Upon the common's ample breast,

Secure in loneliness of space

From aught that could the charm efface

Of innocence and old-world grace

Worn by ancestral right.

Home of sweet days and thankful nights,

Fair fall on thee the morning light,

Soft fall the evening dews.

Wild winds perchance may sweep the wold

But age, untouched by storm or cold,

In memory's sight thou standest there,

Encircled by serenest air,

In changeless summer hue.

Mary S Cope. 1886

This poem written so long ago in America by Mary Cope is written in tribute to Avebury. At first I was wary of its 19th century romanticism, but reading it again and again made me realise that it had a very special charm in its description of Avebury. After all it was an outside eye that was looking back at the stones and the village, and its neat little manor house serene in its garden. Though I think she got it somewhat wrong as to nuns being at the Priory when monks are mentioned in the history.

so what inspired such eloquence? Our ancestry haunts us all, and Mary Cope came from a strong Quaker family whose forebearers had travelled to America in the 17th Century.

Henry (1793-1865) had established a family 'enclave' at Germanstown and called it Awbury, their house and grounds now are part of the Awbury Arboretum and the following quote explains the reason as to why we find Mary S. Cope writing a poem about Avebury.

"The house he built on that land was named "Awbury" after the family ancestral home in the village of Avebury in Wiltshire, England; as the nineteenth century progressed, the name came to indicate the entire enclave and not just Cope's dwelling. John Haines's and Henry Cope's tracts were augmented with purchases made by Henry's son Francis on the southwest and south later in the nineteenth century. The family enclave was expanded in 1885 with a purchase of land

made by Clementine Cope, Henry's niece, in 1885."

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But lets go back to the original Oliver Cope - a tailor who lived in Avebury and took that momentous step to emigrate to America. Gilbert Cope in his genealogy of the Cope family (186l) seems to think that Oliver was not a Quaker when he left England with his wife Rebecca, they seemed to have had three children at Avebury - William, Ruth, and John, Elizabeth being born in America, Oliver must have left England in about 1682, and could have travelled on the same boat as William Penn who also made a voyage in that year. In a Deed of Land he seems to have bought 250 acres from William Penn in the province of Pennsylvania, this he must have done in England as the Deed is dated 1681.

"This indenture made the 5th day of September in the year of our Lord 1681, and in the thirty-third year of the reign of King Charles the second over England, between William Penn of Worminghurst in the County of Sussex and Oliver Cope of Awbury, in the County of Wiltshire, tailor, on the other part witnesseth that the said William Penn, for and in the consideration of the sum of five shillings of lawful money of England to him in hand paid by the said Oliver Cope, the receipt whereof he doeth hereby acknowledge, have bargained and sold, and by these presents doth bargain and sell into the said Oliver Cope, the full and just proportion and quantity of 250 acres within the province of Pennsylvannia"

There is a lovely note by Gilbert Cope at the end of the page in which he states "Abury (sometimes spelt Awbury, Aveburg or Auburn) is an unimportant village in Wiltshire,

about 8l miles west of London. There are none of the Cope name living in or near it at present, neither does the name appear on the family register"

Olivers arrival in America has a somewhat mixed account in Gilbert Cope's book, Mary is given at one stage as his wife that accompanied him on the voyage and that he came on the boat with William Penn (on his second voyage) in 1701.* This account can probably be considered a bit whimsical, though it does say that they landed at Nameen's Creek (the place where Oliver died) as Oliver's will definitely states Rebecca as his wife.

There is also a note that in May 1682 William Penn sent to Thomas Holme - Surveyor General - a list of the people who had purchased land and Oliver Cope is listed as having five hundred acres. So it would seem that Oliver bought this land in England, probably making two purchases of 250 acres at separate times, the dream of an American future winning over a drab existence in a small Wiltshire village.

John Cope one of Oliver's children is seen as the founding member of the Cope dynasty in America and a prominent Quaker member.

Genealogy notes; The original Oliver Cope was born at Avebury in approximately 1647 he died in April in 1697 at Naaman's Creek DE..

Mary Stokes Cope; Her mother was Elizabeth Waln Stokes (1823-1902) and her father Thomas P. Cope (1823-1900). They had 9 children, including Mary Stokes Cope.

What is life

2008-09-01T03:45:00.000-07:00

It is the flash of a firefly
In the night;

It is the breath of a buffalo
In the wintertime;

It is the little shadow
That runs across the grass

And loses itself in the sunset.

Chief Isapwo Muksika Crowfoot

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The Western World

Enlightenment or perhaps a definition of capitalism at the present time;

"Hyper-consumption, large scale market intergration and resource extraction on an unprecedented scale" Professor Peter Brosius - University of Georgia.

"European civilisation has failed. Peoples should have the option to leave." Tero Mustonen of Eastern Finland.

Global warming, population explosion, resource depletion and world poverty are the sure signs of that failure. What has been named as European civilisation in in reality European exploitation of people and nature.

A story that can never be told

2008-08-14T23:15:00.000-07:00

The following poem has haunted my mind for a few days, it is a story that can never be told, a mystery, yet there is something poignant in the way that Snyder captured the archaeological story in a few simple words. Who was she, this person from 26,000 years ago, a shaman of the tribe buried with due honour and ceremony, attendants on either side. Perhaps this small trio of people were related, brothers and sister, caught by some fatal passing disease, and buried with many tears by their family. Maybe she was killed in some sacrifical honour, her attendants accompanying her to the spirit world. Tantalising in death, the history of old bones haunt our imagination, fleshing them once more, gracing their bodies with movement and speech I wonder what we would really be confronted by?

Under The Hills Near the Moravia River

She lay there midst

Mammoth, reindeer, and wolf bones;

Diadem of fox teeth round her brow

Ocher under her hips

26,640 plus or minus 110 years before 'now'.

Burnt reindeer-pelvis bone bits

in her mouth,

Bones of two men lying by her,

one each side.

Gary Snyder

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And perhaps a few more words by Snyder on this cold August morning, reminding one of travelling and far off places, the following taken from Raven's Beak River At the End, in this poem he captures for a moment the old celtic enmeshing of nature, animals and the cosmic reality we sometimes forget.

...

Raven-sitting high spot

eyes on the snowpeaks,
nose of morning
raindrops in the sunshine

Skin of sunlight

skin of chilly gravel

Mind in the mountain, mind of tumbling water,

mind running rivers

Mind of sifting

flowers in the gravels

At the end of the ice age

we are the bears, we are the ravens,

We are the salmon

in the gravel

At the end of the ice age.

Paul Nash - November Moon

2008-08-06T11:06:00.000-07:00

One of the paintings at the Ancient Landscapes exhibition was Paul Nash's November Moon, according to the catalogue Nash had been interested in how the moon appears in daylight in November. Autumn is a time of decay and death, and of course the painting has the cypress trees, evergreens associated with immortality, this tree also is part of death as well, connected with the Greek underworld.

Here Nash is playing the cycle between dying and living, the large mushroom at the forefront and the convolvous or Morning Glory one representing autumn and death, the summer flower twisting its way following the sun. This painting is very similar in expression to the Sun Eclipsing the Sunflower shown earlier on, and its soft pastel tones hide a more dramatic expression.

This picture by Nash is not in the exhibition, but again the moon figures strongly, the rounded hill is probably the Wittenham Clumps in Oxfordshire, which he painted several times, a more formalised version can be seen in Under the Hill.

Partial Eclipse of the Sun. .http://thelmawilcox.blogspot.com/2008/08/blog-post.html

The Brotherhood of the Ruralists

2008-08-01T22:40:00.000-07:00

This is a group of several painters who came together in 1975 and founded the Brotherhood of Ruralists in Wellow, which is not too far from a favourite place of mine, Stoney Littleton longbarrow. They painted the Wiltshire countryside, amongst other things, in a stylised and romantic vision, following in the footsteps of the Pre-raphaelites.

The Station House at Wellow which they bought in 1975 in a derelict state, now it is a family home, though the station verandah can still be seen.

Now both styles of art are an acquired taste, the voluptuous red-hair females of Rossetti and Morris enmeshed in historical fantasy, are a 19th century adaption of the highly idealised style of that century. The Ruralists on the other hand create a misty visionary art style, but also there is that clear cut lines of almost surreal images.

This for instance is David Inshaw's Standing Stones,

They are the stones in the Avenue at Avebury, and he has captured the sexual connotations of the male and female stones, the 'male' stone falling neatly between two 'female' stones. His other works (to be included in the later exhibition at Victoria Gallery - Bath are;

Silbury Hill on a Starry Night
Owl and Silbury;
Portrait of Silbury Hill;

As will the work of Graham Ovendon; a painting and a drawing entitled 'Sentinels of Silbury Hill'

Graham Arnold on the other hand (no illustration here,) paints a vivid scene of Found Objects , such things as we like to display on a shelf. Here a vase of bright red poppies, a conch shell, quill pens in an old victorian bottle displayed against a black background, but to the left of the composition a window on a megalithic structure - a quoit - for they also lived in Cornwall, home to these megalithic mushroom stones that are so much part of the countryside. Arnold's work has caught the serenity of the Wiltshire countryside, with the following painting;-

Earthwork at Maiden Castle;
Dragon Hill, Uffington;
The White Horse (Uffington);
The White Horse, Alton barnes;
His wife, paints in a different style,

but do not think that you are looking at a unicorn placed so serenely in its enclosure backed by a rock. For this is a donkey and the painting is based on a real hill in Shropshire, where the Arnolds lived, and they allowed it to become a sanctuary for wild animals. Two donkeys also lived on this hill, so dreamy notions of chaste white unicorns must be subverted into a rather awkwardly placed donkey in a very small space - though safe in its sanctuary, the space is very small in the wilderness.

August 1st Partial eclipse of the Sun

2008-08-01T05:59:00.000-07:00

Eclipse of the Sunflower

This rather dramatic painting is to be found at The Victoria Gallery part of an exhibition called Ancient Landscapes, Pastoral Visions, and it seemed appropiate to marke the partial eclipse of the sun today with Paul Nash's Eclipse of the Sunflower.
Why did he choose this particular expression of the sun eclipsing the sunflower, he was coming to the end of his life, both through ill health and the war. For him the sunflower had many meanings, for instance the sunflower always follows the path of the sun, and in the classical myth Clytie was punished by her sister who turned her into a flower so that she 'turns with the sun and reflects its colour', and it was in the 19th century that it became the symbol for yearning or unrequited love. And of course an eclipsed sun-disc could also reflect the 'infernal calamity of a global conflict', So this painting represents Nash seeing himself as 'escaping into vast lonely places in complete freedom of bodily action, escaping the land but in death returning to it'.
There are several other Nash paintings at the exhibition...

Druid Landscape

Landscape of the Megaliths

This last painting is not the same 'landscape of the Megaliths' that is normally shown.

Ref; Catalogue - Ancient Landscapes, Pastoral Visions by Anne Anderson, Robert Meyrick, Peter Nahum

Dragons and Yews

2008-07-17T21:17:00.000-07:00

Sigurd slaying the dragon

Sometimes a horn sang out,

an eager war song, but

the troop all waited, watching

along the water the kin

of snakes, strange sea dragons,

swimming in the deep or

lying on the steep slopes--

water monsters, serpents, and

wild beasts, such as the ones

that appear on a dangerous

sea journey

in the morning time.

When those creatures heard

the war horn's note

they hurried away

bitter and angry.

Taken from a translation of Beowulf by Dr.David Breeden

Sometimes when we view history it is best to go back to storytelling to capture for one moment the imagination of past societies. Here in our present time we analysis with such thoroughness, that the life and soul is taken from the events that moulded our ancestors.

So it is with this story,the story of Nickers Pool, Nykerpole at Cunetio or Mildenhall. The first story I had read about this pool said that a small settlement of felons lived nearby and that their ghostly presence had caused wraiths to appear in the nearby River Kennet, the ghosts tumbling around on top of the water.

The second story told of Nickers or Nicor's well, now here we go back to Saxon sea-monsters, for nicor means just that and like the above translated verse from Beowulf, relates to dragons and monsters of the Saxon world. So here we have some evil creature living in the River Kennet that came out at night perhaps and terrified the people at Mildenhall. Strangely it is similar to a story in West Wales about a prehistoric stone cairn, though in this case the water-monster was a beaver.

A body of a Saxon woman was found in one of the Roman wells excavated near this site, it would seem that she was murdered and then thrown down the well and perhaps her disappearance adds to monsters coming out of the river at night.

Here be dragons
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The Yew at Alton Prior

The Saxon presence round this part of Wiltshire is very strong, and perhaps the best place to understand it is in the Vale of Pewsey, along the road by Martinsell hill, or up on the old Ridgeway next to Adams Grave and the great Wansdyke, But for the moment we shall stop in the valley bottom by the two churches Alton Barnes and Alton Prior, situated by a small flowing stream.

There is magic here, time has been trapped for a moment, a small path leading from one church to another and there is a quiet sanctity to the place. In Alton Prior church there is an old supposedly 1700 yew tree, which of course puts us right back into the Roman period of 300 ad.

Why two churches you may ask, for that explanantion you must turn to John Chandler's

words here.

http://www.wiltshire.gov.uk/community/getconcise.php?id=5.

He describes Alton Prior church yard as a 'tree yard' with its great and beautiful Yew tree. For it is indeed beautiful, a soft creamy pink inner wood, sensually smooth to the touch, and the twisted contortions of the tree have a vibrant life of their own. Were yew trees sacred in their own right, perhaps with their evergreen foliage, they were one of the sacred trees of the Celtic people, and this relic in Alton Priors may have had predecessors in the Iron Age.

This is not so fanciful as it may appear for the famous well at Glastonbury when excavated, (and you have to go down many feet to expose the original Roman well,) also had a yew very near.

In Thomas Packenham's book Meeting with Remarkable Trees, there are glorious old yews a couple said to be dating back to before the christian church took dominance, and were 'druid' trees, one is at Selbourne, home to the 18th century naturalist Gilbert White. This great tree was blown down in the storms of 1990, but the vicar at the time, had the great crown cut off, and the trunk was lifted into place by crane to reside ivy clad like a stone monolith in the church yard.

the yew's inner wood

Information on the Nykerpoole was taken from the following link;

http://people.bath.ac.uk/liskmj/living-spring/sourcearchive/ns6/ns6kmj1.htm

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Now there is another story told by Nennius (an 8th AD Welsh monk), who though his stories are often thought of as mythlike and foolish, does tell an exceedingly good tale. Dragons dreams can foretell a future event, and in one of the chapters of Nennius's book, he tells the story of a young boys dream. Nennius had access to 5th century books, and this story is about Vortigen, who had found a young boy call Ambrose, the boy had a dream in which he saw a tent at the bottom of a pool, in this tent slept two dragons , a red one and a green one. They woke up and fought, and the red dragon who represented the saxons overcame the green dragon who represented the British, the tale in its full version from Nennius is told here......

"a pool; come and dig:" they did so, and found the pool. "Now," continued he, "tell me what is in it;" but they were ashamed, and made no reply. "I," said the boy, "can discover it to you: there are two vases in the pool;" they examined, and found it so: continuing his questions," What is in the vases?" they were silent: "there is a tent in them," said the boy; "separate them, and you shall find it so;" this being done by the king's command, there was found in them a folded tent. The boy, going on with his questions, asked the wise men what was in it? But they not knowing what to reply, "There are," said he, "two serpents, one white and the other red; unfold the tent;" they obeyed, and two sleeping serpents were discovered; "consider attentively," said the boy, "what they are doing." The serpents began to struggle with each other; and the white one, raising himself up, threw down the other into the middle of the tent, and sometimes drove him to the edge of it; and this was repeated thrice. At length the red one, apparently the weaker of the two, recovering his strength, expelled the white one from the tent; and the latter being pursued through the pool by the red one, disappeared. Then the boy, asking the wise men what was signified by this wonderful omen, and they expressing their ignorance, he said to the king, "I will now unfold to you the meaning of this mystery. The pool is the emblem of this world, and the tent that of your kingdom: the two serpents are two dragons; the red serpent is your dragon, but the white serpent is the dragon of the people who occupy several provinces and districts of Britain, even almost from sea to sea: at length, however, our people shall rise and drive away the Saxon race from beyond the sea, whence they originally came....

Avebury - Jacquetta Hawkes

2008-07-15T22:58:00.001-07:00

To continue with Jacquetta Hawke's writing, her words on Avebury, what she then saw at Avebury 70 odd years ago, thousands of tourists, is still seen today, as they traipse round paying homage. Strangely she does'nt have much to say about Silbury except perhaps
"there it stands a challenge to science, and a proof that faith can build mountains with the help of no more than bone shovels and antler picks"

Time drifts on but Avebury still manages to keep its air of mystery, its secrets safely kept, Silbury is the same, experts circle and pronounce their verdicts, amateurs theorise but the essence of truth remains stubbornly hidden.

" Learned men and kings (she mentions a testimonial in the Red Lion here), still go to Avebury, but they are supplemented by thousands of tourists. This flow of visitors to ancestral monuments is curiously reminiscent of that of medieval pilgrims to famous shrines; though without faith or doctrine, their fundamental needs and purposes are, I believe, very much the same.
However this may be, there is no doubt that in the summer months visitors swarm at Avebury, and the archaeological traveller may prefer to go there in other seasons when the place relapses peacefully into the downland countryside. Let him go in early spring when the wind still blows chilly across the chalk hills but the beeches are grape coloured with thrusting buds, or in autumn when these same trees are no more than a glowing aftermath of summer in the pale nostalgic air, and he can wander in pursuit of earthworks and stones among cottage gardens heavy with the last dahlias and chrysantheums."

Stonehenge By Jacquetta Hawkes

2008-07-11T08:37:00.000-07:00

One of my favourite authors is Jacquetta Hawkes, an archaeologist who not only loved the ancient world but described it with extraordinary imagination, here she writes of Stonehenge...

The traveller who wishes to approach Stonehenge most fittingly should keep along this road, crossing the little river Till at Winterbourne Stoke. As he reaches the quiet crossroads on the summit, he will be on the edge of one of the greatest, and certainly the richest, congregation of burial mounds in all Britain. Here was a kind of vast scattered cemetery on ground hallowed by its proximity to the renowned sanctuary. Barrows cluster round Stonehenge on all sides - 300 0f them - but here to the west is the greatest concentration and the area most sequestered from the blighting military activities of Amesbury........
When the ritual and whatever it accompaniment may have been of masks, effigies and offerings have vanished so long ago, when there is no stir left of emotion and the ghosts which emotion keeps alive, when the verypeople responsible for raising these mounds have been overwhelmed, absorbed and forgotten, then their detailed study can become lifeless enough.
Better perhaps to look at them with knowledge but with knowledge unexpressed, these round barrows that are like the floating bubbles of events drowned in time.
Away to the right of the road the bubbles ride the downs in lines and clusters. First on Normanton Down immediately above Stonehenge where some of the richest burials of the Wessex invaders have been uncovered, then further away the great conglomerations of Wilsford and Lake. So we approach Britain's most famous prehistoric monument through crowding satellites attracted towards it by the magnetism of its own holiness......
...... Stonehenge is concentrated into a very small space and as a result it seems to have grown upwards. Partly because of this concentration colour plays a great part in the architectural quality of the sanctuary. The huge blocks of sarsen are a pale silver grey and in many lights they stand out with a strange pallor against the duler tones of the downs, an effect seen with heightened intensity in Constable's marvellous painting of the stones enveloped in storm-clouds.
.......We may feel that publicity has destroyed the spirit of this too famous building; yet once among the stones all but the most stubborn resistant moods must surrender to their power.
The massive, roughly squared blocks of sarsen seem to possess a forceful presence which asserts itself within the human consciousness. Their silver grey colour fills the eye but now shows itself to be variegated with dark lichens and with the shadow of the grotesque fissures and hollows worn by centuries of rain and frost.....

Prehistoric and Roman Monuments in England and Wales - Jacquetta Hawkes 1951

The Ruin translated by Michael Alexander

2008-07-10T06:53:00.000-07:00

Well-wrought this wall; Wierds broke it.
The stronghold burst......

Snapped rooftrees,towers fallen,
the work of the Giants, the stonesmiths,
mouldereth.
..............Rime scoureth gatetowers
...............rime on mortar.

Shattered the showershields, roofs ruined,
age under-ate them.
...............And the wielders and wrights?
Earthgrip holds them - gone, long gone,
fast in gravesgrasp while fifty fathers
and sons have passed.
...............Wall stood,
grey lichen, red stone, kings fell often,
stood under storms, high arch crashed -
stands yet the wallstone, hacked by weapons,
by files grim-ground....
....shone the old skilled work
....sank to loam crust.

Mood quickened mind, and a man of wit,
cunning in rings, bound bravely the wallbase
with iron, a wonder.

Bright were the buildings, halls where springs ran,
high, horngabled, much throng noise;
these many mead halls men filled
with loud cheerfulness; Wierd changed that.

Came day of pestilence, on all sides men fell dead,
death fetched off the flower of the people;
where they stood to fight, waste places
and on the acropolis, ruins.
.............. Hosts who would build again
shrank to the earth. Therefore are these courts dreary
and that red arch twisteth tiles,
wryeth from roof-ridge, reacheth groundwards....
Broken blocks.......

.............. There once many a man
mood-glad, goldbright, of gleams varnished,
flushed with wine-pride, flashing war-gear,
gazed on wrought gemstones, on gold, on silver,
on wealth, held and hoarded, on light filled amber,
on this bright burgh of broad dominion.

Stood stone houses; wide streams welled
hot from source, and a wall all caught
in its bright bosom, that the baths were
hot at hall's hearth; that was fitting....

Thence hot streams, loosed, ran over hoar stone
unto the ring-tank......
.........it is a kingly thing
.........city

2008-07-10T05:29:00.000-07:00

But No Ruined Stones

The inward gates of a bird are always open.
It does not know how to shut them.
That is the secret of its song,
But whether any man's are ajar is doubtful.
I look at these stones and know little about them,
But I know their gates are open too,
Always open, far longer open, than any bird's can be…

Hugh MacDiarmid, 'On a Raised Beach'

We are so easily baffled by appearances
And do not realise that these stones are one with the stars.
It makes no difference to them whether they are high or low,
Mountain peak or ocean floor;
palace or pigsty. There are plenty of ruined buildings in the world
but no ruined stones.
http://www.granta.com/books/chapters/1866

William Morris - The Story of the Unknown Church

2008-07-01T23:41:00.000-07:00

...moreover, through the boughs and trunks of the poplars, we caught glimpses of the great golden corn sea, waving, waving, waving, for leagues and leagues; and among the corn grew burning scarlet poppies and blue corn-flowers; and the corn-flowers were so blue, that they gleamed, and seemed to burn with a steady light, as they grew beside the poppies among the gold of the wheat. Through the corn ran a blue river and always green meadows and lines of tall poplars followed its windings.....

The Path - Poppies

Amongst green fields
Brief moments of scarlet magic
fretted with sky-blue flowers
hanging heavy
with pollened bees
High above grey sarsens
lie hidden amidst trees
guarding the bones.

Winterbourne Monkton church

2008-06-30T23:28:00.000-07:00

Winterbourne Monkton, 761 ha. (1,879 a.), lies in the upper Kennet valley north of Avebury. ) The eastern head stream of the Kennet flows through the parish from north to south and by 869 had given the name Winterbourne to lands there.
From: 'Parishes: Winterbourne Monkton', A History of the County of Wiltshire: Volume 12:

Female giving birth to what? note blue waves. The figure looks like it has been carved in at a later date to the zig-zag, this probably accounts for some of the discrepancy in the body, having scratched the 'waves', out the carver was unable to 'add' the face - so is this medieval graffiti relating to a pagan story......

Winterbourne Monkton Church

A probable cap stone brought to the church in the 18th C from the nearby Mill longbarrow, destroyed by a farmer
staddle stones under the old wooden building by the church

Colouring in the font - this seems to be a window

note blue paint on Norman zig-zag

slight protuberance (the only one) on decorative work below the female depiction

There are two interesting fonts in this particular area, the one at Avebury and the Winterbourne font. Some would argue that the above is a Sheela na gig figure but it is not that apparent, is she giving birth to foliage? why is her face blank? And why do her arms seem to represent twisting snakes or even perhaps similar to an Indian goddess.

the font seems to have been carved in the 12th century, and has the definitive Norman 'wave'

zig-zag highlighted in blue paint in places. Red paint also appears, some just beneath the figure and some on the decorative arcading beneath.

The land around here was owned by the Benedictine Glastonbury Abbey, and can be seen as a monastic grange, with lay brothers probably farming the land. The desmene lands here at Winterbourne totalled 550 acres; in addition the abbot held a further 235 acres of hillside pasture, open to all tenants in the manor. ( The Monastic Grange in Medieval England - Colin Platt)

Note; B.M. MS Harley 3961 - On the desmene land, 1 acre was occupied by the site 32 acres were meadow and pasture, and 517 acres were arable.

From the above it can be seen that it was mostly an arable farm, and this would account for the windmills in the village itself for grinding corn, and of course the old staddle stones under the wooden building at the front of the church keeping the rats and mice at bay from the grain.

A windmill was built west of the village for Abbot of Glastonbury 1265 (Adami de Domerham Glast.Cart.) was let in the early 14th century. A new windmill was built in the early 16th century. Another windmill stood north-east of the village in 1815 but was disused in 1889. In 1980 only the stones if its base remained beside Windmill house.

Before 1229 Winterbourne Monkton vicarage was endowed with certain small tithes and all offerings. (fn. 135) The hay tithes of Winterbourne Monkton and 1 qr. of corn and 1 qr. of oats, due annually from Cirencester abbey's lands in Avebury, were then added. (fn. 136) An additional payment to the vicar of 3 qr. of wheat and 2 qr. of barley from the abbey's Avebury lands and of all tithes from a piece of land called 'old land' was agreed in 1268. (fn. 137) All the allowances of grain were replaced c. 1630 by a yearly pension of £8. (fn. 138) At least two further augmentations of the vicarage were made but in neither case is the date or donor recorded. In the 1670s the incumbent received hay, wool, lamb, and lesser tithes from all but the demesne of Winterbourne Monkton manor, and corn tithes from a few acres in the parish. (fn. 139) In 1815 grain tithes from 100 a. and other tithes from all but the 640 a. of the demesne were paid to the vicar.....
From: 'Parishes: Winterbourne Monkton', A History of the County of Wiltshire: Volume 12: Ramsbury and Selkley hundreds; the borough of Marlborough (1983), pp. 192-198.

Church

The dedication of the church of ST. MARY MAGDALENE has not been traced before the mid 18th century. (fn. 161) The church is built of coursed sarsen rubble and has a chancel with north vestry, a nave with south porch, and a timber-framed and boarded tower rising from the west end of the nave. The bowl of the font is of the late 12th century but the earliest part of the building is the 13th-century chancel. The nave was completely rebuilt in the 14th century. Beside the chancel arch there are cusped niches and a small piscina to serve an altar. In the 15th century the east window and the nave roof were renewed and the porch was added. The tower, the date of which is not known, is supported on the west side by the nave wall. On the east side there are two heavy cylindrical wooden posts which rise from the floor of the nave. The church was refitted in the 17th century. A communion table of 1678 and an early 17th-century pulpit survive and there were formerly pews and a communion rail of similar date to the pulpit. In the 18th century a gallery was built at the west end of the nave. It was removed before 1878 when the church was restored
From: 'Parishes: Winterbourne Monkton', A History of the County of Wiltshire: Volume 12: Ramsbury and Selkley hundreds; the borough of Marlborough (1983), pp. 192-198.

Christianised megaliths in Brittany

http://www.themodernantiquarian.com/post/59374/images/dolmen_du_cruz_moquen.html

http://tinyurl.com/4kpj8m St.Michel chapel on top of tumulus in Brittany..

The above two christianised sites in Brittany are included to show that the heavy foot of the church came down heavily on anything that had pagan beliefs or a pagan past which included the worship of stones.

Richard Hayman in his article Green Men & the Way of All Flesh, argues that such things as sheela na gigs and green men found in church stone decoration are the result of style related to christian beliefs and stories. In fact that the sheela na gig came to this country in the 12th century, it had previously started in the 11th century in France. How does he translate them then? it is in the transition between secular and sacred, Christian art showing the opposition of both virtue and vice......

http://northstoke.blogspot.com/2008/04/priory-of-stgeorges-de-boscherville.html

Solstice and a Grey Misty Day

2008-06-21T00:20:00.000-07:00

mock orange

There is something totally enchanting about the soft rain that falls so gently at this time of year. Today of course it should be sunny for Solstice day but unpredictable nature says sod the humans today I will cover this particular patch of England with a grey mist, enhancing the purple seed heads of the grasses, hanging the creamy elderflower heavy with saturated rain, turning the whole world a lustrous green. The dog and I stride through the long grass soaked to the skin and I meet another walker with his dog and we laugh at our soaked appearance.
Coming back I walk beside the old stone wall, there is a tableau of mosses on one stone, little miniature islands in a sea of gray. Tiny brown flower stalks, even tinier seeds perfect in their formation, and I'm reminded of last night radio and Heather Cooper explaining the galaxies and stars and the fact that there was literally nothing before the big bang. Sometimes it is impossible to believe that nature can craft such beauty as these soft mounded plants, little worlds safe in their environment for a time, before time itself comes and sweeps them away.

Edward Thomas - Spirit of Place - Cornwall

2008-06-18T10:30:00.000-07:00

The following are short extracts from The South Country written by Edward Thomas when he travelled in Cornwall. His prose has the magical touch of Jefferies, and Thomas did indeed write a biography of Jefferies. Strangely when I was looking for a piece of writing for today, Rememberance Sunday, I was looking for Siegfried Sassoon's bleak poetry on war,Thomas writes about the bronze age barrows that are strung along the cliff tops looking outward to sea, his prehistory is somewhat muddled, Beowulf is alluded to, and a lovely extract on a stone circle evokes druids the inscription upon the chair of the Bards of Beisgawen was 'Nothing is that is not for ever and ever'. Poetical licence must be granted in lieu of the truth, the factual accounting of today which drags the mind away from lilting prose should be set aside...

"On the barrows themselves, which are either isolated or in a group of two or three, grow thistle and gorse. They command mile upon mile of cliff and sea. In their sight the great headland run out to sea and sinking seem to rise again a few miles out in a sheer island, so that they resemble couchant beasts with backs under water but heads and haunches upreared .......
....and near by the blue sea, slightly roughened as by a harrow, sleeps calm but foamy among cinder-covered isles; donkeys graze on the brown turf, larks rise and fall and curlews go by; a cuckoo sings amongst the deserted mines. But the barrows are most noble on the high heather and grass. The lonely turf is full of lilace scabious flowers and crimson knapweed among the solid mounds of gorse. The brown-green-grey of the dry summer grass reveals myriads of the flowers of the thyme, of stonecrop yellow and white, of pearly eyebright, of golden lady's fingers, and the white or grey clover with its purest and earthest of all fragrances.
On every hand lies cromlech, camp, circle, hut and tumulus of the unwritten years. They are confused and and mingled with the natural litter of a barren land. It is a silent Bedlam of history, a senseless cemetery or museum, amidst which we walk as animals must do when they see those valleys full of skeleton where their kind are said to go punctually to die. There are enough of the dead; they outnumber the living, and there those trite truths burst with life and drum upon the typpanum with ambigous fatal voices. At the end of this many barrowed moor, yet not in it, there is a solitary circle of grey stones, where the cry of the past is less vociferous, less bewildering, than on the moor itself, but more intense. Nineteen tall, grey stones stand round a taller, pointed one that is heavily bowed, amidst long grass and bracken and furze. A track passes close by, but does not enter the circle; the grass is unbent except by the wieght of its bloom. It bears a name that connects it with the assembling and rivalry of the bards of Britain. Here, under the sky, they met, leaning upon the stones, tall fair men of peace, but half warriors, whose songs could change ploughshares into sword. Here they met, and the growth of the grass, the perfection of the stones(except that one stoops as with age), and the silence, suggest that since the last bard left it, in robe of blue or white or green - the colours of sky and cloud and grass upon this fair day - the circle has been unmolested, and the law obeyed which forbade any but a bard to enter it........And the inscription on the chair of the bards of Beisgawen was "nothing is that is not for ever and ever" - these things and the blue sky, the white, cloudy hall of the sun, and the green bough and grass, hallowed the ancient stones, and clearer than any vision of tall bards in the morning of the world was the tranquil delight of being thus ' teased out of time' in the presence of this ancientness,....

The Stone circle of Beisgawen is in actual fact Boscawen -Un

http://www.themodernantiquarian.com/site/229/boskawenun.html

W.B.Yeats

2008-06-17T08:06:00.000-07:00

Hound Voice
BECAUSE we love bare hills and stunted trees
And were the last to choose the settled ground,
Its boredom of the desk or of the spade, because
So many years companioned by a hound,
Our voices carry; and though slumber-bound,
Some few half wake and half renew their choice,
Give tongue, proclaim their hidden name -- 'Hound Voice.'

The women that I picked spoke sweet and low
And yet gave tongue. 'Hound Voices' were they all.
We picked each other from afar and knew
What hour of terror comes to test the soul,
And in that terror's name obeyed the call,
And understood, what none have understood,
Those images that waken in the blood.
Some day we shall get up before the dawn
And find our ancient hounds before the door,
And wide awake know that the hunt is on;
Stumbling upon the blood-dark track once more,
Then stumbling to the kill beside the shore;
Then cleaning out and bandaging of wounds,
And chantS of victory amid the encircling hounds.

The Harp of Aengus

Edain came out of Midhir's hill, and lay
Beside young Aengus in his tower of glass,
Where time is drowned in odour-laden winds
And Druid moons, and murmuring of boughs,
And sleepy boughs, and boughs where apples made
Of opal and ruby and pale chrysolite
Awake unsleeping fires; and wove seven strings,
Sweet with all music, out of his long hair,
Because her hands had been made wild by love.
When Midhir's wife had changed her to a fly,
He made a harp with Druid apple-wood
That she among her winds might know he wept;
And from that hour he has watched over none
But faithful lovers.

The drawings are by W.H. Bartlett and appear in a book by N.P.Willis, The Scenery and Antiquities of Ireland 1842.

The Wild Swans of Coole - W.B.Yeats

2008-06-17T07:56:00.000-07:00

THE TREES are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine and fifty swans.

The nineteenth Autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.

I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.

Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold,
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.

But now they drift on the still water
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake’s edge or pool
Delight men’s eyes, when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?

Seamus Heaney

2008-06-14T11:17:00.000-07:00

These are the last of Heaney's bog poems, in the last verse there is a lovely line evoking two images in one, "A world-tree of balanced stones" . The world tree is part of religious myth but if you would envisage the great ash tree Ygrasdil, with the wells beneath, and combine it with the Cornwall tor image of stones precariously balanced one on top of another, ancient nature wonders, you would understand the deep power of nature within the minds of prehistoric people.

Belderg

'They just keep turning up
And were thought of as foreign'-
One-eyed and benign,
They lie about his house,
Quernstones out of a bog.

To lift the lid of the peat
And find this pupil dreaming
Of neolithic wheat!
When he stripped off blanket bog
The soft-piled centuries

Fell open like a glib;
There were the first plough-marks,
The stone-age fields, the tomb
Corbelled, turfed and chambered,
Floored with dry turf-coomb.

A landscape fossilized,
Its stone wall patternings
Repeated befor our eyes
In the stone walls of Mayo.
Before I turned to go

He talked about persistence,
A congruence of lives,
How stubbed and cleared of stones,
His home accrued growth rings
Of iron, flint and bronze.

So I talked of Mossbawn,
A bogland name 'but Moss'?,
He crossed my old home's music
With older strains of Norse.
I'd told how its foundation

Was mutable as sound
And how I could derive
A forked root from that ground,
Make bawn an English fort,
A planter's walled-in mound.

Or else find sanctuary
And think of it as Irish,
Persistent if outworn.
'But the Norse ring on your tree?'
I passed through the eye of the quern,

Grist to an ancient mill,
And in my mind's eye saw,
A world-tree of balanced stones,
Querns piles like vertebrae,
The marrow crushed to grounds.

---------------------

Come to the Bower

My hands come, touched
By sweetbriar and tangled vetch,
Foraging past the burst gizzards
of coin hoards
To where the dark-bowered queen,

Whom I unpin,
Is waiting. Out of the black maw
Of the peat, sharpened willow
Withdraws gently
I unwrap skins and see

The pot of the skull,
The damp tuck of each curl
Reddish as a fox's brush,
A mark of a gorget in the flesh
of her throat. And spring water

Starts to rise about her
I reach past
The riverbed's washed
Dream of gold to the bullion
Of her Venus bone.
----------------------------

A Wind of the Sea by Jeremy Hooker

2008-06-14T10:21:00.000-07:00

It exhausts me at last,
This querulous petition
Of a chalk Hamlet
To the ground.
The sea-wind needs
No addition from complaints;

It has touched
Chert and flint,
Left the smooth boulder
Unmoved, but acquired
Something of the character
Of stone. I leave
My mouth as its portion.

Let it resolve my breath
Into a taste of salt,
A scent of thyme,
A touch of stone.
My image I leave
To whoever it reflects;

But my body is the sea's;
It is a piece broken
From the hill, a chalk
Stack, not formed,
But worn down by the tides.

--------------------

Dawn

There is a moment
No one sees,
When earth is formed
In the image of neither
Mist nor light.

Grey flowers grow
On the giantless hill,
Over the untouched graves.
Sleeper and sleepless lie
Without a name.

Colour breaks and this day
Is one of the millions,
Bloodred, gold, with a streak
Of unearthly green
Like the eye of a god.

Dawn is perfectionOf a kind.
Now I wake
To the unfinished act
And the dead lie complet
For ever, under their names.

-------------------------

Fossil Urchins

A tribe found them, believing
They grew like dandelions
In the soil.
An exquisite
From the Age of Fishes
Became the sun's icon,
Crowned with rays
,And a ring of suns,
Sacred to the resurrection,
Was placed around the dead.
There is still
a touch of man.
They are composed
Of blood and fire,
Where the sun roots in the earth
They are not clammy like potsherds,
But shapely and warm to the hand.

The Two Trees

2008-06-14T10:14:00.000-07:00

THE TWO TREES
by: William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
BELOVED, gaze in thine own heart
The holy tree is growing there;
From joy the holy branches start,
And all the trembling flowers they bear.
The changing colours of its fruit
Have dowered the stars with merry light;
The surety of its hidden root
Has planted quiet in the night;
The shaking of its leafy head
Has given the waves their melody,
And made my lips and music wed,
Murmuring a wizard song for thee.
There the Loves a circle go,
The flaming circle of our days,
Gyring, spiring to and fro
In those great ignorant leafy ways;
Remembering all that shaken hair
And how the wingèd sandals dart,
Thine eyes grow full of tender care:

Beloved, gaze in thine own heart.
Gaze no more in the bitter glass
The demons, with their subtle guile,
Lift up before us when they pass,
Or only gaze a little while;
For there a fatal image grows
That the stormy night receives,
Roots half hidden under snows,
Broken boughs and blackened leaves.
For all things turn to barrenness
In the dim glass the demons hold,
The glass of outer weariness,
Made when God slept in times of old.
There, through the broken branches, go
The ravens of unresting thought;
Flying, crying, to and fro,
Cruel claw and hungry throat,
Or else they stand and sniff the wind,
And shake their ragged wings; alas!
Thy tender eyes grow all unkind:
Gaze no more in the bitter glass.

2008-06-14T09:52:00.000-07:00

Lob by Edward Thomas

AT hawthorn-time in Wiltshire travelling
In search of something chance would never bring
,An old man's face, by life and weather cut
And coloured,--rough, brown, sweet as any nut,--
A land face, sea-blue-eyed,--hung in my mind
When I had left him many a mile behind.
All he said was: "Nobody can't stop 'ee. It's
A footpath, right enough. You see those bits
Of mounds--that's where they opened up the barrows
Sixty years since, while I was scaring sparrows.
They thought as there was something to find there,
But couldn't find it, by digging, anywhere.

"To turn back then and seek him, where was the use?
There were three Manningfords,--Abbots, Bohun, and
Bruce:And whether Alton, not Manningford, it was,
My memory could not decide, because
There was both Alton Barnes and Alton Priors.
All had their churches, graveyards, farms, and byres,
Lurking to one side up the paths and lanes,
Seldom well seen except by aeroplanes;
And when bells rang, or pigs squealed, or cocks crowed,
Then only heard. Ages ago the road
Approached. The people stood and looked and turned,
Nor asked it to come nearer, nor yet learned
To move out there and dwell in all men's dust.
And yet withal they shot the weathercock, just
Because 'twas he crowed out of tune, they said:
So now the copper weathercock is dead.
If they had reaped their dandelions and sold
Them fairly, they could have afforded gold.

Many years passed, and I went back again
Among those villages, and looked for men
Who might have known my ancient. He himself
Had long been dead or laid upon the shelf,
I thought. One man I asked about him roared
At my description: "'Tis old Bottlesford
He means, Bill." But another said: "Of course,
It was Jack Button up at the White Horse.
He's dead, sir, these three years." This lasted till
A girl proposed Walker of Walker's Hill,
"Old Adam Walker. Adam's Point you'll see
Marked on the maps.""That was her roguery,
"The next man said. He was a squire's son
Who loved wild bird and beast, and dog and gun
For killing them. He had loved them from his birth,
One with another, as he loved the earth.
"The man may be like Button, or Walker, or
Like Bottlesford, that you want, but far more
He sounds like one I saw when I was a child.
I could almost swear to him. The man was wild
And wandered. His home was where he was free.
Everybody has met one such man as he.
Does he keep clear old paths that no one uses
But once a life-time when he loves or muses?
He is English as this gate, these flowers, this mire.
And when at eight years old Lob-lie-by-the-fire
Came in my books, this was the man I saw.
He has been in England as long as dove and daw,
Calling the wild cherry tree the merry tree,
The rose campion Bridget-in-her-bravery;
And in a tender mood he, as I guess,
Christened one flower Love-in-idleness,
And while he walked from Exeter to Leeds
One April called all cuckoo-flowers Milkmaids.
From him old herbal Gerard learnt, as a boy,
To name wild clematis the Traveller's-joy.
Our blackbirds sang no English till his ear
Told him they called his Jan Toy 'Pretty dear.'(She was Jan Toy the Lucky, who, having lost
A shilling, and found a penny loaf, rejoiced.)
For reasons of his own to him the wren
Is Jenny Pooter. Before all other men
'Twas he first called the Hog's Back the Hog's Back.
That Mother Dunch's Buttocks should not lack
Their name was his care. He too could explain
Totteridge and Totterdown and Juggler's Lane:
He knows, if anyone. Why Tumbling Bay,
Inland in Kent, is called so, he might say.

Kent, is called so, he might say."
But little he says compared with what he does.
If ever a sage troubles him he will buzz
Like a beehive to conclude the tedious fray:
And the sage, who knows all languages, runs away.
Yet Lob has thirteen hundred names for a fool,
And though he never could spare time for school
To unteach what the fox so well expressed,
On biting the cock's head off,--Quietness is best,--
He can talk quite as well as anyone
After his thinking is forgot and done.
He first of all told someone else's wife,
For a farthing she'd skin a flint and spoil a knife
Worth sixpence skinning it. She heard him speak:
'She had a face as long as a wet week'
Said he, telling the tale in after years.
With blue smock and with gold rings in his ears,
Sometimes he is a pedlar, not too poor
To keep his wit. This is tall Tom that bore
The logs in, and with Shakespeare in the hall
Once talked, when icicles hung by the wall.
As Herne the Hunter he has known hard times.
On sleepless nights he made up weather rhymes
Which others spoilt. And, Hob being then his name,
He kept the hog that thought the butcher came
To bring his breakfast 'You thought wrong,' said Hob.
When there were kings in Kent this very Lob,
Whose sheep grew fat and he himself grew merry,
Wedded the king's daughter of Canterbury;
For he alone, unlike squire, lord, and king,
Watched a night by her without slumbering;
He kept both waking. When he was but a lad
He won a rich man's heiress, deaf, dumb, and sad,
By rousing her to laugh at him. He carried
His donkey on his back. So they were married.
And while he was a little cobbler's boy
He tricked the giant coming to destroy
Shrewsbury by flood. 'And how far is it yet?
'The giant asked in passing. 'I forget;
But see these shoes I've worn out on the road
And we're not there yet.' He emptied out his load
Of shoes for mending. The giant let fall from his spade
The earth for damming Severn, and thus made
The Wrekin hill; and little Ercall hill
Rose where the giant scraped his boots. While still
So young, our Jack was chief of Gotham's sages.
But long before he could have been wise, ages
Earlier than this, while he grew thick and strong
And ate his bacon, or, at times, sang a song
And merely smelt it, as Jack the giant-killer
He made a name. He too ground up the miller,
The Yorkshireman who ground men's bones for flour

"Do you believe Jack dead before his hour?
Or that his name is Walker, or Bottlesford,
Or Button, a mere clown, or squire, or lord?
The man you saw,--Lob-lie-by-the-fire, Jack Cade,
Jack Smith, Jack Moon, poor Jack of every trade,
Young Jack, or old Jack, or Jack What-d'ye-call,
Jack-in-the-hedge, or Robin-run-by-the-wall,
Robin Hood, Ragged Robin, lazy Bob,
One of the lords of No Man's Land, good Lob,--Although he was seen dying at Waterloo,
Hastings, Agincourt, and Sedgemoor too,--Lives yet.
He never will admit he is dead
Till millers cease to grind men's bones for bread,
Not till our weathercock crows once again
And I remove my house out of the lane
On to the road." With this he disappeared
In hazel and thorn tangled with old-man's-beard.
But one glimpse of his back, as there he stood,
Choosing his way, proved him of old Jack's blood
Young Jack perhaps, and now a Wiltshireman
As he has oft been since his days began.

2008-06-14T09:26:00.000-07:00

June 14, 2008

J.R.Tolkien
One of my favourite epics is Lord of The Rings by J.R.Tolkien, it was one of those 1960s happenings that sprang into life and became fully formed for many people. Today it is still popular as the films testify. It was one of those extraordinary feats of writings encompassing a whole world of adventure, not set in the human world, though they did in fact appear, but in the make believe world of the Hobbits, elves, tree-ents, a tale of honour, courage and bravery against unknown dark forces that conspired to take over this middle earth. A pitched battle between good and evil and the films gloriously bought out the bloodiness of the many battles fought. Tolkien wrote other books, the Silmarillon being one of them, but he also wrote books within the history of his make-believe world, and one of them to be found in Lord of the Rings is the Red Book, fragments of prose, written poetry, etc. This book culminated in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil by Tolkien.
The first rather romantic poem is one of my favourites, a small story written into the poem, that makes you ask who are these people, the man sitting 'still as carven stone', and why the lady was wandering through the wood. There are other thoughts to be had from the images, the great stones along the Avenue at Avebury is supposed to reflect male and female stones, and I have often wondered whether they to were people who have been turned into stone by unseen forces.
I shall record three poems from the book, the other two I recited to my children, the Mewlips one of course with great relish and a leap at the end. The cat one is in response towards cats who I feel are completely selfish creatures who live with humans without giving much in return.

Shadow-Bride

There was a man who dwelt alone,
as day and night went past
he sat as still as carven stone,
and yet no shadow cast.

The white owls perched upon his head
beneath the winter moon;
they wiped their beaks and thought him dead
under the stars in June.

There came a lady clad in grey
in the twilight shinning:
one moment she would stand and stay,
her hair with flowers entwining.

He woke, as had he sprung from stone,
and broke the spell that bound him;
he clasped her fast, both flesh and bone,
and wrapped her shadow round him.

There never more she walks her ways
by sun or moon or star;
she dwells below where neither days
nor any nights there are.

But once a year when caverns yawn
and hidden things awake,
they dance together then till dawn
and a single shadow make.

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The Mewlips
The Shadows where the Mewlips dwell
Are dark and wet as ink,
And slow and softly rings their bell,
As in the slime you sink.

You sink into the slime, who dare
To knock upon their door,
While down the grinning gargoyles stare
And noisome waters pour.

Beside the rotting river-strand
The drooping willows weep,
And gloomily the gorcrows stand
Croaking in their sleep.

Over the Merlock Mountains a long and weary way,
In a mouldy valley where the trees are grey,
By a dark pool´s borders without wind or tide,
Moonless and sunless, the Mewlips hide.

The cellars where the Mewlips sit
Are deep and dank and cold
With single sickly candle lit;
And there they count their gold.

Their walls are wet, their ceilings drip;
Their feet upon the floor
Go softly with a squish-flap-flip,
As they sidle to the door.

They peep out slyly; through a crack
Their feeling fingers creep,
And when they´ve finished, in a sack
Your bones they take to keep.

Beyond the Merlock Mountains, a long and lonely road,
Through the spider-shadows and the marsh of Tode,
And through the wood of hanging trees and gallows-weed,
You go to find the Mewlips - and the Mewlips feed.
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Cat

The fat cat on the mat
may seem to dream
of nice mice that suffice
for him, or cream;
but he free, maybe,
walks in thought
unbowed, proud, where loud
roared and fought
his kin, lean and slim
,or deep in den
in the East feasted on beasts
and tender men.
The giant lion with iron
claw in paw,
and huge ruthless tooth
in gory jaw;
the pard dark-starred,
fleet upon feet,
that oft soft from aloft
leaps upon his meat
where woods loom in gloom --
far now they be,
fierce and free,
and tamed is he;
but fat cat on the mat
kept as a pet
he does not forget.