Taken shakily on my phone - I discovered I'd brought the camera bag with me but not the camera itself! - these photos are not spectacular, but I was glad to be back in Dorset for the day going out with my sister to Abbotsbury and then to West Bay. The former was very quiet - the only other visitors we saw were a group of walkers who came into the café where we had our Blue Vinney baguettes - but there was a surprising number of people making their way around the little harbour a mile south of Bridport. It's the first time in years that Chapel Hill has been deserted apart from the cows: but then it looks a little forbidding, the east window boarded up after the glass has clearly been cracked. People were clearly there around Christmas as there were the remains of decorations and some Christmas-contextual messages left in the prayer niches.
Off topic, but did you know that you had been quoted in Ronald Blythe's latest book?
ReplyDeleteNo! In what context? Wells?
ReplyDeleteYes. The book is called "Next to Nature".
ReplyDeletep.124: The Gospels being so full of wells it was no wonder that hydrolatry became popular. Worshipping water seemed an obvious thing to do. Water was never simply water, it was different wherever one found it, especially holy if a saint lived nearby, particularly medicinal if it coursed through certain rocks. The writer James Rattue adds another reminder: 'In pools of water the human being first saw his own face, and could see the world mirrored around him: and this is perhaps the most surprising and extraordinary power of water.' As I read this I thought of Thomas Traherne's magical poem "Shadows in the Water" in which a boy staring into a puddle "chanc'd another world to meet"...
That was the very passage I guessed! Thank you.
ReplyDelete