Beautiful Badbury

When this blog passed its 2000th post I said I wasn't going to be striving to find something to say every other day, as I had in the past, but only post when there was something positive happening. Nothing very much has gone on today apart from a trip to Dorset to see my mum, going out with her for a meal, and visiting the farm shop at Pamphill Dairy, finishing with my obligatory walk around Badbury Rings. But Badbury Rings is always restful and calming, and maybe you find my photos the same! Today I did the opposite of my usual route of going straight through the monument and then following the southern ramparts back, by turning north along the banks and then cutting back through the wooded centre. I couldn't remember ever seeing the Trig. pillar before, somehow.

Christmas 2023

It was pretty similar to last year in terms of numbers, the Cribbage and Midnight very much the same, 8am a bit down, and 10am a bit up. The fact that it was one of those years when the Fourth Sunday of Advent magically transforms into Christmas Eve at mid-day didn't seem to make that much of a difference to anyone except me and the team of souls who staff the services, who were spread a bit thin between six services, not to mention Carols by Candlelight last Friday night. 

After last year's experiences, I rethought the Midnight: rather than attempt a grandeur we can't manage, we went for intimacy instead, abandoning the old high altar, not having anyone in the choir (two choristers were present but sat in the congregation), and having subdued lighting and lots of candles. I was just thinking that for the first time I could remember the service had gone without any mishap at all when Margaret who was one of the eucharistic ministers knocked one of my huge pillar candles over and sent wax spinning over the dais the altar sits on. At least it hadn't been Tim the crucifer as, in his polyester robe (we still use the ones a churchwarden made in 1975), he would have gone up like a candle himself. 

On Christmas Day I attended the Churches Together Christmas Lunch, ending up giving three of the guests a lift after various people went down with a norovirus. I ended up sitting with a Nigerian gentleman, a woman from Sierra Leone and her small daughter, and a Sri Lankan nurse working in one of the local care homes. Somehow we began talking about Reformation history, and it was quite agreeable to explain about Lady Jane Grey and Henry VIII's wives to people who wouldn't have been able to pick me up on the bits I'd forgotten about. They still knew more about the history of the British monarchy than I do about those of West Africa or Ceylon, though. They had no idea about the UK Christmas tradition of the monarch's speech. The Lunch organisers had some trouble with the audiovisuals and so we ended up watching Chucky Boy on the TV while his words were played through a mic off someone's phone, with a delay of about 3 seconds which was most disconcerting.

Down in Dorset for Boxing Day, I, my sister and elder niece went for a little walk over Turbary Common, that charismatic landscape of my childhood. As I and Lady Arlen discovered last year, there are cows there now, and they were there today. I can't tell you how odd it is to see these bovine presences so close to a very suburban environment I am very familiar with.

Moving In the Past

I have no idea why my Mum decided to use a recent letter to describe how it was that she and Dad came to live in the house in Bournemouth that she still occupies, but it seemed worth recording for posterity. Here's what she said, with her own approach to capitalisation as that seems important to me, too: 

I was 26 years when we moved in. We had a Cooker a Bed an old TV & Settee. Mum & Dad [hers] Bought us the Table & Chairs. Dad [mine] laid the Paths all round & mixed cement & Carried it in a Dustbin Lid haha Couldn’t afford a WheelBarrow.

We had £200 put Back to Buy things But. They charged us £200 for Road Charges So that was that. Still we got there in the end. I’ve bought a New Washing Machine cum Tumble Dryer. I’ve got to laugh as it was a quarter of what the Bungalow cost, 8 Times Dad’s Wages.

Before this, Mum and Dad had had a caravan in New Milton, their home from their marriage in 1962 until the bungalow came up. In the past Mum's related how Dad's employer agreed to inflate his wages so they could successfully apply for a mortgage, and how because the street was newly carved out of a chunk of waste land the gardens of the bungalows were an expanse of mud and the road hadn't been properly laid out, hence the 'road charges'. The 'table and chairs' are an Ercol set which is still serviceable 57 years later.

Of course these are all challenges and delights that modern couples in their 20s are never likely to encounter at all ... !

Layers of History

Strangely, perhaps, for someone who has such an interest in history, I rarely look back at my own, or devote much time to thinking about it. But the interlinking of personal and wider history is a different matter. My elder niece has not long since started studying at Sheffield University and is based in the university halls at Endcliffe. On her way to the city centre she walks past the house where her great-great-grandmother was in service, while a couple of miles away is the rather more modest house in Industry Street where her great-grandmother and namesake Grace was born.

Meanwhile, my mum's side of the family came from Somerset. Her grandfather owned Royal Oak Farm at Clanville once upon a time, a building now worth getting on for £850K, quite a far cry from Industry Street, Sheffield. Here it is, as revealed by a popular mapping app. Of course, although these old buildings are part of our history, they're also embedded in other peoples', one of the ways in which lives cross over one another, link, and construct a wider human narrative. 

Performance

A little while ago S.D. told me of the traumatic experience a group of friends had suffered when attempting to go to church the Christmas-before-last. Today we have an uncannily similar occurrence which makes me wonder how common they are. My brother-in-law works at a church school: there is a new incumbent at the parish church. The term starts with a service for the staff, something I'd been thinking of offering. In came the new vicar whose words of welcome were 'This is going to be an informal communion service. I've brought my guitar and I'm going to sing you a song'. 'It would have been rude if we'd all put our heads in our hands', my brother-in-law said.

This is an artist's impression of what it would be like if I was to try doing it. Ha-ruuuuu!

Sandbanks in the Sun

A trip to Dorset to see my family can involve going to Poole Cemetery to tidy up my grandparents' and father's graves: Mum would do it, but can't at the moment. She warned me they would be in a terrible state yesterday, but they weren't, the dry weather having shrivelled all the weeds that otherwise make a nuisance of themselves among the pebbles.

On the way between there and Mum's the sun glinted across Poole Harbour, the expensive apartments and houses of Banks Road slightly hazy beyond the windsurfers. The buildings periodically change as fashions do, but they maintain their long, low line strung out along the sandy spit that closes the mouth of the Harbour from the north. On the eastern side are deep sands and waves; on the western flank, the tranquil waters that stretch all across to Brownsea Island, and that was where we typically took up our seaside positions when I was small. Going back to Sandbanks is always an exercise in the pleasures of memory as well as experience.

Dorset, and Chelmsford 2023

In our family Badbury Rings is the go-to place for a picnic, and Wednesday found me, my mum and sister there, reliving long-ago times and wandering the windy ramparts. I think the mysterious features we could see on the skyline that looked like a row of gigantic solar panels and a tower of some kind are associated with a sand quarry on the hillside over toward Corfe Mullen. Later on I made it to Blue Pool on the Isle of Purbeck, somewhere I haven't seen for forty years; the colour of the clay-infused water varies greatly, but it had its customary hue of turquoise on Wednesday. There were a few other visitors, but I had the woods almost to myself.

But today's excursion was very different and took me to Chelmsford, mainly to see the Cathedral as it's one I've never done. There isn't much to Chelmsford, nor to its Cathedral, a big parish church bumped up to cathedral status in 1914 and never altered much to look like it unlike some other parish-church cathedrals such as Leicester or Newcastle. It has also been architecturally cleansed a couple of times over the years and so very little of any antiquity remains. It is quite the most un-cathedral-like cathedral I've seen. The font, altar and bishop's throne look disconcertingly as though they are made of recycled plastic, but are in fact of Westmorland stone.

Chelmsford City Museum, though, is a delight: clear, arranged with quite a bit of visual flair, and done with a genuine passion for the history of the area. The story of the building housing the museum is covered, and even the military bit about the Essex Regiment is good. There's also a completely uncontextualised reference in the Roman display to a certain locally-relevant 1980s TV sitcom, and I do appreciate curatorial jokes. And it's still run by the local council, and free to go in!

Thanks to the Museum, I know that Moulsham Street marks the course of the old Roman road to the waystation halfway between Londinium and Camulodonum that was the original settlement here, and it was on Moulsham Street that I found the Little Café, a small eatery which - like Tyfu Café in Caerphilly - I added to the list of nice places I've had sandwiches in. Let's not call them 'greasy-spoons', but good basic cafés. Always look for a place where old people go to eat, and where the staff know the patrons' names! 'Other cafés are available', but why would you bother?

Dorset in Winter

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. 

Obligatory Halloween Shot

In fact Halloween night was wet and windy at Swanvale Halt and keeping the lanterns lit was no easy task. By the time I set out for the churchyard for my customary toast to the dead and to leave a lantern to watch over them - for however long or short a time - there wasn't a single glint of a candle from a pumpkin. Nor did I get any visitors so I will have to eat all the chocolate myself. It will take some time.

Halloween is my younger niece's birthday and my sister took her and her friends out trick-or-treating, though at 13 I get the impression she's a little long in the tooth for it as it seems to be primary-school age children who mainly engage in it. Earlier in the day they'd been shopping in Bournemouth and visited the tomb of the Shelleys at St Peter's which seems like an appropriate cultural activity for the day!

Ambulance Chasing

It was a chance for a last Summer day out for my sister's family. They were intending to go for a walk along the cliff paths around Worth Matravers. Driving towards the village, they saw a gentleman coming towards them on a bicycle. He was a bit wobbly. Suddenly he appeared to lose control of the bike, fell off onto the road, and stayed there. 

They came to a halt abruptly. My brother-in-law went to alert any traffic coming up the blind hill to the south while my sister checked the victim and their daughters acted in a supervisory capacity. The poor fellow was unconscious and bleeding dramatically from a cut to the head - he hadn't been wearing a helmet. The advice from 999 was not what my sister was anticipating. 'We can get an ambulance to you in about five hours. Do you have a towel to staunch the bleeding? Can you move him to the side of the road?' The road, as those who know the area might anticipate, doesn't have any sides, at least not any that would keep someone out of the way of vehicles. 

After about twenty minutes, the injured man was coming round and my sister and brother-in-law called 999 again. They discovered - and it's at this point that the story becomes hard to credit - that the original call hadn't been logged. This time, the incident was recorded 'but the ambulance will still take about five hours. Can you take him to the cottage hospital in Swanage?' 'But he's hit his head, is that safe?' asked my sister. 'It's probably the best option', was the reply.

Well, Swanage is only five miles away so that was naturally what they did. The bike was an electric contraption which the gentleman had on approval with the intention of buying it. They took it to the local pub and asked if they could look after it. 'The landlord said yes', reported my sister, 'as though it was the kind of thing that happens every day'. We suspect that as soon as their car drove off, he was on the phone to Andy the Fence in Wareham, and that bike was on its way to a new owner.

My sister and family did get their walk, albeit delayed by a couple of hours. However, it is rather sobering to reflect that the emergency services are now expecting ordinary members of the public to get potentially seriously-injured people to hospital. I'd advise you all not to do anything that could injure you, or put you in the way of someone who might be ... !

Holiday

What a lot I managed to do during my week off. Resisting my natural instinct just to lie in a darkened room for five days, I amassed a pleasing list of folk seen: Ms Brightshades and Fr Fretboard in London, Lady Arlen (visiting Dorset for a festival) and my family in Dorset, Cara and her husband at Emwood, and Dr & Mrs Abacus in Surbiton. Their daughter was so small the last time I saw her that she took some convincing it had ever happened. 

And as well as taking in Art Deco buildings in Dorset, I saw plenty of other nice things too. Adverts on LiberFaciorum kept arguing that I should visit Tower Bridge, so eventually I did. Some of the views of the staircases are positively Piranesian. I was relieved that the walkways between the towers weren't open to the air, but they do have glass sections which children seemed happy to walk over but I found completely terrifying. I sometimes get vertiginous standing on a chair.

Lady Arlen and I had a few minutes to kill before seeing my Mum, so we took a little stroll on Turbary Common. The Speckled Wood butterfly was a pleasure though perhaps not an unexpected one, but we weren't anticipating meeting cows. Later in the day I paid my respects to the Shelleys in St Peter's Churchyard - it always tickles me that Mary, Bysshe, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft have ended up in Bournemouth of all places - and had an ice cream on the beach.

I may share some images of St John's Church in Wotton another day: for now, here's the churchyard and its view into the Surrey hills on Wednesday. The churchwarden let me into the building.

Finally Friday found me at historic sites just into Kent. Bayham Abbey is a ruin in - at the moment - a baking field of dry grass with a little Gothick house adjoining. It was dissolved ahead of England's other religious houses in 1525 as Cardinal Wolsey raised funds to build Cardinal College in Oxford. Apparently the local people rioted in protest, though it's so out-of-the-way it's hard to see where they can have come from. A small riot, perhaps. 

Not far away is Scotney Castle. I hadn't realised that this was the family seat of Christopher Hussey, the architectural historian who did so much to bring to public record both the history of the English country house and of the Picturesque (and so I know his stuff quite well). By his time the family lived in the New Castle built on the top of the hill by Anthony Salvin, while the Old Castle formed a colossal garden feature on its island below a quarry. It's a beautiful site, which I saw in gorgeous sunshine. I bought books in the National Trust secondhand bookshop (including one about the Palazzo Ducale in Venice, in Italian but the pictures are great), and tried the pea-and-mint soup, a decision which didn't go too badly. Betty Hussey's very, very pink bathroom was a bit of a challenge, but interestingly the NT says Scotney has come with a bigger collection of objects than any of their other properties, attics stuffed full of them which they are still cataloguing after 15 years. One of these is this amazing child's fairy fancy-dress costume, laid out in one of the bedrooms. 

And no sooner had I entered the New Castle that I encountered my patron saint. 'Madonna and Child', the caption describes this painting by Luca Longhi, but that's St Catherine: she's brought her wheel along, otherwise she might not be recognised and let into the party. 

Fair Enough

The infants school have removed the last of their pandemic measures and that means they’ve returned to activities that mix year groups. Yesterday I did my first whole-school assembly since March 2020, though the school have been having them for a while. The new time, ten past nine, is a bit of a challenge as for me it means either saying Morning Prayer earlier than its customary start time of 9am or later (earlier makes more sense). Was that set in stone? I asked the head teacher. ‘Not in granite, but I’d say in sandstone’, she replied.

Neither the Church calendar nor school life lent me a clear topic to talk about. Some of the children were at the Spring Fair on Saturday to do country dancing, but, as I told them, there are no stories about fairs in the Bible, and while some people do dance you can’t describe those incidents as stories (actually you could make a story out of David dancing before the Ark of the Covenant and being despised by Michal his wife, or indeed of Salome doing her turn, but neither would make for a very edifying narrative). Instead I thought of Woodbury Hill in Dorset where the great Fair – one of the biggest in southern England, in its day – probably began after a hermit came to live in the old hillfort in the 12th century, and an annual gathering was set up by the landowner, Tarrant Abbey, to support them, whoever they were. There was even a holy well there whose waters were drunk by visitors to the Fair. So I made up a bit of a story about a holy man (‘We don’t know his name, let’s call him John’) and how the Fair might have started. I even had a couple of photos to show, one of the Fair in full swing in about 1910, and one I took of the hilltop in 2017, now bare apart from a farmhouse and cows, as you can see here.

It struck me that this is a bit like the stories in saints’ lives, woven out of a few things people did know and a lot of supposition about what must have happened. Possibly some of what is in the Bible isn’t too far from that either. Talking of things half-remembered and half made-up, I’d thought my grandparents had met at Woodbury Hill Fair, but checking back I discovered it was the Ilchester Flower Fair at the Lamb & Lark in Limington, which must have been a much humbler occasion. Nan remembered that Grandad and his brother Alec were there, Alec with his arm in plaster having broken it in the gate-jumping contest. Grandad asked Nan to stay to the dance and so she did. I don’t think we’ll have a gate-jumping contest at the Spring Fair next year.

The Lion in Summer

My trip to Somerset with my mum last Tuesday solved one mystery: the building we always referred to in my childhood as 'Lady Hobhouses' is in fact Hadspen House, or rather (brace yourselves) The Newt, so named since the Hobhouses sold it and it reopened as a hotel. But that was an aside. We were aiming instead at Wyke Farm just north of Castle Cary. My granddad once worked at Wyke Farm and my sister has a painted Wyke milk churn in the garden; now you need more than a couple of dozen cows to provide enough cheese for every supermarket in the country, and when you pull into the site at Wyke Champflower its vast silos and silent warehouses look, I always think, like the menacing industrial sites Jon Pertwee spent a lot of time running around as Dr Who in the early '70s. How iconic of modern farming. This opinion has led to my sister referring to Wyke Farm's produce as 'Dalek cheese' which I think they are missing a trick not to make. But my mum just bought the sort of standard cheddar you can get anywhere though she maintains it adds something to buy it on-site. I am cutting my dairy intake, but it being a special occasion it was back in Cary itself that I picked up some cheese at the market, Cricket St Thomas Camembert and spicy Calveley Mill Scorpion; though I steered clear of one labelled starkly 'Hard Goat'.  

I also found this little figurine in a junk shop in town. At first glance it seems to be a finial from something larger but then you realise it has a base and was always intended as freestanding, so I suspect that while it may look old but it's in fact been copied from something else. It will go ... somewhere.

Escape to Dorset

Like everyone else I haven't been very far lately so sitting with my mum in her garden (well, she sat inside the conservatory) and then a walk with my sister and her family around Sandbanks today was a profound and much-missed pleasure. I was tempted by an ice-cream which I thought would be a bit like a Cornetto, as it appeared to operate on the same principle, but proved to be a deadlier concoction of sugars than I was expecting. The lifeguards were out despite the chilly sunlight and there were indeed some hardy souls braving the water.

I've mentioned before the swift turnover of buildings in this part of Dorset, and how many of them seem to want to ape what the builders think Art Deco architecture looks like. This apartment building, though, nos.72-74 Banks Road, is one of the more successful: I couldn't believe it was genuine to the Art Deco period - how would I have missed it? - and it proves to date only from 2008, but it doesn't look at all unreasonable compared to some of the concoctions you sometimes see around the Poole basin. I wonder what it's like inside.

Revisiting Past Haunts

This green lozenge is one of the landscapes of my childhood, Turbary Common on the north side of Bournemouth. Today I was visiting my mother and after a bit of garden tidying went out to drop off a prescription form at the doctor and then buy fish and chips at the new-ish shop on Kinson Road, and the 'top path' over the Common was the quickest, and most interesting, way. The Common was a fun and slightly foreboding place where, Mum always reminds me, I once mis-stepped and sank into mud over the top of my boots. A fair would visit over the summer; in later years there was a model car racing track there, succeeded by horses grazing after the Council declared the Common a Nature Reserve and grubbed up the hard standing. The change in the Common's legal status was the beginning of its regeneration. It was a scrappy, disorganised landscape once, but is now ringed with trees and the bewildering network of tracks which crossed it have been resolved into a few major ones from which it's now virtually impossible to deviate. 

The Common was a world in itself, and though it looks much better than it once did, it has shrunk! So have the surrounding streets which once stretched away in my mind, connecting places whose geographical relationship with each other I wasn't really aware of. At the end of the row of businesses containing the fish-and-chip shop used to be a second-hand shop where I used to pick up copies of Dr Who novelisations which shouldn't have been as battered as they were given their age. On the corner opposite was a detached house which an even younger version of me always found forbidding: it was surrounded by trees but for a drive in and another out, each leading onto a different road, and only the gables of the building looming over the top of the vegetation. The trees have long been cut back, revealing a very modest and not at all Gothic Edwardian dwelling. Today there were even children's drawings of rainbows in the windows. How much more friendly could it be? Unless the residents are lulling us into a false sense of security.

Escape!

Now we are allowed to meet someone we don't live with in a private garden, I felt emboldened to visit my mum for the first time in months. She sat in the conservatory and I was outside. We had shop-bought sandwiches and I brought a flask. Typically the blazing sun of recent weeks is now gone but it wasn't too disagreeable. Afterwards I popped down to Sandbanks and sat on a wall for a few minutes. There were quite a few souls about, but all keeping apart from each other. Some ventured out into the water to do so. Look, it's the sea! Well, Poole Harbour anyway.