Cumbria 1: Landscapes and Townscapes

The name of Byre Cottage – at Dodbury, at Garrigill, near Alston in northeast Cumbria – suggests it used to be essentially a cowshed, but the owners have turned it into a holiday cottage and it’s where I’ve just spent a week. Unlike some of the more basic places I’ve stayed, it’s modern and bright, and gazes over the valley of the South Tyne. A footpath runs right through the little garden, but I never saw evidence of anyone using it. These photos were all taken the morning I left, when the best weather of the week arrived!

There’s a lot of water about in this part of the world, some of it cascading in rocky falls. Beldy Fall was just yards from Byre Cottage; and Ashgill Force is a dizzying experience. The fall is at the top of a gorge: the bridge you can see in the photo carries a road across the top. You can, if you want to take the risk, stand behind the water and look outward as it crashes from fifty feet above. It’s not that likely that the whole thing is going to collapse, is it? There are gentler manifestations of water, too, at wide Kielder and rainy Ullswater.

You see the odd field of cows, but farming here means mainly sheep. It can’t ever have made for an easy living, but derelict farms like this one at Low Craig somehow express how hard it really could be. Imagine the last years of Low Craig.

That’s a different sort of economic scarring from the kind evident in the towns. Alston, a little market town a couple of miles from Garrigill, clambers over a steep hill with its market square halfway down. It’s clearly kept going by catering to tourists, walkers and bikers, but those are fewer than they once were. One of the cafés is closed, and what you might describe as a knickknack shop is heading that way too. I had a look round on Monday when everything was shut anyway, apart from the Cumberland Inn where I had lunch. So did everyone else: Monday’s always a busy day at the Cumberland, apparently, because there's nowhere else to go.

Picturesque Durham is a student city as much as anything else (I saw a queue of at least twenty outside Greggs at lunchtime) but the presence of lots of young people can’t disguise the closed shops there either. As for Newcastle, the streets around the city centre witness to the pride of a provincial capital, confident in its identity and prosperity: and thus in contrast to the hard times it now finds itself in. In handsome, red-sandstone Carlisle, even the Covered Market is half-empty, which is a bad sign when market stalls require so little investment, comparatively, to set up.

Towns like Penrith and Hexham, small but on the next step up from Alston, seem to be doing a bit better: they have their blank frontages and rubbish-strewn corners, but also their mobile coffee stands and side streets of little shops.

I’ll finish this section with a couple of bits of Art Deco, a bijou former cinema in Hexham and a building in Carlisle which uses the red sandstone in a proper 1930s idiom. 

Beautiful Badbury

A trip to Dorset to see my family managed to squeeze in a walk round Badbury Rings. I can always rely on the Rings to take me out of myself even if I do nothing more than follow the same route, from the car park and between the ramparts, straight across the interior and past the orientation plaque to curve right around the rampart and back to the car. In a way it's the ritualisation of the walk that helps - plus the history, and the views.

Hornington Scenes, and Queries

My day off yesterday was only a partial one as there was no other time to squeeze in the Infants School Harvest services first thing, but the afternoon took me to Hornington town to run some errands and I ended up taking out the camera more than I expected. This house was the first thing that struck me: I must have walked past it several times but have never noticed how unusual it is, wedged into an unremarkable terrace but looking like a remnant of something grander.

This alleyway leading onto the High Street seemed, as I imagine Pevsner remarking, 'strikingly metropolitan', like a sidestreet in the City:

Our local Pride event was at the weekend. I toyed with going to catch the end until the PA system broadcast in the direction of the Rectory the most awful rendering of 'Dancing Queen' and persuaded me I really ought to stay at home. One relic of Pride, perhaps, is this rainbow pedestrian crossing over the ring-road. If you were a conservative evangelical, I mused, you'd face the question whether to use it or whether your principles mattered enough to divert you 200 yards to the next crossing.

Finally, another question arises here, in a car spotted by the roadside. This little figure is Buddy Christ from the movie Dogma, which makes one wonder why he appears in this vehicle. If you wanted a Plastic Jesus Ridin' On The Dashboard Of Your Car for genuinely religious reasons, I'd expect you to pick something - well, more standard. He's very cheerful, admittedly.

'Vanishing Dorset', by George Wright (2008)

One of the hazards of the COVID restrictions, like drinking too much or putting on what the Germans call coronaspeck, is (for me) buying books. I have one on the way and may, depending what my bank account looks like when I check, be buying more later on. One of them has been George Wright's 2008 volume of photographs, Vanishing Dorset. 

'In 1983', he says, 'I went to live in an old farmhouse, up a potholed track, over a flooding stream, in a remote corner of West Dorset'. It was a wonderful place for Wright to retreat to from his globetrotting life as a photographer. Eventually, though, everything changed: 'when the newly formed village hall committee decided against allowing live music, I realised ... it was time to move on.'

But in the meantime he had documented some of the places he visited and people he met in the villages round about. The oldest of these images dates from 1980, and that's an outlier: most are from the 1990s or the second half of the 1980s. It's hardly a bygone age; it was when I wad doing most of my visiting of Dorset churches, barrows, and other historic sites. Yet Wright's photographs make this landscape appear antediluvian and its denizens barely like contemporary humans at all. It may just be the way they're dressed, these old boys in their cloth caps and drab overcoats, and ladies in stubby brown shoes and thick stockings, but they could be another race, albeit one no less individual than ours - in some ways, more so. Mr Chick of Rampisham used to serenade his pigs, shirtless, on an electronic organ. They were, apparently, very fond of 'Fly Me to the Moon'. These characters move through a backdrop of derelict farms and impractical cottages. The chaps at James Foote the forage merchants at Dorchester look very little different from the sort of Edwardian shopholders you see in photographs, standing outside their stores. Wright keeps the most elegaic photo to last: the Trysting Tree at Wytherston, in one 1986 shot proud and upright and carved with initials and hearts, and opposite it in 2008 lopped and segmented, lying by the road. Things do change. 

West Bay in 1986 - just three years before my dad's photograph here. 

A Return from the Cloud

My day off took me to Salisbury where I was meeting with Lady Arlen and her daughters, down in the South for a festival. Despite some confusion we successfully met at a Wetherspoons where she took some pleasure in ordering a meal-deal so cheap it would actually have cost ardent Brexiteer Tim Wetherspoon money to serve it to her. I discovered that I had managed to put an un-charged battery in my camera, meaning to record anything from the day I had to struggle with my phone. This was the only usable image, of the cloisters at the cathedral.

For several days I'd been entering an exceptionally bad mood for a variety of unreasonable reasons, laid on top of the general discombobulation of the times. On the way home on the train this sharply deepened until the thoughts passing through my mind were quite shockingly destructive and dark. I couldn't read any more and listened to music instead, looking out of the window and thinking how pointless everything seemed. Then almost instantly, as Lana del Rey's 'Cruel World' changed to Rykarda Parasol's 'Withdrawal, Feathers and All', it was gone. It wasn't actually anything to do with the music, although Parasol's output is nothing if not humanistic in comparison to the lush vapidity of del Rey's imaginative world: it was as though a switch had been flicked. I thought of S.D.'s theory that we can stray accidentally into clouds of ill-temper and then just as abruptly leave them. 

Spring Sun

Do you remember the magnolia I planted a couple of months ago? That one potential bloom has now opened and looks like this:

I am so delighted that this has happened. All across the parish the magnolia trees are in splendid bloom and I am full of joy that my sapling has added to the glory albeit with just one flower!

But the other garden flowers have been joining in. The banks are full of primroses, which I can't see lasting this year long enough for me to be able to use them to decorate the Altar of Repose; the deep pink of the camellias and the delicate pink-white of the prunus blossom adds to the colour.

After the morning's services and lunch, the afternoon was too sunny to spend entirely at home. I've often been to Waggoners' Wells but this beauty spot not far away always affords some pleasure no matter the conditions. The line of ducks was obliging and the Wishing Well flowing plentifully. All very recuperative.

Awa'

The posts over the next few days will reflect on my week around the Scottish Border and Northumberland. I was staying here, at the West Lodge, Milne Graden, a lodge cottage extended at the back with a new kitchen and bathroom (they would have been hard to fit in the original building). The Milne Graden estate welcomes dog-walkers: it welcomes them fulsomely, and if you look carefully you might be able to spot the ceramic dogs in the windows of the Lodge. The house doesn't smell doggy, thankfully.







When I went to Berwick-on-Tweed the weather was gorgeous:

It was rather less good for a lot of the rest of the time ...

I made it down the coast to Bamburgh, Seahouses, and finally to Alnmouth, a place I've glimpsed from the East Coast Main Line for years and always found intriguing:

A trip to find Linhope Spout waterfall on Saturday took me into the hills, giving a sense of what the Northumberland National Park is like without having to walk ten miles into it:

And talking of weather, as I got up yesterday ready to speed to St Andrew's, Kelso - the only church for miles with an early service - so I could head off back home later in the day, a beautiful red sunrise greeted me. It proved to be the 'shepherd's warning' such meteorological phenomena are traditionally supposed to be ...

My wanderings through the week took me across the Border (the River Tweed) more times than I care to remember. As Scotland rumbles its way potentially towards independence from the UK, and perhaps with different customs arrangements from those pertaining south of the river - as opposed to just a few funny banknotes - the complexities of the matter become worryingly apparent.

Dorset in July

Green and lovely Dorset is parched in the heatwave, but is still glorious. I spent Tuesday of my week off looking for holy wells, and had a trip out with my mum this morning.

At Stoke Abbott they'd just had the Street Fair which not all the inhabitants regard with unmixed delight as, one local told me, 'the main road is closed off and strangers come and traipse through your garden'. Someone decided it would be appropriate to 'bless' the spring-fed water-trough in the village centre as some souls believe it's a holy well, which it isn't. No official of any religious tradition, Christian, pagan or otherwise, took part, but I found bunches of flowers floating in the water which is apparently what 'blessing a well' means. 

Of course I took in a trip to St Catherine's Chapel at Abbotsbury, toiled up the hill - now yellow with lack of rain - and sang the office hymn to the blessed Martyr. Sweat ran off me. The doves - many fewer than last year - watched me quizzically and a group of tourists waited outside until I'd finished! The votive deposit remains, including, this time, a prayer headed 'Dearest St Catherine'. There was another for a daughter about to have a baby - also Catherine. 

The iconic Colmer's Hill, which dominates the landscape around Bridport, stood out beyond Symondsbury village.

The most beautiful manor house in the county, Waddon House, looks simply amazing against the impossible blue sky.

Mum decided she wanted to go to Sturminster Newton today, a place neither of us has visited for years. The Museum is closed at the moment, but the roof is being thatched:

The parish church boasts some very good stained glass including this somewhat odd effort by the great Harry Clarke. I was gratified that I recognised it as one of his! Apparently nobody knows why he (a Roman Catholic) was given the commission:

In the much more standard window showing the Crucifixion, the artist - a Mr Webb - has signed the design not with a signature but with a rebus:

At first Mum was disappointed by "Stur'" which she remembered as a bustling market town where her own dad, my Grandad, used to attend the cattle fair (that was probably in the 1950s), but although there is a closed bank and pub along the main street which look a bit forlorn, it still has a greengrocer, butcher, hardware store, library, Post Office, a big Co-Op, and a flourishing farmers' market on a Saturday, as well as the now-ubiquitous small clothing, trinket and what-have-you shops, so this is probably all a small town now needs. On Tuesday I'd driven through Beaminster, and remembered a LiberFaciorum conversation with my Goth friend Archangel Janet who, along with her partner, has moved to Glastonbury and who finds the conservative attitudes she's encountering there rather trying: I was surprised as I always thought Glastonbury would be a pretty liberal place considering the people who are attracted there (like her). Beaminster's economy now seems to rely on organic food shops, beauty salons, alternative therapists and, of course, cafés. I even saw a Black Person. How the world changes.