dovegreyreader scribbles

Beating the Bounds ~ The Belfry

Not quite either of the belfries within my Beating the Bounds square mile, (though I did sing in the choir there for a couple of years,) but St Andrew's Buckland Monachorum near enough, because all these local churches were being built at about the same time. It is said that if you travelled around these parts in the mid-15th century you would have tripped over a half-built church every few miles. A number of them have a similar tower design topped out with very distinctive pinnacles, the same team working round and adding the icing on the church cake.

Tower building was all about attracting the eye and announcing grandeur and importance, a way of providing the people with an experience of heaven on earth. It was about rivalry between villages too, and each tower an example of the care and expense lavished on their church by the community. Rarely did those communities number more than 200 people, and towers were expensive additions which according to John Scott must have eaten up a huge proportion of the local wealth.

I'm not sure I had ever given much thought to who would have paid for these, but as John Scott affirms the main motive was the glory of God and we do the builders and the benefactors a great injustice if we allow 21st century cynicism to doubt it. Look what a glorious legacy they have left us, and sadly what an endless struggle it can be to raise the funds to maintain them now.

I had found John Scott's book in the reference library a while back, entitled Towers and Bells of Devon. Two hefty volumes in fact, and my interest in all things bells piqued by the discovery of a book which should, if the title is anything to go by, have been enough to send me to sleep. Far from it, all utterly fascinating. A meticulous history of each church tower in the Shire with date, size, weight, note and name of each bell ... bit like a very great big baby, but with a note of dedications and inscriptions as well. I hadn't known about the inscriptions but I discovered that the bells in our village church bear little gems like...

'Prosperity to this Parish'

and

' Tenor I to the Church the Living Call and to the Grave I summon All' .

This latter I assume a reference to the tolling of the sonourous Passing Bell, the death knell that seems to be getting a good work out as I read The Nine Tailors. 

So at our allotted time there we were, first in the queue, Bookhound leading the way up the stone steps to the top of the seventy foot tower, built using local rubble and granite, and already we discover a design fault because though I could just about squeeze up the stairs, Bookhound found his top half was around the spiral with his legs still to waiting to catch up. If you look carefully you might just be able to see me 'going round the bend' this on the descent..

Tiny windows on the ascent giving a clue that we were rising higher, just in case the knees weren't telling us as much too..

and higher..

until eventually we emerged onto the roof, and what sights to behold..

...and a close up of one of those pinnacles.

On the way down (much quicker) we were able to stop and peek through the grill at the belfry itself,

From the church website I discover a little nugget of history.

The Buckland Monachorum tower design, with its high pinnacles at the limits of  practicability, sacrificed strength for elegance, though mercifully the first four bells hung all stayed put. However when two more were added in 1723, within ten years and with repeated ringing, the tower was seriously weakened necessitating major repairs. It would seem luck that the whole lot didn't come crashing down.

Now that all makes me want to read The Spire by William Golding and The Corner That Held Them by Sylvia Townsend Warner. I have started both books and failed to finish them, but (sorry *SPOILER* alert) don't the towers collapse in both??

In 1858, it was discovered that the wooden bell cage had rotted and that someone had misguidedly driven wedges between the timbers and the walls of the tower.

Tsk, tsk.

This had caused fractures in the tower as a result of the constant vibration. More worryingly it was not until 1905 that the bells were re-hung in a new wood frame, before being re-cast in 1947 and situated in the metal frame visible, with two tenor bells added to make a glorious peal of eight bells.

Eight bells can ring 40,320 changes which would take eighteen hours. just saying in case you were wondering. I think the sum might 8 x 7 x 6 x 5 etc, someone will work it through.

It's hard to imagine how on earth any work is done in a belfry. The space is seriously limited and claustrophobic, to say nothing of dangerous, and I have yet to figure how you get a hefty bell in and out unless it is somehow lowered down through here, the chamber below housing the clock mechanism.

Unusually the ringers gallery below the clock chamber overlooks the nave of the church which I am not sure I had ever realised in those years that I occupied the choir stalls...

and like many such galleries has some wonderful signs and notices in place. This little warning from 1755... (if you click on these pictures they should enlarge)

and this more recent one...

Imagine the clock chiming in and messing up the changes. 

And so to the ringing, of which I know nothing beyond that which I have learned from the authorial campanology of Dorothy L.Sayers, so I am grateful to that Coronation edition of Picture Post for the low down.. or should that be the high down...or maybe the up down.

The ringers of St Paul's reveal the secrets for the man on the street down below in 1953. Basically you must learn how to pull on a rope to achieve certain results and without 'music' as it were, all has to be done from memory. You musn't move your feet while the rope's end is on the floor or you'll be swept off them and dumped back down with two broken ankles, and not surprisingly in this case the whole process requires absolute concentration. 

World records were few back then. I am not sure about now but the 1922 feat of 21,363 changes in twelve hours with not a single ringer taking a break (no, not even for 'that') seems remarkable and knocks Lord Peter Wimsey's meagre nine hours into touch. Apparently records were rare because no one wanted to listen to bells ringing for thirteen hours.

For anyone who hasn't read The Nine Tailors, the Picture Post piece ends with another spoiler so look away now...

'Disillusioning fact is that even the combined noise of St Paul's twelve bells at their loudest wouldn't really kill the victim of a detective story, locked up in the belfry. It might make his ears tingle - not more.'

 

 

 

Beating the Bounds ~ Holloway by Robert Macfarlane, Stanley Donwood & Dan Richards

I have come to the borders of sleep,
The unfathomable deep Forest where all must lose
Their way, however straight, Or winding, soon or late;
They cannot choose.

Many a road and track
That, since the dawn's first crack,
Up to the forest brink,
Deceived the travellers,
Suddenly now blurs,
And in they sink....

Edward Thomas knew much of holloways and Robert Macfarlane quotes this poem in his latest book Holloway, produced with fellow writer Dan Richards and artist Stanley Donwood. The book is a slim but rich and intense fusion of words, observations and drawings compiled after the three returned to the holloway that Robert Macfarlane had explored with Roger Deakin in 2005. That excursion is recounted in The Wild Places...

'There is wildness everywhere,' Roger had written once, 'if we only stop in our tracks and look around us.' To him, the present-day and the close-at-hand were as astonishing as the long-gone and the far-afield. He was an explorer of the undiscovered country of the nearby.'

The holloway (known in Devon as a green lane) just a few yards from our front gate, has become a special place to us in the nineteen years that we have lived in this house, and as I Beat the Bounds with renewed enthusiasm I am getting to know every inch. I spot every new heap of badger or rabbit digging, each newly broken branch, each recently shifted stone.

It now occurs to me that this of course is the rabbit's own 'holloway'. 

Our green lane is little known or used by anyone else; perhaps a few horse-riders, the man from the RSPB who comes to do an annual bird count, and may be just very occasionally some Sunday bikers who, having found it on the map, have to ride it perhaps on the Climbing Everest principle, because it is there. It occurred to me as I walked up with Nell the other day that it is largely us and our footfall that are now wearing and keeping the path patent and passable.

 
'They are landmarks that speak of habit rather than of suddeness. Like creases in the hand, or the wear on the stone sill of a doorstep or stair. they are the result of repeated human actions. Their age chastens without crushing. They relate to other old paths & tracks in the landscape - ways that still connect place to place and person to person.'

According to Robert Macfarlane none of these paths are younger than 300 years old, in which case maybe it's our turn in history to know and connect with this one, and we never fail to wonder about that history as we walk.

Who may have built the stone sides and what labour it must have involved...

...and who may have used it, and how.

And we think about odd things too... what if a horse and cart were coming down as one was going up, well then what... that debate kept us going the full length of the holloway one day.

Can you drive a horse and cart backwards in a confined space...

Would this little place, about half-way up, with some extra width have made a passing place...

I'd buy a seat and make it a Sitting Place  

And a special treat, some words especially for you all from Robert Macfarlane, and a request....

 

"I have come to realise, in the eight years since I first wrote about holloways, that many people share my fascination with these sunken lanes, which have been harrowed down into the landscape by the passage of feet and rainwater (and sometimes 4x4s...). People have sent me photographs of the holloways they know, the paintings and sketches they have made of them, maps with their locations indicated, or the stories, memories and folklore they associate with them. Something about the idea of a path trodden by unknown predecessors, something about the everyday pleasure of walking and following these lanes, and something more mysterious about the symbolic power of the holloway as an image (tunnel, rabbit-hole, vortex, portal to the underworld), seems to draw the imagination of many. 

Last year, the artist Stanley Donwood, the writer Dan Richards, the letter-press printer Richard Lawrence and I self-published a small book about holloways from first principles. The first principle being a lump of lead. That lump of lead was melted to cast fresh type, which was used to set the text, which was then hand-printed onto soft thick Somerset wove paper pages, which were then ordered, stitched and bound, to make an ISBN-less book in an edition of 277. A year on, Faber and Faber have published a hardback version of that book, *Holloway*. They have also set up a site where people can post their own images of holloways and sunken paths. So - if there is a holloway you know or have known, it would be wonderful if you considered adding it to the gallery. The first few have begun to appear. I have this notion that, if the gallery gathers enough images, we might tag each of them to their location on a map, and in this way create a holloway cartography. The holloways don't need to be English or British, though, or especially old or deep. There's one from Normandy already up there. And perhaps the youngest holloways are barely a few inches in depth; perhaps holloways run through cities rather than only through the countryside. 

The site is here: http://www.flickr.com/groups/holloway/ I'm told you have to be a member of flickr to be able to post; I'm also told that if you're not, it's easy to join. But I know little about the internet and its ways. If flickr defeats you, as it has defeated me, you can always send your photos to johng@faber.co.uk, with a quick note saying they're for the holloway gallery, and with any info about location, photographer and such like for a caption. Thank you!"

My photos are in already so please do send yours too, and now scroll down where Magnus awaits with gifts.

Related articles

Beating the Bounds ~ Rogationtide & Rammalation Biscuits

Beating the Bounds ~ Rogationtide & Rammalation Biscuits

Bank Holidays were always the occasion for the Church Youth Club to go on a Ramble, so who knows what perambulatory traditions we were inadvertently clinging onto as we made our way to Box Hill, or walked from Dorking to Friday Street every year.

I get so confused about Bank Holidays now but we are having one here in the UK today ... and this isn't the Whitsun one.

Rather disgracefully, for something even as a lapsed Anglican I feel I should know, I've had to look it all up. 

The May Bank Holiday used to be on the Monday after Pentecost, or Whit Sunday which falls seven weeks after Easter Sunday, but I discover it was shifted to the last Monday in May after a trial from 1965 to 1970, none of which I knew or could recall. Today is the more recent holiday we captured from Scotland in 1978 apparently, which they had been celebrating since the nineteenth century.

But anyway, all that aside, this year it is also falls on Rogationtide and I have had to look that up too 

The traditional day for beating the bounds of the parish was Holy Thursday (Ascension Day) 40 days after Easter. The rogation days fall on the four days from the fifth Sunday after Easter which itself falls on the Sunday after the first full moon following the vernal equinox. In different places these may be called Cross Days, Gang Days or Grass Days.

Rogationtide is the ancient festival to invoke a blessing on fields, stock and folk emerging after a sequence of natural disasters in fifth century France. By the eighth century in England it involved parishioners 'ganging' after the Cross around the edge of the parish.This helped everyone to remember the boundaries before maps were commonplace. Along the way prominent trees often became places for preaching ­ Gospel Oaks. Locations of various landmarks - stones streams, hedges, ponds were impressed upon the children: in the past by ducking them, ritually beating them and then giving them a treat.

Herbert offers the following reasons to beat the bounds: 
1) a blessing of God for the fruits of the field:

2) Justice in the preservation of the bounds

3) Charitie, in living, walking and neighbourliy accompanying one another, with reconciling of differences at that time, if they be any:

4) Mercie, in relieving the poor by a liberal distribution of largess which at that time is or oght be made.

The enclosures of the 18th and 19th centuries which 'fixed' so many lands into common, field and bounds killed many of the perambulations. But where they do survive they prove a wonderful way of getting into the countryside, different domestic customs are still practised or have been revived in secular ways to offer a friendly way of looking at the place from its edges, checking its corners are in good heart whilst getting to know people. On returning 'home' you may be lucky enough to be offered ganging beer and Rammalation biscuits.

So over the next few days, and hopefully before the rain which is forecast, I have a little bit of Parish boundary to walk solo. A = home, turn left out of the gate and walk along the lane a few hundred yards and the Parish boundary is uphill through those trees somewhere before I will turn left along to the woods, and back down our green lane to home.

I will invoke a quiet blessing of the fields but I won't be doing any preaching, or ducking and beating of local childer, and any considerable distribution of largesse may well be curbed by not meeting anyone in need of any, though I'll keep an eye out. At the lower corner of the woods I will pass our spring water supply so I'll say a quick word of thanks for that. Though we now have a bore-hole so are no longer reliant on it, we still use it outside a great deal and always like to know it is there and bubbling away and as you can see it is piped a long way underground to reach us.

In nearby Lydford, the parson on a nineteenth century perambulation apparently declared...

'Now we must make a shout here that we may recollect the bounds.' The people then Huzzard and took off their hats.' 

So perhaps just a little gentle Huzzarding and tossing of the hat will be called for.

I have made the biscuits in readiness, though any recipe for Rammalation-specific ones (which I assumed to be a derivative of 'perambulation' ) proved elusive. However in an old cookery book, compiled for a local charity by the Young Wives group I belonged to many years ago (when I was a young wife,) and which I was about to throw out, I came across an easy recipe for Matron's Biscuits. I liked the sound of them, had all I needed in the larder and they have proved a great and very moor-ish success, so I have declared these to be official Rammalation fare..

6oz S.R. flour
4oz margarine
1/2 tsp baking powder
3oz sugar
1 dessertspoon syrup
Vanilla essence

Melt margarine, sugar and syrup over a low heat then pur onto flour, baking powder and essence.
Mix well with a wooden spoon.
Put onto greased trays in spoonfuls, flatten slightly with a fork.
Bake at 170-180 degs for 15-20 minutes.
Leave on trays for a couple of minutes before transferring to a wire tray to cool.

You too can make some, or alternatively please just help yourself to one of mine. 

 

Beating the Bounds ~ Hedgerows

Having narrowed down my sphere of paying-close-attention to a mile in each direction from home, I am watching everything with a much keener eye. I can really recommend this approach, especially for someone like me who is always wondering what might be over the next hill and then can't stop themselves from going to have a look. Nowadays nothing would induce me to venture forth because I have too much of interest to see nearer to home, and it is also Rogationtide next week, so the proper day for Beating the Bounds, and I have a bit of Parish boundary ready and waiting.

My hedgerow watching has been aided immeasurably by a little book I came across in the library and which no one seemed to have borrowed since 2008. I have now had it for the maximun three reservations so The Living History of Our Hedgerows - A Guide to Dating Hedgerows and I must soon part company. For such a small book, forty-eight pages. there has been a huge amount of Did You Know material with which to drive Bookhound to distraction.

I had no idea that Saxon ploughs needed a wide turning circle for their oxen which is why their fields were long and thin with curved sides to cope with that, and apparently, when dating a hedge it is often field shape that will offer the first clues. They won't have any sharp corners and if the fields are 'S' shaped it will be a reverse 'S' because the ploughs always turn anti-clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere...no I'm not quite sure why either...can someone explain that??

Nor did I know that names like Hay, Hayes, Hayne and Hey are all parts of place-names which mean 'enclosed by hedges'.

Land-sharing in the Middle Ages involved dividing fields into strips, which I did know, but not that they measured twenty-two yards wide and two hundred and twenty-two yards long, ancient measurements still familiar today as 'chains' for cricket pitches and 'furlongs' for horse-racing.

By this time Bookhound has meandered off to clear out the shed which has resident rodent activity, and you would all be every welcome to wander off elsewhere too if I am having the same effect....except you'll miss a really good Did You Know bit coming next.

You know how you often see a row of trees in the middle of a field??

This one is just along the lane and I had often wondered...

Well, apparently, when a farmer had earned enough money to buy more strips of land he would plant a hedge (usually hawthorn, meaning hedge-thorn) and plant an oak tree every twenty-two yards. Perhaps these hedges have disappeared but the trees live on. 

The familiar rule for dating a hedge, based on a formula derived from considerable research, is one new species every hundred years measured over a thirty metre length. Lesley Chapman recommends doing six separate counts for six thirty metre lengths, avoiding gates or adjacent woodland and then taking an average, so that's my next task on a fine day. Except now I realise I'm going to have to buy the book because there is a really helpful chart in the middle for filling in as you count, and much pictorial detail about species, along with useful information about the red herrings that can have you barking up the wrong tree and lead you right up the garden path etc....quoting a few salient pointers here...

...Hawthorn dominance may indicate a fairly new hedge not yet colonised by other species, or an unintentional hedge because it grows so fast and is unlikely to be eaten by animals. 

...Hazel is an indicator of former woodland, and of great age of the hedge.'

...Ash was deliberately planted for tool handles, so if dominant indicates a deliberately planted hedge.

...Beech and Sycamore were popular in the eighteenth century, and deliberately planted for their appearance.

... There appears to be a maximum number of possible species in a hedge because there can only be a certain number, about thirteen of fourteen, that like the same soil.

...If you see Primrose, Bluebell, Dogs Mercury and Wood Anemone together in a hedge it is probable that it was once a wood.

...Dogwood and Field Maple will only grow if there are at least four species well established, if present you can conclude that the hedge is over four hundred years old at least.

... A badly neglected hedge will lose some of its species. This has implications for dating, for example lack of manpower because of the Black Death when one third of the population died, therefore the hedge may be older than the number of species suggests. I wondered about the impact of the Great War too.

Maybe the biggest surprise of all though came when I read about Spindle.

Do you remember this little hedegrow phenomenon a couple of years ago when great swathes around us here were festooned in webs which we eventually discovered were the intricate labours of the Spindle Ermine Moth..


 
Well, this is what Lesley Chapman has to say about the discovery of Spindle in a hedge..

'Common in Southern England it got its name from its use in making the hand spindles used for spinning wool. It has very hard wood useful for knitting needles... a hedge will have to be six hundred years old before Spindle can grow in it, as it needs thick shelter for its seedlings.'

So, unbelievable though it may seem, that could make some of our hedges fifteenth century before I even begin, and expect me to go into knitting needle production any day now.

 

 

 

Related articles

My Spring Nature Table reading...

Beating the Bounds ~ Berry Wood

Beating the Bounds... earth & sky watching with @Cmdr_Hadfield

One of the real bonuses of living in the middle of nowhere here in the Tamar Valley is the absence of much light pollution beyond our own, and over that obviously we have complete control. 

We have been very careful not to instal arc lights that could be seen from Plymouth, though we can see the city-glow over the distant horizon. Nor did we want lights that flick on as you walk past because every passing cat/fox/badger would set those off, so we have various circuits of lights running on low energy bulbs around the outside of the house which suit us fine. The pitch dark is most welcome on a star-spangled night because we can skywatch in our own private planetarium, or most recently we can Space Station watch.

Chris Hadfield is the current Commander of the International Space Station, a Canadian astronaut who has taken the art of social media into space with him, tweeting and updating Facebook with the most astonishing pictures of the planet that I have ever seen. 

I have 'borrowed' some because I know many of you may not be tweeting facebookers, and I can't bear not to share them, so I hope I don't get shot.

Who could have known how exquisite the Australian outback looks from 400kms above the earth...

It makes me want to go and make a quilt right now. 

And just look at Prince Edward Island, Anne of Green Gables country..

It would be easy to become parochial when you have set your boundaries of exploration for a project like Beating the Bounds to that mile radius around the house as I have, so I will admit that I was thrilled to see this shot of Plymouth, (the Breakwater clearly visible in Plymouth Sound) the River Tamar and Dartmoor...

There's us up on the left somewhere.

So as well as considering what may lie beneath my feet, I am looking up above too, at what is over my head, and thanks to NASA that now includes the Space Station passes.

You can sign up for an email from NASA, which, based on your country and postcode will alert you to an imminent ISS pass in the night sky above you. If you haven't seen it yet you are missing something simple but special... there is something very extraordinary about seeing this bright light travel across the sky before your eyes, and to think there is a little world of work and research going on up there, with people inside.

This is the best my camera could manage but you get the gist...

Though only visible for three to four minutes before it disappears, the ISS is easy to spot once you know what to look for, basically the brightest fastest moving 'star' in the sky, and the NASA e mail will give you bearings so you know exactly where to look. We now greet it whenever it passes over us on a clear night, and as I stand and watch, and take in the beauty of Chris Hadfield's pictures each day, it has become a daily exercise in thinking both above and beyond the ordinary and the earthly. To look up, but also to look down on earth in this way really stretches and extends my perspective and the bounds of the imagination, and I for one will really miss his updates and observations when Chris returns to earth next month.

And here's a short video from Chris Hadfield explaining how he takes the shots using a great big floaty camera. All hail Commander Chris, and thank you.

Beating the Bounds... standing and staring.

This feels like a good day to do some standing and staring.

Firstly hearts go out to Boston, and to everyone over in the U.S. It has been shocking and horrific to watch events on the news, and you are very much in our thoughts at such a difficult time.

Secondly, we have had a bit of a strange and difficult week here in the UK too with the death of Baroness Thatcher. Today is the funeral, and for all those misgivings that so many may have about her politics and her legacy, I am praying that the day can be managed with the gentle dignity and respect that I personally feel we owe to the dead, and those who mourn the loss, whoever they may be. Much has shocked me deeply in recent days.

Nuff said..here's what I have been staring at this last week or so.

Understandably I haven't had much walking time of late but the joy of Beating the Bounds is that from wherever I stand, and without moving an inch, I can probably stare as far as my bounds anyway, and there has been plenty to look at.

Ploughing is beginning in earnest and it is always mesmerising to watch the field outside the bedroom window being quartered and halved as if being painted...
 
Flocks of seagulls appear from nowhere...

and disappear just as quickly. As the crow/seagull flies we are probably only twenty miles from the sea but they are not our usual visitors, we'd be unlikely to see one perched on the bird table.

We have also had a very exciting visit from the Barn Owl Trust.

Some of you may recall that as part of the West Devon survey our garden was chosen as a good location for the siting of the one fully funded barn owl pole box that had been made available.

We love having it in the garden and live in hope of a resident in the Branwolery (thank you A.A.Milne) but sadly the annual inspection revealed some twigs and a few pigeon feathers, so we've had a squatter, but not the real thing. We do know it can take years...

Nor could we even report a barn owl siting in recent months which is even sadder, and we fear maybe connected to loss of local habitat... the ploughing of that front field last autumn to provide a game crop of maize for the local shoot may not have helped. The rough grass that had been there since we have lived here was ideal for barn owl foraging and that was the field where we would most often see one. To compensate we will just have to let our garden grow even wilder.

We live in hope so if you know of any homeless barn owls please do send them our way. All mod cons and we have been known to fling dead things up there to tempt them in when the weather is really icy.

More importantly, wherever you are in the UK, if you spot a barn owl the Barn Owl Trust would like to know. It was our contact over this daily sighting in our garden that started our connection with them and we are delighted to be doing our bit, but numbers are declining rapidly and that is a huge worry.

So, any interesting nature sightings your way...

Our first swallow arrived on Sunday evening and was scouting out the nest over the front door, any sign of them at your end...

 

 

 

The Library

'The library had changed a good deal, she noticed. The old wooden desks had gone, and the newspapers in the racks. There were low vinyl seats that an elderly person could get in and out of comfortably. There were modern pictures on the wall, sunbursts of yellow and orange, and a part marked  ' Children's Play Area'. Children did not play in it, but ran about, loud and healthy. Fluttering notices on a cork board advertised yoga classes and Community Welfare Programmes, play groups and Councillor's Surgeries. People talked quite unashamedly in ordinary voices; there had been only an odd subdued whisper in the past, in the old days when Clifford used to step down to get a detective story, and she used to ask for a nice mystery from Miss Williams on the desk.'

If you have read Every Day is Mother's Day by Hilary Mantel, you may recognise this as Evelyn's trip to the library to borrow a book on 'how to deliver babies in an emergency', and her thirty-year old tickets being met with 'a strange sideways look' from the 'fat girl in a fluffy pink cardigan' behind the counter.

I never fell out of love with the library, the Tinker and I used to spend every Saturday morning in this one after all..
but I will admit that I had stopped using my local one for quite a while until recently. Had it 'disappeared' in that time I would have been desperately sad, but I am ashamed to admit I am not sure I would have had the enthusiasm or the energy to protest, or march under a banner.

But all that has changed.

I am a born-again library user.

Should Devon Libraries even think of closing Tavistock Library down now I'd have to wedge myself in that letterbox you can return books through when they are closed, and they would have to suffer the consequences. Actually someone may already have tried that because when I went to post a book through the other day the letterbox was out of action 'due to vandalism'.

It's the online catalogue and specifically non-fiction that does it for me.

I'm doing a lot of local history research for Beating the Bounds at the moment...incidentally is it research or research ??

I'm doing some research??

Research??

Oh never mind...I'm doing some looking up.

So I think of a book, or read of several in a bibliography and head for the library catalogue. I have reserved some corkers from something called The Stacks, which sounds dusty and cellar-like and probably has the poor librarian donning overalls, gloves and mask and muttering 'oh for goodness sake' until they find it. But my need for Epidemics and Diseases in Devon was great if I was to discover why several local children, buried in the churchyard over yonder, had died in or around 1864.

Can you believe that such a fascinating book had never been borrowed?? I'll bet they were about to throw it away. Anyway my money's on scarlet fever, diphtheria or cholera all of which seemed prevalent locally at the time.

The online archives also give me access, via my ticket number, to the Times digital archive along with forty-eight local and national newspapers from way back when, and a score of other really useful things, and I spend ages poring over it.

So now I have extended my remit. I already belong to Orkney Library and now I have joined Cornwall Libraries too, so the potential for confusion is great, and compounded last week when I realised my Cornish books were overdue and I couldn't get to Launceston to renew them.

No worries, I'd do it online.

Except somehow one of the books wasn't on my online account list. How I had managed to not check it out, when I know I had put it under the machine, and then exited the building without the alarm sounding remains an unsolved Cornish mystery.

No worries, I'd ring the 24 hour renewal line.

Half an hour later and I was no nearer renewing the book and had probably spent ten times the fine on the phone bill.

But look, what was this I saw on my screen..

Ask a Librarian

Local chat is available between 9am-5pm Monday – Friday. Outside of these hours please use the link to the Enquire National Service.

Well how enterprising of Cornwall Libraries. It was a Saturday but I  would probably be 'chatting' to someone who had the system in front of them and could sort it, because I have a fear ingrained from childhood about my pocket money disappearing on overdue library book fines, let alone the thought that I had pilfered a book, so I typed a message into the box...

Date: 11:33 2013/03/09

Chat Transcript: Hello, I am trying to renew a library book online but it doesn't show up on my loans. Have also checked my husband's card in case I used his and it doesn't show up there either. Can you help? It is due back today

[Librarian 11:34:13]: Librarian 'Valeri (24/7 Librarian)' has joined the session.

[Librarian 11:34:24]: My name is Valeri, and I'm a reference librarian in Connecticut.  I'm reading your question right now to see how I can help you...

[Lynne Hatwell 11:34:59]: Right...thank you. I was expecting someone in Cornwall!

[Librarian 11:35:36]: I'm sorry, but I do not have access to that system.

[Librarian 11:35:53]: I recommend that you telephone the library directly during regular hours.

[Lynne Hatwell 11:36:01]: ah, OK no worries then

[Librarian 11:36:11]: Thank you for using the service. Please contact us if you need further assistance.

I might just go and join Connecticut Library now as well.

So which one do you belong to, and do you use it??

And how do you cope with my only qualm... the dead 'things' or indeterminate 'material' that may be gluing pages together??

 

 

 

Beating the Bounds ~ Berry Wood

'There is a ring of beeches on the hill
Lifting to the quiet evening sky
Layered tracery of green and grey,
Voicing reed - like in the hill - wind's sigh
Tales of long ago and far away.
Beneath them lies the valley wide and still....'

Margery Lea On a Hill in Shropshire from These Days (1975)
(Quoted in Silva - The Tree in Britain ~ Archie Mills) 

Looking at our beechwood from a different angle recently I came up with what I thought was a truly original and clever thought.

This is another view, of what is actually called Berry Wood up there on the top of the hill, and which sits very nicely within my Beating the Bounds square mile. It is on private land but we have access because just on the edge of the wood is the source of our spring water supply, piped underground down to our house.

The view that day reminded me a little, and then a lot of that first sighting I had of Ely Cathedral some years ago, as it floated into view across the Fens of Cambridge. 

Yes, I decided, there is definitely something cathedral-like about our wood.

We have been trying to work out how 'our' wood survived the storms of 1987 and 1990 when so many others nearby were decimated. This wood, just outside Tavistock, which we used to live very near, and now pass on every journey home from town, was a similar picture of eye-catching symmetry until that night, and how devastated we were to see it the next morning. Even now, twenty five years on, it remains a ragged sorry sight, still in recovery...

Somehow our wood survived. Perhaps it was not quite in the direct path of the storm at its fiercest, who can know.

There is a calculation that involves measuring the girth of a beech tree at about eye-height and then doing some fancy maths to arrive at an approximate age for the tree, and on that basis we reckon some of ours are about a hundred years old. Not ancient, but old enough for us to imagine the planting taking place on the brink of the Great War.

Roger Deakin calls them 'The Sacred Groves of Devon' in his book Wildwood, and it's not hard to see why, or how our little clump could be seen as one too.

We enter by its west door...

...and without realising it I realise that we respect the silence, talking in hushed voices as we walk the natural naves and aisles. Even if we call the dogs we somehow do it sotto voce....we wouldn't dream of shouting up here.

Looking upwards only reinforces the likeness to a Cathedral as the web of branches that spans the 'roof' weave myriad natural designs...

More reminders of Ely Cathedral...

At certain points the trees soar upwards endlessly, seeming only to reinforce the likeness... the lofty grandeur of a Cathedral nave...

 I mean its obvious...surely all Cathedrals were modelled on this...

Ely...

St Magnus on Orkney...
 
Exeter, nearby to us here...

I thought again of the soaring 'tops' of Berry Wood and was very thrilled with the originality of my analogy....I'll write a blog post about all that I thought, I'm right on it with this idea.

That was until I picked up Beechcombings by Richard Mabey and discovered that the analogy and comparison of beechwoods to cathedrals is as old and well-worn as my wellies.

Not so original then, but never mind, it still holds true.

We wander up to the woods every day with the dogs, and debate whether this tree or that has only just fallen down or has it been there a while... we can never decide. Did we see it last time or didn't we...

and on one particular day we watched the stormlight without..

Whilst behind us, a different world within, dazzling sunlight to the rafters...

'There is forgetfulness within this ring,
Where memory's steeped in calm and thought is stilled.
For they the secrets of old earth enfold
Within their shadowed forms whose crowns are filled
With lustre of the west and evening gold,
And in the listening silence seem to sing.' 

 

And we are watching the ground very closely indeed, because our very own stained glass is starting to peek through...

In fact by May these green shoots will be our very own peal of (blue)bells, resonant and vibrant enough to grace any well-respecting Cathedral.

I can't wait to see them this year.

 

 

 

Related articles

The Wild Places ~ Robert Macfarlane

Beating the Bounds.

Standing and staring...

Beating the Bounds... the Churchyard

Down the Deep Lanes ~ Peter Beacham with photographs by James Ravilious.

On This Day... Roger Deakin

'An invasion of light...' ~ Kathleen Jamie

Every mid-February
those first days arrive
when the sun rises
higher than the Black
Hill at last. Brightness
and a crazy breeze
course from the same airt-

This quote from a poem entitled The Dash, from Kathleen Jamie's latest collection The Overhaul reminded me.

I had read Kathleen Jamie's book Sightlines last March. If I was on a desert island Sightlines is one of the books I would want to hand for the way it makes me notice things I never have before, and in there a piece entitled Light also about those February days...

Every year, in the third week of February, there is a day, or, more usually, a run of days, when one can say for sure that the light is back. Some juncture has been reached, and the light spills into the world from a sun suddenly higher in the sky.

It was March and I had missed the day for 2012, but I wrote this on the page...

It has now been confirmed that in 2012 the UK had something like 172 days when more than 1mm of rain fell. We could barely remember a dry day, and Nell and Magnus, now both eight months old, had known no other than wet. Day after day we have traipsed around after muddy paws, Magnus, eighteen years younger and more sprightly than the Dowagers, showing us exactly how high and across what an agile cat can climb. Nell meanwhile acquiring a plimsoll line of mud around her middle and needing a daily hose down before coming back indoors, and our boots likewise hosed off and lined up to dry every day in front of the Aga.

Frankly it has been relentless, and with an energetic puppy to house-train and walk regularly, a very hard winter of work after enjoying those few rare days of summer we had...oh for some dry.

We have been all eyes for those days of Light.

Slowly the evenings draw out and it is possible to walk dogs at 5pm...then 5.30, but still it rained and the sky glowered down on us.

And then suddenly, on February 14th, no sooner wished for than granted..

and we walked to the woods with the sun on our backs and it felt warm... almost hot...

and Magnus spotted it too, eschewing the basket for the sun puddle on his little mat on the kitchen table...

'...and though scalding
to our wintered eyes
look, we cry, it's here.'

I'm sure we still have days of cold and wet to come but have those days arrived your way too...

And if you are in the Southern Hemisphere does something different happen, but still you sense that change... 

 

Beating the Bounds... the Churchyard

There are several churchyards I can draw into my Beating the Bounds Parish walkabout and  I have posted pictures of this one before, St Mary's Church, Sydenham Damerel. A tiny Adam-Bede-like church that we can see from our kitchen window, the church rebuilt after a catastrophic fire in 1953, and even on the dullest grey day still bathed in reflected light inside as I walked across to it recently.

With a beautiful yew avenue through which I can look across to home, and a churchyard steeped in history and back-story it is a truly atmospheric place. 


Yew incidentally I gather (from the book about hedges I have borrowed from the library) was often planted in churchyards because it was thought to keep out the plague.

I usually invent the back-story as the fancy takes me but for the purposes of Beating the Bounds I am hoping to find out something much more accurate, and as I walked around the churchyard in the rain on a quiet Sunday morning, I spotted something I hadn't noticed before.

How I had missed this war grave right by the path in the past I really don't know, or perhaps it is just that after all that Edward Thomas reading I am more keenly tuned into it all...

27th January 1944 and of course, in this case, I don't need to invent a back story because sites like this one make it very easy to find out ...

RAF Bomber Command sends 515 aircraft to attack Berlin overnight

Perhaps J.F. Richards was on one of those sorties, but delving a little further I find connections to Shropshire, a full name of John Francis (via that service number) and a war record I can't access without joining something and paying a fee, so at that point my inquisitiveness for what really may have happened grinds to a halt.

But I will pursue it with the microfiche for the local paper in the library and see what more I can discover because I suddenly feel the enormity of it all...that I can stand in a tiny Devon churchyard and make that connection with history, and a young pilot who lost his life in the same week that Mathilde Wolff-Monckeberg wrote this from Germany...

'Thousands sleep in the bunkers every night, not having a roof over their heads. It is amazing how these poor human beings manage to create something, some kind of homestead, out of the rawest materials...the siren starts its howling and now everybody is pushing, stumbling, squeezing through the narrow entrance into the bunker...'

And that could have been written from anywhere...Coventry, Cologne, Exeter, Liverpool, Berlin or in Mathilde's case Hamburg in On the Other Side : Letters to my Children From Germany 1940-1946 published by Persephone Books.

As Peter Beacham suggests in Down the Deep Lanes, (the book I borrowed from the library and then had to buy) the churchyard so often taken for granted as the space to pass through on the way to the church, but dealing with continuity as much as finality...

'Left to their own devices older headstones come to rest at various improbable angles, cocking a snook at the last enemy but also nicely mirroring life's relationships...some headstones even look like families or groups of friends talking to each other... they look miserable when forced to stand to attention in ordered ranks...left alone they testify to the diversity of the human spirit.'

So true, and I reckon this little huddle are having themselves a really good yarn.

 

Related articles

Down the Deep Lanes ~ Peter Beacham with photographs by James Ravilious.

Beating the Bounds.

Down the Deep Lanes ~ Peter Beacham with photographs by James Ravilious.

What eventually happens here, by the end of this blog post, isn't really supposed to happen, but this is me, it was bound to.

I have started dropping into the library regularly in pursuit of more local knowledge for my Beating the Bounds project. The local history shelves are well-stocked with a folder of information for each village, Parish records, old tithe maps, mine surveys and countless reference books plus there is a little table over in the corner by the microfiche machine that fits me perfectly. I can also access vast online newspaper archives including The Times, from home and using my library card number, so I am in clover with it all right now.

As you would expect, there is also a jolly good shelf of borrowings on the Shire, so I carted home this great big book entitled Down the Deep Lanes by Peter Beacham, who has provided a commentary to the photographs taken by James Ravilious 1939-1999 (son of Eric).

 
Back in February 2010, Bookhound and I stumbled upon an exhibition at the Royal Cornwall Museum in Truro... James Ravilious - An English Eye, Photographic Images of West Country Life and we were entranced.

Many of the pictures have become iconic as in this one which also sits as a gift card on my shelf ...

Apropos of a minimal connection, but in the interests of full disclosure because  I have found the photos in the same batch...we ate this at Charlotte's Tea Rooms in Truro on that day...

and we bought some of these on the way home...

So anyway I saw Down the Deep Lanes and remembered the exhibition, and I borrowed it before Christmas, quickly realising what a completely 'me' sort of book it is.

The book is a journey down the deep lanes of Devon, taking its title from the final line of Last Load, a poem by Ted Hughes from the Moortown Diary collection which I am also reading through this year...

... And you go, and over the whole land 
Like singing heard across evening water 
The tall loads are swaying towards their barns 
Down the deep lanes. 

This is off the beaten track Devon, not the part we live in, this is the Taw and Torridge end of the Shire, but very like it for its hidden beauty and everyday-ness.

'A single lane is a nature reserve,' intones Peter Beacham as he draws in all that is lovely, but also much that may be perceived as less so in his opening chapter. John Betjeman bemoaned the encroaching presence of the telegraph and electricity poles back in the 1930s, Peter Beacham sees them, much as we now do, as wonderful perches for birds of prey, and I am instantly reminded of my daily three mile drive with the little Gamekeeper up to the village school. We would always take bets on whether we would see a buzzard perched on the fourth, or would it be the fifth pole along as we drove up the hill, but we always saw one, every day. I am quite pleased about the poles for the broadband too; we are the furthest from the village exchange, right on the furthest boundary of the Parish, and as we follow the poles along the lane and the 'gently looping wires' that keep me in touch with all of you, we turn into our gate at the very last one and know that the signal stops here....and we also know it can all go horribly wrong if a cow decides to use a pole as a scratching post in the middle of a field.

I can't tell you how delighted I was to see a chapters entitled Lane, Farmstead, Field, Orchard, Cob, Corrugated Iron, Chapel, Churchyard, Belfry and more... a celebration of the uncelebrated aspects of ordinary life. The persistent face of rural England that remains timeless and untainted in the face of radical change. It's not about wallowing in nostalgia either, it's about what is still existing and functioning as well as it ever did, pragmatism overruling progress, and so much I recognised as I read and looked carefully at James Ravilious's beautiful black and white photographs.

So I read it twice and then the email reminder came asking for me to renew the book or take it back.

So I renewed it online and read it for a third time and dreaded the moment...

Then the next email came asking for the book back...

It was no good, I couldn't bear to part with it, so in the end I have had to buy one of my own, and I am grateful that the Beaford Arts Centre, which holds the James Ravilious archive, had some for sale, and in a sightly cheaper paperback edition.

As I said, this is not what is supposed to happen at all, I am clearly a hopeless borrower, but I will be Beating the Bounds with my own perambulations to my Wild Places alongside the inspiration that Down the Deep Lanes offers in the months to come...plenty to think about there.

 

 

Beating the Bounds.

Bear with me today, this is going somewhere and we should get to the point eventually, I promise, but I wonder if you remember a scenario a bit like this from your schooldays...

You'd be tucked up in the warmth of the Sixth Form Common Room at break time having just come out of an A Level English lesson, and in would troop a group of red-nosed, wet and dripping A Level Biologists...

'Oh what have you been up to?' we'd ask as we looked up from strumming our guitars, possibly still trying to perfect that opening twiddly bit from April Come She Will, or perhaps we had moved onto Anji by then.

'We've been making squares out of wire coat hangers and throwing them on the ground, and then we have to log every thing we can see in the square.'

'Right...lovely ...you're on your own with that one' we'd say, thanking our lucky stars that we'd opted for Arts subjects and thus stayed dry, and we'd strum on.

It wasn't all C F Dm G7 though because I had stupidly opted for A Level Geography too, so the Easter Field Trip to Bude and the Raised Beach Incident was probably looming.

This was the Geography teacher setting us the million dollar question standing with her back to the sea on the cliff edge at Bude..

'So who can name this geographical feature??'

Expecting silence she was rewarded with an entire chorus..

'It's a raised beach,' we all chimed in harmony.

The look of shock on her face at our translation of classroom learning into actual topographical identification was nothing short of profound as she moved on, shaking her head in disbelief and thus failing to notice the sign behind her (and facing us) that read ..

Raised Beach...BEWARE cliff edge unstable.

But anyway, it was the looking closely at maps and what may lie in a boundaried space that made me think of the whole coat hanger thing. Roger Deakin mentions something similar in Wildwood and it all segued nicely with an idea that had shaped up after my reading of Robert Macfarlane's The Old Ways, and then The Wild Places.

We are so very fortunate here in the Shire. We can travel a short distance by car and see so much, but how well do I really know what is close to me. I walk it all the time but how much history am I missing, and Monday's post about the mine at Wheal Concord was a case in point.

So I decided last summer that I would throw a big coat hanger of a square mile around our home and look closely, very closely and see what I found.

Please do not ask me the original dimensions of the coat hanger that then became one that covered a square mile will you. It is for virtual demonstration purposes only, and in any case when I copied and then laminated the map (we are on the edge so I needed two) before carefully drawing on my dotted line square mile, Bookhound spotted instantly that I had actually gone a mile in each direction when I should only have gone half a mile. 

Then I have hardly had a minute to think about it until now.

Anyway, some latitude to my boundaries may be permitted to extend across the Parish a little further because I was delighted that my erroneous lines incorporated the Tamar, and Georgina Duchess of Bedford's carriage drive, and the Duke's stew ponds for his trout, and a bit of Endsleigh, and mines and quarries and woods and churchyards. Suddenly that A Level Geography is coming in handy... remember the exams, and the unseen bit of an Ordnance Survey map from which you had to extrapolate what the local population had eaten for breakfast (or similar) well now I am properly interested in the map and the green dotted lines and the contours and everything else.

I have a facsimile of the original Ordnance survey map too, a thing of beauty in its own way....

Beating the Bounds, as I have titled this close-to-home project, a Parish activity more traditionally reserved for Rogationtide, the Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday immediately preceding Ascension Day, the fortieth day after Easter Sunday (thank you Steve Roud and The English Year) a time for the faithful to process around and give thanks for and to bless the crops, the fields and the animals.

Well I do that all the time really, so I will be beating my bounds and heading for the library to do some ferreting out of information too. Already I discover, apropos of Jude's comment on Monday about the Cornish miners heading to Australia in the 19th century, that from the bedroom window (and within my coat hanger square) we look across the fields to the location of the Devon Kapunda, a copper mine opened in 1852 and named after a much more famous one in South Australia. 

But I wonder too about your doorsteps...

Something interesting very nearby??

 

 

 

Standing and staring...

Nowhere to go, nowhere I'd rather be
than here fulfilling my daily rituals.
                                        Why would one want
to absent oneself, when one's commute

is a lonely hillside by-way, high
above the river?

From 'Doing Away' by Kathleen Jamie (The Overhaul)

There are several paths that wind around 'our' Beechwood, mostly made by us I suspect, and one leads to a small clearing on the southern edge of the wood, a natural proscenium arch framed by branches rather than curtains and raised about four feet from the field below. It always feels as if I am standing on the edge of a stage looking out and should perhaps rattle off a soliloquy, but instead of an audience, there it is, just masses of endless open space echoing back at me.

I'm hoping you will all share some 'stand and stare' moments from recent weeks too... this was most definitely one of mine.