dovegreyreader scribbles

Surfacing with Kathleen Jamie

I suspect great screeds have already been written out there about Surfacing, the new collection of essays by Kathleen Jamie. We've all been waiting a long time, or so it seems, but here's where the writing of Kathleen Jamie differs from so much else that I read, because Findings and Sightlines have each become a sort of vade mecum on my shelf and I hoped that Surfacing would do likewise....become not two but three books I couldn't manage without.

Findings became a true vade mecum. Inspired by Kathleen Jamie's account of her visit to Maes Howe it was a book that travelled to Orkney with me three times. In 2012, when Bookhound and I took the Tinker back there, I pencilled in our own journeys around the islands,next to Kathleen Jamie's, in my copy of Findings. I read it again now and can remember the days so clearly.

On June 3rd we drove out to Hoxa tapestry gallery at St Margaret's Hope

On the 4th we went to Maes Howe and my dad bought me the Complete Works of George Mackay Brown...

At 8pm on June 5th the three of us stood in the middle of the Ring of Brodgar...

Each morning we woke to the distant whale humps of Hoy..

For those who might not know of it, Maes Howe is a

'Neolithic chambered cairn, a tomb, where 5000 years ago. they interred the bones of the dead.'

On the Shortest Day the sun sets directly in line with the entrance tunnel and shines on the far wall of the chamber. It's a moment that Kathleen Jamie goes in search of in Findings, but in doing so sees and finds a great deal more.

When I went back to Orkney with my dad for the Royal Oak commemoration in October 2013, and knowing it would probably be his last visit and memories must be stored like treasures, he and I went inside Maes Howe with a guide and he was enthralled. That evening, as we watched the sun set over Loch Harray, I read bits of 'Darkness and Light' from Findings to him.

'You are standing in a high, dim stone vault. There is a thick soundlessness, like a recording studio, or a strongroom...the world you have entered into is not like a cave, but a place of artifice and skill. Yes, that's it, what you notice when you stand and look around is cool, dry, applied skill. Across five thousand years you can still feel their self assurance.'

If I could have scattered a thimble-full of my dad's ashes in Maes Howe when Bookhound and I went back for our Ruby wedding anniversary in 2016 I would have done (I know, I know, you're not supposed to and I didn't) instead they went safely, and with much love and sadness, into the tidal waters of Scapa Flow at Waulkmill Bay.

I found it incredibly hard to leave Orkney after this visit.

And, with so much riding on it, I'll admit I opened Surfacing with some trepidation...

Supposing Kathleen Jamie had somehow gone off the boil...

Lost that vision for which I am so grateful...

Those seemingly tiny observations, often just a few words, but that work like depth charges in my mind.

Maybe, I've got older and wiser (yes to the former, jury out on the latter) and the alchemy I first discovered in 2005 wouldn't still be there...

As if.

And I knew I would have no worries from the first line of the first essay 'The Reindeer Cave'

'You're sheltering in a cave, thinking about the Ice Age...'

That first essay calibrated my senses, eased me away from the present and back in time. I thought about it, imagined it, sensed it, knew it.

This was all excellent preparation for a much longer journey to the Alaskan village of Quinhagak where Kathleen Jamie joins an archaeological dig. As the tundra melts artefacts are surfacing but this recovery of the past is not without controversy...is it unwarranted interference with the dead, or an opportunity for the young to learn about a heritage that has been lost to them for a generation or more.

There will be a return to Orkney for another dig...more surfacing...

And a piece I loved with a passion 'The Inevitable Pagoda' about those shards of crockery so often found in a ploughed field, or in our case the garden and yes, there is always the pagoda from the Willow Pattern

Each is a glimpse of a life and a time. It begins to sound like a clamour rising like mist from an empty field. All the stories, the voices, the dead...'

You look out over the new-ploughed acres as over human history, and the next field too and the next, all the fields...

Ach.

They fill your hands, these fragments, these stories, but with a wide gesture, you cast them back across the field.'

Whilst Kathleen Jamie casts her pieces back into the field ours are kept in a jar. Our stories have surfaced over twenty-five years of digging this garden and we have kept them in a jar because, from the census returns, we 'know' the people who may have touched them...

John and Betsy Geake (both born in the 1790s) or maybe it was their granddaughter Alice who dropped the plate.

Maybe Ann Hendy threw a dish at husband William...

Honestly the stories we invent. 

And then Surfacing, the essay of the title...

'You're losing their voices. When did that happen? You're forgetting the sound of your mother's voice, and your grandmother's...and today you realise you can't quite bring their voices to mind...'

My eyes actually welled up at this.

Never so true.

And when Kathleen Jamie mentions that her grandmother had diphtheria as a small child a memory of my own surfaced out of absolutely nowhere... that my mum had also had diphtheria as a baby in Liverpool in the mid-1920s and I knew next to nothing about it, and never will....

'And where did they put her, to isolate her and her infection in that crowded house? You can't reach her now to ask.'

How on earth did my mum survive that.

And as I turn the final page on Surfacing I realise that thankfully, whilst I may have got older, so has Kathleen Jamie. She too has surfaced, her memories surface as do mine, the experiences that are universal for so many of us; the empty nest and independent children (and in my case barn owls too) the loss of her father, that sense of time regained as your family responsibilities shift and what to do with it, the opportunities that present themselves, the chance to see and do new and different things and view them in a changed light. And to view the past in a changed light.

In a recent interview Kathleen Jamie suggests that she is not an emotional person and I suspect this might be a favourable asset for an essayist. Maybe it leaves plenty of space for the reader's emotions to flood in, because mine have and will continue to do as I spend time unlocking everything that this book holds. I will read it over and again. It will hold different meaning and relevance each time I pick it up and I will be grateful that such writers exist.

If you are new to the writing of Kathleen Jamie I can promise you these are books for our times. Someone prepared to look at the world without the rose-tints and reveal what matters.

Books that will make you see and think differently.

And if you know Kathleen Jamie's writing and had been wondering about this one, dither no more, you need it on your shelf.

Scroll down for gifts...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Prize draw copies of Surfacing by Kathleen Jamie

Hello Chums...

Well I hope you've had a good summer. I've had a magnificent hunting season but will soon have to drop hints about my basket going back on the kitchen windowsill for the winter...

You'd think they'd know wouldn't you, but no, I have to do a lot of  staring at that stupid plant and that gormless hare thing before they get the message...

I will prevail...

Anyway, listen up...

Thanks to Sort Of Books, there are FIVE hardback copies of Surfacing, by Kathleen Jamie, ready and waiting to go to new homes (UK ADDRESSES ONLY)  so add a comment to this thread and I'll do the draw dreckly as usual.

 

Armchair travel plans

Having taken you on an exciting journey to Mytholmroyd it is time to set my sights on some more travelling  and I have a few excursions lined up from the comfort of my armchair...

In no particular order, because it will depend on the prevailing reading winds, I plan to sail along the western coast of Ireland and Scotland in search of islands with Philip Marsden and his latest book The Summer Isles - A Voyage of the Imagination. 

"In an old wooden sloop, Philip Marsden plots a course north from his home in Cornwall. He is sailing for the Summer Isles, a small archipelago near the top of Scotland that holds for him a deep and personal significance. On the way, he must navigate the west coast of Ireland and the Inner Hebrides. Through the people he meets and the tales he uncovers, Marsden builds up a haunting picture of these shores - of imaginary islands and the Celtic otherworld, of the ageless draw of the west, of the life of the sea and perennial loss - and the redemptive power of the imagination. The Summer Isles is an unforgettable account of the search for actual places, invented places, and those places in between that shape the lives of individuals and entire nations."

I enjoyed Philip Marsden's last book, Rising Ground so I'm looking forward to this one.

 

and Barry Lopez's new book Horizon is waiting for me too.

"Taking us nearly from pole to pole – from modern megacities to some of the earth’s most remote regions – and across decades of lived experience, Barry Lopez gives us his most far-ranging yet personal work to date, in a book that describes his travels to six regions of the world: from Western Oregon to the High Arctic; from the Galápagos to the Kenyan desert; from Botany Bay in Australia to finally, unforgettably, the ice shelves of Antarctica.

Lopez also probes the long history of humanity's quests and explorations, including the prehistoric peoples who trekked across Skraeling Island in northern Canada, the colonialists who plundered Central Africa, an enlightenment-era Englishman who sailed the Pacific, a Native American emissary who found his way into isolationist Japan, and today's ecotourists in the tropics. 

Throughout his journeys – to some of the hottest, coldest, and most desolate places on the globe – and via friendships with scientists, archaeologists, artists and local residents, Lopez searches for meaning and purpose in a broken world."

This is big serious book and one that is going to require some serious attention, but I will know when the time is right to embark.

 

A slightly easier journey might be This Golden Fleece - A Journey Through Britain's Knitted History by Esther Rutter.

It's autumn (I admit it) and time to cast on and knit my way through some evening TV watching. In my usual get-on-with-it fashion I knitted a cardigan last winter from a lovely pattern (Macauley from Blacker Yarns). It's my own fault. I didn't do a tension swatch, just proceeded on the basis that it looked about the right size, which it turns out would be a lovely fit for Twiggy, but sadly not for me. I should have stopped but I didn't because I was hooked on Killing Eve and just ploughed on. It wasn't an expensive mistake, but nevertheless it pours a big dollop of guilt all over me every time I come across the bag of pieces, so I should probably undo it at least.

Meanwhile Esther Rutter is to be applauded for her staying power because by the end of the first chapter she has knitted a very complicated pair of gloves (often during a train journey) in her pursuit of the story of wool's long history around the British Isles. There are highland walking socks, haps (shawls), and a fisherman's gansey to come, so apart from the fact I'm likely to feel a bit inadequate by the final page, I will at least be very well informed and I can't wait to cast on and cast off...if you see what I mean.

Tavistock's history is steeped in the wool trade too so I'm hoping to do some local discovering alongside. I had already wondered why our village parish burial records from the late 1600s made reference to ' Burial In Woollen Affidavit' and thanks to Esther Rutter I now have the answer...

'Responding to a depression in the wool trade...Charles II passed an act in 1666 making it illegal to bury 'any corpse in any shirt, shift, sheet or shroud...in anything than what is made of sheep's wool only.'

This statute was only repealed in 1814 and the swearing of affidavits by two people in front of a Justice of the Peace within eight days of the burial was a legal requirement. 

Whether anyone double checked is another matter.

Meanwhile I'm wondering if anyone else has any armchair travelling planned...

Any exciting journeys that don't involve setting foot outside your door...

And any casting off disasters to report or am I the only one who doesn't swatch...

 

 

 

Under the Rock -The Poetry of Place ~ Benjamin Myers

Are unremarkable places made remarkable by the minds that map them...

It is so long since I finished Under the Rock by Benjamin Myers, and now I'm thinking again about that first line in the book. It was back in March, when I went on a journey to Mytholmroyd with the author of The Gallows Pole, a book I raved about on here last year, so I was intrigued to found out more about his home turf in and around the Calder Valley in Yorkshire where both books are located. I've thought long and hard too about the early observation that

'the countryside is meanwhile idealised by some and dismissed as retrogressive by others.'  

Especially when you live in the middle of it, with all its realities and occasional challenges and know well the often precarious livelihoods it supports, often misunderstood by the centre yet where the decisions can be made on our behalf and supposedly for the national good...well, yes, I wonder on. 

With a foot experienced in both camps Benjamin Myers, moving from London to settle under the shadow of Scout Rock in Mytholmroyd in West Yorkshire, casts his keen and observant eye over it all and I loved this book. This is not your typical writer-moves-to-country-and-puts-us-all-straight type of book, not in the slightest, but it is an intense and unwavering focus on one place, the multiple perspectives of historical, social, geographical and cultural references allowing me to know it. I know too that sense of walking the same place over and over again, to see difference and change and find the voices of the past.

I sensed a Ted Hughes bass line running through the book, homage to what has gone before acknowledging that he was there first; why reinvent the wheel that the one-time Poet Laureate, born and raised in Mytholmroyd, had set in motion with his poetry and writing about this place   

There was plenty in Under the Rock that chimed with my own experiences living here in the Shire. Reference, for example, to the changing names, words that are 'gradually chiselled and chipped away by time and even 're-sculpted in the changing shapes of our mouths, teeth and tongues.' There is a green lane here known as Maggie Purley's and local lore has it that Maggie hanged herself at one end of said lane. But I can find no record... was it Maggie Burley or Durley or anything else really. No one seems to know any more and I'm guessing that soon the story will be lost.

Blending history with legend, myth and local lore there is a burrowing down below the surface of the seemingly impenetrable millstone grit to find the meanings that surround a place that can at times seem light-less and downright depressing. Many's the time I wanted to shout 'Come and enjoy our great big West Country skies to lift the winter spirits,' because even in deepest winter we have light and sun and sky, something which life beneath Scout Rock seems to lack. Of nearby Hebden Bridge 'If you live there you'll be depressed then,' and you have to wonder what the local mental health and prescription statistics are.

And there is a lot of water for swimming in, and a valley that can suddenly become 'a low budget Venice'. We watched the Calder Valley floods on the news and of course thought 'how awful,' but to read of the reality was far worse...

'How quickly we can be pushed back through the ages when robbed of all that we take for granted...'

Through his constant walking of Scout Rock and the surrounding area, with his little dog Cliff alongside, and an exercising of a right to roam, slowly Benjamin Myers achieves a congruence with the place, but one that can be shattered by the imposition of sudden restrictions...

'My moral compass is, I hope, correctly calibrated to the basics of goodness, yet I struggle particularly with the concepts of borders and boundaries, In short, I like to trespass....perhaps life is too short to go only where we are told to go...'

Even though the restrictions were based on the discovery of an asbestos dump, therefore wise to accede, but I understand that powerful sentiment ..completely.

A measure of the involvement, and sense of belonging to the place and the people that Under the Rock had invested in me, was the stomach-churning plea on social media recently that, having been spooked by fireworks, Cliff had gone missing.

It was a long four hours until Cliff was found I can tell you.

The book is interspersed with greyscale photographs and poems entitled  'Field Notes' and has a useful bibliography of sources at the back... incidentally, am I the only person to go through these and tick off the books I have (sixteen) ...and soon I will be moving on to a new book from Benjamin Myers, The Offing..

'One summer following the Second World War, Robert Appleyard sets out on foot from his Durham village. Sixteen and the son of a coal miner, he makes his way across the northern countryside until he reaches the former smuggling village of Robin Hood's Bay. There he meets Dulcie, an eccentric, worldly, older woman who lives in a ramshackle cottage facing out to sea.

Staying with Dulcie, Robert's life opens into one of rich food, sea-swimming, sunburn and poetry. The two come from different worlds, yet as the summer months pass, they form an unlikely friendship that will profoundly alter their futures.'

I'm reminded at once of A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr and that H.E.Bates novella, The Triple Echo. I will report back dreckly.

Meanwhile, if you know the Calder Valley does this sound something like the place you would recognise...

And does light, and year-round access to it, matter or am I being a bit precious about our big skies...

 

 

 

Empty Nest...

It’s been the oddest few weeks and it has taken me a while to realise why...

I’ve got Empty Nest Syndrome.

I’ve felt every shade of melancholy at the dispersal of the owlets and we are missing our owl spotting walks along the lane at owl-light. We're missing the evenings spent sitting out watching them fly, or the parents flying in to feed, listening to their wheezy calls and generally marvelling at the privilege this has been. Half a year of daily dawn and dusk vigilance, blankets and cocoa out in the garden has come to an end. Of course we knew it had to, and how lucky have we been to see three new barn owls at least survive to leave home for new territory, but nevertheless we realised that every day, every time we looked at the box by day (which I now do out of habit from every window) we knew they were sound asleep and safe in there and that somehow felt good.

Now it is empty and we have no idea what happens next.

We hear the shrill call of the adults most evenings, occasionally see a silent pale ghost fly across the garden, so we know they are around, but as far as we know they are not roosting in the box and don’t know whether they will stay here or go. Though barn owls generally pair for life and stay in their known and familiar hunting grounds and gravitate towards their safe nesting place, this is dependant on them both surviving so all we can do it watch and hope.

And I must pull myself together and Get Over It.

Thank goodness that Village Show week is always lovely. The sun shines (it did) and we keep a watch on the flower beds wondering exactly what will survive/ flower in time for picking on the Saturday morning. The day before I help set up the village hall and that evening a group of us sit down and sort all the entries. It involves putting  names in small envelopes to be placed under each and every entry so that, should prizes be won, names can be filled in, points awarded and totted up to find the trophy winners. This year over 300 entries so it was a longish evening and then up early next morning to sort our own entries.

There is always an autumnal feel to the garden on that morning. The grass will be damp, the colours are turning and we will have to look hard for things to fill vases, thank heavens for the dahlia bed now coming into its own.

Thomas Edison had been keeping us guessing all week. Would it, or would it not give us three beautiful blooms...

It did...

And so did everything else...

We take it in turns to enter the flower classes rather than compete against each other with flowers from the same plant and this year it was Bookhound’s turn. He also entered the art class and did well there too (its my picture that's wonky not his)...

I had a dabble in the flower arranging classes which is always high risk. If I knew what I was doing I’d be dangerous, as it is my entry, the sole occupant of the Wildflower Arrangement Class, was judged ‘unbalanced’ and awarded a second prize, which is probably better than not being awarded anything. Bookhound meanwhile was busy scooping firsts, seconds and thirds and as joint winner won two halves of two cups; Most Points in the Flower Classes and Gentleman With Most Points in Show. He graciously sent the trophies home with the other winners based on the fact he wouldn’t be the one polishing them on the Friday night again in 2020.

We arrive home exhausted but happy after a long day ( I was on kitchen sink duty ..who knew a village could drink so much tea) with vases full of flowers arrangements we might never usually concoct and the house positively glows for a few days afterwards. We hang the rosettes in the Rosettery ...

...and marvel at how wonderful it is to catch up with every one. We sat with a pot of tea and exchanged all the news we'd heard (hatches, matches, dispatches, feuds, disputes, victories, sadnesses and joys, squirrels in lofts...the usual things) knowing we’ll all meet up again at the village play in November and carols in December. In fact it will be much sooner with the Blessing of the New Bell Ropes at St Mary's in a few week’s time.

And so the cycle goes on and I feel so much better...except I think the swallows are gathering to say goodbye any day. Two new broods from our veranda nests and an awful lot of guano.

They will fill the telegraph wires en masse and all circle the house until suddenly there is silence and they are on their way. And though I have managed to extend summer's lease from August 1st until now, even I have to admit game's almost up, soon be time to get the logs in.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Reading Gallimaufry

Fleishman is in Trouble ~ Taffy Brodesser- Akner 

I fell for the 'Best Book of the Summer' hype and bought a copy just to see. Well, I quite enjoyed it in parts, but I don't think I loved it as much as everyone else.

New York-based liver specialist Dr Toby Fleishman faces the end of his marriage to high-flying business woman Rachel with some trepidation until he discovers dating apps and realises there may be advantages to his new found freedom. Let's just say he tests that freedom to the limits (many times, all described in detail) whilst also caring for his two children, because just as he's starting to enjoy himself Rachel disappears. Juggling the demands of his job and the needs of the children, life spools back and forth as the past is slowly revealed. The USP of the book, flagged up in the reviews, is the use of what has been termed a Trojan Horse narrator, Libby, an old friend of Toby's, who slowly takes over the narration bringing her own life events with her. It is seamlessly and cleverly done and a relief towards the end of the book to finally get Rachel's version of events, but it seemed to take me an awful long time and oodles of patience with the premise (was I really that interested) to reach the final page. I nearly surrendered at page 250, and would have done had I not spent £15.99 of my Waterstones loyalty card points buying the book. In the end I was mostly glad I finished it or I'd have missed the last line.

Brideshead Revisited ~ Evelyn Waugh

Isn't it funny when you think you know a book so well via lifelong osmosis that there really is no point in reading it...until you find a really nice, floppy-paged edition with 1.5 line spacing (thank you Penguin Modern Classics) and the book group theme is England. I dived in assuming this was a book about an Oxford student and his teddy bear only to find it's about so much more.

When Charles Ryder returns to Brideshead as an army officer and to the house now commandeered for the war effort, memories of his student years come flooding back. His relationship with Sebastian Flyte, sister Julia and parents Lord and Lady Marchmain slowly unfolds and laden with Evelyn Waugh's consummate wit and irony and lashing of Catholic guilt. Sebastian, who fades into an alcoholic stupor somewhere in Europe, is overshadowed by his sister Julia in the plot. All of this was a complete and very enjoyable surprise because I hadn't watched the TV series or the film (on the basis it was about a posh boy with a teddy bear).

I loved the book and it has set me off on a reading trail through more Evelyn Waugh starting with Scoop, also in the delicious floppy Penguin edition and I have the Sword of Honour Trilogy lined up. 

 

The Photographer ~ Meike Ziervogel

Several books I've read recently have focused on photography, On Chapel Sands by Laura Cummins and The Photographer at Sixteen by George Szirtes and maybe that tempted me to pick up this book by Meike Ziervogel. I once visited a new mum called Meike, she was Dutch and she very helpfully told me that her name rhymed with 'formica' and I've never forgotten it. That's an aside but after our humiliating Belvoir experience I do like to get pronunciation right.

Trude, married to photographer Albert and living with her son Peter and her mother Agatha in Germany in the early days of the war.  A cataclysmic betrayal separates the family and it will be many years before they are reunited. Trude and Albert are both traumatised and changed by events and must learn to compromise if they are to succeed as a couple again. There is a defining and decisive moment in the book when Trude must decide where her loyalties lie and Meike Ziervogel sets up such a tense situation that I could barely breath and not could I predict the outcome. 

A great read from Salt Publishing and as another aside, the cover photo is Meike's grandparents.

Footnote : The Belvoir Humiliation was Bookhound and I arriving at the gates for a country fair at and asking if this was the way to Bel-voir? '

‘Yes. Welcome to Beaver,' said the person on the gate.

Any good summer (winter) reads to report over your way?

King of Dust - Adventures in Forgotten Sculpture ~ Alex Woodcock

Welcome back to normal service. The West Country is emptying of visitors and Bookhound and I will be wandering off hither and yon after weeks of going no further than town one way (Tavistock) or town the other way (Launceston). I hope you’ve all had a restful holiday season and are ready for some good reading and commenting in the weeks and months ahead.

It’s fair to say that a book about Romanesque stone- carving in the forgotten churches of the West Country might not be top of the most exciting books I would want to read, but I can't tell you how excited I was about King of Dust by Alex Woodcock. Having read his articles in Elementum Journal I had a feeling I was going to enjoy this one and I wasn't wrong. Incidentally, edition five of Elementum, published recently, won't disappoint anyone who has come to love this journal of nature and story as much as I have.

Billed as 'a craftsman's journey through the landscapes of ancient sculpture', Alex Woodcock weaves in his own journey into stone carving, which would eventually lead to him working at Exeter Cathedral and a journey around some of the most beautiful little churches in this area.

'Now I speak ruins. I'm fluent in the language of decay. The years working at Exeter Cathedral have completely reorientated me....I was part of the cathedral's immune system, intervening when and where necessary to slow the processes that lead to damage and repair parts that had already succumbed.'

I'm an Exonian, Exeter, the city of my birth and a place very close to my heart. We visit frequently and I wander around the cathedral whenever I can. And I have learned so much from this book; new and interesting things that make wandering around a church an even greater pleasure than it already is

From Gunwalloe near Land's End to Toller Fratrum in East Dorset each church is beautifully described and all enough to make me set off on a day back in April, with sandwiches, flask and the book in my hand, a notebook and a hand-drawn map (I traced it) to guide me and off I went to find some of those churches near to us here.

With no idea about the Romanesque I was a blank canvas ready to be filled and there was much to discover about this architectural sculpture, 'bold geometric patterns, fantastical creatures and humans in states of rapture or distress' along with...

Round arches...

Solid masonry walls...

Small windows...

Bulky Columns..

My first stop, St Stephens, Launceston was only open because everyone was gathering there for a funeral, so a quick glimpse of the font and I departed. But I'd seen my first bit of Romanesque and it was a bit exciting. And suddenly I'm also a complete expert on the tympanum, usually found above doorways and rarely noticed (by me). This was my first tympanic encounter at the church of St Gregory, Treneglos not far from Launceston...

Carved in the twelfth century and located in the porch of a little out-of-the-way church, the imagery on the tympanum (in this case a Tree of Life flanked by lions) is all about finding salvation and renewal in this building and placed above the doorway to remind worshippers of this as they enter. How sad then that St Gregory's is now closed to the public for safety reasons, a building in need of its own salvation and redemption, one that is failing fast.

A single broken lattice pane allowed me to peek inside and glimpse the font and the general disarray of a disused building...

Alex Woodcock writes eloquently, quoting Rebecca Solnit as he takes in the silence that surrounds St Gregory's and ponders the 'fragments from another world' that the Romanesque has left behind,

'In medieval culture, churches were considered liminal places, thresholds between one space and another, places where the supernatural merged with the everyday...

Peering through the window and I understood that. Echoes of the past and a desperate sadness about the deteriorating condition of the church now. And how unlikely it seems that it will be fully restored.

I motored on towards Egloskerry; a thriving church it would seem in a thriving village  and by now I spot the tympanum the minute I walk in.

I head for Tremaine  a bit further up the road and eventually find the church, up a hill along a narrow lane and a fair old stroll from the village itself. Dedicated to St Winwaloe...Cornwall knows how to do saints, goodness me was this tiny church worth the finding...

I would never have known of it but for Alex Woodcock's book and his quote from the guru of the Romanesque, Edmund Sedding...

'To one whose mind is still full of the memories of some great English Abbey or Cathedral, this desolate little sanctuary would hardly seem worthy of notice...but to the few who love the work of the medieval craftsmen, these works they have left us are beyond price...'

And with just six people on the parish electoral roll what a miracle it is that the place is open and still used. 

Now a complete expert (after a single afternoon) I spotted the font immediately..

And sat in the church and read Alex Woodcock's thoughts about it...

'Sitting on a pew for a moment...enjoying the complete absence of sound and the smell of damp plaster that permeated the nave... sculpture as a point of connection with the unseen, the doorway into another world. In the small nave of the church at Tremaine, I could understand that.'

A little meadow alongside the churchyard was awash with orchids and bluebells...

'In some parts of the South West the past hangs like a veil across the land, refusing to fully make way for the present...'

suggests Alex Woodcock...

and the unchanging view across the Cornish countryside that day seemed to confirm the idea.

All in all no more perfect and peaceful a-sitting place than this to sit and read King of Dust and knwoing I have a lot more days like this with churches to visit. If you are heading west and you enjoy a meander around forgotten churches then let this book be your guide. Failing that enjoy it from the comfort of your armchair knowing they are there; solid ancient sanctuaries clinging on to the twenty-first century for all they are worth.

Meanwhile does anyone else love a good wander around an old church...

I wonder what you look for...what interests you most...

I had always been drawn to the stained glass until now...