And five minutes this morning in one of Presteigne's honesty bookshops. I found a collection by a modern English/Welsh (?Anglo-Welsh) poet called David Greenslade, a book called Weak Eros, which looks really good. And I was undecided about a single volume of Dr Johnson's essays on the English poets - Dryden, Milton, Cowley etc - which had no spine and no front or back boards. Printed in 1821, abook about obscure poets, in that condition, who else was going to buy it, even at 50p? There is something about the text and layout of books from that time that I love; thick paper, wide margins, heavy, crisp serif fonts. And I might actually read this one.
Sunday, 7 September 2008
The Coleridge Steps
An afternoon of garden tidying. I rebuilt the wretched strimmer-thing to cut the grass. The challenge of living as artists is to bring creativity to as many aspects of life as possible, not to keep 'creativity' for the working days. So I applied this to cutting the grass, and shaved the grass along the edge of the garden steps but left the bulk of the grass there long and shaggy. I don't like suburban formality in a country garden; we have lots of grass but it is patchy and uneven and will never resemble a neat lawn. (Over the summer I left a small corner to grow as wild as it could, and the grass reverted to a form of wild-wheat, with long golden stems and seedheads. And on rare warm evenings the light through the grass was lovely.)
The garden steps are a part of the oldest architecture of house and garden. The steps lead down from the late eighteenth-century toll road to the old front door of the house, which used to be a dairy. So the steps could be built and rebuilt over two hundred and thirty years. They are on the south side of the house but under a thick hedge and the steep hill, so get a bit overgrown. I attacked the grass, but left the moss and lichens growing on the mudstone walls and the ferns growing in the steps itself. In the rain, the stones and moss and ferns remind me of the Lake District and stories of Coleridge's unexpected arrival/departure from Grasmere; with my work on Wordsworth's time in this area I imagine Coleridge leaping enthusiastically up the steps to catch a lift on the road and disappear for months. There is also the possibility that Wordsworth - travelling into Presteigne in the 1820s - could have come along this road and seen the cottage/dairy, and so the steps. I will try and take a picture soon.
The garden steps are a part of the oldest architecture of house and garden. The steps lead down from the late eighteenth-century toll road to the old front door of the house, which used to be a dairy. So the steps could be built and rebuilt over two hundred and thirty years. They are on the south side of the house but under a thick hedge and the steep hill, so get a bit overgrown. I attacked the grass, but left the moss and lichens growing on the mudstone walls and the ferns growing in the steps itself. In the rain, the stones and moss and ferns remind me of the Lake District and stories of Coleridge's unexpected arrival/departure from Grasmere; with my work on Wordsworth's time in this area I imagine Coleridge leaping enthusiastically up the steps to catch a lift on the road and disappear for months. There is also the possibility that Wordsworth - travelling into Presteigne in the 1820s - could have come along this road and seen the cottage/dairy, and so the steps. I will try and take a picture soon.
Saturday, 6 September 2008
Wapley Hill Pictures
Not very good photographs, but I hope they capture the subtle changes in colour, the early mottling and fading.
I love this weird stump, it's one of the markers on certain walks through the woods - like Emily Carr's images of rotting totem poles in Canada - and now it has a fern growing out of it!
Wapley Hill, Mudlogged
Looking south from Wapley Hill towards Hereford, September 6th 2008I try and get up the hill two or three times a week, and I suppose it is my 'patch' of wildness, the best place for seeing the natural world near here. This whole valley is a man-made landscape, of course, controlled and modelled for thousands of years. The pine forest on Wapley Hill is probably 30 or 40 years old, but the long avenue of beech trees through the middle is older, I think. This morning - after the heavy rains of the last week - the ground was sodden and the paths were either deep mud or washed to the bedrock. I was trying to see colour, the bronzes and deep plum-reds of the bracken and the starting-to-turn acid yellows of the beech trees. A lot of mushrooms, mainly yellow and purple russulas (I think) and the occasional fly agaric. The old tree stumps - moss-covered, starfish-like - had tiny clumps of slimy brown capped mushrooms on slender pale stems, and the mossy branches had tiny black dead men's fingers. The bracken seemed to be turning russet and bronze from the ground up; the pictures don't do it justice. A good morning, tramping through the sodden woods, collecting kindling and recording changes in bracken and moss.
Friday, 5 September 2008
Waterscape
It has rained for two days. The Met Office said that we would have a fortnight's rain in one day. Everything feels sodden; the roads have water standing on them the drains are full, the Lugg at Combe Bridge was coffee-coloured and swollen, starting to burst its banks. 'Burst' is the wrong word; the Lugg runs along the bottom of a wide valley here which has been carefully cultivated leaving a long area either side of the river which allows it to flood gently, to spread across the plain - and no further. The cattle use it, and the horses, and it is mixed marshland and woodland. At our point it is called the Moor, and is the ancient common grazing land for the village of Combe, which is where the name of the hamlet - Coombes Moor - comes from. Coombe, Coombes, Combe, perhaps even Combes, all variations of one place of about 30 people. The houses are at least eighteenth-century and were built on the slopes of the valley away from the floodwaters.
But tonight many of the rivers around here are on flood watch. The Arrow, across the hill at Pembridge, the Wye at Hereford and Ross, the Severn (which can flood spectacularly), the Teme at Ludlow, all on red flood watch. Since we have been here the floods have been tremendous; is this a summer pattern for the future, torrential downpours and weeks without rain, semi-drought?
But tonight many of the rivers around here are on flood watch. The Arrow, across the hill at Pembridge, the Wye at Hereford and Ross, the Severn (which can flood spectacularly), the Teme at Ludlow, all on red flood watch. Since we have been here the floods have been tremendous; is this a summer pattern for the future, torrential downpours and weeks without rain, semi-drought?
Knighton Landscapes
Hills fading into low cloud and mist this morning - small hillocks like green whales surging through a field - pine forests regimented, orchestrated, rigid; a strange magnificence to such anal order, perhaps because of the contrast with the wilder elements of landscape. My mother's cousin used to live in Knighton and I often wonder if there are Thomases here still, distant cousins. Remote family. (A distant project, walking old family routes, finding old family towns buried beneath the modern world.) A town of tall narrow houses on steep streets, strangely Irish, strangely flattened Alpine. Grey stone walls, slate roofs, high white-painted windows. An old man in a coffee shop window, doing the crossword. A well-dressed mad man on an endless muttering walk of three streets. The cheerful clear English 'Hello!' from a post lady; the warmer, fatter, richer Welsh voice of the storesman inside the delivery depot. A man asking me the name of a plant, which I thought was a fig; another rooted outsider. Another funeral. A lot of rain, the surrounding pine forest dripping and draped with left-over cloud like wool on a sharp-wire fence. Watching leaves in gutters being carried by the water. Rain rain rain on the car roof as we drove home, the vast panorama of hills invisible behind the water.
Books I
To Presteigne yesterday in an afternoon of fitful rain and cool sunshine. The town was faintly, unusually subdued, as if waiting for another shower of heavy rain. I found some fragments of seventeenth-century Dutch tiles in Tony's antique shop; they are by far the oldest things I own. writing recently about Liverpool I wrestled with ideas about hoarding versus free travel - an argument I have had with myself many times and with others. Do we hoard books, music and beautiful objects or do we travel light and fast? And on a more abstract note, what are the things we hoard? Ideas and old feelings or memories can hold you back more than any number of books. Anyway...
I am a hoarder and will always buy new/old books. Rarely new/new ones. Books are the oldest things I own. I have a small number of treasured items that belonged to my grandparents, but nothing older than a century. I have a large number of nineteenth-century books - mainly poetry and history - and a smaller number of eighteenth-century ones - mainly 1730s religious works and the Gentleman's Magazine, collated and bound in the late 1770s - but before the American Revolution - which I found in the rain outside Atticus in about 1980. It cost me 10p. I also have one or two very old books which could date from the 1690s; I am not sure. Again, these are religious books and the proceedings of the Athenian Society. These old books are usually a bit battered and are not worth anything; I collected them because I pitied their age and vulnerability. Their sense of history; an odd volume of Tacitus from 1811, a loose volume of Goethe in Gothic German dating from 1816, a comparison between Aristotle and Plato in Greek and Latin dating from 1803. Who else was going to buy that? Hang the expense, another 50p to Tony's Antiques.
So the fragments of seventeenth-century tile are older than my oldest book, by at least 20 years or so. Shaky hand-painting, a glaze pitted by air bubbles. I will try and upload images when the light is better suited to my camera and ability; I manage to take a photo of the back, which resembles the corner of an unrestored fresco or a contour map.
I am a hoarder and will always buy new/old books. Rarely new/new ones. Books are the oldest things I own. I have a small number of treasured items that belonged to my grandparents, but nothing older than a century. I have a large number of nineteenth-century books - mainly poetry and history - and a smaller number of eighteenth-century ones - mainly 1730s religious works and the Gentleman's Magazine, collated and bound in the late 1770s - but before the American Revolution - which I found in the rain outside Atticus in about 1980. It cost me 10p. I also have one or two very old books which could date from the 1690s; I am not sure. Again, these are religious books and the proceedings of the Athenian Society. These old books are usually a bit battered and are not worth anything; I collected them because I pitied their age and vulnerability. Their sense of history; an odd volume of Tacitus from 1811, a loose volume of Goethe in Gothic German dating from 1816, a comparison between Aristotle and Plato in Greek and Latin dating from 1803. Who else was going to buy that? Hang the expense, another 50p to Tony's Antiques.
So the fragments of seventeenth-century tile are older than my oldest book, by at least 20 years or so. Shaky hand-painting, a glaze pitted by air bubbles. I will try and upload images when the light is better suited to my camera and ability; I manage to take a photo of the back, which resembles the corner of an unrestored fresco or a contour map.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
