Showing posts with label Obelisk. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Obelisk. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 1, 2023

PERMITTED WASTED WALKING

 

You’ll no doubt be wanting to hear more about my flaneuring in Swansea, and no, that isn’t me in the picture above, though I do like his style.  He was just one of the walkers I saw.





 
There was a lot of interesting architecture, the old rubbing shoulders with the new, as TV documentarians sometimes used to say.

 




I do love metal buildings of any kind but a chapel or in the two cases below, a former chapel, really floats my  boat.  I might have thought this was corrugated iron but I'm told that in fact it's galvanised steel. 




I always wonder what it must be like being inside in the rain.  Reassuring or s
cary?  And of course there’s no shortage of rain in Wales, as I discovered.

On a rainy Saturday morning it seemed necessary to get out there and not be a fair-weather drifter.  So first there was this fine structure supporting a road bridge, not far from Harry Secombe Court (honestly).


And then, and this is the beauty part, there was the Danygraig Cemetery with its many, many obelisks.  Below is just a small sample.




You know, flaneurship may have a few things to offer that are more fun and frolicsome that wandering around a cemetery in the rain looking at obelisks, but not so very many, I think.

 

Oh yes, and probably you knew this already; but those Welsh have a different word for everything:





Thursday, March 2, 2023

WALKING WITH OBELISKS

 Did you know there’s an area of Norwich called Tombland?


I suppose a lot of people do, but I didn’t until I found myself in Norwich last weekend, having been to a disappointing exhibition, and was looking for entertainment.  And although I wasn’t expecting Tombland to be some sci-fi, horror, zombie theme park, I was still disappointed at first to find that Tombland is pretty much the public square in front of the Cathedral entrance. 

 

In fact Tombland is the Old English or possibly Viking (scholars differ) word for empty space, though of course it’s not as empty as it used to be.  And right there in the middle there’s an obelisk, and I think you already know about my mild but ongoing obelisk obsession.  This one is actually a drinking fountain.

 


So it hadn’t been a wasted afternoon, and then because I’d looked at a map earlier, I’d seen that Rosary Cemetery was nearby, and so (being something off a taphophile) it had to be investigated. We had to walk through Old Library Woods which was not much of a wood, though there was a wayside library and a 'community chatting bench,' and some fine bookish sculptures complete with real live, unsculpted, fungi.





       And then into Rosary Cemetery which was, OMG, obelisk central - far more than you see in these pictures – Obeliskland, if you will.

 


         It was established in 1819 by Thomas Drummond, and various sources say it was the first non-denominational burial ground in Britain, though I’d have thought Bunhill Fields – resting place of Bunyan, Blake and Defoe - first used as a burial ground in 1665 would have some claim on this.  Other sources simply say Rosary was the first private cemetery in England. 

         I like walking in cemeteries, I find it a pleasure, and I do spend a certain amount of time wondering what exactly is the nature of this pleasure.  I don’t think it’s a form of gloating.  I don’t walk around thinking how lucky I am to be alive when all these other folk are dead, because I know that my luck will run out and sooner or later I’ll be joining them.



Partly I enjoy the mysteries of cemeteries. The people in these graves all had complex and nuanced lives and you can only imagine what these were because even the most elaborate headstone never tells you much. And even though an obelisk doesn’t tell you any more, it does make a statement.

 


         In fact I’ve considered buying an obelisk so that I can have it my back garden now while I live, and then loved ones can move it to the cemetery when I’m gone, so that others can walk around the graveyard see my obelisk and think what a great man this Nicholson must have been.  

 

Or I suppose if these same loved ones set up the Nicholson Memorial Museum of Curiosities, we might have something like this:

 


Of course since I’ll be gone I won’t know whether the loved ones have actually done this or not.

 

Wednesday, May 26, 2021

BACK IN THE HIGH LIFE


 

Does everybody but me know the term ‘backshot’? I took the photograph below, in 

London, somewhere near Limehouse, thinking it was the name of a ‘street artist,’ and I 

suppose it may be, but I now understand it’s also the word for a sexual practice, not an 

especially unfamiliar one, but I had no idea there was a word for it.  Ah London – always an 

education.



Yes I was back in London last week, after (OMG!!!) a 9 month absence.  The best thing I can say is that apart from people wearing masks it didn’t look or feel very different from pre-Lockdown days.  Yes, the pubs offer table service only, but I reckon that’s an improvement.

 

I wasn’t on a walking trip per se but of course I ended up walking all over the place, through Soho to the Photographers Gallery to see two exhibitions, again neither of them specifically about walking, although walking featured in both.  One was titled From Here to Eternity by Sunil Gupta, about being gay in India – apparently it’s a lot easier than it used to be, 

 



though not as easy as it was in New York in the 70s:

 



There was also Evgenia Arbugaeva’s Hyperborea – Stories from the Russian Arctic which was just fabulous.  I think there’s only a limited amount of walking to be done in those parts, but when you get out there it’s pretty spectacular:



Then a walk with an old mate from Sheffield who took us to the Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park.  Is it a cemetery?  Is it a park?  It's BOTH!!

    You want obelisks?  They got obelisks.

 



And the next day a walk along the King’s Road to the Chelsea Physic Garden - I had a coupon.  There was a plant sale (if you like that kind of thing). There was also a bloke standing next to a speaker.  

 


I think he had a microphone, but there were no turntables, which was a shame in some ways.  In other ways perhaps not.

 

Monday, May 17, 2021

WALKING THE SOIL

 I was doing some idle googling along the lines of ‘What makes a good walk?’ ‘What do 

people look for in a walk?’ and so on, because I’m not certain that I really know.  Growth, 

good mental healthy, inspiration, enlightenment, communion with nature, all seem to be in 

the frame, and I’m not so crass as to belittle these things, but other people’s absolute 

certainty about walking does worry me a bit.  Isn’t there room for ambivalence and doubt?

 

In my googling I found a 2016 article by Kevin Rushby in the Guardian headlined  ‘What makes a great walk.’  Kevin is not trouble by uncertainty. He writes, ‘What makes a great walk remains the gift of nature: the subtle alchemy of landscape, elements and path that is transformed into a dramatic stage for your pleasure and experience by the magical spell of your own tramping feet.’

 

Well, I dunno. What I currently look for in a walk, as I pursue two of my ongoing minor obsessions, are obelisks and bunkers.  So imagine my delight when I discovered that Great Oakley in Essex has one of each.  My amanuensis and I set off on a field trip.

 



The obelisk, as I discovered, is part of a war memorial right in the center of the village, in the middle of a very small car park.  It’s solid and a bit stubby but it’s most definitely an obelisk.  A plaque on it says it was originally dedicated in 1920, then restored and rededicate in 2009, which seems rather a long time.  It was wet when I was there.  It used to look like this, when it was dry:

 

 


I read on the Imperial War Museum site that it was designed by an architect name of Vincent Brown about whom I can find no information

 



The ‘bunker’ is in fact a World War 2 pillbox, a fortification against the possible invading German troops. According to a notice board on the side of the structure, there were steel cables running across the road from the pillbox to a couple of concrete posts (which must really have thrilled the local farmers), and there were also barrels of petrol buried in the ground nearby. The inside looks like this

 



But what makes this pillbox special, as you may have spotted, it’s in somebody's front garden.  I think I’d like to have a pillbox or bunker in my garden.  Think of the photo-shoots, the parties, the ‘sound experiments’ with Theremins and drone machines, the war reenactments, the Sadean high jinx.

 


You might have to put up with people staring into your garden but that’d be a small price to pay.

 

Of course any good walk contains a mystery.  Walking east along the main road, past a new stretch of suburbia you come to a sign for The Soils.  Again, my research has failed me.  I don’t know is this refers to the earth, as in the Parable of the Soil, or whether it’s as in ‘I soiled myself’ and might be the site of a former dung heap of midden.

 



Nearby there is Soils Wood, so maybe it’s the name of a local grandee.  

 

Back in the village, should you need an encounter with nature (and agriculture) there was a big field of rape, with mud that looked like it would have swallowed you up to the knees.  That’s some subtle alchemy all right.




Tuesday, September 1, 2020

SOME NEW OLD OBELISKS

If you happen to be visiting a patient in the Cirencester Community Hospital in Gloucestershire, you might well feel like having a walk after the visit.  If you go one way, the easier route, you’ll pass through the staff car park and see this sign:


Did you know the NHS was in the business of creating forests and orchards?  I didn’t, and I don’t think many others do either, but if you follow the signs you’ll find yourself in a gloriously ramshackle bit of land, with apple trees and pear trees, with a few benches to sit on, though nettles tend to be growing up through many of them, so you’ll probably keep on walking, and chances are you won’t see another soul.  It would be nice to think that patients from the hospital wander here as part of their recovery but I saw no actual evidence of this.


If you walk the other way from the hospital, you go through Querns Wood, where you might see evidence of guitar hero worship among the tree cutters:


And before long you’ll arrive at the Circencester Amphitheatre, a Roman creation, now reduced to a circle of hills forming a grassy bowl.  Once it held about 8000 people, now it’s a place where kids run up and down exhausting themselves while parents watch.


However if you walk around the side of the amphitheatre you can find yourself at the Circencester Obelisk, which is a very big, very impressive and slightly mysterious construction.


The sources say it’s ‘probably’ 18thcentury, and probably erected for Earl Bathurst in what was, at the time, the grounds of Cirencester Park Mansion. Alexander Pope may have had some input.  Bathurst wrote to Pope in 1736, ‘I have also begun to level the hill before the house, and an obelisk shall terminate the view’.  Pope didn’t think an obelisk was quite the right thing for that spot, though signficantly, or not, Pope did erect an obelisk as a memorial to his mother.

My trip to Gloucestershire wasn’t a walking expedition but, thanks to my plucky chaffeuse I was able to walk (after a car ride) in the graveyard of the church of St James’s, Sevenhampton (which is actually in Wiltshire), famous chiefly as the place where Ian Fleming, his wife Anne and their son Caspar are buried.  

The Flemings bought Sevenhampton Place in 1959 and spent four years having it restored and remodeled. It had forty bedrooms, a billiard room and a ballroom. Does anybody in the world have 39 friends they’d want to have stay with them? Anne love the place, Fleming not so much.  Maybe after spending so much time in Goldeneye, in Jamaica, an English country house didn’t seem so appealing.


The Fleming grave is in a beautiful spot, overlooked by a field of cows and marked by (you probably guessed, if you didn’t know already) an obelisk, which is very elegant and surprisingly modest: traits that we only partly associate with Ian Fleming.




Friday, February 21, 2020

WALKING AND RECOLLECTING IN SOME VERSION OF TRANQUILITY

I went for a walk in Colchester. I hadn’t been there in years, not since I spent a year at the university studying European drama and making myself unemployable.  Inevitably some parts of the city seemed very familiar and surprise, surprise some things had changed out of all recognition.
This piece of sculpture on the High Street was a great addition, ‘Woman (walking)’ by Sean Henry – that’s a good, snappy, unpretentious title you’ve got there, Sean. 


And I walked in Castle Park, the grounds of Colchester Castle, a fine castle however you look at it, even if you’re not all that interested in castles.


The gardeners were out planting. 


And I suppose they probably plant all year round, because all at once I came upon a crowd (I’m not sure I’d really call it a host) of daffodils, and I don’t honestly know if there were ten thousand of them - counting daffodils is a tricky business - but there were certainly plenty of them.


And then, all at once, again, I came upon an obelisk.  To be fair I knew it was in the park somewhere but I hadn’t actually expected to find it.


It’s not that big as obelisks go but it’s an interesting one.  It was erected in 1892 by Henry Laver, a local dignitary, when the park was opened. It commemorates the death by firing squad on that spot in 1648 of two Royalist commanders: Sir Charles Lucas and Sir George Lisle, after the siege of Colchester.


Both Lucas and Lyle are regarded as Royalist martyrs in some quarters. Lucas left a manuscript titled Treatise of the Arts of War, but it was written in cipher and was never published, which I suppose is understandable. You don’t want the polloi knowing all the arts of war, on the other hand it does rather cut down your readership.

Henry Laver was an Alderman, a Justice of the Peach, and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, which looked like this. He was also the author of The Colchester Oyster Fishery: Its antiquity and position, method of working and the quality and safety of its products,  which looks like this: