I'd just popped into Doddington Hall farm shop for some cherries, organic beetroot and wild boar sausages . . .
. . . when I was seduced by a path leading into a Secret Garden . . .
. . . and at once found myself in a magical world. Imagining myself to be Peter Rabbit or Benjamin Bunny, I tiptoed past Mr McGregor's' greenhouse . . .
. . . and scurried between two bean rows . . .
. . . until I came to rest in the hollow of an ancient chestnut tree. I must have dozed off for a while, and when I came to . . .
. . . I could hardly believe my eyes. I felt like Alice after swallowing the shrinking potion, then meeting the White Rabbit or the March Hare . . .
. . . or like Peter Pan encountering the tick-tocking Crocodile . . .
The world had gone quite mad. A huge steel eye hovered in the air before me like a flying saucer . . .
. . . stone megaliths sprang out of the ground chiselled with ferns like bishops' croziers . . .
. . . and gigantic dragonflies darted over the pond like Biggles' biplanes. Things were becoming curiouser and curiouser.
I tried to rest my feverish gaze on this comfortingly normal-looking fountain for a moment (normal, that is, if you think it's normal for half-naked winged cherubs to offer you a drink) . . .
. . . but my sensitised ears soon picked up the faint trotting of ghostly hooves . . .
. . . and some heavy thuds as various strange objects fell from the trees onto the orchard grass.
So I'd got my cherries after all, but they were much too big to put in my carrier bag.
I'd already put on oversized pear in there and was walking lopsidedly enough already.
Half-intoxicated by the heady scent of fermented fruit I staggered drunkenly . .
. . . past two very still reclining ladies sharing some intimate secrets . . .
. . . and tried to find my way back to the door by which I'd entered, but unfortunately this maze had first to be negotiated . . .
From 20-27 July the conductor Daniel Barenboim and his youthful West-Eastern Divan Orchestra took up residency at London's Albert Hall to perform all of Beethoven's nine symphonies. It was a resounding success. The week, part of the BBC Proms season, marked the climax of Barenboim's ambitious Beethoven For All three year world tour. Each performance was recorded and filmed, and I watched the whole cycle on TV. Like many others I found it completely engrossing.
Barenboim has always had a missionary zeal about Beethoven. He's the composer who speaks to him the most. He knows the entire oeuvre inside out. As a concert pianist his interpretations of Beethoven's piano music are legendary. As a conductor of Beethoven he's strict but sensitive, meticulous, a perfectionist. His aim was to bring out the extraordinary and exciting contrasts we all know and love in Beethoven: the order and disorder, the resolution and irresolution, the hope and despair, the light and the shade, the intellect and the emotion, the simplicity and the complexity, the varying moods and tempi and unexpected key changes, the dark night of the soul followed by optimistic triumph at the end of the day. Listening to Beethoven is like riding a roller coaster you don't want to and can't get off.
Ludwig van Beethoven
For me there is no other composer quite like him. Despite the massive problems in his life — probable syphilis and worsening deafness — he remained an idealist and an optimist. Each of his symphonies was revolutionary in some way, from the initial bold diminished chord (a B flat introduced to the chord of C like a piece of grit in an oyster) in the first symphony (the first time this had been done) to the inclusion of a choir and solo singers in the ninth (also the first time this had been done). It's as if the symphonic form was not large enough to contain Beethoven's vision, so he constantly had to stretch its boundaries. And the boundaries of his magnificent Choral Symphony became the edges of the universe, the very stars themselves as Beethoven gave musical form to Schiller's Ode To Joy, with its call for world peace, universal brotherhood and the unity of mankind (You millions, I embrace you. / This kiss is for all the world! / Brothers, above the starry canopy / There must dwell a loving father).
What shall I do with this absurdity — O heart, O troubled heart — this caricature, Decrepit age that has been tied to me As to a dog’s tail? Never had I more Excited, passionate, fantastical Imagination, nor an ear and eye That more expected the impossible — No, not in boyhood when with rod and fly, Or the humbler worm, I climbed Ben Bulben’s back And had the livelong summer day to spend.
From The Tower by WB Yeats
(Read more about Yeats and his poetry collection The Tower on my daily Turnstonepost)
This is Great Langdale, one of the most impressive, stunningly beautiful valleys in the Lake District. On the distant mountain horizon you can see Crinkle Crags (left) and Bowfell (right), separated by a broad col; the two lumpy and rocky peaks on the far right of the photo are Pike of Stickle and Harrison Stickle, two of the Langdale Pikes. With the exception of Crinkle Crags (how about it, Dominic?), I have climbed all these fells at one time or another.
My sister-in-law beachcombing the western shore of Morecambe Bay.
Fossilised horn coral we found on the beach near Aldingham.
Figure in an edgescape. Evening light on Morecambe Bay. Farewell Furness, farewell Lakeland, farewell mountain stream and flooding estuary, farewell bird, beast and flower, rock, stone and cairn — but I will be back.
What has evolved is a project that goes beyond art as an object to be looked at, to something that is a part of a landscape to be lived in.ANDY GOLDSWORTHY
In January 1996 the nature sculptor and artist Andy Goldsworthy began work on his Cumbrian sheepfolds project. By April 2003 he had renovated or completely reconstructed forty-six Lake District sheepfolds, which had either fallen into disrepair or disappeared altogether. The sheepfold below, in Low Tilberthwaite, was the last sheepfold he worked on. It's square, and built of limestone with slate sections in the middle of each wall — a reference to Tilberthwaite's quarrying history. In the centre of each slate section is a circle of slate uprights. Various skilled local dry stone wallers helped Goldsworthy with this project.
Touchstone Fold, Low Tilberthwaite.
Touchstone Fold, Low Tilberthwaite.
Ferns and foxgloves beyond the fold's northern wall.
Bridge over Yewdale Beck with sycamore tree, Low Tilberthwaite.
Here is St Paul's Church, Rusland, situated somewhere between Lake Windermere and Coniston Water in the southern Lake District. It stands on its own at the foot of extensive woodlands half a mile from the village. It's a tranquil, isolated, beautiful spot.
The author and journalist Arthur Ransome and his second wife Evgenia lie buried in the churchyard. Evgenia was Trotsky's secretary, and Ransome met her while working as a foreign correspondent covering the Russian revolutions of 1917. He had a long love affair with Russia, originally travelling there in 1913 to study Russian folklore. For many years he wrote for the Manchester Guardian, contributing a Country Diary fishing column, but it's for his Swallows And Amazons series of children's books that he's most famous.
View of the Rusland Valley from the churchyard: oak woods, green pastures, scattered hamlets and gently rolling fells — the essence of peaceful, rural England.
This is Sandscale Haws, a National Nature Reserve on the Duddon estuary. From here you can pick out some of Lakeland's most magnificent peaks, including Scoat Fell and Pillar (which blogger Dominic and I climbed last Wednesday), Red Pike, Scafell and Scafell Pike, England's highest mountain at 3209 ft (978 m).
The reserve contains a nationally important stretch of sand dunes and is home to hundreds of species of wild flowers, including many different types of orchid. The estuary itself is a vital feeding station for tens of thousands of migratory birds, and the rare natterjack toad breeds in sheltered pools among the dunes.
(You can read Dominic's full account of our visit to Ennerdale and our eleven mile walk over Haycock, Scoat Fell and Pillar here.)
In a remote and little frequented part of Cumbria, on the eastern edge of the Lake District, you can cross this bridge over the river Lowther . . .
. . . and follow a mossed drystone wall to Shap Abbey.
The west tower is fifteenth century, though the rest of the abbey dates from 1199 . . .
. . . not that much remains of the earlier bits.
An order of monks lived here called the Premonstratensians or White Canons. Think of them as a halfway house between the austere and rigidly disciplined, stay-at-home Cistercians, and the more laissez-faire, sociable, itinerant Augustinians.
The site is cared for by English Heritage, and I'm glad to see they've left nature to take its course and not made the mistake of tidying things up too much.
Dazzling displays of biting stonecrop adorned some of the ruined walls . . .
. . . and on the way back we passed these magnificent sycamores bunched shoulder to shoulder over the river Lowther.
Last week we stayed with family on the Cumbrian peninsula of Low Furness just south of the Lake District National Park. It's a special place — far removed from holidaymakers and the Lake District honeypots. Of course it rained, and when it wasn't raining it looked like it was going to rain. Never mind. I don't mind rain, as long as it isn't continuous, and the mist and the rain and the low cloud made for an interesting, somber, muted light. Who says you need sunshine for photographs?
Pebble beach at Aldingham on the western edge of Morecambe Bay.
Sand and tidal mudflats in Morecambe Bay. It's dangerous to walk too far from shore — the tide comes in faster than you can run, and there are quicksands.
The same place in black and white.
If you look closely you will find fossilised sea creatures in the stones and rocks. In this chunk of limestone I think I can spot belemnites, crinoids and brachiopods. How old are they? 200 million years? 300 million? 400 million?
This is the mineral haematite, a type of iron ore, also known as red kidney ore because its rounded masses resemble animal kidneys. Note the two fossilised bivalves or brachiopods in the bottom left hand corner of the ore deposit.
You can breathe freely here. It's something to do with the pristine, washed-clean feel of things, the wide open spaces, the uncluttered topography — a land-and-seascape, an edgescape reduced to simple verticals and horizontals.
Looking towards the southern fells of the Lake District.
