Category Archives: Placescapes

A thinking aloud / sketchbook category of notes, memories, images concerned with the quality of place from my own and others’ perspectives

Glastonbury Encounters – Shops, Shoes, and Sheep

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Glastonbury Tor in the mist from the Mendip hills

Losing a sheepskin mitten, the imminent arrival at the start of February of St Brigid’s Day / the Celtic Festival of Imbolc / Candlemass , and rediscovering some photos from the 70s and 80s are the seemingly random reasons behind writing this linked set of posts about Glastonbury and the surrounding area. The process has been reinforced by the inability to travel beyond my “local area” (splendid though it is) and my constant impulse to put words and images together, especially in all this suspended time and wearying weather.

So these factors have propelled me back Continue reading →

Glastonbury Encounters – “England’s mountain(s) green”

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35mm film contact strip of my first visit to Glastonbury Tor

Going up the Tor

I’ve climbed Glastonbury Tor a fair few times over the decades, either as an ad hoc detour on the journey to or from my folks who lived not far from there (see this post), or as an outing from Bristol with family and friends, the weather often changing from sunshine on the climb up to showers or freezing cold winds that generated much complaint from the kids, but the vistas and exhilarating atmosphere at the summit usually won the day. The contact strip in the photo above is possibly from my first visit to Glastonbury in 1975. Continue reading →

Glastonbury Encounters – Springs and Wells

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On the way back to the car after our Glastonbury Tor climb (previous post) we passed the entrance to the Chalice Well Gardens, source of the Red Spring where Joseph of Arimathea is said to have placed the chalice of the Last Supper that also collected the drops of Christ’s blood at the crucifixion – the Holy Grail. I’d taken some German dowsers there in 1988 who were fascinated by the iron oxide-rich water and the powerful responses from their dowsing implements. It’s a lovely space, not just for the well and the water that threads through the site, but for the plants, the Continue reading →

Fortunes, fruit and fevers … biography of an orchard, part 1

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 Pill Village

The village of Pill, my home in North Somerset, clusters (once attractively I hear) around a deep, muddy, tidal creek formed by the Martcombe Brook rising just a couple of miles south of the village. A ‘pill’ is the West Country and Welsh name for a tidal creek – there are several pills along this stretch of the river, each identified with its own prefix, our old, ‘proper’ name is Crockerne Pill, see below for explanation. The Martcombe Brook spills into the River Avon, two miles or so south-west from where it joins the Severn. Shirehampton is only the river’s width across from us (but a different world Continue reading →

Discovering Sheffield – in the footsteps of family ghosts

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Proud neon sign in the excellent Kelham Island industrial museum

Two and bit years ago I visited Sheffield where our son Will had been living for a few years during student days at the University and later working there. He loved the city and had made many good friends but was about to move to Vienna to join his Austrian girlfriend, so this was probably a last chance to explore the city with him to follow up on some family history connections I’d not known about on earlier visits to see him.

I knew my father’s family came from Sheffield but little else of the family’s history at the time Will started at University in 2005 but it was interesting how quickly he felt at home in this city of his ancestors and took so readily to the nearby Peak District that had beguiled my paternal grandparents – they met when they were both members of an early 20th century rambling group I believe and later named their house in Oxfordshire after Winnats Pass. Continue reading →

In the (e) zone(s) – filling up the flatlands

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DSC_0477

Setting off on a job to photograph Weston-super-Mare’s Enterprise Zone recently, the car began emitting bad sounds and demanded immediate attention from our Motorman in Avonmouth. Now Avonmouth is somewhere that’s always looked pretty dismal in my view and I’ve had no cause to explore it before but with time to kill there while waiting for the repair I wandered about the streets near the station to see if I could find any endearing qualities. Continue reading →

Roman walls, Post Office curtains and hidden wireworks

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The Post Office Curtains

The Post Office Curtains

Placescape –  Caerwent and Lower Wye area

Living on the far left hand margin of the West of England is pretty good in terms of places to visit for a non-urban day out; within a 35 – 40 minute drive we can be amongst sand dunes at Berrow, leaning into the wind on the craggy heights of Brean Down above the Severn, looking down Cheddar Gorge from the top of the Mendips, wandering in the lush pastures of the Chew Valley, paddling in a stream in a wooded, flowery valley on the Cotswold Way, or admiring wading birds in the Severn wetlands at Slimbridge.

These are very roughly south, east and north of home but, within the same time scale, if we go west we can be in another country, and a different world, Wales. We can see the Black Mountains across the Severn from outside our village Co-op and for me they are always alluring. Continue reading →

A Bristol-mix Saturday

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This set of photos resulted from an impromptu tour around a really odd mix of bits of Bristol last Saturday. No particular purpose, just decided to see how things were changing in the Enterprise Zone area around Temple Meads and moved on from there. Not everyone’s top choice for spending a Saturday but it’s good to take in a panoramic view of your Continue reading →

Drawn across the hill – the White Horse of Uffington

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IMG_0696sliceI don’t remember the first time I saw the mysterious chalk creature leaping across the downland turf at Uffington, but I was a kid, and probably under the inevitable ‘horse-love’ spell of girls of a certain age. But along with the more prosaic, and very recent, white lion etched into Dunstable Downs not far from my childhood home of St Albans, and the puzzling and spindly Long Man of Wilmington in Sussex with his parallel poles, these pictures scraped out of the chalky soil Continue reading →

People and stone-places

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IMG_7480This post started out as a piece about a visit to Stanton Drew late one afternoon in November last year where I’d taken some photographs; but the process of selecting the photos (amongst the text) set off a sequence of recollections about previous visits, and that in turn led to memory detours into different stone-made territories, and dowsing….

Stanton Drew is a large, but little visited group of three stone circles just south of Bristol set in the fields next to the River Chew; legend has that the stones sometimes go down to the river to drink, they must, after all, be thirsty after all their cavorting – these are wedding guests who were tempted by the devil to carry on dancing into the Sabbath and for their sins were turned to stone. The long ridge of Dundry Hill provides a backdrop to the north that includes the sculpted Continue reading →