Tag: Photos

Ready for a patio party

Cirencester had an Abbey, St Neots had a Priory; both are long since gone, but both are remembered still. Cirencester has a lovely public park, The Abbey Grounds, St Neots has a public building called The Priory Centre for theatrical and musical performances and all sorts of local events and meetings. Donna and I have very much enjoyed living in both places.

Our old patio

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Image of the day – 202

What’s in an image? Sometimes quite a lot, more than meets the eye. I’m posting an image whenever I can.

Click thumbnails to enlarge

Before we moved to Cirencester we lived in a big old detached property in St Neots, Cambridgeshire. We could seat 10 or 11 people around the big table in our dining room, and a similar number on the patio outside. Our friends called it ‘The Party House’. When we first moved in, the house and garden both needed a lot of work; the second photo shows our housewarming party in September 1999, soon after we moved there. The mix of people includes people from work (Unilever), friends from church (Open Door, St Neots), and neighbours.

September 1999

But Cirencester house prices are far higher than in St Neots so when we moved we bought a much smaller place and extended it, turning the garage into a bedroom and en suite bathroom. We still miss the spaciousness, but we love living in Cirencester. I began my life in this lovely, old, Cotswold town and it seems fitting to complete my life here too.

The local countryside

Arlington Row (Wikimedia)

Quite apart from the town of Cirencester itself, the Cotswold countryside is very special. The towns and villages are all built from the same honey-coloured Oolitic limestone. Although it’s a beautiful colour when it’s freshly quarried or pressure washed, the stone ages to a pleasant neutral grey and becomes mottled as it hosts the growth of white, yellow and black lichens. Many of the buildings have traditional anti-drip ridges above the windows and doors, the roof tiles are frequently of Cotswold stone as well, and gutters, downpipes, doors and window frames are usually painted in a sympathetic, dusky, greyish-pale-green hue as well. These old homes, farmhouses and outbuildings blend gracefully into the countryside. Some of these buildings are rightfully famous, like Bibury’s Arlington Row (pictured above right). It almost looks as if the houses have sprung out of the ground like the nearby trees and hedges!

Historical change

Historically things were very different. If you’d visited the Cotswolds in 1500, the only stone buildings would probably have been ecclesiastical or military: churches, cathedrals and castles would have been built in stone along with city walls, but all the houses and many businesses (shops, pubs, inns and so on) would have been built of heavy wooden frames with wall infill of wattle and daub, a building technique going right back to Neolithic times.

Some of the old houses in Cirencester were originally built this way, rich wool merchants replacing them with stone in Georgian times, and in some cases a stone front was built just outside the old timber frame walls giving the appearance of a stone structure at lower cost. Arlington Row in Bibury was built by a local monastery for wool storage and later divided up for use as weaver’s cottages.

Rivers

Cirencester’s River Churn is part of the headwaters of the Thames. As rivers go it’s very small, rising at Seven Springs just south of Cheltenham, high in the Cotswold hills, running through a wooded, winding valley twelve miles to Cirencester and then joining the Thames at Cricklade after a further ten miles through flatter land. From the confluence with the Thames the Churn is by far the longer of the two rivers, but both names are very old, going back to the Iron Age, and perhaps a good deal earlier. Where they meet, the Thames is wider and deeper than the Churn so would have been thought the main river.

More on St Neots

The River Great Ouse

I began this article with a photo of the patio at our old home in St Neots and I should say some more about that lovely old town before finishing. One of the main features of St Neots is the River Great Ouse, a huge and navigable river by comparison with the little Churn. Both the Thames and the Great Ouse enter the southern part of the North Sea on the east coast of England and at that point both are significant rivers.

Cirencester had an Abbey, St Neots had a Priory; both are long since gone, but both are remembered still. Cirencester has a lovely public park, The Abbey Grounds, St Neots has a public building called The Priory Centre for theatrical and musical performances and all sorts of local events and meetings. Donna and I have very much enjoyed living in both places.

St Neots is a good deal larger than Cirencester and both towns are still growing rapidly in size and population.

Being at home

As I was writing I began to see how important home is. Home can be anywhere on the land surface of this planet called ‘Earth’. But there is something special about home, this is true for all of us. The difference between St Neots and Cirencester is quite minor. English is the most spoken language in both towns. Food and drink are similar in both places, so are the customs and the public holidays and the way life is lived. I could feel at home in either place and I have friends in both places.

But the place where I currently live is special in certain ways. I know Cirencester very well, but St Neots will have changed slightly since we moved ten years ago. For all of us, home is the most familiar place in the world – quite literally.

And I began to see that the same is true in places that are not places at all. For me, heaven is a familiar ‘place’ too. Of course it’s not a physical place in the way St Neots or Cirencester are. But it’s certainly home for me, where everything is familiar and reliable. Heaven is where my heart is already, Jesus is there, his Spirit lives in me and with me day by day, hour by hour.

‘Home is where your heart is’, we are told. My heart is already in this mysterious non-place which is beyond any normal meaning of the word ‘place’. Thinking in terms of place just helps me relate the extraordinary to the ordinary of everyday life.

Perhaps in this last section I’ve lost many of my readers, but I know some of you understand what I’m trying to say. There is more mystery in this universe than we can grasp with everyday thoughts and ideas. Don’t dismiss these thoughts as the ramblings of a deluded old man, they are not that at all. Here is a hidden truth that we can all lean into; and there’s a treasure here that you do not want to miss. So take my advice – go on digging until you find the treasure. His name and his character are there for all who will look deep and long.

Consider starting by reading the gospels, or my personal story of discovering church, or what church is like when it’s growing as it should.

See also:

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You might also like:

Ullswater
Sheep, a street, and a home
Caring on the water

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If you enjoyed this or found it useful, please like, comment, and share below. (If you don’t see those links, click the article’s title above the main photo and they will appear.) Send a link to friends who might enjoy the article or benefit from it – Thanks! My material is free to reuse (see conditions), but a coffee is always welcome and encourages me to write more often!

A stunning ceiling

We went to see Worcester’s famous cathedral. There was a service underway so we couldn’t visit the nave, but today’s photo shows a section of ceiling between the choir and the altar retaining stunningly beautiful medieval-style painted decoration.

A stunning ceiling

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Image of the day – 201

What’s in an image? Sometimes quite a lot, more than meets the eye. I’m posting an image whenever I can.

Click thumbnails to enlarge

We visited Worcester recently, we wanted to visit the birthplace of the famous composer, Edward Elgar, in a nearby village, but afterwards we drove to the old city, parked the car, and went to see the famous cathedral. There was a service underway so we couldn’t visit the nave, but today’s photo shows a section of ceiling between the choir and the altar retaining stunningly beautiful medieval-style painted decoration. The stone vaulting was built in the 14th century and the decoration restored in Victorian times.

Beautiful buildings

Up until Henry VIII’s split from the Catholic Church, some of the most beautiful buildings in Britain were the old monasteries and abbeys, all of them Catholic and most of them destroyed and/or sold off to Henry’s associates and friends. A few centuries later Oliver Cromwell’s men caused further loss and damage, pulling down statues and rood screens, whitewashing painted masonry, and more.

Here are a few of the ruined treasures I’ve seen with my own eyes and wished I might have seen before their destruction took place: Cirencester Abbey, Fountains Abbey, Malmesbury Abbey, Tintern Abbey, Whitby Abbey. See some of these and many more at English Heritage.

But here in Worcester Cathedral some of that splendour is still to be seen, and the ceiling is just a part of it. We can make good guesses about some of the losses from documents, drawings and paintings created by people who had seen some these places before they were destroyed. Past structures can be partially imagined as well, reconstructed in our minds from fragmentary records glued together by informed thinking.

This can be extended to the deeper past as well, we can imagine Roman Cirencester (or Corinium as it was known during that era), and know small parts of it quite well based on excavated remains and reconstructions.

And in our own day?

Lowther Estate

What parts of our own early 2000s architecture and artworks will be lost before future generations have an opportunity to admire and enjoy them? We do have one advantage over past times, and that’s our ability to photograph and video structures and artworks before they are lost. This was emphasised for me when Donna and I visited the Lowther Estate during our recent family holiday in the Lake District. We drove east from our holiday house in Windermere to visit this very grand old palace, built in 1806 to replace Lowther Hall which had suffered a fire and was in a poor state of repair.

The days of grand, old houses were passing and Lowther Castle was no exception. The grounds were used for tank training during World War 2 and the beautiful and extensive gardens decayed and were later used to grow spruce for timber. The roof of the building was removed along with many of the internal walls. The two photos below show part of the interior more than 100 years ago and as it appears today.

These images represent similar parts of the building. I can’t claim they’re correctly matched, but they are close. The top photo was taken before the roof was removed and the interior structures demolished.

Click the photos to expand them.

The lower photo shows the area as it is today. These images allow us to compare two instants in time, one before the destruction and one afterwards. In a sense we can see what has changed. Technology moves on, the first image lacks colour. For more recent changes we can compare colours, movement, sound and more. So the further back in time we go, the less full and accurate the information tends to be.

Remains of the statue

There’s one more detail worth mentioning. If you expand the first photo and look at the upper right, you’ll see a statue, probably of William Lowther, 1st Earl of Lonsdale (1757–1844), the man who had the present castle built between 1806 and 1814. He’s depicted as a knight in chain mail with a large sword. A small piece of that statue survives and today stands incongruously in the gardens outside the ruined building. This is one of the few details of the interior still visible to visitors today.

It seems extraordinary today that such an amazing building would be deliberately destroyed, but death duties often made it impossible for stately homes to continue in occupation and that was the case with Lowther Castle. So many lovely old houses were demolished for the same reason during the early 20th century. It’s one of the tragedies of that period of British history.

But there’s much to celebrate, too. The National Trust and English Heritage were set up to save, restore and conserve what remains; and without them we would have lost so, so much more. Let’s remember, too, that we each live our own lives and there are so many ways we can care for the people and places we value. Surely our place in this world, individually and together, is to do as much good and as little harm as possible in every aspect of our daily lives. So enjoy today to the utmost, care for the people you meet and the places you go, focus on justice, peace and beauty and you won’t go far wrong.

See also:

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You might also like:

The Lake District
Caring on the water
Image of the day – 26
An old castle made new

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If you enjoyed this or found it useful, please like, comment, and share below. (If you don’t see those links, click the article’s title above the main photo and they will appear.) Send a link to friends who might enjoy the article or benefit from it – Thanks! My material is free to reuse (see conditions), but a coffee is always welcome and encourages me to write more often!

Butterfly dead or alive?

Like all living things, butterflies have a metabolism in which interlinked biochemical processes are always active. On death these processes cease and the remains are consumed as food by other organisms or colonised by fungi and bacteria which digest and reprocess the remains.

Painted lady

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Image of the day – 200

What’s in an image? Sometimes quite a lot, more than meets the eye. I’m posting an image whenever I can.

Click thumbnails to enlarge

This painted lady butterfly was feeding on nectar from flowers of Verbena Bonariensis at Sizergh Castle in the southern Lake District. There were bees working these flowers as well, mostly bumble bees but also honey bees. The entire garden was buzzing with activity.

Why dead or alive?

This is not as random a question as it might sound. I’m part of a group of around ten people who meet weekly to think together about following Jesus in meaningful ways. We’d been considering Ephesians 2:1-10 where Paul writes that we were dead but have been given new life. I chose a random animal, a simple butterfly and asked the question – ‘What is the difference between a dead butterfly and a living one? We didn’t go into the answer in any depth, so I thought I might consider the differences here instead. Let’s make a list and work our way down.

  • A dead butterfly cannot move, it just lies on the ground motionless unless someone picks it up, the ants carry it away as food, or the wind blows and sweeps it along the ground. A living butterfly generates usable energy by feeding on the sugars in nectar from a flower and uses that energy to flap its wings for flight. And a simple brain controls the direction of the flight while the butterfly uses sight and smell to home in on useful flowers to collect more sugars. Being capable of directed movement is a key difference between death and life.
  • Appearance is another difference; a living butterfly has beautifully coloured wings. A recently deceased butterfly might look just the same for a short time, but those lovely wings will lose their lustre as the butterfly dries out. The colourful patterns will fade, dust and cobwebs will contaminate the surfaces. This is typical for all creatures, while they live they maintain and clean themselves, but after death these processes stop.
  • Ability to sense danger. When a butterfly is alive, if it’s resting in the sushine on a leaf or a flower and your shadow passes over it, it will launch itself into the air and fly away. The butterfly can’t distinguish between you and a predator (like a bird or a dragonfly) so it gets out of the way just in case.
  • Butterflies, like all lifeforms, are capable of reproduction. Adult butterflies mate, the males fertilise the female’s eggs, the eggs are laid on the plant that this particular butterfly needs for the growth of its caterpillars, the eggs hatch as baby caterpillars and these voraciously eat the leaves of the foodplant and grow and grow, then pupate on a stem, in a crevice, or underground to emerge as butterflies in the following spring or summer. It’s a complex life cycle, far more complex than that of a mammal, but it works well for butterflies. If a butterfly dies before it is able to mate, it will not contribute to the ongoing future of the species. If it dies after mating it will make a contribution to the next generation. Timing is everything!
  • Like all living things, butterflies have a metabolism in which interlinked biochemical processes are always active. On death these processes cease and the remains are consumed as food by other organisms or colonised by fungi and bacteria which digest and reprocess the remains through their own, different metabolic processes.

So it appears there are quite a few distinctions that can be made between something that is dead and the same thing when it’s alive. So, leaving biology aside for a moment, if we are aiming to follow Jesus, what might the difference between dead and alive look like? Can we gather some clues from the butterfly?

I’ve written another short article about that question.

See also:

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You might also like:

The Lake District
Large White
An old castle made new

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If you enjoyed this or found it useful, please like, comment, and share below. (If you don’t see those links, click the article’s title above the main photo and they will appear.) Send a link to friends who might enjoy the article or benefit from it – Thanks! My material is free to reuse (see conditions), but a coffee is always welcome and encourages me to write more often!

Ullswater

The Ullswater Way is a footpath allowing visitors to walk right round the entire lake. We walked parts of it, Donna and I walked to Pooley Bridge and back one day, and I walked several times to Howtown and back. There are good coffee shops at both destinations.

Ullswater

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Image of the day – 199

What’s in an image? Sometimes quite a lot, more than meets the eye. I’m posting an image whenever I can.

Click thumbnails to enlarge

Ullswater is a lake in the north-east of the English Lake District. Donna drove up from Cirencester where we live and all the way home again too. I can’t share the driving as I still have no driving licence due to a medical issue nearly a year ago. I posted off my request to regain my licence today and hope soon to get my electric car back on the road and share the driving with Donna on long journeys again.

Refreshing

We had a great holiday – Debbie and Beth brought all the grandchildren along and Paz (Beth’s husband) joined us though Steve didn’t make it this year. Topping off the group was Aidan’s partner Jess and it was so good to get to know her a little better. After all the hot, dry weather we’ve had this summer in the south of the country it was wonderful to see lakes full of clean water, fields of green grass, and trees with healthy, fresh leaves. The countryside was thriving.

There’s no doubt remaining that we have messed with the Earth’s climate over the last hundred years or so and it’s becoming urgent to mend our ways. Fortunately there are some signs of progress. Despite resistance from some politicians, businesses and investors, more and more people are becoming aware and making efforts to change. And even small changes can make a difference.

In response to these shifts of climate, species of both plants and animals have been moving towards the poles and to higher hills and mountains to places where there are climates they are better adapted to. The Lake District is well north of the Cotswolds where I live most of the year, yet the conditions there are much more familiar to me, heavy snowfall in winter, much cooler summer conditions, more summer rainfall. Here in the south, summers in 2025 and 2026 have brought extreme heat and almost no rainfall. I won’t be surprised if 2027 turns out to be the same. The climate in southern England is now almost Mediterranean.

That’s another reason why the holiday week seemed so lovely to me; it was like turning the clock back 60 years or more to when I was young.

More about the lake and its surroundings

Ullswater runs from southwest to northeast across the northeastern part of the Lake District. This follows the glaciation history of the area; the glaciers of 25 000 years ago scoured out valleys from the central, highest point forming a pattern like the spokes of a wheel. This period is known as the late Devensian Glaciation, part of the Last Glacial Period. When the glaciers melted around 15 000 years ago, river-fed lakes replaced the ice, river erosion deepened the valleys and deposited silt where the rivers entered the lakes, creating the flat land areas now occupied by small towns and lowland farms. These fertile, flat areas are still slowly enlarging, encroaching further down each lake.

The Ullswater Way is a footpath allowing visitors to walk right round the entire lake. We walked parts of it, Donna and I walked to Pooley Bridge and back one day, and I walked several times to Howtown and back. There are good coffee shops at both destinations.

The holiday house

Our holiday house was very close to the path and it was well marked with signposts so reasonably easy to follow. There was a private field on the lake shore near the bottom of the rough track up to the house so we had our own little bit of shingle beach with room to park the car and some picnic benches. A lovely place to stay, though some of us would have liked a small shop within easy walking distance; but you can’t have everything!

Boats on Ullswater link Pooley Bridge with Howtown and Glenridding.

Map around the holiday house

Click the map to open it, you can then drag it and resize it to explore the area more fully and see Ullswater in context (if you shrink the map far enough).

People and language

During the Roman and sub-Roman periods The Lake District was occupied by close cousins of the Welsh. The people are still here but English has replaced the original Celtic language. Lots of familiar name elements appear on roadsigns for anyone with a slight knowledge of Wales, Cornwall or Brittany. Pen (top), crag (rock), mere (sea) and many more pop up all the time.

The mountains of Wales are known as the Cambrian Mountains and the area of the Lake District was traditionally called Cumbria. Wales (in Welsh) is called Cymru (say Come-ree) The Welsh language is Cymraig (pronounced Come-rye-g) so you can see the similarities right away. The Celtic language that was spoken in Cumbria was Cumbric. It’s pretty certain that back in Roman times the two languages would have been very similar and probably mutually understandable as two dialects. Also, something very close to Cumbric was spoken in south west Scotland.

Saint Patrick came from a Roman villa somewhere on this western coast, perhaps on the Welsh, Cumbrian, or south-west Scottish areas. He’d have been able to speak Cumbric or Welsh as well as Latin and perhaps Greek, later learning the Irish Gaelic as well, of course.

See also:

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You might also like:

The Lake District

Useful? Interesting?

If you enjoyed this or found it useful, please like, comment, and share below. (If you don’t see those links, click the article’s title above the main photo and they will appear.) Send a link to friends who might enjoy the article or benefit from it – Thanks! My material is free to reuse (see conditions), but a coffee is always welcome and encourages me to write more often!

A fallen feather

There were several groups of dinosaurs that had feathers. These were probably mostly for warmth, display or camouflage rather than flight thought there were some flying dinosaurs that had flight feathers.

Reflections on Barton Mill Pond

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Image of the day – 198

What’s in an image? Sometimes quite a lot, more than meets the eye. I’m posting an image whenever I can.

Abandoned feather

I’m sure you recognise this as a feather. But there may be quite a lot of things you don’t know about feathers too. In this post we’ll come up with as many questions and answers as we can.

What kind of bird is it from?

We all know that birds have feathers, but which species produced this particular feather, and what function did it provide? Most probably it came from a wood pigeon, according to Google’s image search.

The lowest part of the feather (bottom left) is downy and helps to keep the bird warm. The upper pale and dark grey parts have a different function altogether, they might be from the wings or tail of the bird to push the air in a downward motion to provide lift, or to guide direction of flight by manipulating the airflow in subtle ways calculated by the bird’s brain.

When a person is described as a bird-brain it may not be as derogatory as was intended! A bird’s brain is extremely well adapted to the work it has to perform. Feathers, too, are also very well adapted for the functions they provide; read more about the parts of a feather at Something over tea.

Do other animals have feathers, or is it just birds?

Mammals have hair or fur. Like feathers; skin, nails, claws, hair, fur, scales and horns are all composed of the protein keratin. It’s a tough, flexible protein with good structural strength and the ability to bend enough to resist fracturing. But among creatures living today, birds are the only group to have feathers. I wrote some other articles about birds.

Go back in time, however, and there were several groups of dinosaurs that had feathers. These were probably mostly for warmth, display or camouflage rather than flight thought there were some flying dinosaurs that had flight feathers – some of them on all four limbs so imagine a bird with four wings and teeth and you’ll get a rough idea of these creatures.

The Natural History Museum has an interesting article on its website about the origin of feathers. A lot of the detail remains to be worked out, but progress is being made.

Feathers have hidden features

A feather consists of a main central tube (the shaft) as the main support structure with a series of side branches (barbules) that can hook together. When these barbules get accidentally unhooked little gaps open up and the feathers become less affective (especially if they’re flight feathers on the wings or tail).

When birds preen, one of the things they are doing is using their beak to rezip any unhooked barbules. You can see some unzipped gaps on the feather in the photo at the top of the article.

Use of feathers by humans

Feathers are a natural resource. People have used them for centuries for clothing and display, for their insulating properties, or for artwork. Here are some specific examples, you can probably think of many more:

See also:

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You might also like:

Life always wins out
Tree shading

Useful? Interesting?

If you enjoyed this or found it useful, please like, comment, and share below. (If you don’t see those links, click the article’s title above the main photo and they will appear.) Send a link to friends who might enjoy the article or benefit from it – Thanks! My material is free to reuse (see conditions), but a coffee is always welcome and encourages me to write more often!