A Little Maid

No,not B Baggins:) He is quite definitely not the little maid! Here he is walking up the bridle path onto Blackamoor yesterday morning. It was still very icy which took me by surprise as all the roads and footpaths were clear. As we walked along though we discovered several little signs of Spring along the way.

This single dandelion flower peeped out from a sheltered spot beneath the brambles.

Further up the track Moldywarp the Mole had obviously been busy. I love this little passage from Wind In The Willows - perhaps this is what Mole had been up to:)

The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring- cleaning his little home. First with brooms, then with dusters; then on ladders and steps and chairs, with a brush and a pail of whitewash; till he had dust in his throat and eyes, and splashes of whitewash all over his black fur, and an aching back and weary arms. Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent and longing.

I'm pretty sure that this is Jew's Ear growing on a branch of elder - if it is Jew's Ear then it's edible and is used in herbal medicine too. The new growths appear in January and can survive freezing temperatures without coming to any harm.

A few bluebell leaves are beginning to push through though it will be a while before we see the wonderful sheets of hyacinth blue flowers.

The fresh young growth of nettles is appearing too - this was always used as a Spring tonic and it is rich in Vitamins A and C as well as potassium, manganese and calcium. It's one of the nine Anglo-Saxon sacred herbs so it's use goes back into the mists of time. It can be cooked like spinach or used to make nettle beer and when they are past the stage of being used like that they are an excellent addition to the compost heap.

And here at last comes the little maid - this is taken from A Walk Down The Lane by Ernest Aris and conjures up such a lovely picture, the celandines are still to appear and those in the photo above are from last year.

The Rip Van Winkles of the wild lie quiescent in their winter habitats, awaiting the days of warmer winds and softer airs. Around a bend in the lane comes a little maid: on her shoulders the snow lies thick. It fills the folds of her dress and mingles with her bonny brown hair. But there is April in her face and July in her eyes and in her hands are celandines and yellow coltsfoot blooms.

Climbing Over A Brick Wall!

An e-mail last week from my friend P enthusing about a family history breakthrough prompted me to do some work my own family history. It's a good while since I looked at it as the little research I've done in the last couple of years has been on my husband's family. In the meantime Find My Past has put a lot of Cheshire parish records online and as I gazed at the family group sheet for William Wright and Sarah Worthington (click to enlarge the photo)I thought in a very desultory fashion that I'd check to see whether I could find Sarah's baptism. To my utter amazement there it was! Sarah dau of Isaac and Hannah Worthington of Mobberley. She was the only one of their children to be baptized in a non-conformist church. There has never been any sign of non-conformity in my family so although I'd scoured the parish registers from all the surrounding C of E churches I hadn't even considered looking at non-conformist registers. I've been looking for this for over twenty years!! That will teach me to look at all the possible sources however unlikely they might appear to be.

You'll need to click on the photo if you want to read it - Sarah is shown in red with her parents Isaac and Hannah and her grandparents John Worthington and Elizabeth Hallworth.
I was lucky enough to find not only her baptism but her date of birth as well.

Sarah is the missing link that takes me back to John and Alice Worthington who must have married around 1665. I already had all this information and a lot on the Worthingtons too (back to c1700) but Sarah was the missing link as without her I couldn't prove anything. Sadly it's unlikely that I shall locate the marriage of John and Alice as they must have married during the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell when many parish registers were either lost,destroyed or simply not entered. Another of my family lines has come to a grinding halt at this period too.

This is Dean Row Unitarian Church where Sarah was baptized, it was built in 1694 so is both old and,I suspect,very interesting. I find it very attractive too for all that it is a simple brick building. Once we get the longer days and warmer weather I shall be off to visit both Dean Row and St Wilfrid's in Mobberley along with St Lawrence, Over Peover where generations of my Wright ancestors lie in the churchyard. That should provide me with a couple of posts later in the year:)

Dogs Just Want To Have Fun!

B Baggins is great friends with my friend P's dog Bertie and on Saturday afternoon we took them up on Blackamoor just as the snow was starting.

It was very cold and there was ice on parts of the track. I spotted this little ice bridge between the two rocks in the stream, you might need to enlarge the photo to see it.

None of the photos are very good because the dogs were way ahead, it was snowing and I was snapping as we walked. B Baggins hasn't featured much lately though so I decided to post them anyway.

There were big chunky icicles along the river bank.

The ice cold water didn't seem to bother Bertie and B Baggins, P and I skipped across the stepping stones though.

Bracken fronds encased in ice.

Heading for home! Bertie is a lurcher and very fast indeed - you can just see him disappearing round the bend in the lane:)

The Darkling Thrush

I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter’s dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.

The land’s sharp features seemed to be
The Century’s corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited ;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.


This poem by Thomas Hardy seems very appropriate for the present weather, Old Man Winter has come to remind us that he isn't finished with us just yet. The photographs are mine apart from the songthrush which I've borrowed from the web - a small local nature blog called Westfield Life

I think Hardy must have written this poem at about this time of year, he certainly sounds as though he's had enough of the winter:) The very cold clear weather does have its positive side however, we have had some beautiful daybreaks and sunrises - I only wish I could manage to take a halfway decent photograph of one of them - this is the best I've managed so far taken a couple of days ago at the bottom of Shorts Lane.

A R Quinton

I first came across the artist A R Quinton years ago in a series of little cookery books that I found in a bookshop in Bakewell. I started collecting them as I really enjoyed looking at the cover illustrations and I also discovered that the recipes in them are actually very good. There must be about forty of these books now and I have 31 of them. Only the early ones in the series have illustrations by AR Quinton though, the later ones use other artists from the same era. The painting on the front of the Kentish recipes is of Smallhythe where the actress Ellen Terry lived. DH and I visited the house a few years ago and it still looks very much as it did in the painting. All the photos will enlarge if you click on them by the way.

In the same shop I eventually came across this book illustrated by Alfred Quinton and I enjoy it as much for the artwork as for the prose. In fact let's be honest here - the artwork is definitely the real reason that I love it!



When I'm in Suffolk I like to spend time exploring the lanes and villages that are off the main roads. Brent Eleigh is one of the places I came across and the view of this beautiful house is pretty much unchanged - only the geese and the horses are missing. If you click on the link it will take you to the post where I wrote about this village along with my photo of the house.

I would love to walk into this painting of Bossington in Somerset, it looks idyllic. I wonder whether it's still the lovely, quiet lane that appears here - I do hope so.

Gradually I came across one or two more books full of A.R.Quinton's paintings, some like the one above were second hand. Alfred Robert Quinton was born in 1853 in Peckham, London. He studied at Heatherley's Art School and by 1880 was sharing a studio with another artist at New Court, Lincoln's Inn. His watercolours were regularly exhibited at the Royal Academy and two of his paintings were bought by the then Duke and Duchess of York the parents of our present Queen. From the early 1900s Quinton travelled all round England painting local scenes which were published as postcards by the firm of J.Salmon Ltd. He paints the kind of rural scenes that appeal to me immensely and he has left a wonderful pictorial record of the England that existed before the advent of the car.

Another book of paintings, I enjoy just leafing through these and slipping back in time. It also goes with me if I'm travelling in areas where I know he painted so that I can try and find the villages and cottages.

This is Kersey in Suffolk then and now - certainly still recognizable as the place in the painting though the large tree has gone and the ever present cars and telegraph pole have appeared - neither improve the view! Most of the cottages have been done up too and have lost some of their charm as a result.

I discovered that there are lots of the Salmon postcards to be had so I have started collecting a few of the village and cottage ones. They are quite hard to find as many that are on ebay are views or of places like Oxford or Windsor. They are very nice but it's the rural ones that I really like.

This is my favourite book as it has a biography of A.R.Quinton along with lots of his paintings and a great deal more information about rural life in late Victorian and Edwardian times than appears in the other two books.

One of the paintings in the above book is this one of Cockington in Devon, it brings back a lot of happy memories for me as we always spent our annual holiday in either Paignton or Torquay when I was a little girl and we always went to Cockington. The painting is of the forge which dates back to the 1400s. When I was a child it was still a working forge, now I believe they sell miniature horseshoes to the tourists. Cockington is definitely one of those 'never go back' places I think, I'd rather remember the quiet, pretty village of my childhood.

Oh dear, I'm afraid I'm going to have to add all these to my book pile - the top of the pile too! I'm still ploughing through Mr Ditchfield's Vanishing England but I shall be rather glad when I've finished it and can move on to Alfred Quinton.
Blogger does seem to have come back to normal now so hopefully it will stay that way. I really didn't like being locked out of my own blog!

The Other Book Pile

This pile of books mostly came at Christmas and I'm afraid I've actually bought one or two (or even three!) since then. These are mostly fiction and four of them I've already finished.

'Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day' is a gentle book and a delightful story set in (and written in) the 1930s. Miss Pettigrew is a governess who goes to the wrong address for a job interview and gets involved in the life of a nightclub singer. I really enjoyed reading this.
I've also read both the Laurie R King books, they are the latest in a series about Mary Russell and her husband Sherlock Holmes! I've enjoyed all of them and am now waiting for the latest one to appear in paperback. I've also read Nancy Mitford's 'Christmas Pudding' as Christmas seemed the obvious time for a book with that particular title. It was OK but nothing to get over excited about.

Next on my list is going to be this which is the story of a farming family in Surrey during the Second World War - always a favourite period of mine.

There is quite a thick section of photographs in the centre and I'm looking forward to getting to know this family. It's going to take over from 'Vanishing England' for a while. I was wrong about having read this one before - I was thinking about another book by the same author called 'Rural England Cottage and Village Life'. The latter is an altogether delightful book illustrated by the paintings of A R Quinton. .Vanishing England' is, I fear, rather heavy going and will have to be read in chunks sandwiched between more entertaining affairs!

'Hedgerow and Wildlife' is a little book for dipping into and is small and light enough to carry with me if I want to have it handy on the spot. As it says on the cover it's a guide to animals and plants of the hedgerow and I especially like these illustrations showing the winter silhouettes of the three trees. It's mostly the written word though and would need to be combined with more specialist books on trees, wildflowers etc. It's more a starting point than anything else.

Rowland Parker was a retired teacher who lived in an old cottage in a village called Foxton in Cambridgeshire. He became interested in the history of the cottage and the people who had lived there before him and this book is the result of 12 years of research done (published 1973) before researching houses and families became a popular pastime. Thanks to John from By Stargoose and Hanglands blog for bringing this one to my attention. His blog is well worth reading.

'The Island Queen' arrived in the annual Christmas parcel from my friend in New Hampshire. It's a novel but about a real person. Celia Thaxter made a wonderful garden on the island of Appledore, one of the Isles of Shoals which lie 10 miles off the coast of New Hampshire. It should be interesting.

The remainder of the Christmas pile of books - I really did rather well for new books:)

I'm very taken with this hat and shall be acquiring some Noro yarn to knit it up very shortly. Now that the weather has turned much colder and the ground is frozen I shall be able to spend time reading and knitting - since New Year the weather has been so mild that I've spent a lot of time working in my garden. Winter seems to have reasserted itself for the moment though so it's back to the more usual January pastimes.

A Winter's Tale

I have a great many books - shelves and shelves of them in fact. Some I have bought and never quite got round to reading properly and others I haven't read for many years. A couple of days ago I decided to gather a pile of these together and put them on a small table next to the sofa so that I can spend some of the dark winter afternoons and evenings reading or re-reading them.

Vanishing England is one of the pile that I've read in the past but I want to make a few notes of the places and buildings mentioned this time and see whether later this year I can look for some of them to see whether they have indeed vanished. If they are still there it will be interesting to see how much they have changed from the time when the book was first published in 1910. There's quite a lot on East Anglia so those I may well be able to check on when I'm visiting Neil and Cesca.


England is A Village I have read not just once in the past but several times, it was written during the early months of WW2 and published in 1940 and describes a country village life that is now long gone but one that I can just about remember.

Something else that makes this one of the books I would grab if there was a fire are the lovely illustrations by Denys Watkins Pitchford, they are so atmospheric.
Denys Watkins Pitchford is the real name of the author of three of the other books in this pile - 'The Wayfaring Tree', 'Tide's Ending' and 'Dark Estuary'. 'BB' was not only an artist but a wildfowler, angler, conservationist and superb naturalist.He was responsible for the re-introduction of the rare Purple Emperor to a wood in Northamptonshire which is now one of the best sites in Britain to see this beautiful butterfly. I own 16 of his books at present and hope to acquire more but the ones I don't have tend to be expensive as they are very collectible. The two I want most are 'A Summer On The Nene' (a really good copy is over £100 - by some distance!) and 'Indian Summer' which ranges between £40- £110! There is every chance that one of these will be joining my collection this year:)

These are the two little books sitting on top of the pile, there are two more in the series which are on my book wish list. Published in the late 1940s they are simple guides to what you might see through the year in each location. 'A Walk Down The Lane' begins

"It is damp and raw on this Winter's morning, with heavy clouds, cold,clinging mists,mud and sodden grass; chilling to the very marrow of ones bones. The lane takes on a forbidding appearance. Nature is in her nakedness and the trees shiver as Boreas, the great North Easter, blows through them."

That pretty much describes many winter mornings on the lane that leads up to Blackamoor where I walk every day with B Baggins.
The other three are 'A Walk In The Woods', 'A Walk By The River' and 'A Walk O'er The Downs' - I rather suspect that the author lived in Sussex:)

This photograph comes from Seasons of Change and shows a woman plaiting rushes into baskets. Many women supplemented the meagre wages of their ag lab husbands by making lace, straw plaiting and other rural crafts in the 19th century. The book itself chronicles the impact of the Industrial Revolution on rural life between 1850 and 1914. It is profusely illustrated with photographs throughout. I've had this book a long time but have never yet done more than leaf through it.

From the same book comes this photograph which shows how quickly people forget how hard life was only 100 years ago - the lifetime of my grandparents! This is John Brinkworth still working as a hedger and ditcher at the age of 81! No old age pensions in those days, you had to keep on working as long as you could and then if your family couldn't support you it was into the Workhouse. My mum was born in 1910 and all her life she was terrified of having to go into hospital because she associated hospital with the Workhouse. Of course many hospitals did begin life as the local Workhouse which was definitely not a place where you would want to end your days. I do seem to have strayed off the subject a bit here don't I? :)

A modern reprint of book originally published in 1952 and full of all kinds of interesting bits and pieces about the countryside and country life as it was then. I was 6 years old in 1952 and regularly walked 5 or 6 miles with my mum along local country lanes, my dad worked on Sundays so in Spring, Summer and Autumn mum and I usually went out walking taking a picnic lunch with us. We used to sing as we walked - The Happy Wanderer, Daisy,Daisy (Lend Me Your Bicycle Do),The Gypsy Rover, It's A Long Way To Tipperary and lots of other songs. It was a different world then.
Edited to add:
Did anybody notice? I was walking up the field back to Short's Lane this morning when I started singing to myself 'Daisy,Daisy, Lend me your bicycle do' when I suddenly thought 'LEND ME YOUR BICYCLE'? By the time I reached the lane I was laughing out loud and singing the proper words ''Daisy, Daisy give me your answer do'. What on earth was I thinking last night when I wrote that? Talk about a senior moment!

The Time Travellers group has a little sub group devoted to researching the Brigantes tribe which ruled a large area of Northern Britain. Cartimandua was queen of the Brigantes at the time of the Roman conquest so she is going to be my introduction to the Brigantes about whom I currently know very little indeed.

Another book I've had a good while and still not read, it's about the history, folklore, wildlife and people of the Fens - a very special area of England most of it barely above sea level which until very recently was remote from the rest of the country.

The Fens are famous for the wonderful array of wildfowl, waders and other birdlife to be found there. Here also can be found the fen raft spider, this is the UK's largest and rarest spider, one I trust I shall only ever see from a distance and preferably not at all!

So that is that is my reading for the next few weeks. I think you can glean quite a lot about me from those titles. There is of course another pile - the new books that arrived over Christmas! That's for another post though.