Leaving On A Jet Plane

This is going to be a very quick post as I'll be leaving for the airport in a couple of hours. I'm all packed and ready to go, I'll be flying to London today and staying overnight then tomorrow afternoon I'll be flying to Boston. I had a lovely day yesterday as all of us went out for lunch to belatedly celebrate my birthday, both babies were very good and it was great to have everyone there together. This is just to finish up my Norfolk trip so that I can get straight into boring everyone with my US photos when I get back :) On the third day I decided to spend the morning at Gressenhall Workhouse and Farm ,they have a small working farm with rare breed animals which was originally the farm which supplied the local Workhouse with food. There's a rural life museum, a Victorian cottage and garden and all sorts of other things there and would easily provide a great full day out. I only had a couple of hours so decided to go round the farm. The photo at the top is the farmhouse.


You can go inside the downstairs part which is lovely, I'd be happy to move straight in there. This is the kitchen with a lovely old range on the left. Not quite so lovely when you had to blacklead it regularly I suppose:)



This one side of the scullery with the old mangle. I remember my gran using one of those and it was extremely hard work especially since she was only 4'11" tall. I was tempted to run off with a couple of those wonderful pieces of pottery!


The other side of the scullery with it's lovely deep sink and wooden draining board.


A pair of Suffolk Punch horses, the big working horses used for ploughing, carting etc. They are very rare now and I believe there are only about 360 left. They are lovely gentle horses even though they are so big.


The horseman was kind enough to unfasten one of them and bring him to the stable door to have his photo taken. I've somehown managed to make him look rather thin which he wasn't.


Red Poll cattle


Large Black pigs


I chanced to turn up at the same time as a group of vintage cars which were doing a travelling tour of Norfolk. This lovely green one arrived more or less at the same time as me.



The really special thing about these cars is that they were all steam driven!! I didn't realise that there were such things as steam driven cars.


Aren't they just great?



I also went to Dereham while I waited for the Farm to open, this is St Nicholas Church which was founded in AD654 by St Withburga though the church you actually see was built around 1200. Our friend Bishop Bonner was parish priest here at one time and his cottage (previou post) is just down the road from the church.



The font was made in 1488.



The interior showing the nave and chancel.


The detached Bell Tower was built between 1501 and 1536.



St Withburga's Well where the founder of the church was originally buried. It was a pilgrim shrine in Saxon times. I wouldn't mind betting that the spring feeding the well was originally a pagan site.



Naughty Abbott and monks! You will need to click on the photo to be able to read it properly.


That's it, I have an hour to get ready and have some breakfast then I'm off. Back in early October.

Land of the Iceni

The area now known as Norfolk was once the territory of the Ancient British tribe called the Iceni whose most famous member was a female warrior called Bouddica (or Boadicea)who came close to defeating the Romans in 61AD. She led a rebellion after the Romans flogged her and raped her daughters. Among the Celts it was quite normal for women to be both tribal chieftains and warriors. Norfolk is a rather more peaceful place now but it has a long and fascinating history. On the first day of my trip I visited a lovely moated 15th Century manor house called Oxburgh Hall. It's a National Trust property so, of course, there are no photographs of the interior. This is actually no great loss as it's the outside which is so attractive, the inside has been largely Victorianized and the only really interesting and attractive bit was the marvellous Priest's Hole which, wonder of wonders, you are allowed to go into. This is easier said than done, the entrance is a narrow opening in the floor going into the hiding place at an angle. Dear readers, I forgot that I'm 61 and went down there! Then I rather wished I hadn't as it was tiny with no windows of course, and rather claustrophobic. I began to wonder whether I'd actually be able to get out again especially when I was followed down by a tall, well made man who got stuck halfway!!! He finally managed to wriggle through and there was just about room for the two of us. Happily getting out turned out to be much easier than getting in for both of us but I was decidedly relieved to be back above ground again. It made me realise how appalling it must have been for the Catholic priests stuck in there for days at a time with only a candle for illumination. The Bedingfields remained a Catholic family throughout the reign of Elizabeth I and during the English Civil War they were Royalists in a decidedly Parliamentarian area. The Priest's Hole would have had a considerable amount of use I should think.


You could climb up a narrow spiral staircase and go out onto the roof of one of the towers so I did that too and had it practically to myself. This is one of the views from up there.


This is the Gatehouse and is what you see if you are standing in front of the bridge over the moat though from the photograph you wouldn't guess that the bridge is there.



These swans appeared swimming along the moat and looked so regal that I couldn't resist taking their picture.



A Red Admiral butterfly taken in the woodlands surrounding the manor house.


As I turned into the lane leading to Oxburgh Hall there was also another sign to the 'Iceni Village and Museum' so after visiting Oxburgh I continued down the road to find out what the Iceni Village had to offer. It was rather fun but not, I suspect, entirely archaeologically accurate! This was the entrance, of which the little guide book says ' although there is no proof that the Iceni used this type of entrance, drawbridges were well known to the Romans.' Hmmm,yes, well........here it is anyway complete with heads taken from defeated enemy warriors.


This is a model of a chariot similar to those that would have been used by some Celtic warriors and is reasonably accurate I think.


This is a so-so reconstruction of a Celtic round house which would have been used by the head of an extended family with lesser lights using the long house in the background. I must admit that, having worked in an archaeologically accurately built and equipped roundhouse at Francis Prior's site at Flag Fen, I found this a bit disappointing. As a day out for a family with young children it's quite good fun though.


The rest of the Museum included a rather pleasant Nature Trail and I took this photo of what may or may not be a dragonfly called a Common Darter:)



Viburnum berries



Another part of the Museum site was this lovely 17th century cottage, tucked away in the woods, which is my favourite of all that I saw, I think this would have belonged to the local wisewoman :)



I took several photos of the inside but only really have room for one here which is the kitchen. Probably a bit pristine looking for our wisewoman.....



Nearby was the ruin of St Mary's church thought to be one of the oldest churches in England built around 628AD. It has a beautiful round apse and it was apparently converted and used as a house for the parish priest from around the mid 1500s.


This is the interior of the rounded apse with the sun streaming through an upper window causing the bright spot in the centre.


The middle day of the trip was the funeral but on the third day I spent the morning in and around the small town of Dereham.


Isn't this a delightful cottage? It is in Dereham and dates from 1502, it's built of brick, flint and wattle and daub. The front is decorated with coloured pargetting which is ornamental plasterwork.


This is a close-up of the pargetting. Delightful as it is, this cottage was the home of a truly appalling man called Bishop Bonner who was responsible for burning over 200 heretics between 1553 and 1558 during the reign of Queen Mary who was known as Bloody Mary.

As ever, clicking on the photos will improve them enormously.
I'm hoping to have time to do another post on Norfolk sometime tomorrow in between having a manicure and pedicure, a birthday lunch and packing. We'll see:)

Autumn

Bryony berries looking like jewels strung along the hedgerow.

I'm not the first to post John Keats' poem but it's so lovely it bears reading more than once I think:) The photographs are from a short trip to Norfolk last week to attend my Uncle Vic's funeral, it's quite a long way so I decided to stay over a couple of nights and renew my acquaintance with this lovely part of England. It's some years since I was last there and this visit has made me resolve to go back more often. I'm not likely to be around much for the next three weeks or so, though I'm hoping to get at least one more post about Norfolk done before I leave for a two week stay in the USA next weekend.
Clicking on the photos will improve most of them.


To Autumn (1819)

I





Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.



II



Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

III



Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,--
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.




The photos
Wild crab apples and hawthorn berries
Hazel nuts (taken near home not in Norfolk)
A recently harvested cornfield
Small tortoiseshell butterfly on wild mint
Damselfly (Bluetailed damselfly I think)
_________________________________________

Desert Island Books - Part 2

I've always been a fan of Agatha Christie and she is is well known for her Poirot and Miss Marple books. Less well known is the fact that she was married to the eminent archaeologist Max Mallowen and she accompanied him on all the digs that he did in what is now Iraq. In fact she became the expedition photographer and catalogued and labelled all the finds. It was from these expeditions that she got the background material for some of her most famous novels such as Appointment With Death and Murder in Mesopotamia and also for Murder On The Orient Express - she always travelled by the Orient Express on her way out to the Middle East - how I would love to have done that fabulous journey travelling First Class on this legendary train:)
I'd actually never heard of Come Tell Me How You Live until a few years ago when I went to a special exhibition at the British Museum called Agatha Christie and Archaeology. It was absolutely fascinating and I thoroughly enjoyed it and at the end I discovered in the shop this book. I bought it on impulse and am very glad that I did. It is a light-hearted and very amusing account of her life when she was on these digs. Well worth trying to find a copy of if you are interested in either Agatha or archaeology.


It must be pretty obvious from the dog-eared appearance of this book that I have read it several times! As long as I can remember I've had a fascination for the Second World War - not the fighting but the everyday lives of women and how they coped with life. These diaries of Clara Milburn were discovered and published in the late 1970s and I find them absolutely rivetting. She was an ordinary middle-aged, middle class woman who kept a diary right through the war detailing the ordinary everyday things that happened interspersed with war news as they heard it on the wireless or read it in the newspapers. She wrote about her garden, rationing and the food they ate, her clothes, the dog,the weather, nights in the air raid shelter - it is all so immediate that you are taken back into her world and worry with her about her son who is a prisoner of war and share her delight when letters arrive from him.


One of the things I love to see when I fly over England is the patchwork quilt of fields which are unique to this country - this book is about these fields,the hay meadows, pasture, water meadows and arable land and the history of agriculture which has shaped them. Together with this it tells of the wildflowers and wildlife which lives on and around them in the hedgerows,drystone walls and the wooded copses. Apart from history and ecology it is full of wonderful photographs of both the countryside and the plants and animals that live there. Just right for someone exiled on a desert island:)


Norfolk Life by Lilias Rider Haggard is another book about country life in England but between the wars this time - my favourite period apart perhaps from medieval/Tudor times. Lilias lived in Norfolk and was the daughter of H Rider Haggard who wrote 'King Soloman's Mines' and 'She', both of which were made into famous films. They were minor landed gentry and the book gives a fascinating insight into the life of a woman who had no need to work for a living, she was intelligent and had many interests but was essentially a countrywoman. From this particular book I'm going to put a tiny excerpt to give you a flavour of her writing:

The snow-flood is coming down the river, and a steadily rising tide of turbid water creeps over the marshes. This afternoon the Common lay without a sound, a flat, grey expanse up to the low hills on the horizon, where the woods lie black against the sky. Behind them the sun, a furious ball, was sinking through a pall of mist. A solitary swan was moving in the sunset waters of the river. Suddenly there was a winnowing of many wings, a strange whistling call, and out of the mist seven wild swans swept down with necks outstretched,and settled on the water in a flurry of spray. They floated there almost motionless while the fire on the water faded to the steel grey of the sky, and only their plumage was flamingo pink. It was like the fairy-tale of the enchanted swans, but in February one would search in vain for enough nettles to weave seven shirts for their disenchantment.

Of all the books I've written about, this is the one I would choose ahead of all the others. Incidentally, if you are wondering about the nettles - if you cut nettles and leave them lying under a hedge through autumn and winter to rot you can obtain lengths of fibre from what is left that can be spun just like flax and used to make cloth. I hasten to say that I have never done it, I just know it's possible:)



This book is here because it's a reminder of the best and most interesting holiday I've ever had. A group of us went regularly on archaeology/classical based trips, visiting all kinds of mostly Greek and Roman sites with a couple of free days to do our own thing. Evenings involved good food and quite a lot of wine:) Jordan is a fabulous country just packed with interesting things to see - the Dead Sea, the Rose Red City of Petra, Jerash, Mount Nebo( where Moses looked out over the Promised Land),Crusader castles, the desert where Lawrence of Arabia spent a lot of time and all sorts of other things. Driving out in the desert in an open top jeep is quite an experience, so is walking on the red hot sand! The food is wonderful, the people are friendly and polite and the weather is great. The final couple of days we spent in Aqaba which has a beautiful beach, warm sea and glass bottomed boats that take you out to see coral reefs in the clear waters of the Red Sea. This book has masses of pictures and the history of the places nearly all of which I've seen. I know I sound like a travel brochure but if ever you get the chance to visit Jordan, take it - you'll love it.


Finally, another gardening book. I bought this in 1986, the year it was published. The author, Stephen Lacey, was only 29 and though he's written other books since none has come even close to The Startling Jungle, it has passion for the subject, great knowledge and lyrical descriptions of the flowers and foliage which make you want to rush out and get every one of them to grow in your own garden. This is another book which bears evidence of the number of times that I've read it.

You may have noticed something about the books I've chosen, they are almost all written in or about the 1930s and 1940s, those that aren't are written about aspects of an even more remote past - an indication of the fact that I don't find the modern world especially attractive. A desert island would probably suit me very well:)

Five (Plus Dog) Go To Edale

Friday was a beautiful sunny day - a rare thing in England this summer. When Steve rang and suggested an outing to Edale we didn't take much persuading. The title was inspired by one of my favourite Enid Blyton series', though that particular Five actually included the dog Timmy so I'm cheating a bit:) Our Five consisted of DH, Steve,Hannah, grand-daughter Kaitlyn and yours truly plus, of course, the inevitable Mr B Baggins. Edale is made up of several small hamlets which were originally shepherd's booths or shelters. It is in the centre of some fabulous walking country which I intend to explore more thoroughly in the near future. Most of the photos would benefit from clicking and enlarging.



The Old Nag's Head dates back to 1577 and was originally a smithy. It is now the official start of the Pennine Way which runs for 270 miles along the backbone of England. It runs through the Peak District, the Yorkshire Dales, across Hadrian's Wall and the Cheviots finishing up in Kirk Yetholm in the Scottish borders. This is a walk I'd love to do though probably with a guide led group as my map reading skills are pretty well non existent - frequent remarks by DH about it helping if I had the map the right way up will give you some idea:)


We passed this pretty group of cottages as we walked through the village.



Interested spectators - the interest was mutual as far as Kaitlyn and Mr Baggins were concerned. K kept pointing and after granny had said 'sheep' several times we got pointing accompanied by 'eep' 'eep' :) Bilbo Baggins of course was on a lead much to his disgust. He was anxious to demonstrate his sheep herding skills to us.




K with her sunhat rather askew and showing off her unicorn reins which she loves wearing. At 16 months old she walked a considerable amount of the way up this hillside path. We were rather proud of her and I gather she slept extremely well that night:)


Just one of the views as we walked.



B Baggins enjoying a drink and cooling his paws in a moorland stream.



As we get higher the heather starts to appear along with the gritstone rocks of the Dark Peak.


A solitary rowan tree growing among the bracken and heather - so naturally I had to take this photograph.



Cute or what? The drystone wall is typical of this area - Derbyshire, Cheshire, Yorkshire and the Lake District. They are, I think, found mostly in the north of England. Dry stone walling takes a considerable amount of skill, as the name implies there is absolutely no cement involved. My dad could do it, he actually had quite a few old country skills though I didn't really realise it when he was alive. He could use a sickle and scythe and I suspect he also had some poaching skills too, he certainly came home with the odd rabbit or pheasant in his capacious pockets on occasion.

Moorland

Granny J left a comment on one of my posts and asked what exactly moorland is so I'll try and explain with the help of one or two not very great photos taken hurriedly in the last couple of days.
Moorland is invariably at least 800 feet above sea level on high plateaus and hillsides and it is very open country. The moorlands of the Dark Peak near where I live are gritstone with a layer of about 12+ feet of peat on top. It is generally exposed, windy, cool and has a high rainfall and this means that there are many areas of treacherous bog around. The moors are covered with heather, bracken, moorland grasses and very low growing shrubs like bilberry and crowberry. The scenery can be magnificent but not in this particular post - I just stopped the car and took quick photos from the roadside which isn't the best position.


This was taken yesterday in the late afternoon with lowering skies and a decidedly unfriendly aspect to the landscape. It also explains the fact that it looks as though only half the photo is there - the rest is thick grey cloud. I took it really because the heather is flowering so fantastically this year and I wanted to try and capture it. The photo at the top was taken at the same time and shows some of the rock formations that are scattered over the area. It will need enlarging to see it better but isn't very clear anyway because of the conditions.


Looking down towards the Hope Valley - again not all that clear because of the low cloud and low light.


This was taken today on a different road and on a much pleasanter day. There are great sheets of purple stretching into the distance. I can't ever remember seeing it as good as this.



One of the permanent residents of the moorland, sheep can survive up here and there are large flocks of them everywhere.