‘Unction and Slaughter’
Faith and Doubt in the poetry of Geoffrey Hill
by Ratnagarbha (Ambrose Gilson)
The only Megalith in Essex?
This standing stone was spotted just outside Hatfield Forest, north east Essex. Although it has clearly been set up by a farmer just outside his farmhouse as an interesting feature, the stone itself does look very old and extremely weathered. It is some kind of conglomerate with many small pebbles ingrained in the rock. Surely someone trying to manufacture a megalith would not use this kind of stone as it doesn’t look especially mythic or impressive. However its shape is certainly very like some of the smaller standing stones at Avebury. So if a forgery a clever one…
PS I hear rumours of a church somewhere in Essex that is supposed to have a ring of buried megaliths all around the edge of the grave yard. I hope to report on this properly at some point in the future. Any pointers gladly received…
The Old Straight Track
Stourbridge Common –
tracks to nowhere, the iron bridge, memories of the fair…
Stourbridge Common is the nearest piece of semi-rural land to where I live in Cambridge. It is only a five minute cycle ride away but on dark winter afternoons it can take on an epic doom-laden appearance… The straight track across its centre becomes a walk into the infinite instead of a few hundred yards towards the railway bridge.
Watercolour is alive and well
Some fine water colour paintings by Buddhist artist Sudhi S. Pooniyil. He finds inspiration in the village life of his native India, as well as scenes in the UK. More on his website at https://sudhispooniyil.com
Backstreets of academe
Some recent sightings in the backstreets of Cambridge, not exactly dingy but not well heeled either. Raffish encounters with odds and ends…
Golden tunnel
to nothing good
Littoral Fringes of the New Forest
Many of us would like to have a corner of the earth with which we have a special connection. But I suspect I am not alone in finding myself pulled in two directions: there is the place where I was brought up, on the fringes of the New Forest and the edge of the large estuary of Southampton Water – a shoreline but not a seashore, with industrial relics, and intrusive modern gravel banks, a boundary zone for which the word liminal is far too airy fairy…. Continue reading “Littoral Fringes of the New Forest”
New Post – THE GATE IS OPEN: William Blake’s time by the sea
THE GATE IS OPEN
Adriana Díaz-Enciso explores the inspiring but troubled sojourn of Blake and his wife in a cottage by the sea on the South Coast at Felpham
New Post – striking mythic drawings based on ancient slavic beliefs
We feature the fascinating mythic art work of Marek Hapon based on the ancient slavic beliefs of his pagan ancestors.
“My first contact with ancient Slavic beliefs occurred while spending summers at my grandmother’s farm in eastern Poland. It was there that I discovered the world of supernatural beings — some frightening and others wondrous. One such scary demon was the Licho…. ”
A walk in the Malverns
It was a sultry summer day, not very hot, but humid. There was a decadent end of summer feel even though it was only towards the end of July. I decided that August would be a herald of autumn rather than a glorious finish to the season, and so it was necessary to make the best of it, dress light and step out with determination along the languid maze of lanes that thread the countryside to the west of the great spine of the Malverns. Beyond that tawny ridge to the east I knew there are motorways, cities and the hundred million distractions of modern life. But here, west of that sheltering spine, just silence apart from what Heaney so memorably called ‘the distant gargling of tractors’. On the verges the thresh of bleached grasses is soaked in dew, there is a sense of rot about to happen, but for now the air is damp but cool and the lanes are empty and inviting. The sky is a mix of clouds and clarity. Sometimes for half an hour it appears to be going to cloud up completely and looks ominous, but the next moment the vapours dissolve and the sky goddess is back in her glory…
Castle Hill at dusk
The Castle Hill area of Cambridge is almost certainly the oldest continuously inhabited part of the city – it is here that the Roman fort was established in the first century CE. Perhaps this is why the whole area, which is still a tangle of streets and alleyways, once you leave the wide ring road that snakes through it, has a sense of strangeness and dislocation. You are very close to the hyper-busy tourist areas of the colleges and shops, but there is a sense of being threaded into the density of the past, the whole area has a slightly eerie quietly brooding atmosphere that clogs the arteries of one’s immediate concerns….Continue reading “Castle Hill at dusk”
