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standing stones; Orkney three

Posted jane -->on 27th Nov 2018

I had not expected the opportunity to meet up with any standing stones or other historic sites on this trip, but to everyone’s delight India and Alison arranged a minibus and driver, designed a route, made sandwiches and off we went.

clever India had a folded book for us to make beforehand, an uphill and downhill island book, so that we could sketch as we drove along, preferably without looking down into our laps but taking in the stunning Orkney sinuous hills, lochs, sounds, firths and islands in a right brain drawing (that is, looking at the subject rather than the paper) the view changing rapidly meant that your hand had to swoop about, sometimes layering several viewpoints.

first on the itinerary was the broch of Gurness, just up the coast a little from Woodwick. it used to be the Knowe of Gurness, a green mound, until someone discovered a hole leading down into the remains of the broch.

probably trowes (Orkney version of troll) were thought to live in it before it was opened up, but in fact it was built by Picts in the iron age, and has the remains of many houses around the central tower

all built with slabs in a very similar way to Scara Brae in the Neolithic, which the Orkney stone lends itself to, splitting easily into large thin rectangular pieces

the entrance to the broch has many gateways and buildings stretching across the site. life here would have been crowded in a smoky claustrophobic environment.

we continued to Birsay, to the remains of a palace built about  two thousand years later, by a very unpleasant man, I think life might have been considerably worse than in the iron age for his peasants.

huge kitchens and brewhouse, plenty of chimneys, but this was fortified, and the Stewart earls, an illegitimate branch of the family, were hanged for treason in the 1600’s. by 1700 it was abandoned. a much shorter life than the broch.

just across the way

on a flat cap of land separated by a tidal causeway, the Brough of Birsay, (and how did our dear leaders know the tide would be out?) Thorfinn the Mighty, the viking earl who ruled Shetland, Orkney, nine earldoms of Scotland, and parts of Ireland from 1014 to 1065, had his base here. there are low walls designating the foundations of the settlement, complete with steam bath houses and drainage. it seemed quite basic and small for such a powerful man. but before the vikings wiped out christianity three hundred years earlier, there was a small Pictish church on the site.

then we had a scenic route around the coast

before turning inland for the climax of our trip

the Ring of Brodgar at sunset

the Viking story about these massive stones

is that a group of giants came to drink at the lochs and were caught out by sunrise, frozen into stone.

they are so huge that it’s hard to imagine how neolithic people got them there and stood them upright.

some are very tall indeed

and some are flat on the ground

we had wonderful light

it caught the heathery hills across the loch with a tinge of fire

and painted the sunward side of the stones

a lot of people have decided to leave their mark

including my initials ….

I would not dare to try to own them in such a way

even if I could

it’s like standing next to a remnant of a gothic cathedral

the mystery is clear and tangible

whether fallen or upright

the colours of the land; Orkney part two

Posted jane -->on 26th Nov 2018

some people assumed that there would not be much in the way of leaves to dye with here in Orkney towards the end of November, and that the weather would be too awful to get outside much. but in fact the weather was mild and open; some days the sun shone all the short hours it was up.

the low lying islands make the sky huge, and there is light reflected from the surrounding and interlocking water of sea and loch.

at the bottom of the garden at Woodwick House the island of Wyre is a low hump across the sound, and the sea constantly changes colour

  

and the bare trees form a patterned screen – in this case

Rousay is the pink land under the pink cloud on the horizon, caught by the setting sun.

in George Mackay Brown’s book Magnus he describes this group of islands, ten including the mainland which he gives its old name, Hrossey (horse island) “the islands shift their places around the firth, Hrossey, Eynhallow, Rousay, Gairsay, Shapinsay, Wyre, Eday, Sanday, Stronsay, Egilsay” as Magnus and his men sail/row across the sound towards his martyrdom on Egilsay

on the beach there is a thick wreath of seaweed, coloured from ochre to rust to deep wine-purple, amongst stones that are lighter versions of the same colours, and at low tide, fine grey sand, ripple marked.

from the beach you can walk back up beside the burn, as it pours over the rock steps and pools in treacle brown depths

on a path through shrubs and trees

with secret spots to hide and read a book or draw,

leant over by tree branches. from the name I suppose there must always have been trees here.

quaint post and rails – the seabird skull my addition, a find from the beach –

snow drop bulbs everywhere in bare earth and humous, already starting to sprout green horns.

at the top there’s what they call in scotland a doo-cot – a dove cote

with compartments for all the pigeon nests, providing baby pigeons for pies. whether this is a genuine really old one is hard to say, but it’s been made into a sort of pagan chapel

a quiet contemplative place

beside the sound of the rushing burn

at the gate before the bridge

and at the other side of the house there are castellated turrets – a late Victorian fancy. the gates are missing, anyway, and the path down the to the sea is public.

the hens are the rightful owners of the garden, six of them, and with no foxes they don’t have to be shut in at night.

this one is the boss, she’s twelve years old. one day they laid four eggs!

inside we had been hard at work stitching on paper, watercolour, or other special paper – some hand made. I had brought heavy weight watercolour, and it was brutal to stitch on, so mine was quite minimal. others filled up their three pieces with masses of abstract stitching and pieces of fabric.

then we made folded books, into which we inserted leaves/and seaweed

wrapped them into parcels with cloth

and after a brief cook

opened our little treasures, at the same time adding to our drip-sheets/abstract paintings (Japanese inksticks ground on beach stones and peat from the burn-side, using sticks and home-made brushes, and yes, fingers)

they looked gorgeous when wet

though this lovely rusty brown

dried to something a bit duller.

the drip-lengths were made into something very exciting on the last day.

when you work with leaves and stitches your eyes get tuned into all the fine details of the landscape

things you might walk past before, suddenly shine out at you with their beauty.

 

the fortress of the high powers

Posted jane -->on 28th Oct 2018

the last day of the course at Ty Newydd was a trip into Snowdonia, hill-walking with storytelling and heightened speech.

we drove up the Nantlle valley from the coast on the Anglesey side

through the pass to a high reservoir

where we stopped so that two of us could deliver their invocation/heightened speech in the spirit of place

the weather collaborated and while the utterances were in progress we were enveloped in a hail storm.

we stood close together like penguins keeping warm in a snowstorm. reading from an ipad covered in melting hail was quite a feat, having climbed up a very steep little hill.

although the weather was uncomfortable at times, it would not have been so atmospheric without the huge fast moving clouds and intermittent sunshine.

we drove on to Beddgelert, refreshed and warmed ourselves, and those able to march up hills and scramble over rocks continued to Dinas Emrys, to encounter dragons and fortresses.

it’s a National Trust site. I am not normally fond of carved wood things on walks, but this dragon bench is very fine. the scales on its back stood up five inches proud of the spine, its tail, with similar scales, made a a complete three hundred and sixty degree turn at the other end of the seat, and huge claws splayed out at each end. Here Eric (Maddern, one of the course leaders) began his tale of Merlin’s prophesies at Dinas Emrys, taken from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain. the story features the welsh red dragon defeating the saxon white dragon.

we walked on through woods on mossy paths and up and down stone steps

the hill we were walking to is probably a volcanic plug; it sits between the higher mountains – on the west side Moel Hebog, which blocks any view of Yr Wyddfa (Snowdon) itself, and on the east, Grib Ddu with Moel y Dyniewd higher behind,

in the valley of Afon (river) Glaslyn

we passed waterfalls – this the biggest, with its pool of blue stones

and a huge quartz block, a pulpit stone

then more stone steps as we climbed higher

through wood

and pasture

higher

with views of wooded hills

and bare mountains

until we reached the narrow neck of land

and the steep path

connecting Dinas Emrys

a very defensible precipitous path, looking down to the Arfon Glaswyn valley

coming down, after the rain which began soon after we got to the top, I slid on my bum over the steepest rockiest part, it seemed safer.

here the view of the lake

looking down to Llyn Dinas

at the top at last, to sit in the square of what are probably the foundations of an eleventh century tower, and listen to the last part of Eric’s re-telling.

below the tower is a hollow place with a pool, a natural amphitheatre. it was choked with rush and the ground covered with bracken, but Eric has been clearing it, and now the eye is open. in one of my favourite children’s books, written in 1959, the Lantern Bearers by Rosemary Sutcliff, this place is reimagined as the mountain hideaway not of Vortigern, but of Ambrosius, the son of the leader Vortigern betrayed when he brought in the saxon warbands led by Hengist and Horsa. she uses the name Dinas Ffaraon and translates it as Fortress of the High Powers. Emrys is the Welsh version of Ambrosius, but it also means immortal one. her description of the approach, from the lake, although it’s not the way we came up, has the same feel of mystery and magic. “The path squeezed its way through, and plunged on upward. In the softer and more level places it was a slithering quagmire, at others it ran out onto bare, mist wet rock” and she places Ambrosius in the hollow place at the moment of meeting the main character, Aquila, “on the edge of a little hollow with the gleam of water at the bottom of it” Aquila hears the notes of a harp from buildings in this hollow, and finds Ambrosius within.

re-reading this book I get the feeling that Rosemary Sutcliff was quite an influence on my own writing; her strong sense of place, and detail of plants and animals make her fiction intense and vivid.

as we searched out fallen wood for our fire, and Eric dug away rush and turf from the stones, it began to hail. nevertheless the fire was lit and we ten uttered our heightened speech to our chosen entity; to the lost eagles of Snowdon, to the Green Man, to Pan, to Rhiannon (that was me), Artemis, Myrddin, Math, Sophia, Thor, and Taliesin.

although we couldn’t see Snowdon from the reservoir because of the cloud, when I left Wales the next morning I caught a glimpse of it, covered in a light dusting of snow, from the Porthmadog bypass. it’s on the very left edge of the photo and soon the cloud covered it again.

orchids and swifts

Posted jane -->on 10th Jul 2018

in June we remembered the orchids at Warham Camp, and made a date to visit while they were in flower

we had timed it perfectly

there were common spotteds

and pyramid orchids

covering the south and east sides of the huge rampart banks

built of chalk dug up from the layer of it that is just under the subsoil here in the middle of north Norfolk

so that this iron age fort has a very special fauna and flora, including chalk-loving and drought-loving plants .

it is surrounded by conservation grassland, the river Stiffkey (a chalk stream) was straightened in the eighteenth century and cuts against part of the ramparts, and even the arable fields have wide nectar headlands, so the insect life is healthy and varied, and so is the bird population.

a beautiful flower beetle on a scabious flower

we saw common blue and chalk hill blue butterflies (the caterpillars of this feed on horseshoe vetch).

this painted lady was in the churchyard as we passed through on our way

most of the flowers are quite small versions, due to the thin dry soil.

in the centre of the circle of banks and ditches thistles dominate. more details of the archaeology can be found here

linnets and whitethroat were singing in the hedges,

swifts, swallows and martins swooping over the nearby fields and the central dish of the fort.

there was quite a breeze so you may want to turn the sound off for this scan of one of the banks and its orchids

the impression I was left with of the birds and the landscape with its flowers resulted in two paintings. one of the swifts at Warham, and one of swallows hawking green barley after rain at Edgefield.

I made a start

remembering the chalk and the clouds, then left both alone for a week

last week I took the swallows hawking one, and did some quite radical things to it

but after a couple of hours it had settled into something more peaceful and less abstract.

so yesterday I took the Warham one and chucked lots of runny blue paint down it, ran some red and some burnt sienna around it,

worked back in with a big brush and gesso and some greens,

then I had to get those  mounds of the ramparts back in, without losing the sense of the river and the sky

 

but I left quite a lot of the blue watery stuff,

put more opaque pale greys into the sky, with the diving swifts

and added the pyramid orchids, that strong pink, and just a couple of butterflies

there’s a lot of movement and colour. I think it has something of the day in it.

 

the danish camp

Posted jane -->on 25th Aug 2017

is what the locals called the iron age earthworks at Warham, nowadays it mostly goes under Warham Camp

you walk up the back lane to Wighton – we cut the corner off and went through the churchyard – one of the two in Warham, All Saints. the church is closed for renovation at the moment, an interesting mishmash of building styles and re-builds, and its tower collapsed a very long time ago by the look of it

we crossed the river Stiffkey, one of our treasured north Norfolk chalk streams

water clear as a bell

by a pretty little bridge with curved walls

and up the top of the road to the track.

the earthworks or fort – though the actual purpose of the site is not really understood – are huge, double ramparts with ditches, dug in the chalk, so the whole thing would have glittered white in the sun when it was new. the information board says it was built around 200BC and used until 100 AD with the remains of Roman building – tiles and so on, in the enclosure.

the river once curved around, cradling the circle of the fort, providing an extra barrier, but probably also providing summer pasture for cattle and horses. the enclosure-mad landowners of the eighteenth century straightened the Stiffkey, cutting off a slice of the ramparts in the process, while draining the wetland around it for agricultural use.

for us, apart from the glamour and resonance of the history of the place – wild celtic tribes, warrior queens, heroic charioteers, golden torc hoards and all the rest – the plants and insects here are quite special.

the chalk ramparts are a wonderful habitat for various orchids and butterflies

there are chalk hill blues, and common blues flitting about

autumn gentian is very common here – a plant I’d never seen before – amongst birds eye trefoil and ladies bedstraw –

the orchids are over in late summer, but I found seedheads of common spotted.

colonies of stemless thistle like the south facing slopes

clumps of mignonette

harebells all over the mounds, scabious and devil’s bit scabious,

meadow flowers in the thin grasses looking like medieval tapestry

self-heal

wild angelica

the area inside the rings of banks and ditches is covered in thistles and nettles – thistledown blowing across and catching on everything

and the surrounding hedges full of hips and haws

a holme oak, very old, stands inside the enclosure

probably seeded by a bird carrying an acorn from the trees in Warham’s churchyards. from the camp you can see two church towers, St Mary’s Warham and All Saints Wighton

next year I will be visiting in early summer, to catch those orchids in flower.