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Ty Newydd again

Posted jane -->on 13th Aug 2019

Back to Ty Newydd, the National Writing Centre of Wales for a nature writing course with Mark Cocker and Kathleen Jamie (with Horatio Clare as the guest writer/reader) last week. when I was there in the autumn it was late October and quite a different feel to everything. and this was such a different course to the rather alternative storytelling retreat with Hugh Lupton and Eric Madden.

last week it was warm and we had a lot of sun

the lavender in flower and filled with bees – honey, and several different bumblebees

I think this is a carder bee

and this is a white-tailed bumble. One of our morning workshops with Mark had us looking hard at the bees for at least fifteen minutes to write something really concentrated about them.

there were also dragonflies – this is a dead one found in the house

and a few moths. this rosy footman was stranded in the house overnight

having entered and become confused by the glass the night before. there are so many moths with wonderful names; it was great to have someone (Mark) who is an expert on insects to share information.

this time I managed a walk to the beach almost every morning – the circular walk is just over two miles, taking in small paths

through tree-edged fields of grass

under the single railway line

past brambles – ripe blackberries one morning for breakfast –

bracken, grazing cows

a deliciously tarry hut

down to where the river Dwyfor comes out into Cardigan Bay

and along the coastal path

beside burling water (burly water described by Norman MacCaig) that in spate into a high tide must be quite a sight –

but the tide was out or going out in the mornings last week – and one morning a heron flapped across low to the little waves

there’s always a special light in the mornings

and back up to the house, David Lloyd George’s last home

a lawn full of self-heal, and the semi-circular porch and window echoed by lines of flat pebbles set on end raying out in another semicircle before the grass starts

the house is surrounded by mature trees, but this walnut is my favourite, its branch across the stone steps down to the kitchen and utility part of the house.

I omitted to take photos of the wood and the river where we spent one morning making notes, leaving me with a few close-up portraits of Himalayan balsam flowers – extraordinary sexy glutinous objects.

full of thoughts about my own writing and about the very good insights into the poems we worked on, from the whole group of writers, and from Kathleen Jamie. I drove home in a gale, shreds of leaves flying across the road. these damsons blown early off the tree in my garden went into a cake. the next lot will be gin.

those blues seem to have got under my skin

yesterday I tackled a large oil painting (48 x 48 inches) which has been waiting for me to know what to do to it. the large emulsion brush turned out to be the key.

it’s good to have a break from something like painting. doors open, just like that!

 

 

 

a little bit of norfolk squit from Bullfer Grove

Posted jane -->on 22nd Apr 2019

Gods and Goddesses

here I’m surrounded by little gods

the ones that don’t need me – wren

and thrush worship them, voices across

field and tree. My dog is inhabited

by them, her long glossy neck and

cocked ears tell me so, she’s listening

to them, head in the sun. The climbing roses

and wild ones that loop sharp stems

have them in their buds, just swelling,

and in their thorns. We meet them in the

green lane when there’s no-one about

dressed in bridal flowers and trembling

new leaves, in the wood they tower

tossing wild cherry blossom down

and on the ground they mist among

the bluebells, ringing hanging heads

heavy with dew.

abstract paintings

Posted jane -->on 31st Mar 2019

following on the from the photos of the saltmarsh in the last post, I’ll take you through painting developments in the last month or so. one has been a constant flow of painterly finds from my friend’s blog Breathing story

this is a work on paper by Idris Murphy, a well respected Australian painter of landscape, both in Australia and in Europe.

I think my best work so far is informed by my own landscape and still life paintings, such as this landscape I painted about a year ago.

I follow Lewis Noble on facebook, his working methods, and his paintings are inspirational, though I wouldn’t go on one of his courses in case I found myself painting just like him! but the collage under the paint on this and most of my abstract paintings is a direct influence, he tears up sketches and pools their information in a collaged work on paper, then uses torn paper to block out parts of paintings. what I’m doing is directly collaging torn abstract sheets painted with ink and water colour onto the canvas before I start, plus now, I’m tearing bits out of the newspaper, from topical articles, and pasting them onto the canvas, sometimes text from them survives, sometimes it doesn’t.

this one, Called, 70 x 50 cm on linen, I painted late last year, and the newspaper came from the sheets of newspaper I was using to protect the table, a couple of years old, before the Guardian became tabloid size …

another element – I bought some marble dust for texture, having investigated a big tub of black “earth paste” left over from early attempts to paint with acrylic. it’s very crunchy – this is it in the black door shape.

lured by hellebores I worked on a couple of still life paintings (this is 40 x 40cm)

and this 30 x 30 cm (painted the next day). both painted over last summer landscapes I decided weren’t good enough to keep. I like painting on these lumpy surfaces, it loosens me up. and I was pleased with this looseness, due to the under painting/drawing being done with a big brush. I was also very taken with the spiky seed pods in these hellebores.

the same afternoon I painted this, a small canvas 30 x 24 cm, and it has bits of the flower arrangement in it, and some messing about in the thick paint with palette knife marks grown on from the seed pods in the first two. other elements like the speckle of the vase and the lush pinks and greens are directly from the same paint mixed for the still lifes.

I decided I liked the size and shape of the previous one and have done a few more

hints of landscape in these two.

meanwhile I have things on the go in oils. I find it much harder to work with – suddenly the fluid acrylic is perfect and oil seems stiff and too opaque. this one had a lot of layers, but at last the slow drying time of the oil was an asset, as I went back the next day after working on it and scraped lots off! it’s a canvas 50 x 50 cm.

this one had lots of layers in preparation, and the last one under what you can see here was newspaper torn from the front page of the Guardian the day after the Christchurch mosque massacres. a small amount of text and parts of words are still legible if you look for them. the blue “door” or perhaps vase has marble dust in the paint. it’s another 50 x 50 canvas.

this is a 30 x 24 cm canvas, you can see “truth” emerging from the paint.

I have a crackle paste – well I tried it and it didn’t crackle, but it was very thick. also on this one are some gold mica flakes, and they have become a feature of the last few paintings. this one is 30 x 30 cm, on canvas.

after taking the photos of the marsh I should really have done some drawings – this is as near as I’ve come. again, many layers, newspaper I’ve managed to cover over completely, and gold mica flakes. 50 x 50 cm.

on the same day this one arrived. a vase? a doorway? nothing intended … 30 x 30 on linen. it’s currently my favourite. another thing to think about with abstract painting is the Japanese concept of empty space, the space between things, ma.

not so much emptiness in this one, it’s the whirling whirligig of the west … 30 x 24 again.

and then this is the last, finished this week, after much struggling and ghastliness. I went up to the studio shed at 6 in the dusk to paint over the whole thing with gesso, and found myself making new marks, with the black earth paste and then some scraping back and a lot of deep scoring with the palette knife. next thing it was looking quite cool and mysterious … and connected with some writing I’m doing, a palimpsest poem about Doggerland and old age, and so this is named from a line in my poem – “of creatures thawing” – it’s 50 x 50 cm.

details

scratching and scoring and fluid paint

and yes, those gold mica flakes ….

there’s more to come, I have 3 canvases in the shed with newspaper and stuff stuck on them …

there are more photos to incorporate

and a dog to walk

 

one hundred photos

Posted jane -->on 25th Mar 2019

last week my spanish galga Bims and I went to Morston for a walk out on the saltmarsh

I put the hipstamatic camera app on my phone to “shake to randomise” in the interests of exploring the many many filters and effects I’ve accumulated and this is a photo essay with the best of them. above Mabel lens and sequoia film looks like an ancient Kodak slide from the 1930’s.

it was particularly muddy because the tides have been extra high as the full moon (a super-moon) approached

and a beautiful mild and sunny day – a soft sky webbed with vapour trails

the plant life of salt-tolerant grass, sea lavender and suaeda maritima (sea-blite) still looking grey-brown and dry – a bit livened up by this picture

and the shrubby sea-blite, suaeda fructicosa, with its fleshy pink and green leaves, more colourful in some places.

I walked (Bims galloped and got very muddy) to Morston meols creek. Meols is a Viking word for the land between farmland and high tide.

(Hipstamatic: tejas lens, hackney film – this is the prettiest new combination, I think)

I have just bought a book with Godfrey Sayers’ record of the names given to the marshes, mud pools, sand banks and creeks by generations of fishermen

most of them are wonderfully evocative – I list them here, but they don’t relate to the photos – Blacknock, Billy’s drain, Stonemeal creek,

Patch Pit creek, Simpool,

the main lagoon of course known as the Pit, looking across it to the old lifeboat house on Beachway.

the Freshes where the Stiffkey joins the harbour, its course and the tides controlled by two big sluices,

Freshes creek, where the mussel fishermen used to bring their harvest

Agar creek and Dead Man’s Hole over by Blakeney,

Warham Hole, High Sand creek out on the sand bank,

on the spit itself, Stanley’s Cockle Bight, the Hood,

Wallsbeck, Tibby Head,

Scalpe Run and Blackwater creek at the head of Morston Creek (generally known as the Channel by contemporary sailors)

Garborough Creek and Lady Crick,

the Run, and Down Below, the channel out to open sea.

while I was busy peering at my phone, Bims got very involved with the sad flipper remains of a seal. she wanted to bring this greasy stinking object home, but it was too heavy. so she rolled her shoulders, neck, ears and collar in it. and her muzzle was pretty oily too. so she had a coal tar shampoo bath when we got home. I also did a stupid thing – due to my new varifocals I put my foot in a hole and came down on my side so that my fist, hanging onto B’s lead, punched my ribs. which are very sore. yoga is painful. one has to pay for art.

 

a february diary

Posted jane -->on 28th Feb 2019

so much has happened this month, I’ve been busy writing, painting, walking, and I’m going to attempt to squeeze it all into one post, or at least most of it.

most of my walks are mid-morning these days, after a writing session first thing, but a couple of times a week we get out early. on the fifth it was sunny but still frosty at eight-thirty, and we caught sight of four roe deer out in the sun on the rape field. these three went in one direction, and one more back into the wood. another early morning we saw seven just outside the wood. I’ve never seen so many together before. hares have been quite evident in the same huge field, despite the bird-scaring cannon which makes us jump. B is on the whole very good, she seems to have accepted that I won’t let her go and chase all these creatures, and merely stops and stares.

we have had several trips to Wells beach, so that she can run full blast, and one to Morston for mud-running.

through february it has been very pleasant to open the curtains just before dawn and catch the eastern sky colouring up.

different days give different colours

but this was the most lurid, halfway through the heat wave, presaging the three wildfires that have made the news in this last week after over two weeks of dry scarily warm weather. with very little regrowth, winter moorland can be extremely dry I suppose.

on the first two tuesdays I joined a group of writers and Dr Jonathan Ward for the last two in a set of six “writing outside” sessions based at Cley marshes NWT centre. on the last one we walked from Kelling village down the green track to Quag and the shingle ridge, which is marked “Kelling hard” on the map

here there is an interesting juxtaposition of arable, marsh, wetland pools, high dry sheep grazing, and the beach with all the old WW2 defences and the Muckleborough collection’s anti-aircraft guns sticking up ominously on the skyline. just to make the atmosphere even more threatening, a pair of military jets were grinding round and round above us, leaving thick grey vapour trails.

the old pillbox has at last been destabilised by wave and shingle and has come off its brick base. I wonder how long it will take to break up.

for these outings I have made my own notebooks, folded from thick cartridge paper and prepared with abstract watercolour marks. this obviously has an effect on one’s notes, which are made between brush strokes and in the interstices of the pages which fold back on themselves. more about these in another post.

I’ve also been painting, mostly in acrylic and working on abstracts, with layering and collaging. but I had promised to give the art group in the village hall, of which I am a member, a demo and workshop with oils. I bought these anemones and put them in a beautiful georgian cut glass jug for the subject. the idea for the demo had come up last July when three of us had been inspired by the Winifred Nicholsons at Kettles Yard in Cambridge to paint flowers in oils in her manner, thick paint and loose mark-making.

the painting I did on the day was not completely successful – I don’t think anyone paints that well while showing others what they are doing! I had a lot of paint left over, so I painted this the next day. paint in its raw thick just out of the tube state. everyone had a small board and I cut down the anemones to give a small simple subject for a workshop that lasted a couple of hours.

some pleasing results

the anemones came home and adorned my table for a few days

outdoors, February is the month for snowdrops.  these were at Smokers’ Hole, a place where the footings of a building and snowdrops from a long since treed over garden adjoin a bridge on a footpath, over the river Glaven. I’ve always been puzzled by this place – the lane to it from Hempstead is called Mill lane – so was there a mill here?

the snowdrops in my garden increase every year. the warm weather has finished them off rather soon though.

irises and croci have appeared through the grass where I planted bulbs last year.

my distorted hazel has lots of magenta tasseled flowers – I always think of the nature lesson in D H Laurence’s Women in Love when I see them. will I get any nuts this year?

blackthorn – in the hedges a few blossoms – so many hedges have recently been flayed that there’s no chance of flower, but some small trees are smothered in white flowers. they are always very early.

on our walks we have been to Kelling heath, Muckleburgh hill, Wiverton Downs, Blakeney Downs, Cockthorpe common, Holt Lowes – any one of which deserved a blog post, but in company I hardly got my phone out for pictures. must try harder.

in the village I take a few on my usual green lane walk

this morning – but the warm dry weather has made so much of it look even more wintery and dried up.

Cakes lane has had its biennial haircut and is not very pretty; the primroses just starting to come out.

Bims caught in a halo of sunlight

so, a clutch of small abstract mixed media paintings. trying to allow the gestural. “land after”

“sleepless paths” with text and texture – the dense black is an acrylic paste of paint and particle.

“hidden guitar” all these are twelve by twelve inches. square seems a good shape for abstracts.

then this layer eventually ended up as this

“of breath turning” I used “super heavy gesso” for the white paint, which happily feels more like lead white oil paint than runny acrylic.

“thousands” this one is sixteen by sixteen inches, not quite so densely painted and allowing more gestural brushstrokes. the ripped newspaper collaged under the paint is parts of articles about the schoolchildren’s climate change protests.

“stooped” a late stage – this one might be finished, it has several layers, and is twenty four by twenty four inches.

then, the weather being so warm, I can work in my old pottery studio (originally my painting studio in fact) and I had a rethink on this large canvas. I’ve rubbed it down with a rag full of linseed oil house paint – very runny stuff – in a beige colour. just to see what would happen really. I think it’s better. this sort of painting is all about process really. there comes a point when it’s better to stop than go on! it was called “sun, stars, and constellations” at one point.

 

 

 

more folded books – Orkney part four

Posted jane -->on 1st Dec 2018

here are our lengths of paper, painted and drawn on in the dyeing shed, brought indoors to fold and cut;

put together the whole is more. we used japanese ink sticks rubbed onto flat stones from the beach with water, and peat from the burn banks, making brushes or finding twigs and other materials to make marks.

we had embroidered squares and dyed them to make book covers

padded with pieces from the floor-covering old blankets that had been used to protect the billiard room carpet from our activities. however, on advice I left my book uncovered, and used those pieces of silk joined to other pieces to make another tsunobokuro bag. which has since gone to wrap my daughter’s birthday presents ….

but there was more –

we stitched papers into the book

from the selection in our first present of materials, from Alison – old map pieces

tracing paper, and the rubbings I had done of George Mackay Brown’s words around the pool in the garden

sewn in with linen thread

a new artist’s book. an interesting technique which needs none of the usual materials for book binding beyond aul, needle and thread.

then we worked with Alison with colour again on our last afternoon

by this time I had loosened up a great deal.

I used the watercolour tubes I’d brought, on papers from Alison’s contribution

and on this one, the vegetable dyes and oil bars she’d brought.

then I added some colour to the sketchbook from our trip

it melted the fountain pen ink

and is rather gestural instead of “filling in”

but in some cases I think I did a bit too much

however on the whole I’m pleased, and

intend to make more sketchbooks in this way

perhaps on the writing outside courses; the next one starts in January.

a slow look at the sound on our last morning, and a slow look back from a grey seal. a place to stick in the mind, and a wonderfully productive week with “sister stitchers” – keeping in touch via instagram –

I have already obtained a copy of George Mackay Brown’s A Portrait of Orkney, and ordered his collected poems.

on the subject of poems

my poem is out in the Rialto, very exciting

 

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.

 

sister stitchers in Orkney outlands: part one

Posted jane -->on 23rd Nov 2018

another magical place in the space of four weeks – Orkney – and a wonderful retreat led by India Flint and Alison Mountain of Big Cat textiles in Newburgh (where I have been for several really good courses, taught by the likes of Michel Garcia and Larry Thomas as well as by India)

arrived in the dark after a flight from Aberdeen to Kirkwall which caught the last of the light with views of the Moray Firth, Caithness, the Pentland Firth (complete with ferry ploughing a pale blue wake) and the interlocking islands, sounds and firths of Orkney, so when I parted the curtains at seven am and saw this out of my window I was in love with the place.

we stayed and workshopped in Woodwick House, an Edwardian very Scottish looking country house with a kind of tower attic and stepped gables and crenellations wherever possible. it still has its beautiful but draughty sash windows, but also bits and pieces of more contemporary text and some quite good paintings, in a simple plain decor that felt comfortable and un-posh, not imposing anything except an awareness of the Orcadian tradition of ancient and contemporary art and poetry.

the fact that there are quite tall and old trees in two shelter belts running down each side of the garden to the beach of this little bay (“wick” means bay) is unusual on these bare and windswept islands. they are mostly sycamore, salt-hardy and tough, a non-native tree which thrives all over the UK. the pool in the photo is part of an installation of sculpture and poetry (not sure when this was made) and around its rim are words written by George Mackay Brown, one of Orkney’s most famous poets. some letters are sadly missing, but part of it reads –

drink here voyager about to depart
on the salt sound
Eynhallow

Eynhallow is one of the smaller islands in the group just off the main island here.

we began with a fancy-restaurant-standard supper made by Alison and India, setting the ball very high for the rest of the week.

the next morning down to the serious business, working on paper with Alison, splashing vegetable dyes about on paper,

and continuing to layer up with pastel, oil pastel, gesso, more paint until the whole thing a bit soggy, then we folded our large sheets into books

put more onto the nicely reduced and framed sections

I discovered that pastel in layers with the translucent dyes and also darker ink-depth mark making

and then working over the top with more pastel

gave very pleasing results. I am wondering about a bit of fixative when I get home though.

for the first textile phase, led by India, we were given a strip of old wool blanket to stitch and add more fabrics to.

I was really quite minimal in my stitching compared to most. one had no idea where this was leading, by the way!

by the end of the morning however far we had got, our rolls of blanket went into a pot or rather a huge fish kettle of burn water (a burn runs down under a bridge at the entrance to the garden and along its edge, the water a coppery clear caramel from the peat) and a little “iron water”, to steep and relax in some heat.

we had the afternoon to wander, and bring back leaves, seaweed, stones, twigs and anything else we found to add to the stitching.

bundles duly went back in the kettle for an evening boil-up

identified by tied on additions which make these little objects full of character before you even start

by the morning they had cooled down and we had our christmas present moment of unwrapping, with many oohs and aahs, much excitement.

as India fished them out

starting to unwrap mine

then they all dripped on the line

you can see how much of the landscape is imparted

eventually dried in the boiler house

we made bags. here is mine, a tsunobokuro bias-stitched envelope or sack on our expedition to some of Orkney’s ancient sites later in the week.

the stones of the Pictish broch at Gurness

their lichens and weatherings

echoed in the colours and textures we were able to obtain with the dye processes and the pigments and paints on paper during the week.

 

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.

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