• it seems to me …

Monday, 24 October 2011 Leave a comment

It seems to me, with the wind howling and the rain driving all before it on this bleak October day, that this is a good moment to stay indoors and shift my blogging to a dedicated provider rather than bury it in my iWeb site.  Better that than go for a walk along the Cornish cliffs, where you never know what might happen.

 

This footage was shot a month ago, on 23 September 2011, at 17.00, looking north east.  It’s on a section of the north coast in West Cornwall, where the cliffs are formed of slate.  It’s called Dead Man’s Cove.  No-one died.  No animals were hurt.  But some of the human ‘noises off’ might suggest otherwise.

Cornwall Community News carried the full story, with pictures, on 15.10.2011.

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• Tindal’s Continuation

Sunday, 16 October 2011 Leave a comment

On a visit to the always fascinating interior of Lanhydrock House n, I made a beeline for a little side-room where hangs a huge map of the West Country made by the 18th-century cartographer Robert Tindal, his ‘Continuation of Mr Rapin’s History’.  Here’s a close-up of eastern Cornwall.  It’s centred on my part of the county and displays a certain vagueness in its placement of features.  A few spiky rocks mark ‘The Hurlers’ near what is now Minions, although for reasons of space the name is placed in a giant curve to the north.  But it’s interesting to see it highlighted as a significant feature.  And I’m taken with the spelling of my nearest town, Leschard.  There’s also an interesting and – to me – unfathomable road linking Tavistock with Bodmin, running north of Killington (Callington) and between The Hurlers and Liskeard.  I wonder how accurate that is and where it passed through.

IMG_4944 copy

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• Liquidambar at Dusk

Wednesday, 31 August 2011 Leave a comment

Autumn seems early this year, but blackberrying was already done by this time in 2010 and it hasn’t started properly yet.  Other things are already changing colour – the horse chestnut is bronzing rapidly, the crab apples blushing.  This liquidambar, which I planted just under two years ago, has established itself well and is colouring nicely, and there should be a few more weeks of changing tints and densities.

I strolled out at dusk this evening to take a shot of its current colours.  The pipistrelles were very curious, dive-bombing to see what the unexpected heat source was.  And less than a hundred yards away, one of the local tawny owls was quavering imperiously.  Their calls fill the night air almost constantly at the moment.  They make a change from the cow further afield which has seemed in perpetual pain for the last few months.  Next thing it’ll be the horses, harrumphing in the pasture next door.

Who said the countryside was quiet?

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• O’er Moor and Vale

Saturday, 20 August 2011 Leave a comment

A horse, a horse?  Mark him down for a horse!

We did wonder what Dalmatians and Gloucestershire Old Spots might think.  This was just one sight on a four-hour walk across the moor yesterday afternoon in perfect walking weather – breezy, pleasantly warm, and nobody about.

Our trek took in Hawk’s Tor, with its extraordinary linear cliffs and eroded cheesewrings, Trewortha Tor, with its Easter Bunny, King Arthur’s bed (damned uncomfortable and would give you a wet bottom), Kilmar Tor and Bearah Tor, with clear views of Dartmoor.  Below Kilmar is this cist, a 3’-deep burial chamber surrounded by tooth-like protective stones and originally covered in a mound of earth.  You have to search to find the cairn, but it’s worth it when you do.

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• This Turning Tree

Friday, 19 August 2011 Leave a comment

For some reason, a poem by Charles Causley sprang to mind today.  He lived less than ten miles from where I do now, but he died in 2003, before I moved back to Cornwall.  A good few years ago, I composed a song on his verse, this turning tree, and the MS is still languishing somewhere in a trunk of like-fated pieces!  I was taken by its subject matter – the death of a sailor – not least because one of my great-great-grandfathers, a master mariner and captain of a ship that sailed out of St Ives to and from the Mediterranean and Black Sea, died on a voyage off Salonika.  More particularly, I was captivated by Causley’s gnarled language and terse syntax.

Grave by the Sea

By the crunching, Cornish sea
Walk the man and walk the lover,
Innocent as fish that fare
In the high and hooking air,
And their deaths discover.

Beneath, you said, this turning tree,
With granite eye and stare of sand,
His heart as candid as the clay,
A seaman from the stropping bay
Took to the land.

Once this calmed, crystal hand was free
And rang the changes of the heart:
Love, like his life, a world wherein
The white-worm sin wandered not in.
Death played no part.

Wreathed, and with ringing fingers he
Passed like a prince upon the day
And from its four and twenty towers
Shot with his shaft the haggard hours,
Hauled them away.

So he set from the shaken quay
His foot upon the ocean floor
And from the wanting water’s teeth
The ice-faced gods above, beneath,
Spat him ashore.

Now in the speaking of the sea
He waits under this written stone,
And kneeling at his freezing frame
I scrub my eyes to see his name

And read my own.

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