St Agnes Well

I’ve been reading The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë, and the contrast between the setting of the novel in the nineteenth-century countryside and the news from America this week was extreme. But somehow this little detour I went on after a walk fitted right into my reading.

I had been clearing up some rubbish from a lay-by near Cothelstone Manor, as I sometimes do when people’s thoughtless stupidity about the countryside annoys me, when I noticed an odd little building by the side of the road, so I went off across the fields to investigate.

Following a sign, I picked my way across some rather marshy grass and found this funny little stone building with an Alice in Wonderland-sized door.

Named after the wife of a nearby landowner in the sixteenth century, not after a saint at all, it’s an ancient well which is supposed to bring good fortune to those who wash their hands in its water.

It was restored about 15 years ago and apparently the stonemason who worked on it wanted to create a place for the water to collect while still allowing the well to remain locked up. That’s worked out rather nicely. After my rather muddy crisp packet gathering expedition it was quite instinctive to dip my hands in the cool, clear water pooled at the entrance.

It’s a nice little place that I must have driven past hundreds of times and I love the idea that the countryside is literally stuffed with these hidden treasures, if you only know where to look.

Postscript: On collecting rubbish from the Quantock Rangers.

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Baa baa…whatever

Today was a horrible day. Fretful and loathe to get up, I lurked inside for as long as possible before I faced the damp outside.

But eventually my aim to counteract the worrying that is going on in my head with some productive activity did win through. So, as well as food shopping and mending the garage light (changing the bulb – sometimes things are not as bad as I fear), I drove over to Triscombe in the heavy mist (ok, maybe it was low cloud) and bought some narcissi and grape hyacinths, anemones and aubretia to brighten up my dreary garden that just will not come into flower.

If you’re within reach, I can highly recommend them. Time has slightly stood still there and very lovely it is to and chat to Stuart about this and that, while you’re thinking about what to buy – even if it’s just bird seed.

The birds here seem very hungry, so I stocked up with so much that it came in a sack!

Then I went in search of lambs. Now, rather oddly, I saw the first lamb out in the fields when I was out riding on New Year’s Day. That lamb must be quite senior now that the countryside is full of actual spring lambs.

Things have been very tough for sheep farmers this last year (and not so hot for the sheep either). Wet all last summer, so lots of them (the sheep) are lame with foot rotty problems – they’re limping about all over the place, their fleeces sodden and muddy. This one is quite clean, although not pink as those that graze the red earthed land around here often are.

The horrible, long winter had temperatures that were well below freezing at night for long spells, followed by a very cold spring which led to sheep being buried in snowdrifts and lambs dying as they were being born. Luckily, it wasn’t that cold down here in the south west, but spring is still being held in abeyance by the cold and it’s windy as hell, or I should say, as usual.

So, anyway, here are some lambs. They brought a smile to my face with their silly antics – one of the lambs below is standing on its mother.

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Bridgwater

I’ve always thought of Bridgwater as rather a dump. Useful for shopping but still a dump. There are few nice places to eat and even fewer decent shops, unless you count superstores – there are plenty of them. Last Thursday I went there to meet the Girl who was arriving by coach. A very delayed coach because it was Eastertime and the roads were busy. So I parked the car at Asda next to the coach station and did some shopping and found a new smoke alarm without trying. And managed to buy yet another lightbulb that didn’t fit the lamp it was meant for. Excellent.

When she texted that they were going to be even more delayed, I went for a bit of a walk and found that there are some bits of Bridgwater, that when photographed – if you Photoshop out the plastic bags blowing in the wind and crop judiciously – can look quite appealing.

But for the most part, I feel sorry for this erstwhile historic centre, market town and port, for having been cut up by roads that split its heart.

So that now we drive around the centre from one ugly retail park to another and miss the only architecture worth looking at and the town centre that has so much history nearby, but is now neglected and showing signs of dereliction.

 I’m probably being unfair in many ways. I know Bridgwater has a vibrant annual carnival and has one of the south west’s best motorcycle dealerships. I’m sure there are people who love living here and many parts that I haven’t seen. So, if this offends, I’m sorry, but it’s what I see when I come here.

 

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Nothing of interest to report

This is more by way of a log of my activity here for myself (the original purpose of this blog), so it’s not very interesting.

The temperature didn’t rise above freezing all weekend. The pond was frozen so I kept breaking the ice for birds and other wildlife, and pulled sheets of it out together with whatever was attached. Quite an easy way of getting rid of the leaves that fill the water.

Ben has been here to work on the chimney finally – the scaffolding’s only been up since about November last year. It hasn’t rained for about 10 days, so there’s no way to check if the new flashing has worked. Fingers crossed.

I intended to bring the logs down from the garage to the woodshed this weekend, but couldn’t get the big gate to stay open as the hedge was getting in the way so I spent Saturday afternoon hacking at it (the hedge) with shears, the trimmer and secateurs. I’ve actually managed to make it look miles better and am really pleased with the achievement because it’s always been the hardest part of the hedge to reach.

This weekend was hard work, what with grooming and mucking out the horse for Sunday’s ride as well but it’s such a relief, after all the rain in the last few months, to have been able to do something practical and worthwhile. I almost feel enthusiastic about all the other stuff that needs doing…

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Logs, camps, and a cat

We had logs delivered in the morning. Three quarters of a lorryload, tipped as far as possible into the garage. They’ll be stashed in there until there’s a better day to move them by wheelbarrow, one load after another, to the woodshed round the other side of the house. Down the lane and up the bank and through two gates and up the slope and round the bend and over a step. It’s quite a mission, so it can wait until it’s not raining.

Feeling frowsty after lunch, we went for a walk on Ash Common. The day I first saw Spring Cottage, I looked at another cottage in Ash Priors, the village nearby. Thatched, Grade II listed and right by a little stream traversed by the front path, it was a bit overlooked by some newer houses, so it wasn’t for me. It’s nice to go back and see whether I still feel that way from time to time. And I do.

Right by – YOU ARE HERE – a map of the common, someone had dumped the body of a black and white cat in a torn bin liner. Poor, damp, muddied thing. We couldn’t think of the scenario that would lead someone to do such a thing with an adult cat. The Girl wanted to give it a proper burial. Feeling rather bleak after that discovery, we splashed down flooded paths, past newly coppiced oaks and hazel trees. Logs seemed to be the theme for the day.

Ash Common feels quite like the great London commons, with a road dissecting it and large open spaces edged by deciduous woodland. It seems an unusual space in this part of the country though, as it’s surrounded by other open countryside. It made me realise how little actual common land there sometimes is in rural areas, although there’s plenty of uphill and coastal space that’s open to all via the National Trust and local authorities, and lots of footpaths through farmland. Paradoxically, Ash Common, like most, turns out not to be common land at all, but privately owned.

With birdsong above us and admiring bright lichens, we found a shelter that someone had made out of branches. More than just children, we wondered? It seemed quite well constructed and must have taken some time to put together. Then, closer to the middle of the common, we came across some tethered horses grazing and a caravan – a proper caravan with a couple and two dogs obviously living in it. A bloke with dreads came out and stared back at me. I wonder what their story is.

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Cafe and cocktails in Oxford

I said I’d do a separate post about the cafe we went to while we were in Oxford in my last post.

Despite it’s traditional English exterior, the Grand Cafe struck me as fundamentally un-English, although it was serving creams teas and the like. There was something about the unhurried nature of the service (one poor waitress – they were terribly understaffed on the day we were there), the elegance of the surroundings, the lack of muzak and the hence conducive atmosphere, and the slightly dishevelled nature of it all, that called to mind Viennese cafes in which you can while away the afternoon, without being harried for your next order, or chased away by crowds of pushy shoppers with packaged sandwiches. From seven o’clock, they do inexpensive cocktails. Go there, if you can.

As an aside I have to say that while my new Panasonic LX-5 is slightly driving me mad with not having a viewfinder – I just can’t really adjust to having a slightly second-hand view of things, compared to a DSLR – I totally love its ability to take pictures in low light. I’m only pointing and shooting at the moment in order to get used to its capabilities. It also helps that I love grainy pictures, I suppose.

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Satellite view

This picture shows in spectacular clarity the way that our cities and countryside can look from space. London is the very light area on the right, Bristol the largest light area on the coast to its left, with South Wales hanging over the inflowing Bristol Channel like a repeated strings of fairy lights. Almost immediately below the droopiest bit of Wales there on the other side of the water are the Quantock Hills, and Spring Cottage is about 12 miles inland from the coast. The very dark area to the left of the belt of lights going south, which is basically the M5 corridor, is Exmoor at the top and Dartmoor further south.

As you can probably tell, I could look at this for hours. This picture was taken by the NASA Suomi-NPP satellite on 27th March this year. You can find the image, along with many others, online.

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Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit…

Most British people of a certain age will remember a Chas and Dave song called Rabbit from the late 1970s/early 80s. I was reminded of it when I was looking through pictures I’d taken in other Novembers in Somerset.

I would love to know about the history behind the construction of this Georgian house whose doorway, with it’s beautiful fanlight, is literally covered with rabbits.

Situated in a quiet Langport side street but close to the main street at the end where merchants built their homes, it’s a relatively unassuming house but one could guess that whoever built it had some kind of business connected with rabbits. Rabbit was once, of course, a much greater source of meat than it is today, with historical records showing rabbit warrens being recorded as parts of properties with separate valuations. Rabbit skin would also have been a valuable source of warmth for winter clothing in the days before fleece and down clothing.

Coincidentally, I’ve just discovered this talk on Monday about Langport’s architecture seen through the eyes of Nikolaus Pevsner. Only wish I could go. But meanwhile I will just have to make do with British History Online in which I could get completely lost for hours at a time.

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Decrepitude

Lest anyone think that I am living the dream, here is a part of it that is more nightmare.

This is one of the walls the so-called wash house at the cottage. Built at the same time as the main house around 1800, it was probably exactly that – somewhere the washing could be done, separate but not that far from the fireplace in the cottage where the water would have been heated. The cottage itself had no bathroom or kitchen at that time – they were additions in the late 1960s. Yes, that late. It was also in 1962 that electricity first came to the cottage. That probably sounds like a long time ago but that’s during my childhood, so it doesn’t seem so to me.

I often wonder about the lives of the people who have lived here over the last couple of hundred years – I have their names and should find out more about them. In the twentieth century, they were mostly older couples and widowed single people, in the nineteenth, families with children and even a lodger who was a weaver – nearby Spaxton used to be a centre for cloth manufacture way back. With no shops for two and a half miles, they probably made their own bread and got their eggs, milk and meat from the farm down the lane. They definitely will have grown their own vegetables. They would have had to walk everywhere, for the cottage is relatively remote and there isn’t space to keep a horse, although there’s a barn over the lane that might have been rented for that purpose.

I don’t feel very driven to repair this wall. It’s not doing anyone any harm and it has a kind of beauty about it; the wash house being built into the hill behind. I like the link with the past that being able to see under the very twentieth-century rendering allows. Although a bit of the ceiling did fall down the other week. Must get that fixed.

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Cheddar – not so gorgeous

On Sunday we went to Cheddar. I asked the GPS app on my phone for the quickest route, yet we wound our way there through unnecessarily circuitous lanes. Pretty though.

It probably wasn’t slower than taking the motorway but it certainly made my passengers, Nurse J and Mrs Honeytree, feel car sick. They argued about who should sit in the front seat: but unlike children, their arguments went: “No, no, I’m fine in the back, you stay there.” “No, I insist that we swap, you’ve been in the back long enough.” Until I finally stopped the car and said: “Swap.”

When we finally got there we sought out some lunch at a little cafe that was decorated in twee, vintage style with all manner of old bits and pieces, board games, kitchenalia and pictures. We sat under a shelf of royal memorabilia, presided over by a plate decorated with Charles and Diana’s engagement picture. Not a good omen.

We ordered: Nurse J, some fizzy mineral water; Mrs Honeytree, some vegetable soup; and I, a jacket potato with baked beans. The phone rang: a crisis with some offspring and Mrs H went outside to deal with it. The food arrived, and got cold. It wasn’t very nice. My beans were small and salty. Who would have thought you could get sub standard baked beans? But you can.

So far, so depressing. And on a gorgeous, sunny day as well. Then we went for a stroll around Cheddar, which was mostly road. OK. This is not the village’s fault, after all – it is in a gorge, so it can’t be spread out. But it seemed to be full of tawdry little shops selling souvenirs and even the ‘official’ Cheddar cheese shop was rather disappointing. All the cheese sealed in plastic like at a supermarket and the tasting of the many varieties carefully controlled by an officious little man, who would spear a tiny cube on request from a covered stainless steel bowl, so you couldn’t even see why you would want to try one type rather than another.

What we wanted was something more like the stuff on the left below. What we got was a whole shop full of the stuff on the right. And about seventy labels warning about ‘Health and Safety’ regulations. Lovely. And so they lost our custom.

I tried to stay positive. The complaints of the others were getting to me. I felt responsible for bringing them to this horrible place by way of a journey that had made them feel ill. No, I insisted, it was lovely, cheese was fine sold like this. As a penance, I started getting a sore throat.

We decided quickly to leave and drove up through the gorge, marvelling at the 1950s buildings constructed right into the foot of the cliffs at the bottom. Marvelling, that is, at the planning regulations that allowed such despoilment of a beautiful natural feature. Further up, the gorge got less built up and more beautiful. Climbers abseiled down into groups of admiring observers. Sunlight began to filter into the scenery and eventually we emerged at the top into a completely different landscape from the one we had left behind below.

As I was driving, I couldn’t take any pictures of Cheddar Gorge itself, which is pretty impressive. Next time, I will have to stop and do so. If there is a next time.

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Glorious

What’s better than good friends, good weather and good exercise?

The views up at Will’s Neck, the Quantocks’ highest point (about 15 minutes’ drive from Spring Cottage) were fabulous at the weekend. As clear as clear can be. When it’s like this, you can see Exmoor to the south and the Bristol Channel and the Welsh coast to the north.

Apparently Will’s Neck is a Marilyn or a type of ‘relative hill’. I find this hilarious.

I don’t know why more people don’t come up here, although I’m glad that they don’t. Even on such a lovely day we only passed about ten people all morning.

It isn’t always like this at an altitude of 1,261 ft (384 m) – for reference, Spring Cottage itself is at 210 m (I talked a lot of rubbish about this to my friend at the weekend and got my Imperial and metric measurements completely confused). It’s often shrouded in low cloud and drizzle up here, and it can be very windy, like the last time I was up here, when it was possible to believe that you were completely lost. And not everyone was having good weather either, as we could see in the distance below.

I took these pictures with my phone, which is rather unpredictable. I’ve kind of given up taking my DSLR out with me these days, particularly when I go to places I’ve been before. Perhaps it’s time for a smaller camera?

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Sitting on my fence

As so often, something small leads to something big. I thought I’d pick a few blackberries from the hedge at the back of the house. The result was spending most of the afternoon heaving at a dead blackthorn.

We’re very lucky around here. Being in an AONB – Area of Outstanding Beauty, England’s first – probably has something to do with it. The hedges are mostly in pretty good shape, compared to some parts of the UK, where they’ve been mostly replaced by wire fencing or removed completely as fields become larger and larger, with all the associated loss of wildlife and shelter.

Like many hedges, the one around this garden is made up of a mixture of different species, either in large sections or completely mixed: brambles or blackberry, honeysuckle (lonicera nitida also known as Poor Man’s Box), blackthorn, laurel, hazel, eleagnus, field maple and holly.

A hedge is a pretty substantial thing seen in cross section – this one must be almost 12 feet across – where they’re allowed to grow properly and not be cut for road safety or the convenience of moving gigantic farm machinery.

The reason this part of hedge is so clear in cross section is because a part of it has been removed – before my time – to allow views from the cottage across the hills down to Bridgwater Bay.

At the other end of the house, part of the hedge was at some time removed to allow for the building of the woodshed. Part of this, a bit of blackthorn, died last year and I’ve been waiting for the stump to rot enough for me to remove it and taking it out in bits whenever one of the trunks rotted enough to be pried loose.

Today I got rid of its last couple of trunks, after an afternoon of stripping and cutting away the ivy, brambles and roses. It looks annoyingly slender and light here in the wheelbarrow but it certainly wasn’t easy to shift.

Done now, though.

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North of the border

Leaving the house at 5.10 in the morning, I forgot my big camera when I went up to Scotland for a few days last week. I was left struggling with my phone camera, which was very frustrating as there were just so many interesting things that I wanted to capture. But I managed.

There’s little in Edinburgh Castle that’s domestic, only the room in which Mary Queen of Scots gave birth to James I of England.

The small royal apartments were my favourite but the castle also offers fabulous views of Edinburgh and masses of military history, if that takes your fancy.

Although I’d been to Edinburgh before, I didn’t remember very much about it, so it was interesting to go around and explore the winding, cobbled streets of the old town. I’d love to go back and ferret around more in the little alleys and courtyards that they call ‘closes’ up there and explore more of the city’s ancient architecture. One thing doesn’t surprise me: that J.K. Rowling wrote the first Harry Potter here. There’s just so much inspiration in the very fabric of the place.

Edinburgh Castle’s tame gull.

From Edinburgh, we moved on to the Kingdom of Fife, only a short distance away across the Firth of Forth. I drove over the Forth Bridge and, although I’d heard on the radio that they had finished painting it, it certainly looked like they were still at work. Perhaps it’s the rail bridge they finished?

You still see many open doors as you walk the streets in St Andrews.

The university town of St Andrews was obviously very ancient with plenty of buildings dating back to the early seventeenth century but its present day incarnation is far too twee for me (and lacking an apostrophe, too upsetting for words…).

I wouldn’t want to study or work there but it takes all sorts, including royalty. I preferred Elie, on the coast to the south, which would be my seaside hideaway if I lived up there.

Elie at low tide

Anstruther was also a lovely find and we walked along the Fife Coastal Path from there to Crail – a real town with real people and a zero chintz factor.

Drying the washing on the harbourside in Anstruther.

Anstruther Harbour

The path from Anstruther to Crail runs alongside farmed land with everything from wheatfields, grazing sheep, cows and goats, to a free range pig farm.

For some reason these goats on the coastal path make me think of a nudist beach.

Crail seen from the Fife Coastal Path.

Lobster pots on the quayside in Crail.

With the exception of the lobster pots, the pictures on this page are all just as they came off my phone apart from some cropping because iPhone photos are too square for my liking. But I discovered by chance that if you edit images you’ve taken on the phone (this is an iPhone, I’m talking about) first – doing only minimal adjustment – and save them, then they are editable as Raw in Photoshop once they’re on your computer. Obviously, this can’t make them into better pictures, nothing can. But as the iPhone really isn’t very brilliant at subtlety, this at least it gives you a greater possibility of making improvements than the straight-up Photoshop options do, which is all you get if you do a straight upload from your phone. Next time, I really must remember to take the DSLR.

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Rest and not quite relaxation

The human body is a wonderful thing: where yesterday evening I could barely move my hands, this morning my fingers are lithe and leaping over the keyboard. The reason was that it was actually dry yesterday morning, so I took the strimmer out and cut the grass in the back garden, which had got too long to mow successfully.

This is no mean feat as it is quite a big bit of grass. (I say ‘grass’ but it’s actually moss and all manner of other things. I quite like the term greensward, although it it no-one’s idea of a lawn, because one thing it is is green.) It’s supposed to look like this:

But I no longer feel that I have to keep up with Lady-Vendor’s standards of garden maintenance. It’s impossible anyway. She had a gardener who came for a whole day each week and I can’t have that. So between us, Pauline – who comes for a couple of hours a week – and I do what we can, if the weather permits. And it hasn’t permitted recently, so things have got a bit out of hand. One thing always leads to another and I soon found myself strimming the banks along the road and at the back of the house, and mowing the front garden as well.

I mutter to myself while I’m doing it: “There, almost done now. Ooof, just a bit more. There, that’s the best I can do…” Luckily, there are only cats, birds and insects to hear my madness.

On top of everything, I realised rather late that I was expecting house guests from Canada in a while, so, cursing my inability to see the bigger picture (too many things to focus on at once in this summer’s calendar), I set about cleaning the house from top to bottom and making the beds up for their stay. Somehow, the corners of rooms and windows are always adorned with cobwebs; the floor muddy and strewn with cat litter and nameless bits; and the windowsills dotted with dead flies.

Two hours later I headed back to the Real World, joining hoards of others, mostly holidaymakers with caravans and trailers, coming back from the west country along the M5. Without the exhortations of LOCOG, this would probably have been a four-hour journey. But, despite arriving in London in the rush hour, there was no traffic at all. A completely empty Games Lane on the stretch of M4 from Heathrow due to the Olympic rowing in Eton but still almost NO TRAFFIC in the other two lanes, and I got back in normal time, despite crawling along between between Bristol and Swindon.

Anyway, I’m off for a bit of a rest now. Or I will be,  once I’ve got everything sorted out…

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Silver lining

After such a miserably wet day, yesterday evening turned out quite nice, so when I saw deer up in the field, I grabbed the camera and my keys and dashed out to photograph them.

I’m so glad I did.

The light was gorgeous and it completely made me remember what a glorious place this is.

And why I am here.

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