Is anything ever . .

    .    finished? I keep coming back to rewrite a sentence here and correct a spelling mistake there and insert missing apostrophes. I did have the intention of writing a fuller account of my visit meanwhile you can see some more pictures I took whilst in England at Flickr; see Seeking Episteme for links.

Addendum

Sad news. Anthea's dog Solo died Monday 6 July 2009.

Back to Arizona

All good things must come to an end. Yes, there were some things I didn't get to do, but all-in-all a refreshing trip and I have all these images as an aide de memoir.

Yes, sister dear I have all my 'stuff'. One last bit of video of the out of Silver End towards Rivenhall and the Kelvedon turn offThe obligatory shot out of an aircraft window . . . The San Fransisco Peaks above Flagstaff just visible under the murk near the top of the picture.

A last walk with Solo

Compare and contrast an old oak tree still bare on my arrival three weeks ago; and in leaf this evening.
A very pleasant evening after the cloud and rain this morning. Still a bit windy (out of the west 10-15mph?). Current temperature about 45°F. I've mentioned Solo - here he is.

A favourite pursuit is angling and most water in this part of Essex is controlled by the Kelvedon and District Angling Association.

Rainy morning

My last full day. I go into Colchester one more time for a book-browse before returning the car and to make sure there is nothing that I absolutely can not live without; and buy some Pam Ayers poetry for my sister.

I suppose I'd better start packing. Isn't this where we came in?

To East Anglia

I needed to make one last foray into the past after my brief picture-taking visit to Witham this morning. I first arranged to keep the rental car one more day so that I could visit one more tower where I used to ring during the time Kathy was stationed at RAF Lakenheath. I checked on-line (Why didn't I do this before my trip?) to make sure Thursday was still practice night at St Peter and St Mary Magdalene, Fordham. I 'phoned Roger, the Tower Captain, to confirm and let him know I would be there. And so, off I set at about 1pm. Why so early? To do more sightseeing and take pictures. The journey became another pilgrimage, not quite to the sea again, but to Lord Nelson's county to visit England's Nazareth . . . Little Walsingham.

On the way I stopped to take a quick picture of Constable country in Dedham Vale.

The river Stour here forms the natural boundary between Essex and Suffolk. It is very difficult to see in this shot but Dedham church tower is just visible, rising up above the middle of the tree line, in the distance. Much of the vale still offers views that John Constable saw and painted, especially along the river which passes to the north-west of Dedham. It's possible to hire a rowing skiff to row the three or four miles down river to Flatford Mill and Willy Lott's cottage. The river is tidal at Manningtree and flows out to the estuary between Harwich and Felixstowe.

A very fine restaurant, The Talbooth, lies at the Bottom of Gun Hill on the Essex side of the river as you come into Stratford St Mary.

I stopped again in Thetford home of Burrell traction engines, Thomas Paine, St Peter's suffer's from benign neglect (except for the bells).and St Cuthbert's is the parish church where all the action is; priory ruins (not pictured), earthworks and castle mound.Thetford is one of those unsung little towns, possibly because it was one of the 'rotten boroughs'. It is at the centre of the Brecklands, an area roughly bounded by the towns of Swaffham, Watton and Brandon, scrubland mostly given over to forest and a large Ministry of Defence training ground now. It also contains Grimes Graves, flint mines of the stone age. Brandon was main the flint knapping centre of England. View of Thetford town centre from the top of the castle mound. I didn't stop again until I reached the Slipper Chapel outside Walsingham; but I passed many notable sites such as the reconstruction of an Icene village (Boudicca's tribe; I've talked about Colchester without mentioning Boudicca??? Shock-horror) at Cockley Cley. The road offers a fine view of Castle Acre which contains ruins of another priory and a castle built by de Warrenne (I think); the parish church, dedicated to St Andrew, is quite prominent and the 'local' is a popular pub with travellers: The Ostrich.

The road also offers a dramatic view of another imposing church tower at Fakenham, another Norfolk market town. From Fakenham I took the road towards Wells-next-the-Sea, through the Barshams to Houghton St Giles and down a side lane through a ford to the Slipper Chapel and the Roman Catholic shrine of Our Lady of Walsingam. This is where pilgrims would leave their shoes to walk barefooted to the Shrine of Our Lady (St Mary, the Virgin Mother of Jesus, Star of the Sea, Queen of Heaven) who had appeared to a Lady Richeldis in the thirteenth century. Mediaeval England was very much 'into' St Mary the Virgin which is why so many English churches are dedicated to her. I didn't doff my shoes to walk the last mile to the shrine which was probably originally in the grounds of the Augustinian priory of which only the gatehouse, in Little Walsingham High Street, and a portion of the church remain. The Anglican shrine was built in the 1920's and has been a centre of national pilgrimage at Pentecost since.

Of especial interest to me is the Chantry chapel designed by Laurence King and built using, yes, hand-made bricks from W.H. Collier.Pilgrims are accommodated in the hospice,which has grown over the years, and the public is invited to enjoy the gardens which contains the stations of the cross.One natural public place of the village is The Commons. At the other end of the village is Friday Market. There are also Friary ruins, Sunk Road (reported to be haunted) and the fine parish church redecorated by Laurence King after a disastrous fire which gutted the building in the early 1960's. Mmm, I didn't take any pictures of the distinctive flint-and-brick work and the Dutch influenced gable ends . . . I stayed for Mass at the shrine so didn't walk more as time was pressing and I needed to eat and then aim to arrive at Fordham for ringing practice at 7:30pm.

Witham

Prounounced Wittam (or Wi'um, the ' being a glottal stop, in 'Essex-speak') unlike the river in Lincolnshire which isn't.

Fans of Dorothy L Sayers books should know that she lived and died here; it was in front of this house that I was stopped by a plain-clothes policeman in a Wolsey and taken home as he thought I might be running away from home as he'd passed me before walking along the road towards Witham two miles further back by The Fox at Rivenhall End. I was about seven years old.The Town recognised Dorothy L Sayers by naming a few streets after her and erecting this bronze of the lady with her cat Blitz (Thanks for the correction, Ruth. I think I need to get my eyes tested).

What was the cinema remained unused and empty for many years until it was transformed into a library and also contains the Dorothy L Sayers Centre.

The main thoroughfare is Newland Street. Some of the shops I remember from over forty years ago are still in business: Mundy's and Holt the butcher. Julian, my nephew, did a catering internship at the White Hart;

and the George and Red Lionremain but sadly the Spread Eagle, famous for the four gables, is no longer a pub.

Modern Witham grew up away from the mediaeval market town which grew up around St Nicholas' church, Chipping Hill. 'Chipping' is an old term designating a market as in Chipping Norton, Gloucestershire.

Two general views from each side of Newland Street looking towards London.

This is the school in Spink's Lane that I attended from 1962 to 1969.
This brick pedestrian bridge over the river Brain is a quiet corner of Witham below Chipping Hill which has not changed much; but the surrounding housing estate has.

Colchester redux

Anthea took me to lunch at Perry's, a large garden centre/nursery/restaurant in Inworth. Salmon and broccoli pie and jacket (baked) potato. And my American friends must understand that English broccoli is tender and flowery; and one can still buy purple sprouting broccoli, a little more expensive because it is a biennial; therefore less commercially viable.

Whilst Anthea had her afternoon nap I nipped off to Colchester again, I'd seen something in a shop window on one of my previous visits that I just had to buy. And I browsed in a chain bookstore, not half as interesting as Browsers in Woodbridge . . . and bought a couple of books. Paperbacks; not expensive tomes. Another quiet day wondering where the time went . . .

Wild flowers and woodland

I accompanied William walking Solo across the fields, that is on public footpaths around the fields, this morning. In the nearly three weeks I've been here many of the trees have come into leaf and the early spring flowers are dying off.

Catching up

I took a long drive yesterday evening (it's light until nearly nine o'clock) up to Diss, Norfolk by way of the A12 and A140, across the A1066 to Thetford (lost again for a little while) then followed the roads down to Bury St Edmunds (roads all different again) to Sudbury (Ah! no changes to the roads or traffic flow for forty years) The road from Sudbury to Halstead and thence to Braintree is just as hairy (i.e. dangerous!) as when I used to cycle it back in the days when I did a lot of cycling. Many stretches of those roads now have limits of 40 and 50 miles per hour and I obeyed the 30mph limits through villages

I roused myself up this morning wondering what to do and chatted with Anthea; William is on 'lates' this week and lay in bed watching the telly most of the morning. I read and edited yesterday's blog adding a few more pictures. I pondered the things I have not done: the folk festivals I did not get to; the open ringing days I missed; the steam days at railway preservation sites like the East Anglian Railway Museum at Chappel, Essex (Blur's first gig in 1989 I learned from a local paper). I know I'll take this video of the other pond and the top of the garden. The pond contains a variety of fishes: ghost koi, green tench, leather carp and a couple more that I won't attempt to spell.

After lunch I nipped down to Kelvedon to buy tickets for the first night of Kelvedon Players' production of Alan Ayckbourn's How the Other Half Loves. The 'nip' turned into another wander around the village and a visit with Carol and Eva, old friends of Anthea. Carol took me round his collection of Great War and WW2 memorabilia of everyday life displayed in a Quonset hut which used to be on the Rivenhall airfield. Many Americans who served in the bomb groups stationed there have visited, and contributed to, Carol's collections. Off ringing again tonight . . .

Behold, the Sea.

I made a brief pilgrimage to a very special place in Essex today. My longstanding friend Steve came to visit today as he had not seen my sister and William for far too long. Steve just works too many hours repairing boats in a very busy marina on the Orwell estuary outside Ipswich. This machine is his chosen mode of transportation: After profuse apologies for his long absence over a cup or two of tea, we decided on a trip to Burham-on-Crouch, a small town where Steve once lived and worked. I managed not to get lost as I'm in more familiar country; but I did go quite a long way along a very narrow road which became a private road to a farm out on the Dengie Hundreds; making a wrong turn explains that, not getting lost. I was saved from making a bad video clip of part of the journey when the camera batteries died and I had no spares, so we went shopping for batteries so I could continue taking pictures. But I'm getting ahead of myself a little. I can't say I 'know' the country between Maldon and Burnham well but the Althorne bends are legendary in these parts. These are a series of sharp bends right, left, right, left, right, left . . . it's like going up (or down) stairs sideways. We drove along the street in Burnham where Steve used to live and then went down this lane, slowly It's not quite so scary as it looks because it is a one-way street and, as is evident from the SLOW on the road, I wasn't going the wrong way along it. Traffic flows change over the years and I have tried, once so far, to go along a street the wrong way . . . there was nowhere to park so on we went to Southminster and Tillingham on the way to Bradwell-juxta-Mare. Latin attaches itself to some place names for the pedantic e.g. parva, magna, cum; but the common man just says, 'little', 'great' or 'with'.

The weather was a bit blustery with the occasional shower but when we eventually reached the end of the road and parked the car, after my quest for camera batteries, we had arrived here:

I like to say that one can stick a pin anywhere in to a map of England and there will be a wealth of history connected to that spot. St Peter-on-the-wall has connections with Lindisfarne, off the coast of Northumbria, and Iona, in the Inner Hebrides through St Cedd, the Anglo-Celtic missionary who brought Christianity to the Anglo-Saxons of Essex at the invitation of King Sigbert. Cedd arrived by sea from Lindisfarne in 653 A.D. After the Romans withdrew from the British Isles a mystic but down to earth Christianity was maintained through the great missionary Celtic saints: Aidan, Columba, and Cedd among others. Cedd was one of twelve commissioned by Aidan. The interior now, 'twas bare when I first knew it.

I first saw St Peter's from Mersea Island, across the estuary of the Blackwater. It beckoned as only a remote, lonely place can. The chapel was build with material at hand, namely the remains of a Roman fort.
Wild life abounds, mostly a great variety of birds. We walked a long the sea wall. At last I had arrived at the sea, but the tide was out. This video pans from the decommissioned Bradwell nuclear power station, to views of Maldon, the hills (the terminal morraine of the last ice age as our geography master like to remind us) beyond Goldhanger and Tollesbury across the estuary; The Strood; Mersea Island; and Brightlingsea across the Colne estuary and finally the North Sea.

A sailing barge was tacking up the estuary towards Maldon, but my simple camera does not have the telescopic capacity to take a decent shot; this was the best I could manage. Oh, the horizon isn't very straight is it? These pictures only convey a little of the atmosphere of the mudflats, creeks and estuaries of the Essex coastline. No definitive cliffs here declaring, "This is where England begins." Tidal flows are great and low tides expose many miles of sand and mud; when the tide rushes in the unwary can be caught out on the sand banks or mudflats.EDIT 20 January 2014: Morecomb Bay is the most infamous place for drownings.

I'll find the words to describe these pictures later . . . meanwhile . . . . here are a few more pictures of the flat littoral of Essex depicting Bradwell power station, dramatic clouds and more mud.

Last day in Southampton

Brief trip into Southampton city centre this morning. This being a holiday week-end there were many people about shopping, yes, on a Sunday; used to be unheard of in England. Voyager of the Seas was about to leave from the quay and I snapped a few pictures of the wall and Bar Gate and a couple of plaques on the Jane Austen trail.