Virginia Water (Colours)

I miss your sad Virginia whisper....

The ruins of Leptis Magna (North Africa) erected in 1826

Several years ago, in my yoof, I used to jog past the ruins of Leptis Magna, a Roman town near Tripoli, on the Libyan shores of the Mediterranean, whose glory days came almost two thousand years ago. I would chug along, breathing the desert air, my sandals flapping against dry grains and my keffiyeh fluttering against my perspiring shoulders. The architraves and pediments looked down on me and the columns reared stiffly like mummified tendons, a stretch away from cramp.

But the soft moss, the tendrils of the trees, the pale humps of occasional fruits of boletus edulis under the oaks struck me away from the drought and luxury of colonial Africa. These stones were crafty imports, the gifts of foreign potentates, the very core of imperial romanticism...... I woke to find me strumbling (sic) around the paths of a royal park in leafy Berkshire, my inexpert footwork a hasty attempt to create some semblance of well-being, without jarring the gristle overmuch.....

It was one Colonel Hanmer Warrington who, in 1816, persuaded the Governor of Tripoli that a selection of columns and some sundry stones would make a fine present for the Prince Regent, who was later to become George IV.  I imagine perhaps that it would be difficult to know what to buy for a Prince Regent, and that a two thousand year old type of Lego might be just the ticket.

So it was that Commander W H Smythe was tasked with shipping 22 granite and 15 marble columns, 25 pedestals, 10 capitals and 10 bits of cornice, as well as 7 loose and 5 inscribed slabs and various fragments of sculpture, to the British Museum.  After a brief rest there, in a convoy of gun carriages, the stones were then, in 1826, rumbled out to Windsor Great Park, for a game of rebuild a Roman city...... In fact what you see now is not only Leptis Magna, but it is also part of the remains of Carlton House, as there wasn't really enough original masonry to create the desired effect. In addition, the concerns of Queen Victoria about 'ealth and safety' and the actions of teddy boys in the '50s (not to mention the heavy footfalls of joggers in later years) had caused cumulative severe damage..... so, in 2006, they started to put it all back together again.  And in 2009, having picked up all the original fragments, it was opened to the public.

This naturally fitted in with the overall project to turn a patch of featureless heathland into a royal park. William Augustus (Duke of Cumberland, and also Park Ranger) the second son of George II had initiated all this in the mid-18th century, when Thomas Sandby was the landscape architect (and also Deputy Park Ranger), head gardener or creative genius, as you wish.  This extension to Windsor Great Park was awash with ornamental bridges, follies, chinese fishing temples and a junk, turkish tents,  - or, at least, it was awash with all these when in 1768 it rained a little more than expected, the dam gave way, and one had to recommence......

So then they wheeled in Sir Jeffry Wyatville (aka Jeffery Wyattville) who had made his name extending Chatsworth, improving Windsor Castle and finishing Ashridge (see http://www.richardpgibbs.org/2012/08/ashridge-draft.html) wily shapeshifter that he was (buried in St George's Chapel no less, in 1840).  Must have been a heavy duty assignment this, what with Bonaparte safely interred, creating five-arched bridges over a slender lakelet, and stacking up some imperial columns - must have really taxed the cortex.....

Sir Jeffry Wyatville's Five Arched Bridge, 1826

So you're in the Rocky Mountains, the Adirondacks, the forests of New England, way way away, where savages play tricks with your sleep patterns and the sky is black by day. This is exotic, not like the Grindling Gibbons of your antechamber, but like the blood-trickling chill of a hunting expedition to Newfoundland.  The chakachakchak of a corvid jars the ears, and a rapid dudadudadudadud surprises from some pecker high in the dead trees. Compared with the dull formality, the sterile diplomacy, the vapid intimacy of the dinner tables and withdrawing rooms, this is raw nature at its wildest.  At least for Berkshire.....

I love it.....

So jog on, Chingachook.  Jog on Hiawatha.  It's wild enough for me.  History crunches underfoot as I trip the light fantastique.  On a regular weekday there aren't too many dogs to dodge, and the kids are all in school.  Leptis Magna notwithstanding this is landscape at its humane best.  Water bleeds into earth into trees into sky.  The occasional flash of a kingfisher shocks the rods at the extremities of the retina. Water fowl paradoxically (they are less colourful) tease cones.  Ears catch the shreds of birdsong, filtered by others and again by others.....

Then there is a brief downhill stretch of path, as the great/grand cascade falls ten metres, leasing the waters to the run off, while my joggling (sic) skirts round the now blocked off cave. Victoria Falls it ain't.  And Marilyn would hardly have been so impressive here pretending it was Niagara, but Augusto Pinochet lived nearby (at Wentworth) and he and Margaret Thatcher may well have picnicked here in their halcyon days....  How are the mighty waters fallen?  

I have no time for heroes here.....

The Great Cascade (1789)

I don't really need a signpost, but hey?  It does no harm to be given direction.  Four and a half miles may seem nothing to you, buddy, but I never could run.  Once took a 50% cut in a school cross country event and still came last.....  The nearest I got to being an athlete was my foot.....

But, I love it.  Bone jarring, head banging, knee trembling.  I remember those days.  Leptis Magna.  Circus Maximus. Mini Minor.  How the classics infuse my arteries? 

And then I hit another clashing giant cultural import.  The Totem Pole.  I find relief in knowing that this 100 foot erection was brought here in 1958 to commemorate the centenary of the foundation of British Columbia as a Crown Colony (for a moment I feared it had been forgot!) A plaque tells us that it was carved from a single 600 year old log (trunk?) of western red cedar taken from the forests of Queen Charlotte Island, 500 miles north of Vancouver.  In July 1985 a delegation of Kwakiutls (the original carvers) came over to refresh the paintwork.  

By my calculations, they should be back soon.....

The Totem Pole (1958)

The images are striking, and go by esoteric names, such as Cedar Man (the one at the bottom) and Man with a Large Hat (the one at the top).  In between are eight carvings, including Halibut Man, Old Man and Beaver.....

If I wasn't in a hurry, I would try somehow to link the symbolism here with that of Leptis Magna. In reality I prefer the natural world. Two scaup (Aythya marila) attract me in Wick Pond behind the pole, but I must get on.

The crowds have thinned, like my hair, and I am torn between the longer way, round the lake, but flat, and the direct route, but up the hill.  Ribs vibrate as the aorta stretches, valves hiss and slurp as blood strives to force oxygen into areas that have been left alone for years.  I begin to hallucinate, as plain and simple silver birches surge with unreal colours, and the waters themselves gleam with scaly power.

My vision is blurred, but heightened, made more visual, in a strange, unsharp way.  Gaussian blur, the Orton effect - my optic nerves are all bojangled.  Whoever suggested, Leptis Minor or not, that jogging could be good for you?  I would make my bed of reeds, lie me down in still waters, try to stop the waves behind my eyeballs....

Any road I hit the Valley gardens.  Here, Sir Eric Savill spilled over from his (1932) Savill Gardens and created a magnificent collection of rhododendrons, camellia and azalea (and no, I am not sure of the difference either....)

The really clever thing is that some, such as camellias (named after the Jesuit botanist George Joseph Kamel, who lived and worked in the Philippines) flower in the winter and spring. Others, such as azaleas, a subgenera of the rhododendron, flower in the summer.  So there's always something blooming....

And then I understand that some rhododendrons are invasive species that have to be eradicated (and they have ripped out a lot of them not far away round Cow Pond).  But then?

The Valley Gardens

What do I know?  I used to think that I know what I like.  And I like what I know,  But in reality I am too fast for that.  I jog past a daffodil one day, and it's gone the next.  Just like that. A bunch of flowers disappeared into a fez and we are none the wiser for the sleight of nature's hand.  I love it.  But it is me that is neither here nor there.  We all pass by.  

Some mercifully quicker than others!

At this stage it is all a blur.  Like in Norfolk, Virginia, the roar of speeding nature, of the turning world, trips and splits my leg.  Hard knocks.  Bourne again, sweet virginia.  Supposedly the name Virginia Water comes around from the name of the stream here being synonymous with Elizabeth I, the virgin queen, after whom someone named Virginia in North America.  The tribute came home to roost, with the unbroken waters here between Ascot and Sunningdale.  

Dead flowers surround me in the morning, as I dead head my exercises.  Be bop a lu la goes my heart, weaving through the paths toward the two valleys,  twitching my leg to the cock pheasant that croaks a chorus to the roar of my twin exhausts, the grind of the gears, the spray of the mud.....

Until eventually I crash out in the King's Boat House, all ship shape, caulked and feathered.  The park falls quiet, holding its breath for an encore.  The waters slip and slap, finned and huffed, while the woods around push up their saprophytes.  

And then, most wonderfully, a robin sings.  This may be a royal park, all design and crown, but the little shapes of nature, and the larger drifts of time, allow us now to breathe a tiny speck of happy life, despite it all.....

http://www.theroyallandscape.co.uk/gardens-and-landscape/virginia-water/

Doggone my soul, how I love them old songs

Oh, they were a comfort to me when I was alone 

The dancing stops, but the music she goes on 

Doggone my soul, how I love rock and roll, hey

Windsor Great Park

A Right Royal Entertainment

One summer, many years ago, I was a guide in Dunrobin Castle, ancestral home of the Dukes (and then the Countess) of Sutherland. My job was to sit in a window seat of the grand drawing room and to make sure no one touched the displays, which included vast Canaletto paintings of the Doge's Palace and Mortlake Tapestries, as well as priceless furniture and objets d'art. The flow of visitors was steady, and some would stop to ask a question or two. One day I remember two couples from Yorkshire came through, and, at the risk of stereotyping, I can still see one of the men before me now. He was tall, late middle aged, with thinning grey hair and a red face. His brown corduroy trousers were held up by golden braces over a check shirt finished off with a woollen tie. He looked around, with something like ecstasy, surveyed the gardens below the window, laid out on the model of Versailles, breathed deeply, clutched his braces, and sighed, "EEEE, th' very atmosphere gives ee Kulchur!"

In more recent times I lived quite near Windsor for some years, and recently had reason to return. By chance, one of the grand dames of belles lettres had just been misinterpreted in a speech she delivered for the London Review of Books at the British Museum (on February 4th) and a twitrumpus had broken out about how she dared attack a member of the monarchial family.... As has now been widely discussed the Prime Minister clearly had not read the speech and other commentators had leapt to "defend" Kate Middleton/Cambridge without seeing that Ms Mantel was pointing out the dangers of misrepresentation in the press, and in history, of women in royal marriages.

Eton College

Anyway, having been stirred to consider the effect of royalty on our insignificant lives, I wandered the precincts of the castle at Windsor, ventured across the river to peer into the hallowed courts of Eton College, and then walked the distance through the Great Park, admiring the ring-necked parakeets in the ancient oaks of this royal hunting ground. 

Ring-necked Parakeet - Gorgeous Invaders

The four thousand eight hundred acre park is wonderfully varied, from the horticultural pleasures of The Savill Garden, on the East side of the park, near Englefield Green; through the neatly clipped polo pitches past Smith's Lawn; to the rhododendrons and azaleas of the Valley Gardens; 

along the shores of Virginia Water, 

past the ruined Roman colonnade of Leptis Magna (which George IV had imported); to the Village (built in the 1930s to house estate workers), where you can buy ice creams in the Post Office; across the A332 into the relative wilds of Cranbourne Chase; 

then back up to the peak of Snow Hill with its equestrian statue of George III modelled by Sir Richard Westmacott as Marcus Aurelius (though said to emulate Étienne-Maurice Falconet's late eighteenth-century statue of Peter the Great in Decembrists Square, St Petersburg).

The Long Walk

This statue, known as The Copper Horse, dominates the two and a half mile view down the Long Walk, or rather closes the view from the Castle, across the deer park.

Looking the other way from the hill you can see the Royal Lodge (for fifty years the residence of the Queen Mother, but since 2004 that of the Duke of York) as well as the Royal School and Cumberland Lodge. 

Marcus Georgius III - Rex Imperatore

My favourite spots are the wild woods of The Dell near Bishopsgate, and the Heather Garden, which is fenced off just near the Polo Grounds at the top of the Valley Gardens,

but I must acknowledge that the park has given me, and my family, much fresh air and relaxation over the years, and it is a great resource for all, from wayward princes to the hoi polloi. 

Prince Harry (on right of picture), bodyguard and friends

But back to the Castle. Founded by William the Conqueror and then built up by Henry II on a rocky rise above a bend in the Thames, this is the largest and oldest occupied castle in the world (it has five hundred residents). It has apparently been the home of 39 monarchs, several of whom have enlarged and restored it from time to time, and it is now the favourite residence of Queen Elizabeth II, who had to do her own bit of restoration when the State Apartments were drastically singed in 1992.

Stand-up entertainment - Victoria Regina

This is one of the most visited tourist attractions in the UK, and at £17.75 a head it is probably one of the most lucrative, though there is plenty to see, once you get in past security. The glorious gothic of St George's Chapel and the miniature masterpiece that is Queen Mary's Dolls' House (with flush toilets and working lifts) are particular highlights, but the Royal Collection, with paintings by Rubens, Holbein and Van Dyck, takes some beatings. The very atmosphere gives you culture!

And this is where I am reminded of the controversial lecture by Hilary Mantel. "Is monarchy a suitable institution for a grown-up nation? I don’t know. I have described how my own sympathies were activated and my simple ideas altered. The debate is not high on our agenda. We are happy to allow monarchy to be an entertainment, in the same way that we license strip joints and lap-dancing clubs." It is splendid entertainment, from the Changing of the Guard to the pageantry of a service in the Chapel. Windsor Castle is a living piece of history, not, like, for example Schonbrunn or Versailles, an example of past glory preserved in a block of amber. 

But the question still provokes me. Is monarchy a suitable institution? Is the continuation of the aristocracy and an antiquated system or privilege and honour acceptable. Doesn't the phrase "William the Conqueror" cause some discomfort? What if we thought about each succeeding dynasty as a conquering one? With William the Norman French language became the tongue of the court. With George I came German and the House of Hanover (he spent about one fifth of his rule abroad and though fluent in several languages, was reputed not to handle English that well, certainly at the start of his reign). And when did we get this House of Windsor? I doubt if Michael Gove will insist that future generations of school children are taught the Royal Proclamation of King George V in The London Gazette: no. 30186. p. 7119. 17 July 1917, which went: "Now, therefore, We, out of Our Royal Will and Authority, do hereby declare and announce that as from the date of this Our Royal Proclamation Our House and Family shall be styled and known as the House and Family of Windsor, and that all the descendants in the male line of Our said Grandmother Queen Victoria who are subjects of these Realms, other than female descendants who may marry or may have married, shall bear the said Name of Windsor......" nor that the name he wanted to lose was Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (a branch of the House of Wettin), and why? Well, there was a war on, and ordinary citizens, such as David Herbert Lawrence, for example, were made to feel very awkward by their compatriots if they had any sort of connection with Germany (D H Lawrence had a German wife.....) [And wasn't it rather obvious at the same time that Mountbatten was only an attempt to anglicise Battenberg?]

The Queen - out of steam?

And why Windsor? The word derives from Old English for a winch by the river, though that was probably not considered relevant. I expect it was more that the castle is one of the most imposing and resilient pieces of masonry since the invention of the Motte and Bailey, and it had a convenient railway station, and was only 21 miles from Marble Arch..... I wonder if the location would have been so popular had George V anticipated the current tendency for one jet aeroplane every thirty seconds to take off from Heathrow and roar only a few hundred feet over the royal bedchambers?

Anyway, continuing in republican train of thought, I would make a proposal. Despite Kate Middleton/Cambridge's bump and the plethora of other royals who might leap to the throne given half a chance, this dynasty cannot go on indefinitely, and so perhaps it really is time to modernise the monarchy? Firstly, the title: I suggest we call the leader the Quing? Get rid of the sexist distinction between King and Queen, and regularise in the spirit of actors..... Then abolish all other titles as being obsolete, redundant and divisively unnecessary (as Italy did with no loss of any notable pride among the proud).  So Charles is just Charles, and Fergie is, well, nobody.  Then remove this problem of inheritance. Need a constitutional monarchy be hereditary? I don't see why it should. This would have saved Henry VIII so many wives, and would save us so many column miles of speculation over the Cambridge progeny. And then have an election, ad ogni morte di papa as they (used to) say in the Vatican. Everyone could then have a say in the continuation of the realm. And finally, the name. The House of Windsor has had its day, and seems to me to smack of domination. How about somewhere more proletarian, more cosmopolitan, more egalitarian? Somewhere not far from Windsor, perhaps? How about the House of Slough? A perfect recognition of the reality of the United Quingdom.

I feel better now. No hard feelings, Liz. We do all love you, though perhaps not everyone feels so good about some of the others in the family.

But then, wait. What did Hilary Mantel actually say? "The debate is not high on our agenda. We are happy to allow monarchy to be an entertainment, in the same way that we license strip joints and lap-dancing clubs......" Do I detect a derogatory note here? Or is this pure pragmatism in muscular prose? Is my proposal taking the whole issue too seriously? 

And then, wait again. Suppose my plan was adopted, and we had an election? Good Grief! We could end up with Sandi Toksvig (or should that be Talkswhig?) who would say things like, "It's my country and I'll do what I like..." in her State Opening of Parliament speech, and refer to "My wife and I..." at Christmas. Or perhaps worse, we could have Hilary Mantel..... Or Barbara Windsor? Of the House of Slough???

No. I have overstepped the mark. I retract my proposal. After all, what is wrong with being designed by a committee and built by craftsmen, precision-made, and capable of going from perfect bride to perfect mother? 

Let's leave things as they are? At least for the moment..... The royal family gives us grand entertainment and, "Th' very atmosphere gives ee kulchur!"

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n04/hilary-mantel/royal-bodies

http://www.royal.gov.uk/HistoryoftheMonarchy/KingsandQueensoftheUnitedKingdom/TheHouseofWindsor/TheHouseofWindsor.aspx

http://www.royal.gov.uk/theroyalresidences/windsorcastle/windsorcastle.aspx

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-21502937#TWEET612285