Hertfordshire 1 - The Chiltern Hills

Spring Fever - When that Aprill with his shoures soote.....

Although there is an unusual tendency among certain human types to mutter and moan at every change of weather, there can be little argument that the gradual lengthening of days and warming of the soil in March and April brings relief and joy to the northern world....

Among the first signs of life renewal, which may be in January or February (they are traditionally linked with Candlemas), are snowdrops.....

But these icy little flowers are soon followed by sunny primroses, (from prima rosa - first flower) emerging on banks and in ancient graveyards (Primrose Day is April 19th, when primroses are laid on Disraeli's monument at Westminster Abbey).....

And in the meantime the male catkins of goat willow (pussy willow) turn bright yellow to brighten hedges and scrublands....

Around the same time daffodils come into bloom.  Wild daffodils are also known as Lenten lilies, and Easter lilies, and they used to be among the commonest of our wild flowers.  I remember the fields near my grandparents' home in Sussex being completely filled with them when I was young....  The two bright yellows of these flowers gladden hearts as they shine like the sun, and it is not surprising that Wordsworth's poem is one of the nation's favourites.....

Ten thousand saw I at a glance
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

But perhaps the best of spring comes with the emergence of shining lakes of perfumed bluebells?  I suppose it marks that point of no return for Spring, when the earth is full of growth, the air is full of scents and songs, and the fires of love warm life anew.  We may suffer inclement showers and stormy winds, but the prevalence is for light, and the snows and frosts of winter are now, we hope, fading memories.....

O I admire and sorrow! The heart's eye grieves
Discovering you, dark tramplers, tyrant years.
A juice rides rich through bluebells, in vine leaves,
And beauty's dearest veriest vein is tears.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, On the Portrait of Two Beautiful Young People

Near where I live are the splendid beech woods of Ashridge, but all around me are pockets of ancient woodland with well-established colonies of native bluebells.  From a distance sometimes they shimmer like water, as Housman suggests, waves of them lapping at the boles of trees....

And like a skylit water stood
The bluebells in the azured wood.

A E Housman

A walk in the bluebells has long been an annual necessity in our family, and, though the real thing is never as good in two dimensions, there has often been an attempt to capture the moment....

My mother took this snap of dad in the last year of his life....

With the sun a little higher in the sky, and the unfurling of fresh young leaves and fronds, the woods at this time of year continue to surprise with their variety. Later in the year, when the trees are in full leaf, less light penetrates to the floor, so the sparkle is gone.....

At this time, the stems themselves can seem like trees....

And their own haze makes the perfect background for their individual bells....

Sometimes they are whipped by hurried breezes, 

Sometimes you find a solitary plant standing quietly in a clearing.....

Although they are found all over the British Isles, and don't only clothe the floors of beech woods, in the Chilterns they mostly live under the canopy and do their best to flower and set seed before the darkening leaves close over them and they die back.....

A bluebell's eye view....

The rich weave of colour that we see when the bluebells are at their best distracts us from everything else, and it comes as a surprise to find that among them, as if by stealth, other bright gems are set....

Greater stitchwort with its fragile stems needs the cover and support of other plants to raise its delicate flowers to the sun, and then lower in the undergrowth, Germander speedwell makes its appearance....

And peeking from the foliage, another little blue flower appears....

That sweet and bright-eyed flowerlet of the brook
Hope's gentle gem, the sweet Forget-me-not!


Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Keepsake

Ground ivy joins the blues, 

White dead-nettles attract the bees..... 

Jack-by-the-hedge appears in flower.  This is also known as Garlic mustard, and it has long been used for flavouring and for salads.....

Though if you would like a slightly stronger taste, then the leaves of Wild garlic, or Ramsons, can be gathered and eaten in salads or wilted like spinach.....

And, as the bluebells begin to fade, Yellow archangels take their place in the parcels of ancient woodland in Heartwood Forest.....

So......

Whan Zephyrus eek with his sweete breeth

Inspired hath in every holt and heeth

The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne

Hath in the Ram his halve cours yronne,

And smale foweles maken melodie.....

[Geoffrey Chaucer, 

The General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales]

Then I love going on rambles in the countryside.....  It's such a positive time of year!

Spring Fever is generally a good and lively thing, and the rising sap stirs us from our invernal lassitude. But every silver lining has a cloud, as they say, and Spring Fever can also be the opposite, known as Frühjahrsmüdigkeit, an unexpected tiredness or loss of energy.....

This may account for the lack of engagement noted in this quotation from P G Wodehouse's novel, Spring Fever:

Breakfast had been prepared by the kitchen maid, an indifferent performer who had used the scorched earth policy on the bacon again..... 

Or it may in part be responsible for the appalling laziness that led to this example of Spring Cleaning:

There's always someone around to spoil things.

Fly tipping not far from Heartwood Forest.

* * * * * * *

This one's for my mum.....

A Souvenir of Surrey

Picnic on Box Hill

My older (older? elder? the one before me, whichever...) brother reminds me of a memory.  Our grandparents (on father's side) sitting slightly stiffly on a plaid blanket on Box Hill. Surrey stretching away below.  For me it's hazy, but vaguely there, in amongst images of a maroon Standard 8 with a wind-up windscreen and our dad's Armstrong Siddeley with green leather upholstery and running boards.  I'm sure it was a lovely day.....

For reasons I won't go into I am staying in the Burford Bridge Hotel (from its origins in the 16th century until 1905 known as The Fox and Hounds). I am possibly sleeping in the very room where Lord Nelson gave Emma Hamilton his last salute before hitting the deck at Trafalgar.  

Or it could be that I share a bed with the spirit of John Keats who escaped the fetid fogs of London in 1817 to finish his Endymion here ....

There is a paly flame of hope that plays 

Where’er I look: but yet, I’ll say ’tis naught 

And here I bid it die. Have not I caught, 

Already, a more healthy countenance? 

By this the sun is setting; we may chance 

Meet some of our near-dwellers with my car.

Quite what car Keats drove I am not sure, though I like to think it might have been a thing of beauty.....

Five years old when Endymion was published

Alternatively, I could be sharing with Jane Austen, who I believe directed one of her most famous scenes on the slopes above us here.....

Emma and Chris Martin face each other.....

They had a very fine day for Box Hill; and all the other outward circumstances of arrangement, accommodation, and punctuality, were in favour of a pleasant party. Mr. Weston directed the whole, officiating safely between Hartfield and the Vicarage, and every body was in good time. Emma and Harriet went together; Miss Bates and her niece, with the Eltons; the gentlemen on horseback. Mrs. Weston remained with Mr. Woodhouse. Nothing was wanting but to be happy when they got there. Seven miles were travelled in expectation of enjoyment, and every body had a burst of admiration on first arriving.....

Jane Austen - Emma

Where the bee sucks.... Cowslips on the chalk downs

Box Hill, not to be confused with Boot Hill, despite the existentially similar names, takes its name from Box (as, confusingly, does Bexhill). The reason not being that this has anything to do with Pandora, nor indeed with Mohammed (Ali that is). No, Box is bucus sempervivens, described by Richard Mabey, in Flora Britannica, as a drab, malodorous and not especially useful shrub.....

Much maligned - some people like the smell of cat piss....

Indeed, Box Hill was a popular picnic spot as long ago as the reign of Charles II, when the diarist John Evelyn praised its yews and box trees, it seeming from these evergreens to be summer all the winter. 

To quote Richard Mabey again, The exceptional hardness of box timber made it a valuable raw material, and it was used for chessmen, rulers, rolling pins, pestles, and especially for printing blocks; the nineteenth-century engraver Thomas Bewick claimed one of his blocks was still sound after 900,000 printings......  Box wood does not float in water.  It was also used in WWII for Spitfire propeller blades...

An aged beech on the wooded slopes

There aren't so many box trees here today, but the hill is now owned and maintained by the National Trust and parts are still shaded by dense thickets of box, yew, and mixed deciduous woodland.

The original site of 230 acres was given to the NT in 1914, by Leopold Salomons, one of the founders of the Employers' Liability Assurance Association (1880) which vestigially still exists, after many transmutations, as Aviva, which covers, amongst many other lesser things, my wife's car insurance (so I guess I owe Leo respect.....)

The Burford Spur

From the hotel I escape the spirits (with their exorbitant prices) to climb the Burford Spur.  As I begin to puff a little, I look thirstily down across Denbies Wine Estate (the largest single estate vineyard in England, established in 1986 - though first planted by the Romans a little earlier).  The North Downs Way, which here coincides with the Pilgrims' Way from Winchester to Canterbury, passes through nearby, crossing the river Mole and climbing past Westhumble to Ranmore Common.  At the same time, behind me on the Zig-Zag road, I hear the whizz and whirr of Olympian bicycles....

I walk up, past the upside-down grave of eccentric Major Peter Labilliere, who was buried near here in June 1800, to the National Trust tea room, and then to the Salomons Memorial, with the same stunning view that my grandparents enjoyed all those years ago.....  I pause briefly to record a scene with my palette knife.....

Towards Polesden Lacey

The scenery is heavy with the England I love.  I think of my grandparents, Great War scarred, connecting the centuries.  I think of myself (sometimes) as part Dad's Army and part Postman Pat, but they were part Queen Victoria and part Battenberg; Little Nell and Far From the Madding Crowd. This is the scenery of H G Wells, and of Ralph Vaughan Williams, whose house, at Leith Hill Place, once belonged to Josiah Wedgwood (whose grandson Charles Darwin experimented in the garden).  From Box Hill you can make out Leith Hill, with its Tower, about six miles south (and slightly west) of Dorking.....  I can hear larks ascending.....

And on the way down I meet a traveller (from an antique land).  He has walked through the night, and aims to reach Farnham before dusk. He has been eating ramsons and tells me that last night he was spooked by catching twelve pairs of red eyes in his head torch as he surprised a family of deer on his walk.  (I really must try the ramsons.....)

Ramsons - wild garlic

He is a young man on the Pilgrim's Way, a walking metaphor in this time of political uncertainty. His wandering is salutary. Together we admire the world about us, 

Bluebells and Ramsons - an unusual combination

then he accelerates across the Stepping Stones (dedicated in 1946 by Clement Atlee) leaving me wobbling on the first stone, unsure of my balance...

This is a beautiful spot.  The river Mole (quite possibly named after a Roman mill - mola) is tranquil, though it wasn't on Christmas Eve 2013 when it burst through the ground floor of the Burford Bridge Hotel, and guests had to be evacuated (and not readmitted until September, a policy that seems still to affect service at the hotel)....

I wander along through Burford Meadow, catching a flash of bright rust and cobalt as a Kingfisher dashes for cover.  I stand, still, to glimpse it again, then another bolts across the surface of the water and into a bush.  I have the wrong camera to shoot them, but doubt that I would have the skill to frame one at that speed anyway.... I content myself with a snap of their nesting site in the clay bank cut by the river, and imagine that sharp, feisty bird posing for me in his (or her) tropical glory....

Above the river, but carved by it over time, rise the Whites. The North Downs chalk gleams amidst the dark box and yew, freckled with fresh young beech and sycamore leaves. A breeze flutters across the grass and up the hill.  Another memory stirs within the archives of my mind. A few days after my grandfather died I woke suddenly in the warm summer night.  My curtain billowed like a spinnaker and a cool air filled the room.  My grandfather had come to say good-bye.  

Perhaps he is here now, picnicking on Box Hill in the ever after? I sense Dora and him gently reposing on a blanket of gossamer, sipping cowslip wine, as he reads Jane Austen in gentle voice....

Even Emma grew tired at last of flattery and merriment, and wished herself rather walking quietly about with any of the others, or sitting almost alone, and quite unattended to, in tranquil observation of the beautiful views beneath her.

http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/box-hill/things-to-see-and-do/walks/


http://www.ldwa.org.uk/ldp/members/show_path.php?menu_type=S&path_name=Pilgrim%27s+Way

TESSERAE - 11 - The Province of Ravenna

Piadine Romagnole.....

We stay at Il Palazzo, just outside Brisighella, surrounded by peach and cherry blossom and roads that crumble into ravines of gypsum. Brisighella is a medieval village, in the Province of Ravenna, half way between that city and Florence. Adriana and Ettore, who have run this azienda agrituristica biologica for almost thirty years, provide us with delicious local and home-produced food, and excellent sangiovese, trebbiano and chardonnay to go with it.

As the President of the Local Council, Elena Bianchi, says: Travelling to Brisighella you will discover a village and its land, lost in a natural and still untouched scenery, a delight for the eyes, a place to love, forever.  High from above a Fortress, a Church and a Tower like watchmen look after her. She appears in the glitter of the surfacing chalk, shows herself through the soft hues of the old houses and lives it up in her festivals, captivating you, our guest, with and unforgettable experience.....

Il Palazzo is in the middle, part hidden by trees

Brisighella dominates the valley of the river Lamone, and lies at the eastern end of a vein of gypsum that stretches twenty-five kilometres toward Bologna, and which now is largely protected by the Parco Regionale Vena del Gesso Romagnolo.  The area has spectacular cliffs, is riddled with over two hundred caves, and is home to rare species of plants, animals and birds such as the Cheilanthes persica (felcetta persiana) fern, mediterranean horsehoe bats, cave salamanders, yellow-bellied toads and Eagle Owls.  Natural woodlands of downy, Turkey and holm oaks, field maples and manna ash  mix with hornbeam and service trees, and in the undergrowth and on the grassy slopes there are helleborine orchids,  wood anemones, larkspur, cyclamen and snowdrops.

In times past, gypsum was mined here, as it had many uses, including as a mortar or plaster in building, as a constituent of agricultural fertilisers, and, when mixed with powdered white lead, as gesso - then gilded with gold - for medieval illuminated manuscripts.  In Brisighella there is a raised street, unique in the world, known as Via del Borgo, or Via degli Asini (Donkey Street), along which miners brought their beasts into the first storey rooms of the houses which rose steeply out of the rock .....

The town is served by the Treno di Dante, which winds from Florence to Ravenna, which also calls at the ceramic capital of Italy, Faenza.

Looking down on Brisighella from the Clock Tower, the houses of the Via degli Asini at the bottom

If that service had been available in 1300, Dante himself might have taken it, as he was exiled from his beloved Florence, and never returned, eventually dying, at the age of 56, in Ravenna, in 1321.

Alabaster - another use of gypsum - windows in the Mausoleum of Galla Placida, Ravenna

Of course, we visit Ravenna too..... Once capital of the Western Roman Empire (402 - 476 AD), then the Ostrogoth capital (until 540), then Byzantine capital of the Eastern Roman Empire and the Exarchate of Ravenna, then (from 751) principal city of the Lombard Kingdom, until it came under papal rule..... under which it remained, apart from occupation by the Venetians and the French, until the unification of Italy in 1861.

All of which is to say that Ravenna has had a chequered history!

Emperor Augustus, founder of the Port of Classe

Ravenna's glory lies in the eight UNESCO World Heritage Sites that are found here.... which include, the octagonal Basilica di S Vitale, which was consecrated in the year 548:

Ravenna's fame rests largely on the skills of unknown artists who created a series of stunning mosaics, and the mosaics in S Vitale date from the second quarter of the sixth century. They portray the Evangelists and Prophets, scenes from the old Testament:

And show S Vitale himself (on the left) alongside his Redeemer, with Bishop Ecclesio (on the right) in the Apse:

Next to this monumental brick basilica is the tiny Mausoleo di Galla Placida:

which was constructed in the middle of the fifth century and which is decorated with mosaics which are probably the oldest in the city (and which would already have been over eight hundred years old when Dante saw them....)

Almost contemporary with this is the Battistero Neoniano, which takes its name from Bishop Neone in the mid fifth century.....  The mosaics here show Jesus being baptised in the Jordan, surrounded by the Apostles.

Some fifty years after these two buildings, Theodoric (Patriarch of the Eastern Roman Empire, and Regent of the Visigoths from 511 - 526) built the Basilica of S Apollinare Nuovo.  The mosaics here are almost a century younger than those of the Mausoleum and the Baptistery, and with their golds and greens seem almost new.....

And the figures seem to step right off the walls with their grace and energy:

But for me, at least, the jewel in Ravenna's crown lies outside the city walls, in peaceful isolation nearer the sea.  

This is the Basilica di S Apollinare in Classe, which was consecrated in 549. The mosaics, however, date from various periods in the sixth and seventh centuries and, with their natural scenes and allegorical images, they startle you with their freshness..... 

In 1873 Henry James visited Ravenna, and recorded these impressions in Italian Hours: Between the city and the forest, in the midst of malarious rice-swamps, stands the finest of the Ravennese churches, the stately temple of San Apollinare in Classe. The Emperor Augustus constructed hereabouts a harbour for fleets, which the ages have choked up, and which survives only in the title of this ancient church. Its extreme loneliness makes it doubly impressive. They opened the great doors for me, and let a shaft of heated air go wander up the beautiful nave between the twenty-four lustrous, pearly columns of cipollino marble, and mount the wide staircase of the choir and spend itself beneath the mosaics of the vault. I passed a memorable half-hour sitting in this wave of tempered light, looking down the cool grey avenue of the nave, out of the open door, at the vivid green swamps, and listening to the melancholy stillness.

Ravenna is a treasure chest full of rich delight.  But it is also a lively and thriving city.  The Piazza del Popolo, with its Venetian Columns (1483) and the medieval Palazzo del Comune, is the centre of the action, and here you can while away the time sampling the local speciality - the Piada (or Piadina), which is a round flatbread filled with cheese and ham, or virtually anything you fancy (which is really what this Province is like itself!)  So, under a bright blue sky, with a glass of Albana (bianco) or Sangiovese (rosso DOC) di Romagna, this is how you should appreciate La Provincia di Ravenna.....

And then, of course, there is gelato to follow......

L'ombra sua torna, ch'era dipartite.....

http://www.ilpalazzo.net/