Teeming Green Above Ludlow’s River Teme

The Green Cafe below Ludlow Castle

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Ludlow is one of Shropshire’s loveliest old market towns, the earliest surviving remains (including parts of the castle) dating from the early Norman period in the 11th century. It’s also one of our favourite places, about 20 miles from Bishops Castle, but we had not visited for ages. And so a couple of weeks ago, when spring was teasing us with the notion that sunny days had returned, we thought it was about time for an outing. A significant lure included thoughts of lunch at The Green Cafe.

This award-winning little restaurant sits on the riverbank, between Dinham Weir and Dinham Bridge. Ever popular, it has an outdoor terrace, and an inside (compact) dining room. But wherever you choose to sit, you are guaranteed a warm welcome, including with added blankets if it’s cold outside and there are no seats free inside.

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The menu is always inventive, dishes coming in large or small versions, and with emphasis on fresh, locally produced ingredients. The cakes and deserts are fabulous, although this time we had no room for them. We’d filled up on smoked salmon with pickles, labneh and mustard yoghurt, plus a dish of roasted tiny new potatoes with aioli sauce. All very delicious. After that, there was nothing left to do, but to wander over Dinham Bridge, look at the views, see spring happening and watch the river flow by.

Going with the flow

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#SquaresRenew   Every day in May Becky is hosting a square format header photo. The themes are move forward, reconstruct, renew, burgeoning.

Operation House Renewal: Moving Forward

I’ve not said much about the house renovations. For one obvious reason, it’s been a touch stress-inducing. But the roof has been restored (re-battened, felted and insulated), the chimneys re-pointed and leaking elements fixed, the bedroom gables made secure, and the rear conservatory demolished and removed, and so we’re on the upward trajectory. Or so Graham assures me.

We’re pleased with the roof. On the house front the original Welsh slates have been re-used wherever possible, with reclaimed vintage ones making up the shortfall. The back-of-the-house tiles were all asbestos and had to be removed by a specialist company. They’ve been replaced with Spanish slate, new Welsh slate now being too expensive to contemplate, which is a great pity. But then back in 1922 when local builder George Nicholas was roofing the house, he likewise thought Welsh slate was too expensive to use on the rear elevation. The house then backed onto fields, with only cows to know the difference.

With the roof done, super-builder Alan Morris has been forging ahead, even as he shivered in biting winds and rainstorms re-pointing the chimneys. On top of that, it’s not an easy site: street access is problematic (narrow road), and the new rear kitchen extension, mostly on the footprint of a conservatory, is hemmed in by house, hedge boundary and a terrace wall.

New tiled roof and old conservatory

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Demolition begins:

Bricks from the inner skin of the conservatory to be re-used on new exterior walls.

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Shifting the debris and digging out new foundations

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We filled three skips which required some nifty delivery and retrieval. Large vehicles can only reverse into the street. There’s not enough road width to exit at the top of the hill.

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Builder Alan explaining some finer points of construction to Graham

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And this is where we are now: waiting for the floor to be insulated and the concrete laid (Tuesday)

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#squares-renew

For the month of May, Becky is hosting the daily posting of a square format header photo. The themes are renewal, burgeoning, moving forward, reconstruction. I’m thinking our renovation works are pretty much covering the lot. And finally, most importantly, we have a moving forward with the weather: sunshine and some warmth. I think we can now say (fingers crossed) it is actually spring here in Shropshire.

Breakthrough

Day two of Becky’s month of squares. The themes are burgeoning, move forward, reconstruct, renew to interpret how we will. The only rule: the header photo must be SQUARE

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Sometimes to move forward you need a flash of inspiration: the kind of serious ah-ha moment that brings clarity, or a shift of focus. Not always a comfortable process, mind you, but if it sparks momentum, then that alone can be salutary. Or as Tom Petty put it “if you don’t run, you rust.”

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This photo was taken one Christmas afternoon on the lane to Penmon Point on the island of Ynys Mon (Anglesey). The view is of the North Wales mainland across the Menai Straits. These extraordinary light shows over the water are a local feature, and so I tell myself that it’s not surprising that the island was the Druids’ last stronghold in the face of the Roman invasion, or that early Christian hermits settled here. (See Island of Old Ghosts.

Early morning above Beaumaris

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#squares-renew

Seeing Things In A New Light

Hurrah for May and Becky B’s month of squares. The themes are burgeoning, move forward, reconstruct, renew to interpret how we will. The only rule: the header photo must be SQUARE.

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This photo is a view of very familiar terrain as seen from the upstairs windows of our cottage in Much Wenlock. It was a piece of landscape we looked at every day for sixteen years. What wasn’t familiar was this glorious copper light and that cloud come visiting from a Baroque masterwork.

It was early spring, the sun already up at 5 a.m. a time I rarely saw. And now here was the field, usually so plain in the flatness of main-day light, quite transformed. It felt like a parallel universe. So, I thought, this is what Townsend Meadow gets up to when we’re not looking, showing itself off in this magically theatrical glow. What have we been missing?

I never saw anything like it there again, although there were many other light and cloud shows over the years, usually at sunset. But it made me think. Sometimes it pays to break a habit. And if that unexpected view changed the way I saw the meadow, what other bigger shifts may be possible?

#SquaresRenew   burgeoning, move forward, reconstruct, renew

‘I hear you singing in the wire…’

This week Egidio at Through Brazilian Eyes sets us a particularly novel challenge. He asks us to consider how our photographs might chime with particular pieces of music: perhaps something we were listening to when we took a photo, or a scene that evokes a favourite song or melody.  Go to  his blog post for more insights and some fine photography.

As for my musical photos here, I’ve always been fascinated by power lines. The scale and steeliness of pylons; the way they hold dominion, stride out across the landscape. There’s a sense of isolation; alienation; our physical inconsequence against these giant spawn of human ingenuity.  And so perhaps for some of these reasons, whenever I hear Wichita Lineman (Glen Campbell version of course) with its tones of longing, loneliness and big, big vistas, it never fails to resonate through my psyche. And I don’t even much like country music. But there you are: one of those conscious-subconscious mysteries.

Glen Campbell singing Jimmy Webb’s Wichita Lineman

Lens-Artists: Music to my eyes

Welcome To My World ~ A Late-Day Walk Above Bishop’s Castle

On Sunday I did a lot of complaining about the cold and lack of sunshine. Perhaps the weather gods took pity. At five o’ clock the clouds lifted and the sun came out, and although it was still chilly, we thought a walk was called for. There was a path I had my eye on back in the winter when it was too muddy underfoot to attempt it. But after a couple of downpour-free days and lots of drying wind, I thought it should be passable.

First, though, a spot of orientation by way of some archive photos. Above is Bishop’s Castle High Street as viewed from the Town Hall window. Our street runs parallel to it, behind the ancient timber-framed house in the right hand foreground (the Porch House).

Next is an autumnal view of said street, named Union Street after the Clun Union Workhouse that once occupied the site next door to us, now a care home with a community hospital behind.

Our walk took us uphill, and left between cottages into Laburnum Alley, a shadowy path that runs between old stone walls and gardens. I imagine much of the stonework along this ginnel came from the demolished castle.

The path exits onto Welsh Street near the top of the town. There’s a handy kiosk here selling eggs and garden plants and sundry items that need a good home. I noted the tray of chunky broad bean seedlings, and pots of strawberry plants. There was also a notice advertising baby rabbits for sale.

Just beyond the kiosk are a couple of striking looking  barns – a case of scenic dilapidation…

And across the road is The Wintles, an upmarket community of eco-homes, built in the days before eco-homes were quite invented:

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We’re on the edge of town now, and this is the green lane path that had caught my eye. It borders The Wintles’ communal ground of allotment and vineyard.

The verges were bright with stitchwort, wild garlic flowers, cuckoo pint, violets, cranesbill, unfurling ferns and cow parsley just opening, Jack by the Hedge aka Garlic Mustard. The lane was sheltered, but even so, I wished I’d put a hat on. It was easy, then, to promise Graham that this was not a major expedition; simply a brief foray to see where the path led.

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It led us to a gate and wobbly stile into a sheep field. We struggled over. Ahead the pasture rose steeply, and I could tell G’s enthusiasm was waning. Just as far as the horizon, I said, in winning tones.

But once we were in the field, we found ourselves looking at marvellous hill country. On our right stretched the Long Mynd, its westerly flanks bathed in sunshine…

The sight of the hills all around had us striding on and up, now and then stopping to look back on the town. You can see the parish church of St. John the Baptist, dating from the late 1200s, in the second photo. It stands at the foot of the town.

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We were watched of course…

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At the top of the sheep pasture there was another stile and beyond it an increasingly uncommon sight – a ploughed field (no-till farming becoming the norm these days).

But beyond the plough, what a fabulous scene, the hills of the Shropshire-Wales borderland. A hint of The Lost Continent somehow miraculously manifested on our almost doorstep? It was too exciting. And anyway it was at this point we lost sight of where the path actually went. The way marker arrow suggested straight ahead, but tramping on wind-dried plough is v. bad for the ankles.

A retreat was declared. But we’ll be back to discover more.

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Heading for home down Union Street.

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Jo’s Monday Walk Go here for some stunning Portuguese walking.

In A State Of Abstraction

If this header photo makes you feel shivery, then that’s how it feels today in Shropshire (21 April ‘24). We don’t have ice, outside or on the windows. And the only snow we’ve had

was back in March, and nothing like the winter white-out we had a few years ago (second photo).

But today the air, beneath a bank of sullen cloud, has a razor’s edge. When, at midday, I went to check on things in the greenhouse, I was glad I’d put on a second woolly jumper. And even that wasn’t warmth enough; still the cold crept into my bones.

What is going on? We’re three parts through April, yet the soil is cold. I keep putting off planting the seed potatoes; leaving them chitting on the potting bench. Soon they’ll be more chit than spud.

And yet, when the sun does shine, as it did yesterday, you could almost believe it was spring. (This should tell us something elemental about what warms the earth. The presence of SUNSHINE). The tulips are certainly saying spring; and the mass of wild flowers on the lane verges say so too: the star-like stitchwort, cowslips, primroses, Jack by the Hedge, the gaudy hoards of dandelions…

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And the trees are bursting into leaf, the first flush of greens tinted bronze and pinky-purple and pale gold:

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And then the farm hedges are white with blackthorn, and the farm fields bright acid yellow with oil seed rape flowers:

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And in the garden the lilac buds are forming and the apple blossom full-on:

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Meanwhile on the house renovation front, we are very glad, (what with the persisting coldness) that the roof is now restored:

and that we’re almost done with the conservatory demolition. This is the floor:

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And that our hero builder has cleaned off and saved over three hundred bricks from the dismantling to use on the extended exterior.

For now they’re stacked on the garden wall, making their own installation:

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With all that’s going on, I’m also thinking that a state of abstraction is good place to be just now. So many thanks to Ritva at Lens-Artists for this interesting approach.

Lens-Artists: Abstracts   This week Ritva gives us abstracts. Go see her post and be inspired.

Mad About Megaliths

It’s an old passion, the love of old stones, already set in before my first decade on planet earth. My memory tells me it had something to do with Saturday afternoon drives along Cheshire lanes and mother announcing that the unusual row of cairns along one such lane were the ancient Celtic graves of sacrificed virgins. Sometimes she could be most unsuitable. The story wasn’t true anyway, but it sparked a yen for things prehistoric.

Mitchell’s Fold Bronze Age Stone Circle, Shropshire

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My second decade thus found me sitting in the basement lecture rooms of Sheffield University Arts Tower, looking at slide shows of standing stones, cairns, cists and chambered tombs, the subjects frequently screened upside down. The lecturers in the small Prehistory Department, couldn’t seem to fathom the loading of the slide carousel (it became a standing joke). And then they didn’t seem to think it mattered which way up we looked at things.

They were probably right. After all, there is very little one can say about these ancient structures and configurations. We might be able to hazard a date for their construction from some excavated artefact found nearby. And we know that tombs were tombs from the human remains found within them.

We also know that these sites must have been hugely important to the people who constructed them. (Think physical effort needed to heft the stones; antler picks and stone axes the only available technology). And then there is the siting of the monuments which, in nearly all cases, strongly suggests pre-literate humanity’s elemental connection with landscape. Place had MEANING; all of it doubtless sacred in ways we no longer grasp.

But when it comes to knowing who the people were, and how they lived and what they believed – the rituals and customs honoured over generations – then the stones remain stonily silent.

And I think that’s what I like about them. They are mysterious. Utterly mysterious.

Here’s another photo of  The Hurlers stone circles on Bodmin Moor, Cornwall. (The obvious mystery here being who or what is that seeming pendant figure on the horizon?) The Hurlers are said to date from the late Neolithic, early Bronze Age (so around 2,500 BCE) and they are unique in that the site comprises three perfect circles set in a row. (Impossible to photograph without a drone). But that’s not all.

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The circles line up with a striking natural feature – the Cheesewring granite tor (Keuswask in Cornish), which of course makes one wonder if it somehow featured in the circle ceremonies, if only as a beacon site to gather in communities from across the moor.

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In Pembrokeshire, West Wales, there are numerous megalithic sites. One of the most striking is Pentre Ifan chambered (dolmen) tomb c. 3,500 BCE. The capstone is seventeen feet long and thought to weigh around 16 tons.

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The finished tomb would have been covered with a huge mound of stone and earth, and the whole constructed in sight of the sea and  Mynydd Carningli (Mount of Angels).

You can read more about Pentre Ifan in a previous post HERE.

Lens-Artists: Rock Your World   This week Donna sets the theme with photos of some fabulous rocky subjects. Go see!

Apple Blossom, Wintery Weather And A Puzzling Plant Pest

The wind is roaring round the house as I write this. The good news is the house roof is back on and fully restored. Ace builder Alan finished it off today, up there on the scaffold top, in the teeth of gale and squall, painting the gable tops, realigning a dodgy gutter. He said it was freezing up there. What a hero.

The re-laid slates are looking pretty smart, but the grand reveal will have to wait till the scaffolding comes down at the end of the week. In the meantime, it’s good to know that the weather will now stay outside the house and the fragile gables stop crumbling into the bedrooms.

In the garden, spring is happening despite the perishing wind. Our gnarled little apple tree by the compost bin has dared to open three buds, but you can tell they’re shivering. I think it’s a Crispin. We had a few good apples from it last year. The other two apple trees that came with the garden, had to be hard pruned, as in eight feet of  top growth removed, so we’re not expecting much from them for a while.

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In between rainstorms, and wrapped up in sweaters, padded parka, fleecy pants and woolly hat, I’ve been a) digging up the lawn to create more vegetable growing space; b) attempting to dig out and unpick ground elder, Spanish bluebell and Mexican cigar plant colonies*; and c) continuing to disengage the hedge from chicken wire and the ivy overburden. This last activity is proving slow going. My presence causes the sparrows to dive from the hedge-side feeding post and into the hedge, where they shout loudly until I go away.

*Now for the plant pest and a note of caution, as in beware of letting Mexican cigar plant (Cuphea) loose on your property. In our garden, it’s like ground elder on steroids. Even the tiniest root fragment will turn into a shrub; the new roots spreading several feet in fleshy festoons, thick as macaroni – under paths, into lawns. When in flower, it has a trillion tube-like blooms that also make seeds. Only if you have the chance of entertaining humming birds should you have it in the garden, and only then in a container.

Needless to say, we do not have humming birds in Bishops Castle. It’s also astonishing that a tropical plant should make itself so at home in this rather draughty, frost-prone corner of Shropshire, although I gather there is at least one variety of the the 250 that is winter hardy.

When we moved into the house last August, this promiscuous entity was sprawling out of our garden, admittedly from a very sheltered, sunny bed, and up over next door’s garage roof, i.e. two metres taller than it’s supposed to grow. Though it did occur to me that perhaps it had found some ancient long-drop W.C. to root itself in. It was also giving itself a leg up along the length of a pine tree that was growing horizontally across the back of the flower bed. But I keep wondering if I’ve misidentified it; maligning an otherwise innocent shrub.

Any thoughts, gardeners? The serrated leaves are puzzling me, but when in flower, it looks like THIS. And descriptions of the swift growing/spreading roots/long flowering season fits.

“The sun has burst the sky…”

A week or so ago, I heard this poem being performed on Radio 3 (otherwise the BBC’s serious music station). I was still in bed, not quite awake, but I could see early morning gloom edging the window blind. And then came these word, read with such madcap gusto. That lit up the day.

Read them now, aloud. Go for unleashed exuberance. Then see what happens…

The sun has burst the sky
Because I love you
And the river its banks.

The sea laps the great rocks
Because I love you
And takes no heed of the moon dragging it away
And saying coldly ‘Constancy is not for you’.
The blackbird fills the air
Because I love you
With spring and lawns and shadows falling on lawns.

The people walk in the street and laugh
I love you
And far down the river ships sound their hooters
Crazy with joy because I love you.

copyright Jenny Joseph, English Poet (1932-2018)

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Now you’ve done the dress rehearsal, go for an all-out ‘first night’ performance. Never mind what the love object is. It could be the cat, a beloved human, an imaginary lover, the universe, a special tree, yourself…

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So what happened…a burst of sunshine perhaps – in body, mind and spirit.

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The photo was taken early one morning in Kalamata, Greece. Intervening olive tree with the Gulf of Messenia and Taygetus Mountains beyond.