A Kirkcudbright Garret Dweller Posts

It's been a quiet couple of weeks in my attic. I've finished the Shipping News, worked my way through 100 Years of Solitude and now I'm giving my attention to Random Acts of Heroic Love, as well as playing a few mandolin tunes here and there and knocking out some chords on the old guitar. It's been a temperamental time weatherwise but inbetween the wet bits, there been some rather lovely bits and this being Scotland, the change between them can be sudden but in all my wanders about the town, I've only been drowned once this week. In the mean time, while I wait for something to happen, here's some of the snaps I've fired of on my wanders about town, starting with the harbour from the bridge with Maclellan's castle popping up in the middle of it - it's not really a castle, there was no real need for them in 1582 when it was built, but a rather large house.

"The galumphing curves of the ugly concrete bridge" wrote the author Dorothy L Sayers of this bridge way back in the first half of the last century - time hasn't improved it much and if you want really unattractive you could photograph it from the other side and you stand a chance of getting the closed down dairy factory in it.

A small copper (must be about the last call for butterfly pictures this year I should think)

A lapwing stands on a muddy bank

A yacht out on the bay

This wooden carving remembering those lost at sea sits down at the harbour looking out over the bay.

A couple of old abandoned boats that are favorites with local photographers - the first one had a name on it until recently but it appears to have been snaffled and I can't remember it nor can I surf it up.

This row of sandstone blocks are awaiting the sculpture symposium at the weekend - if that bloke from Ellesmere turns up, this is not a finished work that represents the relationship between the art shop the bus stop and the harbour.

Bad thing happen in Kirkcudbright too!!!!

The view from my garret window.

Ellesmere Sculpture Trail eventually

It’s already over a week since I got back from Wales and I’m still typing up blogs from that trip, but I think this is the last. Strangely it’s delay has caused it to wait long enough for a small article of some significance to appear on the BBCs website but more of that at the end.

At a reasonable time for lunch, Bev and me headed off with the intentions of slotting in one of Morrison’s very reasonably priced all day breakfasts before nipping across to Ellesmere to admire their sculpture trail. But while I was standing in the queue about to fill my teapot, Bev spotted something amiss. A complaining customer, and then she noticed that all the other customers were looking that way, much in the way merecats do, and then she noticed that all the table still had numbers on suggesting that none of the full restaurant had received any food – indeed they hadn’t, the kitchen staff of 1 was becoming increasing bogged down and they claimed an hours delay in serving (probably optimistic). We left, only to find Morrison’s café in the next town having similar problems (not quite so bad). We eventually found a little café which provided a lovely breakfast at 3 o’clock in the afternoon and two highly cherried sticky buns.

There is some debate between us as to quite whether the equation between a trip to the loo and fag break comes to less or more than 5 minutes, either way that’s how long the tourist information had been closed by the time we got there, so we set out, leafletless, for a walk round the canal where we were lead to believe there where sculptures to be found. Some we found, like Mercedes Cano’s Shoal of Fish, described accurately as, “Each piece was made and welded together in the old forge at the canal yard” (you can’t really go wrong when you just stick to the facts), some we saw in the distance but couldn’t decide whether they were a sculpture or a misplaced shopping trolley and at least one piece we think we just walked past, such was the minimalist approach.

When we eventually managed to pick up a leaflet later on from the information point by the Mere we discovered that the pieces by the canal we from the 2010 sculpture symposium. Never mind, we now had a leaflet and were in a position to examine the 2009 symposium pieces armed with the information about them.

Glacial Menhir by Louis Alfonso - The catalogue says "This is a communication between the soil, land and Mere". This blog says "Hmmm" There is a 3rd rock hidden in the long grass here - seems that grass cutting has been suspended around the sculptures.

 

Puerto del Agua by EmilianoSacco. Catalogue says "I've tried to show the relationship between the rock and water". I say, "It's a bit like a Nik Nak. Quite nice."

A Prisoner by Tom Gilhespy, Catalogue says, "This rock has been moved from the north by glacier and I've chained it down now". Bev and me are both known to pick up the odd pebble from time to time and Bev was reminded of the poem about the stones that move, I think it might be in my old blog somewhere. We liked this.

Grasshopper on the sculpture

We think this is a Scotch Argus (Erratum - I now think it's not a scotch argus but something else??)

A Fallen Tree by Mother Nature (uncatalogued)

Rotation 2 by Trevor Clarke Catalogue says "This reflects the journey of the rock on it's journey here"
 

By now, having obtained the leaflet telling us where everything was, we could have made our way to the rest of the sculptures that we had missed but they were a fair way away and, to be quite honest, we were feeling completely underwhelmed and the photos on the leaflet didn't look like we would have been heading to see very much, so we didn't. On our return we did see on the net that there were a few interesting items that were not in the leaflet, of which the boaty arrangement on the left is one, but we'll live.

Yesterday I read on the BBC that there is to be a sculpture symposium here in Kirkcudbright from the 27 of this month till the 4 of September. I shall be gone to the Folk Festival at Portpatrick for the last few days of it but I doubt they'll be rushing off with the results so I should get to see them. I'll be interested to see the results in the light of what we saw in Wales.

 

 

 

Thanks Kim

To celebrate 5 years of fine blogging, Kim Ayres has been asking for suggestions and offering some of his delightful photographs in return.He often joins us in the local hostelries for tunes with his mandolin and bazooka, but really there is little need to write too much about Kim when he does it so well for himself at http://kimayres.blogspot.com

Given the choice of Kim's pictures, I have chosen the following sunrise at Carlingwark Loch in Castle Douglas which I passed on the bus only this very day. Photographs that occur at times where I should still be drinking tea and eating slices of toast are better left to somebody else, anyway Kim does it far better than I ever will. Thanks Kim.

Shrewsbury museum and castle (a bargain)

 To round off my Shrewsbury blogs here are a few pictures from the museum (and a little later on the castle). Nicely priced for a Scotsman (£0.00) it has a reasonable selection of stone aged artifacts and some remains from the nearby Roman town of Viroconium as well as some stuff relating to Darwin (a good excuse for stuffing a few animals), some lovely local tiles and pottery and a very fancy bed.

Leading off this rather arbitrary mix is a little statue of an ape based on Rodin's Thinker but very much with the Victorian (and in some places current) controversy over Darwins theorys in mind.

Some Roman glass

A Coalport vase (1871)

The bed is from 1593 although the drapes were made recently.

At about quarter to four,I thought it was about time to wander down to the station and take in the castle on the way back, but not before I'd managed to get myself a cup of tea. So I arrived at the castle at the back of four o'clock. It was priced at a very reasonable £2.50 entrance fee (where else can you get into for that money now a days) but the attendant said that since it was less than an hour to closing time he would let me in for nothing (making the £1.30 invested in a cup of tea very worth while). There's a military museum there which is excellent and you cannot really do it justice in less than an hour and still have time to look at the castle and I suspect that there is some part of the museum linked to the castle itself but I didn't see it, perhaps it had closed by that time.

The castle started out life as a Mote and Bailly castle built between 1067 and 1074 but the mound it has been built on has been covered in flowers and some pretty gardens and on the part where the castle itself was, the owner in 1790 built his daughter a summer house called Laura's tower - this doesn't really help conjure up the brutal quashing of bloody rebellion by knights on half ton horses. The shape of the 13th century extensions to the castle are much more apparent with much of the original curtain walls still being intact. From the walls of the castle, the armys of Edward the firsts time (he that wouldn't leave Scotland alone - it didn't get him anywhere did it?) would have had a superb view of the railway station where the could have spotted rebelious Welsh hords as they were getting off the train.

Laura's tower - probably used mainly for needlework rather than drunken feasts with lots of wine and eating with fingers.

The view from the station.

Stained Glass at St Mary the Virgin

Now I'm not a religious man in the slightest but I do enjoy a good church. Even today their carvings, paintings and glass impress and it's well worth a thought as to how they must have appeared to their midieval congregation. St Mary's is believed to have been founded in 970 by King Edgar on the site of an earlier Saxon church but the current building seems to date from the 12th century. Most of the stained glass in the church hasn't actually started out in this church - it seems that in the 18th and 19th century the clergymen of the church have caught a bit of a collecting bug and brought in windows of all sorts of ages and nationalities and made them fit into window spaces of the church. You'll see form the window on the left that there are on 2 kings that have arrived at the stable. Goodness knows where the 3rd king has got to but he would have been there originally when the window was made (obviously for a bigger gap somewhere.)

Now, I've failed to take any notes (or rather photograph the information label) about the above window but if I remember the above roundels built into the window are Dutch. Below is a rather maginficent rosette which is Victorian and made by David Evans who did much of the work on the churches windows, both as artist and tradesman. When 4 windows for the continent where bought and only 2 turned up Evans was called upon to build another 2 in the style of the originals.

This window on the right here, which my camera doesn't seem to have wanted to take an awfully good picture of, sums up to me what seems to have been the window policy of the church in Victorian times. The feet and stones here date from about 1532 and started out life as part of crucifiction scene from Lichfield Abbey, the canopy above the saint originally belonged to Winchster college chapel and are as old as 1380 and these have been joined together by David Evans in 1840 with a figure of St. John (minus his feet of course as they were already there).

The most impressive window in the church, above the alter, didn't start out life here either. It was in St Chads church in the town until 1788 (even then not its original home) where it collapsed into a great heap of glass and was pieced back together into the main window of St Mary's in 1792. It was made back in 1340 and features the recumbant figure of Jesse (the father of David and from whom the window takes it's name), from his loins springs a vine and effectively his family tree of 16 kings and 21 prophets until you get to Mary and Joseph and Jesus. Unfortunately they haven't put the window back in quite the order that it was intended and Jesus, Mary and Joseph appear at the bottom and Jesse starts a row up. The arched bit at the top isn't that old either being added when the window was put into it's current location.

Hidden way up on a high window is this jumble - stained glass was expensive and it seemed a waste not to use the broken and extra bits

And finally, This was in St Alkmund's rather than St Mary's and for that matter, it's not stained glass either, it's painted, but I like it, so here it is.

Ye olde and not so olde

Shrewsbury, however you want to pronounce it, is a pretty town and conveniently close to Newtown to jump on a train with a day return and a cup of tea. Although it’s just over the border in England, you could make a case for still being in Powys for it was the capital of that region in the 5th century when it was called Pengwern. There’s plenty there to occupy a couple of days I would say and I never got to the Abbey or anywhere near the battlefield of 1403 where Henry IV defeated Hotspur (Hotspur, apparently, decided to open the visor of his helmet for a breath of fresh air just at the wrong moment and was shot in the head by an arrow). But enough of what I didn’t see and a little bit more of what I did do on a rather full afternoon.

I suspect you'll have to go a long way before you come across such a concentration of half timbered houses. I would think that by their very nature they would be far from fire proof and it should not be forgotten that while this may be the grand design of tudor living the Tudor's also brought us smoking in bed (as well as the potato, but that has little relevence to this tale). When you look up in Shrewsbury, and few towns encourage looking up quite so much, you begin to notice that many of the dates on buildings are far from Tudor and indeed many of the half timbered buildings are indeed Elizabethan, the current Elizabeth that is, or Victorian or something inbetween. A bad thing? I think not, when you look at some of the other buildings about the country that town planners have chucked up, then I think a little copying of the past doesn't go amiss and certainly gives this town a bit of character.

That good old multinational Costa Coffee certainly looks ancient, and I suspect that the major part of the house is, but when you look at the carvings round about it, you see that they were done in around 1990, in fact the one below "celebrates" the poll tax with a carving of Mrs Thatcher and Michael Heseltine.

Sorry, hope you're not feeling too ill after that.

The statue which has found it's way into the picture above, with his right arm in a heroic pose, is Clive of India, who was one of the local town worthies, or unworthy perhaps if you hail from the subcontinent. Without a doubt though, the most famous person to come out of Shrewsbury was Mr Charles Darwin, who's theories did much for the evolution of common sense.

Down by the river there is the following interesting structure to celebrate his bicentenary which has been given the snappy title of  "The Darwin Memorial Geo-garden Quantum leap"

On the front of St Mary the Virgin church, which has the 3rd highest spire in England, there is the following plaque

A cautionary tale and a little typing saved. St Mary's church has one of the finest collections of stained glass in the country, but that is the next blog.

The beach at Tonfanau

On the way back from Wiltshire, I went to Wales for a few days to see Bev and Craig at the Flying shuttle in Newtown, where on Tuesday night in a coincidental continuity with the previous blogs we had a carry out curry from a fellow who used to have a shop on Brick Lane. Food seems to have been a quite noteworthy point of the few days as on Saturday I ate an Italian of the dimensions that I was unable to pour a bottle of cider on top of it all – thanks Bev (who paid).

On Sunday Bev, Giz and me (still straining slightly at the seams with scallops, carbonara and tiramisu) clambered into the car and wended our way across Wales, where we left the car at Tonfanau Station (with it’s one platform that you have to ask the guard nicely if you want the train to stop there) and wandered down to the beach.

Spotted just before the beach, this butterfly. After a rake in the butterfly book later, we recon this is an Adonis Blue.

For the highly observant, Mount Snowdon is somewhere in the hills in the background.

For the first time since 1989 (where it was the Indian Ocean as opposed to Cardigan Bay) I was tempted into the sea) - only as far as my knees granted, and completely undocumented on film so you'll just have to take my word for it. I do have proof for Bev and Giz being in the water.

What I though was a pair of oyster catchers, turned out to be a pair of Curlews when I looked at the pictures later

Between the beach and the railway tracks were a selection of abandoned military buildings, probably dating back to the war. On of them appears to have come a cropper with the retreating cliff and there were quite a few large chunks of brickwork around this part of the beach. Here somebody has put in a bid for a Turner prize with the addition of a shoe.

If I were giving out the Turner prize, then the person who balanced these rocks, and half a dozen more besides, would be more likely to get it.

I don't think I've ever walked over a railway line before (it was an official crossing), so it would be a waste not to take the obvious photo.

And finally, a little piece of Welsh countryside, where we sat and ate a sandwich and a packet of crisps on the way back.