On the Beat

My brother, his wife and some friends and I went wassailing in Herefordshire. It was a curious experience. A wonderfully clear evening - one forgets how many stars can be seen in the countryside - was obscured by smoke from paraffin-doused torches. It was cold.

There were a lot of Morris dancers, faces blacked (perhaps a tradition suggesting their origin as "moorish dancers"?) and tophats decked out with vegetation - the living embodiment of the green man, I assume. (I used to have a copy of "The Golden Bough", which must explain all this; perhaps I prefer making up my own explanations...)

There was a procession, the line of wassaillers reminiscent of the extras from an old Dracula film. (We were the townies: it would be me they were coming for.) We stood around in an orchard as the Morris men - all men - lit thirteen fires: in a mash up of pagan and Christian cultures. The thirteenth fire - the Judas fire - was stamped out.

The apple trees were fed cake and given a drink of cider - though the dancers drank more than the trees.

And then the dancers danced, clacking sticks and jingling bells. Morris dancing is hard to take seriously after decades of ridicule (I remember particularly sketches by the Goodies and Monty Python).

Instead of heading north, we headed south: we went to see Antony Gormley’s monumental sculpture the Angel of the North. Again, I have seen the sculpture both from the train and whilst driving north (it is much easier to see heading north than south, due to the bends in the road and rails). but I had never been close up. It was very impressive - awe inspiring.

Driving back south, we stopped to walk to Dunstanburgh. The sky was heavy. As we left, the sun was setting, the tall clouds catching fire and the ruins dyed deep orange. It was spectacularly glorious.

One day during our stay in Northumberland, we went to Lindisfarne - also known as Holy Island.

I had seen the castle from the train many times, and often thought of venturing across the narrow causeway; the road is flooded at high tide so one must time one’s visit.

The castle was reworked by Edwin Lutyens and boasts a rather scrubby little walled garden designed by Gertrude Jekyll.

It was Lindisfarne Priory that I really loved. Now ruined, and the subject of a violent history, the Romanesque arches and pillars and the weathered stone were quite beautiful.

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Over a year ago, we spent a week in Alnmouth. I took a lot of pictures, but I have only just processed them.

One morning, I woke early and went down to the beach to watch the sunrise; the next day, we both went down.

It was very cold, the wind coming in off the North Sea. But it was also very beautiful watching the sun slowly rise behind the clouds.

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Yorkshire Sculpture Park lies just off the M1 (jn 38); it is a glorious setting. Before I started wandering around, I had lunch there, too, and it was very good.

It was a lovely day. I chose to walk 1½ mile trail to the Longside Gallery, taking in artworks by some of my favourite artists, starting with James Turrell. He works with light: artificial light sometimes, but he bought a volcanic crater in Arizona to work with natural light, and the work at YSP also works with natural light. He adapted a deer shelter (called Deer Shelter) into a contemplative space: a large room with a large hole in the ceiling, through which one can sit back and watch the sky.

I loved this: it was powerful, relaxing – beautiful. I sat for a long time in silence, watching the clouds fly by.

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I first came across Avebury by chance: I was driving from Oxford to Somerset about twenty years ago on a dark, foggy autumn day, and the most direct route to where we were going took us through the village. I hadn’t been expecting it: we came around the corner, and looming out of the dense fog were these large, impressive stones. We stopped and looked around; and it has been one of my favourite places ever since.

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I know Bristol quite well; I nearly went to Bristol there, visited friends who were there at university, and now my friends G&K live there; I tend to go once or twice a year.

This visit in September was a little different – we weren’t staying with G&K, and I had more time to wander around.

One morning, whilst F. met up with coughingbear and ankaret, I wandered down to the docks. I had been hoping to go to the Bristol Industrial Museum. Unfortunately, it seems to have been shut for a long while as it undergoes regeneration as the Museum of Bristol or something.

Still, much of the things in the museum are actually too big to fit in the museum; they are left outside, rusting.

There is something about large industrial objects – maybe it is the little child in me, dreaming of being a train driver. It was great fun just walking along the old railway tracks, beneath the huge dockside cranes.

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Our few days in the west country were mostly spent in Bristol (indeed, our trip to Bath was actually a day trip from Bristol, just ten minutes down the railway line!).

The first place we went to in Bristol was the church of St Mary Redcliffe. This was a hugely impressive building – medieval churches often fill me with wonder and awe: all that energy put to building such vast, beautiful spaces.

There were, of course, pictures.

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After F. and I went to Sherborne, we went to Bath. It was another beautiful September day, and the sun made the Georgian buildings hum with warmth.

I had been to Bath before – a mid-winter’s day about twenty years ago, and I don’t think my post-Christmas hangover then did the town justice: I was newly moved to Edinburgh, and Bath on a gloomy December day couldn’t really compare.

In the bright September light, though, I was fascinated by the buildings. It felt like I was wandering through a Jane Austen novel.

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