Notions of Place

[along-the-deerness]

Not quite the full series, but pretty close.

[along-the-deerness]

Lately things have been busy enough that I haven't set down to do any writing. have been out and about quite a bit, lots of photos, a few GPS tracks, various discussions, conversations online or in-person. but by the time I think about writing something it's really late or it just flows into the next thing and the next thing.

But today I have a little bit of time and short incident worth mentioning. the nearest road junction to our house is called Lymington crossing on the opposite side of the road primary school for library and community centre. Schools in session today and I could hear kids shouting as they were outside playing. Passing that junction about 6 p.m., I saw two ~10 year old lads breaking a big block of styrene packing into small pieces and tossing it into the air so that the beads blew away like snow flurries.

My civic eco-warrior got the better of me and I went over to chat with one of the lads who was standing in the road crumbling his bit of styrene. When he was within earshot, I asked if he had a bag for picking up the pieces once he was done playing with it. So I said there's probably a bag in that rubbish bit over there by the bus stop. I'll go get it, and we can clean this up together. And I did and we did, along with the other lad, and the third boy who showed up wanting to know what's going on.

A relatively positive outcome.

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Along the Ridge

Today I've climbed up some 40m from the river to walk along the top of the southern ridge.

It's a very different scene and a very welcome alternative, with its own nice variety of adventures and treasures.

One could think about ways of marking things, be it scratches on a tree trunk, carvings on a wooden post, wattle woven between some trees, bits of decoration here and there, or more subtle things like selective thinning and pruning to open up for particular view.

Marking serves a purpose, to draw people's attention to something, or to create a language; a way of communicating about woodlands care, or playspaces, or work spaces.

Everything we do is a marking of some sort, but a lot of the time it is secondary, or inadvertent. Opening up a trail leaves a mark, but the primary aim is passage, getting somewhere. Pruning a tree for harvest, or reducing competition is a mark but the primary aim is something else.

So walking through the woods or alongside them is an opportunity to think about other sorts of engagements other sorts of activities, including observations of things that aren't of our making.

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Coastal

It's 6 days since my last post, but seems longer. Maybe I've been busy. There have been several things on the go.

One is the Queen Anne's Lace / wild carrot cordial, which was about 30 minutes picking flowers Sunday evening and another half hour taking photographs of them.

Tuesday there was sorting through the garden shed, plus starting to clear space at the allotment.

Wednesday was errands interspersed with vehicular misadventures. Our first bus trip into Durham since last year, to get a hire car that was serially uncooperative.

Then today was given over to DIY in the morning more allotment work this afternoon.

While Birmingham seems to have been having freakishly thunderous, torrential, sweltering weather, here it's been relatively cool, except Tuesday, which was the day I got a bit of sunstroke whilst trimming trees from the top of a windmill.

Today, working at the allotment was a bit like being at the seaside. The sky has been misty all day. There's been a light breeze carrying those very fine droplets that let you know it's wet out, though nothing gets damp. And the rosehips are such a brilliant red. Like at the seaside. Coastal weather here in the valleys, I reckon. Very nice.

[along-the-deerness]

Playing with data

I’m plotting points and making more website stuff.

These thumbnails have GPS data and web addresses

Which look like this once they are filtered from all the other info

And which turn into geo-located dots when synchronised with a map.

with clickable links to the thumbnail photos.

Which then feed the wiki.

that’s more comprehensive than the blog.

And next week, I’ll be doing more stuff outdoors.

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... and a pony.

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Where are we now?

Over the weekend I decided to look into some of the local geography and history. What I read over the the course of a morning was enough to fill several pages worth of commentary.

I started by looking at the political geography of the area. In some respects it's pretty straightforward: there is the county council; there is the parliamentary district; there are parish councils, and then there is a thing called the Area Action Partnerships. That seems to be a mix of parish or county councillors and institutional officers, ergo fire brigades, police, NHS, and others, who help set and/or deliver localised priorities.

Peculiarly, these 4 layers of government have different geographical boundaries, and I spent some time trying to figure out how they do or don't line up. A map of these should show up at some point. It doesn't seem that one has been conveniently produced.

This exploration got me to looking at the parish of Brandon and Byshottles, which is where our new house is. So then it's over to Wikipedia to look at the history of the parish and how it got its names and so forth.

At that point, I was wondering about who owned the land, and started trying to figure out who established the various settlements.

That is when Joseph Pease, Quaker, capitalist, railroad magnate and social paternalist turns up. He earns several spots in the history books for things of greater significance than establishing several mines and mining communities in county Durham, apparently on land owned by others. A trove of useful detail comes from an Economic History MA thesis by Norman Emery in 1984: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/7831/1/7831_4828.PDF?UkUDh:CyT

But of his incidental accomplishments, it's worth noting that the hamlet of Lymington was named after one of Joseph's in-laws. His granddaughter married a man called Newton Wallop, who styled himself Viscount Lymington. Whether the Pease family owned the land is not clear (which is also the question about Esh Winning). But they did own the mine, and they did develop the villages with a sort of Cadbury style ethos, where every house had a garden with enough space to keep a pig. So it seems like they got to name villages as well. Part of me is tempted nickname Lymington with something a little bit more colourful, like Walloping.

This all happens in law last half of the 19th century, so it's interesting to go back to the period just prior, trying to get a sense of what the place was like. This part of the county was sparsely populated and there weren't a lot of tracks and established footways. So the social and economic character of the place starts ballooning 180 years ago, and is already dwindling by the 1920s. A tidal wave of economic development sweeps through the valley in the late 19th century, and leaves all sorts of stuff in its wake. Unsustainable grand buildings, industrial remnants, reconfigured landscapes and patterns of settlement. Including the really peculiar town planning equivalent of the Beeching Act, where the chief town planner graded all of the rural villages on a scale of A to D, and those that were in category D got wiped off the map and the ground.

The aggregate of all of these things makes for some interesting potential for socio-geographical interpretation.

Enough for now? That's today's update.

Oh, but I should mention that Liz and I took a walk.

[along-the-deerness]

Ways and Waterways

This area was industrialising in the 1850s when the map surveys were done. I have looked at one area of landscape with an eye on footpaths and watercourses, to see what routes and traces might still be around. This is an abstraction of those ways covering several square miles. It’s curious that there are so few footpaths. I wonder if people just walked across fields, or whether most paths were ignored by surveyors. That said, the area was pretty sparsely populated until the coal boom.

From Wikipedia: In 1801 the Brandon and Byshottles population was 522; in 1811, 435; in 1851, 525; by 1881 it had risen to 10,850; and in 1891, it was 14,240.

Brandon and Byshottles is the name of the local parish. It’s pretty large - maybe 25 square km. so at the time of the map survey, there may have been less than 1000 people here. Maybe there weren’t many paths between places...

[along-the-deerness]

Ways and Streams

This will mean something to Anna, Liz, and maybe a couple of others. But it’s only a first draft, superimposing 1898 & 1923 OS maps and aerial photography. I have to remove extraneous lines like that 500 foot contour, and certain boundary lines. We will then have the beginnings of a story.

2nd draft looks like this

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Summer

30 degrees today, and now lightning and thunder rumbling down the Valley nearly continually.

One peal of thunder rolled around the valley like some special effects on a surround sound speaker system. At the same time people were out in their back gardens enjoying the spectacle and chatting with each other.

I'm looking forward to more of this.

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Big Sky

Call it the blessing of a place if you like. Situations where gratitude shows up. Beyond that of just being alive.

Things like an awesome sunrise at 5AM, or the view from Big Sky Green. The quiet. No road noise, just some pigeons over there.

Gratitude is a thing to be cultivated. It might exist on its own to some degree, but being pulled away from all the familiar joys means finding new ones, which might happen in the background, but making a conscious effort is probably a better approach.

It’s been a tricky thing my entire life. Moving from one place to the next and needing a year or so to find out what I love about the one I’ve moved to. I cheated this time, cuz’ I’ve been here before. I know a few things already. But I can think back to the struggles of moving to Madison, Portland, Boston, Oakland... and think about a different approach this time. Starting by noticing.

Noticing things like lumps of stone. There’s much to be said about them, as you may have seen in earlier photos. The marvelous wild fruit. The easy walk across the village. The much more arduous walk across the hills. The lilts in peoples’ voices. To some extent these are going to take the place of wacky street art, or chatting with friends at the farmers’ market or resident’s group meeting. There’ll be less of that here, and more of other things.

So I’ve got Big Sky Green as a place to do some big sky thinking. And sunrise over the North Sea to start some of the days in a burst of colour. Things to think about, appreciations to cultivate.

[along-the-deerness]

Dry Creek

Today on a half hour walk to get out of the house, we explored the (mostly) dry bed of the local creek; Rowley Burn. It's a tempting place to do something creative, so I may go back there with loppers and gloves and some thought to arranging things.

I spotted this while walking the bed. Am sure to incorporate it into something.

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Wonderful

Amid the immediate need to get stuff set up, sorted, organised, listed, attended to, planned, installed,  cleaned, shifted, hooked up, stashed, mounted, stacked, and tidied, I’m forgetting something. Or rather, not forgetting, but not being.

[along-the-deerness]

The Facebook Version

I’ve been wanting to cross-post Tumblr material to my Facebook newsfeed, but that is not an option, whereas posting to a Facebook page is almost straightforward. So I’ve created a page to mirror this blog, that gets a snippet of each Tumblr post and links back to here. 

I’ve been testing it over the last three days and am content with the way it works. So pretty soon I’ll be inviting people to subscribe to the Fb page for the semi-daily updates on here. 

This Tumblr blog works okay, is exceptionally easy to use, with limited functionality.So I'll keep posting here, mainly, and in other places on occasion. 

https://www.facebook.com/notions.of.place

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Starting indoor renovation work. Getting rid of the hundred or so bathroom tiles is the first easy task.

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Liz makes a dash for the chair.

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Would you like to be a stone in this wall? Which of them do you identify with?