This oak was in leaf a few days before the trees in the woodland behind it. The golden green will soon darken up. The path winds up from Canterbury city to the University of Kent, a popular walk with local people and a breath of fresh air for university people going about their business.
This winter our walk in and out of town has often featured, at ground level, a young heron, who seemed to be making a living in the shallows of the River Stour. A few yards upstream the water is much deeper, due to the sluices from the former mill site. This provides deep water and a living for a couple of cormorants who dry themselves on the roof of the sheltered housing block, or else the trees across the road from there.
On this day in 1826 Charles Lamb replies to John Dibdin who has written from Hastings, Sussex, where Charles and Mary Lamb had enjoyed many walks on their own holidays.
Let me hear that you have clamber’d up to Lover’s Seat; it is as fine in that neighbourhood as Juan Fernandez, as lonely too, when the Fishing boats are not out; I have sat for hours, staring upon a shipless sea. The salt sea is never so grand as when it is left to itself. One cock-boat spoils it. A sea-mew or two improves it.
By the way, there’s a capital farm house two thirds of the way to the Lover’s Seat, with incomparable plum cake, ginger beer, etc.
from “The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 6 Letters 1821-1842
Four miles from Hastings, the Lovers’ Seat is on the Fairlight cliff, seen here from Pett Level on a day when clouds were forming at the cliff top. Although the beach often has families enjoying the sand that lies below the shingle seen here, a little way off are quiet spots where one can stop and stare. A rare solitude for Lamb, the convinced Londoner.
Where and when today can I find a few minutes of solitude with God and creation?
Juan Fernandez is a group of Islands in the Pacific Ocean belonging to Chile; it includes Robinson Crusoe Island, though that name was not in use in 1826.
Sea-mew: sea gull, especially the common gull.
We came across this gate while walking in Sussex. When we got home I saw that there were a few stories to be heard – or seen – here.
This is where a track crosses the railway, or better, the other way about, because the track was there well before the railway was built. There was a station here, though few passengers. The station had a wooden platform, wooden shelter and no lighting, oil, gas or electric. Not surprisingly. there is little to be seen of the station, nor of the crossing keeper’s cottage.
The footpath is on the Brede Level marshland. It must get very muddy, so someone has added cobbles to make the foot crossing dry. The crossing keeper would surely have kept the gates open to trains, closed to road vehicles, so the position was something of a sinecure, or a job for an elderly worker still strong enough to manage the heavy gates. There were fewer road vehicles than trains. A lightweight farm gate either side of the track is all that’s needed.
The old pedestrian gate is a picture; I guess it’s XIX Century. Its new galvanised post suggests that a surveyor did not want to scrap this unique specimen – the one on the opposite side is quite different, but both were clearly handmade by carpenter and blacksmith, probably in the South Eastern Railway works at Ashford. No question of an off-the-peg gate here. Note the decorative work on the top hinge, and the swivelling pulley cover to keep fingers safe; its makers took pride in their work. The gate frame will have been made of hardwood, possibly English oak, and when the upright palings had perished a sheet of marine plywood was substituted. Railwaymen seem to have had a soft spot for this gate over the last 150 years or so.
Modern technology is represented by the telephone: drivers of slow moving vehicles are warned to call the signaller for the all clear before crossing the railway. We arrived here by foot downhill from Udimore where King Edward III once stayed. He was supervising defensive fortifications at nearby Winchelsea in 1350 when the Spanish fleet came into sight and gave battle, ending in an English victory, witnessed by Queen Phillipa from the top of the track we are following.
Since then a naval safe haven has become a saltmarsh, supporting sheep beside the river; and the sea is now some distance away.
In the distance across the marsh is a hill with a village and pub, a destination for our walk. A shared walk, a shared meal; reminders of why we chose to share all things, for better or worse, forty-three years ago.
 willturnstoneSilence can be a moment of revelation, writes Eddie Gilmore of the London Irish chaplaincy. Here’s a paragraph from his reflection, where a hike across Wales opened that possibility to him. As ever, the whole article is worth reflecting upon, but here’s that taster. When I was fourteen I was on a school trip to North Wales and we were hiking one day across the high and remote moorland when the guide asked us to stop dead still and to listen. Having grown up in a city, and in a house where my sister liked to have Radio 1 playing all the time, and where the TV was usually on non-stop, it was probably the first time I had heard that sound of silence. And what an amazing sound it was. It lasted just a few seconds before some of the others started giggling but it was a little moment of revelation for me. What revelation could we receive if we stopped the noise for a few minutes? That said, I used to find silence following a noisy lawnmower around some extensive grounds, part of my mind concentrating on the machine and the grass, the rest, eventually turning to silence.There are many entries to the bliss of solitude. |
Willow wands growing through the snow. Calm after the storm.
Ev'n winter bleak has charms to me, When winds rave thro' the naked tree; Or frosts on hills of Ochiltree Are hoary gray; Or blinding drifts wild-furious flee, Dark'ning the day! O Nature! a' thy shews an' forms To feeling, pensive hearts hae charms! Whether the summer kindly warms, Wi' life an' light; Or winter howls, in gusty storms, The lang, dark night! The Muse, nae poet ever fand her, Till by himsel he learn'd to wander, Adown some trottin burn's meander, An' no think lang: O, sweet to stray, an' pensive ponder A heart-felt sang. Three wintry verses from Burns to mark his day. The Sots dialect is not too difficult here, but just a couple of translations from our third verse. Fand: found. Burn: brook; it crops up in English place-names, Saltburn, Blackburn, etc..
Here is the beach at Pett Level, Sussex, a few miles west of Brighton. Today we have a Londoner’s reflections on the seaside and walking around Sussex, up to 15 miles a day. Mary Lamb was in Brighton with her brother Charles and a friend. She is writing to Dorothy Wordsworth up in the Lake District. Seaside holidays 200 years ago! A little taste of her summer in our winter.
I resolved to learn to look out of the window, a habit I never could attain in my life, and I have given it up as a thing quite impracticable—yet when I was at Brighton last summer, the first week I never took my eyes off from the sea, not even to look in a book. I had not seen the sea for sixteen years.
Mrs. Morgan, who was with us, kept her liking, and continued her seat in the window till the very last, while Charles and I played truant and wandered among the hills, which we magnified into little mountains and almost as good as Westmoreland scenery. Certainly we made discoveries of many pleasant walks which few of the Brighton visitors have ever dreamed of—for like as is the case in the neighbourhood of London, after the first two or three miles we were sure to find ourselves in a perfect solitude.
I hope we shall meet before the walking faculties of either of us fail. You say you can walk fifteen miles with ease,—that is exactly my stint, and more fatigues me; four or five miles every third or fourth day, keeping very quiet between, was all Mrs. Morgan could accomplish.
God bless you and yours. Love to all and each one.
I am ever yours most affectionately M. LAMB.
From The Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb, 1796-1820, Edited by E. V. Lucas
My friend Frog shared these wintry photos, I found them so calming that I’m passing them on to any reader feeling festivally frazzled!
We had gone up North, despite the railway strikes, for an important family funeral. But thanks to the railway strikes, we travelled early and had time for a few reflective walks. The restored Huddersfield Narrow Canal is easy, dry-shod walking; we found warm accommodation in Greenfield village. On a day of showers and sunshine we turned a corner to witness this autumn scene: a watery sun shining through the golden leaves of the beech, the hedge behind it still hardly changed. Can spring be far behind?
This world belongs to the gulls, waders, ducks and herons, and perhaps to the birdwatchers and the wader-shod man who disappeared into the wreck with his spaniel.
Will Turnstone 