26 October: Dig the whole day through.

Mrs T and I went to Richborough Roman Fort this morning, a few miles from Canterbury. There are high walls still above ground but much more remains underground. We had booked a tour to the excavations, along with several other adults and children. It’s one of those places where the sea has retreated. In Roman times it was an island, linked by a causeway to the mainland, famous for oysters. The former sea is now farmland, the sea a good 2 miles away. All change!

The tour was most interesting, led by people who knew their subject and could speak to the non-expert. At various times between 43 AD and the great Roman retreat, the place was a garrison and a trading port and there is a sizable town under the earth. The bit that was being excavated had been identified as an amphitheatre in Tudor times, but this was the first modern dig after a local surveyor had a peek in 1850 or so. His plan did not fit the one the technology found from drone flights, till the scientists allowed for the shift in magnetic North, which aligned the two plans exactly.

What we could see was of course trenches cut through the soil, but one of them included a section of the wall of the bullring, which was painted: only 17 others have been identified throughout the Empire. Experts are coming down to have a close look and try to interpret the painting, meanwhile the young archaeologists, and a couple of elderly ones, were still digging and cleaning the painting with smokers’ stiff toothbrushes. A nail brush would be too hard.

There was also a wall of what had been thought to be an entrance to the building but turned out to be the holding area for the beasts. Grooves for the hurdles to keep them apart. A few yards away, a complete cat’s skeleton was found, bagged up for analysis, and nicknamed Bagpuss. Coins, pottery, jewellery; there are many finds to be examined and recorded.

And now the archaeologists have to hurry as the farmer wants his land back in the middle of next month. The walls will be covered up again, but carefully, to ensure the safety of the relics for possibly a few hundred more years and to leave the surface safe and sound for cattle to graze over.

It was a privilege to see this amphitheatre; no photographs allowed at the dig, so no photographs in the blog either. The view above shows part of the remaining Roman fort.

From a walk near Chilham

Chilham is a village near Canterbury, a good place to start a country walk as once you leave the village you are on quiet roads, then climb up a chalk track which is much less muddy than other paths. Here is a clutch of pictures from one spot near the village.

The first picture shows a brick wall and part of the railing above it. Note the date on the brick. This was put here to proclaim the remodelling of the garden by Capability Brown and Thomas Heron. I think that’s a partly eroded ‘B’ before the date. The garden belongs to the Castle, seen here from between two railings. Grey geese rather than Canada out on the water. The railings allow the owners to show off their landscape without being over-run by visitors: you could imagine a carriage being driven slowly past here and polite admiration expressed; but no-one was getting in there uninvited!

Just a couple of metres away were these magnificent hazel catkins.

It was good to see young saplings, as in the left foreground, planted to replace old trees dying off; good to see the snowdrops behind the trees and elsewhere on our walk.

A few hundred metres away part of one fallen tree had been given a new life as a hippo.

A fierce hippo as it happens. A good number of the trees in the background look as though they might have been planted after the hurricane of 1987 when many were lost across Kent. That was fierce. Our Sunday walk was peaceful apart from the noise of scrambler bikes on another track through the woods; and so home to tea by the fire.

A murky day in Manchester

It was a murky day in Manchester last winter when I met this column of men from the Great War. The sculpture is based on John Singer Sargent’s painting in the Imperial War Museum, ‘Gassed’. He had been to the front line, though he was in his eighties, and seen the men, British and American, suffering blindness after a mustard gas attack.

They are led by a medical orderly; there is a skill to leading such a group: observing the terrain, being alert for mud, ruts, obstacles, exaggerated dropping of the left or right shoulder to lead the men to turn. There are many ways to love your fellow man: the column of men support each other in what the sculptor, Johanna DomkeGuyot calls ‘Victory Over Blindness’.

Her sculpture, loves her fellow human beings: honouring the dead but challenging the living through portraying the gritty, grimy reality of unmedalled, unsought heroism. It is a bold but totally right decision to plant the men at ground level, not way over our heads, like the man on the Manchester cenotaph; an image that all but says, dulce et decorum est – how sweet and right it is to die for one’s country.

Let us not forget that the victims of war, soldiers or civilians, are men, women and children like us and ours; that cruel things have been done in our name as well as against us. Let us do all we can to bring about peace and reconciliation between nations and peoples, and within our own communities.

Lord grant us peace.

DULCE ET DECORUM EST

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots  
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud 
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest  
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Wilfred Owen

 

 

The Art of the City

smart

As part of the Canterbury Festival, much pruned down this year, L’Arche Kent and others have produced an art trail or pilgrimage across the city. I’ve captured a few of the pictures, but the some of the photos are beset with reflections; if I’d used the flash it would have bounced off the windows, hiding the pictures, so here the windows are, mostly taken on a wet day.

Are we inside looking out, or outside looking in? The reflection makes a different picture to what the artists intended!

More from L’Arche Kent’s Rainbow artists, and in the next picture.

Support for the National Health Service staff with the rainbows here.

A window with a message, linked to the next, which showcases some recycled clothes. I saw the artist assembling this exhibit; he seemed to be enjoying herself and doubtless enjoyed the making of the party outfits. The arch is a ghost image from across the street.

People’s experience of being locked down. Have a good read!

Catching Lives is a local organisation for people who are homeless.

Finally the front window of L’Arche Kent itself at the Saint Radigund’s Street Office! A show of talent.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this little autumn pilgrimage across Canterbury. Do keep L’Arche, Catching Lives and all struggling artists in your prayers.

A walk around Fredville and Barfrestone.

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On the occasion of our Ruby Wedding, Mrs Turnstone and I took a walk around the country park belonging to Fredville House. This is still working farmland, but the trees have been planted over the last 300 years and more to create a pleasing classical landscape. Our walk took us through the park and back in by one of the gatekeeper’s lodges, then returning to the park and out by another lodge. We were now in Frogham with its redbrick cottages, but we pressed on, past the tree nursery and along a short stretch of the North Downs Way, noting the new, far from lowly cattle shed and into the village of Barfrestone. We caught a glimpse through the hedge of the house where we met, the Old Rectory, then visited the graves of L’Arche friends, and into the old churchyard, admiring one stone in particular, noticing the gardener and St Thomas over the door of the ancient church of Saint Nicholas. After a picnic on the grass, one last look at the rectory, and home to Canterbury.

Going viral XX: Passion flowers of hope.

around during lockdown, we came to Saint Stephen’s church. Many years ago we came here regularly for Roman Catholic Mass. Today the church, like all churches, is closed, but not the churchyard. We found one stone with a passionflower, bottom centre of the disc, amid roses, a morning glory (?) and others that must have meant something to the bereaved husband. There are oak leaves and acorns in the triangular panels below the disc.

This verse is my best reading of the damaged inscription. It speaks of hope.

A happy world, a glorious place
Where all who are forgiven
Shall find their loved and best beloved
And hearts like meeting streams that flow
For everyone in heaven.

That speaks of hope.

Going viral XVIII: an unprecedented opportunity to create some new ‘normals’.

Gwen Riley Jones is a computer imaging member of the John Rylands library staff. Since the team cannot get into the library, they are working from home, imagining rather than just imaging. William Blake would approve.

Enjoy the walk!

Going Viral IX: This is the place

Saint Michael and All Angels, Harbledown, Kent. 5.4.20

We have a right to a sacrosanct place set aside for encountering God … Jesus teaches that we must ensure that the temple is always conducive to prayer – silent, reverent, empty of all other kinds of pursuits. We need this place – perhaps much more than we realise. And Jesus defends this need. He is IN this place. This is the place where Jesus can be found.

Sister Johanna Caton, OSB: ‘Hanging On’, in Agnellus Mirror this morning. Sister is a member of Minster Abbey and writes poetry and prose for the Agnellus Mirror blog.

Mrs Turnstone and I walked past St Michael’s yesterday on our daily constitutional.

Mediæval Monsters

Once Henry VIII let the forces of destruction loose on the churches of England all manner of beauties were lost to hammer blows. Think of Thomas Becket’s shrine in Canterbury, but also spare a thought for the many little splendours that were smashed by self-righteous iconoclasts.

These fellows are no manner of beauty at all, but they avoided the storm, perhaps because they are out of the way. Even the tympanum – the semi-circular composition over the door – survived, though a similar one at nearby Patrixbourne did not escape. The figures around the edge provided designs for mosaics when L’Arche was based here in Barfrestone: my favourite was the gardener at the top, but the mermaid, just below Christ’s knee, was also popular. But we gave Archbishop Coggan a mosaic in green and mustardy gold, based on the happy, lower right-hand monster above.

Christmas Greetings

Here are the Shepherds greeting the Infant Jesus, and the dog came too.

Many blessings to all our readers this Christmas, and a peaceful and prosperous 2020.

The window is from Switzerland, but in the unlikely spot of St Mary’s church, Patrixbourne, Kent.