Time, Art and A White Witch

So I didn't post for three weeks or so and then four weeks. And when it got about eight weeks I started feeling that was far too long a time to be away.  And now, it's getting on for five months, and, well, I'm not sure I remember what blogging feels like any more! But of course the best way to re-start blogging is to just do it. So I won't even try to catch up with my life since my last post in May, and I'll tell you instead about a trip we took out into Surrey a few days ago. 

Surrey's a county just south of London, and parts of it still feel surprisingly rural, even though it's incredibly different to how it was 100 years ago. Or 115 years, to be precise..... because, on a visit to Hungerford, Berkshire, we visited my favourite second hand bookshop, which is in The Hungerford Arcade.  There, I picked up a book written in 1906, simply titled "SURREY."  

It has many pretty watercolour plates of Surrey as it was then. 

 

And when T. looked at the pictures there were lots of places he liked the look of, and we thought how nice it would be to go and visit them. Some, like Betchworth, (above) are recognisable today on Street View, although gardens are tidier now, and the  roads are metalled and have parked cars, instead of chickens roaming about in the dust like in 1905. And of course those picturesque cottages would have been damp and uncomfortable by modern standards... and also it seemed a bit as if we were trying to turn the clock back to 100 years ago. But still, we got in the car and off we went, glad that we weren't in 1905 for the travelling, at any rate.  

The picture that had particularly caught T's eye was of Waverley Abbey, in the valley of the River Mole....shown here as a most picturesque ruin draped in ivy, sitting in the parkland of Waverley House mansion, so the text said.

 

We knew it wouldn't be draped with creeper now - it looks wonderful but wrecks the old buildings it grows on eventually.  And there was an overall rosy aspect to the watercolours which made us suspect that the artist, Mr Sutton Palmer, might have had his rose tinted specs on. 

Waverley is still very rural, so we parked nearby and walked about ten minutes down a footpath into what was obviously part of the grounds of Waverley House, which still stood across the River Wey to our right...  

Waverley Abbey was a surprisingly large selection of ruins and fragments to our left.

 The building shown in the old watercolour is visible towards the right, and we found that it led into a large vaulted hall which mostly still survives. We found that it had lost its apex since 1905, and the right hand top window had broken still more - so that creeper had obviously done its wicked work.   

We noticed that a system of fortifications had been built at the edges of the abbey site, one of a whole chain across the South of England in anticipation of a Nazi invasion in 1941. They are now swallowed in vegetation, with the tank tank traps (below) now attractively covered in green moss, 

and a large gun emplacement now a wildlife haven but originally intended to make the whole area a battleground. 

A great big gun banging away in their direction would have been the end of the abbey ruins, for sure, but luckily, as we know, that invasion never happened.  

Founded in the 12th century, Waverley Abbey was every bit as imposing as the largest of cathedrals. However, in around 1540, the king of England decided that neither Waverley, nor any other English abbeys, were OK with him.  He didn't see why others should be controlling all that cash when he could have it. He was also sure the people of England wanted an English religion.  By happy coincidence that would also allow him to divorce his wife, who he was very fed up with, since he had his eye on another one.  

So he closed down all the abbeys, kicked out the monks (and the poor and sick who they had looked after) grabbed the money, divorced the wife and converted the country to an English religion with him at the head.  Unfortunately "Good King Hal" as King Henry VIII was known by his fans, went down in history as loveable rogue.  But he established the Church of England and changed the course of history, whether for good or bad we will never know. 

Returning to the car, we spotted a footpath sign about 100 yards down the road. It was still a couple of hours until sunset, so we decided to stroll down the path, which was heavily wooded and overlooked a river to the left and rose up to the right to a small cliff.  We soon passed a wrought iron gate set into the rocks. It led into a cave, padlocked shut.   Outside it, a small sign announced that this was Mother Ludlam's Cave.   

A sign explained that Mother Ludlam was a white witch who lived in the cave in medieval times, and helped the poor by lending them things they needed. It seemed that the poor had to return the borrowed items after two days. One day someone from Waverley Abbey borrowed a cauldron and didn't give it back.  In fact, she flew into such a rage that the thief took sanctuary in the nearest church, which apparently still has the cauldron.  A witch's cauldron is a funny sort of thing for a church to own, so I expect the story has gained a bit in the telling over hundreds of years.  I hope to visit the church and investigate next time I'm in the area - if Mr. A.R. Hope Moncrieff book is to be believed, there's plenty more to see. 

 You could see into the cave easily.  I'm sure it's changed a lot and was probably cosier in 1400, but it certainly had a handy water supply.  

The book has plenty more suggestions of what to see in Surrey so we are looking forward to exploring more.  

We've been getting out on the bike as often as possible too, but I didn't feel energetic the other day and T. took a cycle ride across the top of London through Highgate Woods, along what was once a railway line. There, he came across a man painting something very, very small on the edge of what had once been a disused railway platform. 

He didn't mind being interrupted, and was very friendly. He is called Ben Wilson and he works as an artist. One of his projects is to paint bits of discarded chewing gum. He hates litter and decided that one thing you could do with it was make art with it.  Painting chewing gum needed no gallery, permission or license, since he was not littering himself, but only improving stuff which had already been discarded. 

He was a cheerful man and told T. he began as a sculptor, but has moved more towards the miniature chewing gum paintings in recent years. It can take him a long time to create a picture. To start with, he uses a blow torch to heat the gum and then paints it with three coats of enamel, and finishes it off with lacquer.  T. didn't get a picture of the picture he was painting here, but I found an image on the internet and here it is.  

(Photograph: Ben Wilson)

Ben told T that he makes little "trails" of tiny pictures, so our next project is to seek them out now we have an idea where they are.

We've been spending a lot of this lockdown time walking around Hampstead Heath and getting to know it really well. We literally have not got bored with it at all in all these months.  The other week I spotted some bits of - well,  "found art"  I guess you'd say, in one of the more remote corners of the Heath. First I saw a Dame (Queen) of Spades and thought she must be French - she looks so glamorous.  

But then I found the Jack of Spades, and decided the cards must be German, because the Jack (or Knave) is called the Bube.  

 There was no trace of the König (King) of Spades nor of any of the other cards in the court, and it looked almost as if the virile young Jack and the pretty young Queen had eloped together. This would explain why they were so far from home, in these shadowy evening woods above London, alone beneath the swaying trees. I left them undisturbed, and I hope their story worked out well! 

I've decided to take a 5 day course at the Royal Drawing School.  The subject is Interior and Exterior Space.  I'm hoping I'll learn a bit about drawing interiors from my imagination. But the funny thing is that I'm getting more and more interested in looking at nature, particularly nature on a tiny scale. The closer you zoom into nature, the more detail you see and the more amazing beautiful and harmonious it all is.  

In my semi-lockdown walks, I've been  photographing ordinary looking bits of grassland, woodland floor, patches of wild flowers and so on.  This typical shot shows leaves, dead grass and small bracken plants. It is pretty but walking around a wood you might not even notice it underfoot.  

 I play around with the resulting images in Photoshop with the aim of forgetting about what the things in the picture actually are, and only looking at the forms and shapes and way they are put together. 

Here is the image above, rotated 90 degrees,  and converting into a negative.   

The images I get may be partly or totally abstract, but they seem to me to show the incredible complexity, energy, and movement of Nature.  I feel I can pin any ideas I want on these images. The one below seems almost violent to me, reminding me of some kind of alien creature bursting out of  a torrent or flood.   Really, it's a group of toadstools quietly growing on a log, with bits of horse chestnut case scattered about.  

The picture below was not altered at all. It's just a patch of bracken, and looks as if it was waving in the wind, except that it was standing perfectly still. 

 I am not sure I'll be as interested in the man made interiors when I start my course, but I'm looking forward to it anyway as it is something different from what I have ever done.

I have been visiting all your blogs during the last few months, though not always commenting, and will continue to do that. Thanks for being there, and hope you are enjoying your autumn!