Cotswold dry stone walls

An especially pretty example of the stone walls common in the Cotswolds. They're built with no mortar, just stacking layer upon layer of flat stones horizontally, and finishing with a layer of vertical coping stones to help hold it together.

Repurposing

I love this—the traditional red phone boxes are mostly gone now, just like pay phones in the U.S., but many of them have been repurposed into mini-libraries, or, like this one, a defibrillator in case of emergency.

An animal distraction

Fortunately there was a pair of donkeys in the field next to the ruins or I might have taken another hundred pictures of archways.

Arches

More Minster Lovell Hall

Minster Lovell Hall

This was our last stop on the Cotswolds tour. After a long day of quaint cottages and village streets, who wouldn't enjoy a good ruin?

The hall was built by William, Baron Lovell, in the 1430's. Unfortunately it didn't remain in the family for long; William's grandson Francis was a supporter of Richard III and after Richard's defeat at Bosworth, the property was seized by the Crown. It was abandoned and dismantled for building stone in the 1700's, and has been a ruin ever since.

Saturday reflections

From the day in the Cotswolds: houses by the water in a village called Lower Slaughter, a name straight out of Agatha Christie.

Here's a flower

For someone who lives in an uber-urban environment, without access to a yard, being able to wander through the gardens in the early morning was wonderful. Going to Central Park, much as I love it, isn't quite the same thing when you have to schlep there and back.

While I am on the subject of flowers, I do want to brag that I have an orchid, given to me by a student almost a year ago, and IT'S STILL ALIVE. I have no idea how I have managed this, but it feels like quite the accomplishment.

I wish I could have bottled the smell here

 

This path runs along the side of the garden opposite the city wall. It leads to the back gate, and the T.S. Eliot Theatre where we had lectures and various orientations (T.S. Eliot was indeed a Fellow at Merton, but he hated Oxford, spent all his time in London, and quit after one year. But I suppose if you can brag about a connection to a Nobel Laureate you do.)

The scent of flowers was so strong at the end of this path that sometimes I would just stop and close my eyes and breathe it in.

Evening in the Fellows Garden

Most of the garden is actually a huge lawn—this picture shows maybe a third of it—with a few trees, and beds of flowers on the perimeters. The walkway by the city wall (where the J.R.R. Tolkien table is) has beds of lavender that you can smell on the other side of the garden.

From one college to another

The south side of Merton—this is the view you get approaching the college through the Christ Church grounds. The path between the field and the wall is called Dead Man's Walk, and is reportedly haunted by a Royalist soldier who was executed there during the English Civil War. The wall contains part of the original Oxford city wall, and the section on the right hand side of the picture encloses the Fellows Garden.

Gardens at Merton

In addition to the Fellows Garden, there are several smaller garden spots at Merton, with benches and trees and flowers. During the term, there is probably not a lot of solitude to be found there—the grounds aren't nearly as extensive as, say, Christ Church. But I spent time sitting on all of these benches, and never had to share.

The garden on the right was my favorite; it's hidden behind a hedge and has apple and pear trees. It's conveniently close to the laundry room and was a nice place to read and wait for the wash cycle to finish.

Back to gardens

I've been busy the past couple of days, but will be finishing up with Merton's gardens this week. In the meantime, here's one of my morning walk flowers.

My rooms

Two more pictures, taken on an afternoon when I probably should have been doing something else. (That window seat was fortunately not that comfortable, or I might have wasted even more time just sitting there looking out at the quad.)

Mysteries of Mob Quad

At first glance, this picture probably looks like something you get when you press the shutter by accident. But I took it on purpose, standing outside my room in Mob Quad, looking down the stairs at the door that leads out to the quad.

But it's the other door that interests me, the one in the wall over the staircase. Like, what the hell?

I never found anyone I could ask about why that door is there. The doorknob looks modern, so I am assuming that it is—somehow—used for something. The best theory I can come up with is that they have some kind of ramp they can extend from the door to the top of the stairs where I was standing and use that to move furniture or maybe trolleys of books for the library. Or just hoist them up with a rope. (Mob Quad buildings do not of course have elevators.)

(While I'm on the subject of Mob Quad, I must admit that every time I talk or write about it, the theme from the TV show The Mod Squad starts playing in my head.)

Magpie Lane

Posting a few odds and ends until I have time to process the next batch of pictures.

This charmingly named street leads from the High Street to Merton, so I usually walked it at least twice a day, avoiding those cobblestones whenever possible.

That's not possible on the street that runs in front of the college, which is still all cobblestones, no asphalt. Fortunately there are sidewalks.

Sunday bird blogging

A pair of crows in the Fellows Quad at Merton.

Saturday reflections

Here's some extreme color after all that black and white: a store window on Cornmarket Street in Oxford.

Finishing off in color

Finally, here are a couple of pictures in color, so you can see how green the cemetery is. The sections that are still overgrown are positively jungly.

Write your own adventure

I love the way this photo seems to inspire a story. Who are these men? Why are they meeting in a crypt? What is the man on the left carrying?

(Spoiler alert: It's a bag lunch, courtesy of the kitchen crew at Merton.)

The residents

Coffins in the catacombs, in the light from the guide's flashlight.

The Terrace Catacombs

The view of the city from the terrace outside the church in Highgate made it one of the most popular places to see and be seen in Victorian London. Underneath that terrace though are some truly creepy catacombs, which can only be visited with a guide—who locks the gate behind you before the tour begins. (Not sinister at all!)

There are a few skylights, and windows at either end of the 320 foot passage, but most of it is actually darker than it appears in this photo.

Two angels

The Rossettis

This is the grave of the poet Christina Rossetti and most of her family, who were apparently just stacked on top of each other.

Missing is Christina's brother, the Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who had reportedly insisted that he not be buried in Highgate; he is instead buried in Kent, where he died in 1882. His wife, Elizabeth Siddal, who died twenty years earlier after only two years of marriage, is buried with the family though, and that may be one reason he didn't want to be buried there.

Lizzie Siddal was model and muse to several of the Pre-Raphaelites (most famously posing as Ophelia for Millais—taking laudanum for the pneumonia she caught after posing in a bathtub full of cold water for hours may have started the addiction that eventually cost her her life.)

She was a poet and painter in her own right, and though she was probably less talented than her husband, and certainly less accomplished, honestly I find her much more interesting as a person. It will probably not come as a surprise to learn that he treated her badly—he was chronically unfaithful, and the Rossetti family's disapproval of her working class background kept him from marrying her, although they first became engaged ten years before they actually married. By then her health had deteriorated to the point that she had to be carried to the church. She became pregnant, but the child was stillborn. During a subsequent pregnancy she died from an overdose of laudanum, though whether it was an accident or suicide isn't clear.

After her death, Rossetti was so consumed with grief that he refused to let her coffin leave the apartment for six days, and he enclosed the only copy of a manuscript of his poems in the casket, wrapped in her long red hair.

This is where the story takes a macabre turn. By 1869, seven years after her death, Rossetti became convinced he was losing his eyesight, and wanted to focus on his poetry rather than painting. The problem was that the poems he considered the best he'd ever written were buried with Lizzie in Highgate. His business manager, Charles Augustus Howell, arranged for a secret exhumation. The book was retrieved, and Howell reported to Rossetti—who wasn't there—that Lizzie was perfectly preserved, and that her red hair had continued to grow and now filled the coffin. Howell almost certainly made all of that up in an attempt to ease Rossetti's guilt, but Lizzie received some poetic justice—literally. The poems were published, along with newer work, to a scathingly negative critical reception. Rossetti regretted having agreed to the exhumation for the rest of his life (as well he should) and the man who facilitated it for him, Howell, ended up dying with his throat cut in a Chelsea pub.

These are some lines from the last poem Siddal wrote:

Life and night are falling from me,
Death and day are opening on me,
Wherever my footsteps come and go,
Life is a stony way of woe.
Lord have I long to go?

Hallow hearts are ever near me,
Soulless eyes have ceased to cheer me:
Lord, may I come to thee?

Life and youth and summer weather
To my heart no joy can gather.
Lord lift me from life’s stony way!
Loved eyes long close in death watch for me:
Holy death is waiting for me –
Lord, may I come to-day?

Circle of Lebanon

This ring of vaults is at the other side of the Egyptian Avenue. There used to be an ancient cedar tree inside the inner circle but it had to be cut down several years ago.

The Egyptian Avenue

This walkway has eight vaults on each side, and the entrance design was inspired by the Victorian passion for Egyptology. Apart from the lotus columns and two crumbling obelisks nearby it doesn't look particularly Egyptian to me, but the Victorians certainly got the references.

The trees are so thick overhead that the avenue feels more like a tunnel, and it actually did used to have a roof. Apparently the resulting gloominess discouraged sales so it was removed, but the trees are doing their best to act as a replacement.

Compare and contrast

One of the sections of well-maintained graves and monuments, and a jumble of headstones under the trees.

The pelican memorial

One more filtered image: the grave of Baroness Elizabeth de Munck, who died in 1841. The carving on the stone shows a pelican feeding her chicks with her own blood, a common heraldic device, and was probably commissioned by the Baroness's daughter, Maria, who was a well-known opera singer.

Highgate Cemetery

This cemetery in North London was one of our field trip destinations. In the early nineteenth century, London was running out of room to bury its dead, so seven cemeteries were built on what were then the outskirts of the city. Highgate is the most famous; it's the final resting place for both George Eliot and George Michael, along with Karl Marx, Michael Faraday, Christina Rossetti, and many rich, poor, and in between residents of the city whose names are remembered only by those who loved them.

As the cemetery filled up, profits went down and by the 1930's large sections were abandoned and overgrown. Restoration work has been ongoing since the 1970's, but in between the grand Victorian monuments there are sections where plain tombstones whose weathered names and dates can no longer be read lean into each other for support in the middle of thick foliage.

It was appropriately drizzly for most of our visit—gray skies, gray stone, which made the vivid greens of the grasses and trees almost otherworldly. So I redid many of the photos I took in black and white, or with filters that made them look old and faded. I'm happy with how they turned out, and that's not something my stubborn perfectionism lets me say very often.

Definitely not stodgy

This was one of the Taylor Swift exhibits scattered throughout the museum: the sweater and piano from the video for Cardigan. That album is one of the things that kept me sane during the pandemic, so it was fun to see this, and I especially enjoyed its placement in a room crammed full of paintings by Constable and Reynolds that could be considered a wee bit, yes, stodgy.

The books

A closer look at two of the books: an almanac and a Bible. (That's my enormous thumb holding the Bible open.)

Miniature books

Every Monday one of the museum staff gives a talk on one of the items in the collection. The talk takes place in the library, yet another beautiful reading room. The day I was there, the talk was on miniature books, including what is supposedly the smallest book in the world.

Except for that book, which was encased in a kind of petri dish and not really visible without a microscope, we could actually touch and look through the books the librarian was discussing.

The garden at the V&A

I never really liked the V&A very much; I thought it was a stodgy building full of stodgy paintings.

So I hadn't been there in decades. But several of the Merton classes with an art or history focus had done field trips there, and it sounded more interesting than I remembered.

I was not wrong about the stodginess—I will never not find an enormous gallery full of silver bowls and candiesticks the art museum equivalent of Ambien. But the non-English art is more extensive than I expected, and there was some interesting photography, and a series of exhibits scattered through the museum of costumes worn by—Taylor Swift! So I actually had fun there. And the cafe under the grand portico on the left sold a variety of snacks and cold drinks to be enjoyed around the pool in the central courtyard. (Which is not exactly much of a garden, though that's what they call it.)

Speaking of bricks

Some of the buildings I passed walking through Chelsea on my way to the V&A.