Countryside Jobs Service...

Hhmmmm...

Countryside Jobs Service Distance Learning...

Hhhmmm again...

It happens now and then that I wake up in the morning and there is a little quiet nagging voice that says, "Go count the puffins."

On those days it is best that I go for a walk in the fields.



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So. Much. Tweed!

The London Tweed Run: what England is supposed to be like.



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Off tomorrow

home to England for a bit, thanks to the kind intervention of a friend.

Some family-oriented R&R and long wet country walks, as well as a full sweep of all the Chester charity shops.

And black pudding!

Oooooo!



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I do so miss my little house

as who would not?

So tiny, it only fit me and the cat, and Uncle Mike had to stoop nearly double to get through the kitchen door built for hobbits.

I remember, when we were still redoing the kitchen, and I hadn't even finished peeling the 100 years worth of lino up off the old sandstone tiles, I lit my first coal fire in the grate, put my feet up and thought, "I hope this never ends".



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Nature Girl

This is an old post from a previous life. I lived in Cheshire once, and was fairly civilised. Went stomping around the footpaths in my tweed skirt and wellies, collected oak branches from the fields for the fire. Ate blackberry jam I made from berries picked off the hedgerows.

Tell me again why I am here in this weird, desolate place. I've forgotten.

In April 2008, I determined to walk to Maiden Castle, an Iron Age hill fort in the neighbourhood. I got all the way to the end of the Sandstone Ridge, saw many wonderful things and didn't get to the castle in time to find it before it was too dark and I had to go home.

Part II

From the entrance to the Bolesworth Estate, the road goes ever on and on...

and up.


Lesser Celandine hide in the grass and nettles in the verge, like sparkles on water.


My mum used to say that you can tell the moment when spring really starts. For weeks the dark brown bulbs of chestnut buds have been forming and growing. Then one morning, they leaves have all flopped down and it has begun.

Jews ear fungus. Edible, I discovered, and I think popular in the Far East where it is sold dried.


Sat on a stump at the top of the hill behind the Bolesworth Estate, looking back whence I had come. You can make out Tattenhall in the distance, but more important, the weather catching up to me. The hills in the far distance are Wales.


...and up and up...

The woodsy bits at the top of the hill are the crest of the Sandstone Ridge. A morraine of rock and rubble pushed up by the thousand foot-high ice sheets that once covered the Cheshire plain. (No photo of latter, sorry). The ice is responsible for much of the shape of the terrain here and for the type of things that can be grown. It picked up boulders and rocks from miles away in Cumbria and Scotland and left them desposited all over. Some of them are local landmarks and some, it is said, were the site of pre-Christian ritual sacrifices. The ice also carried with it lots of smaller bits of rubble that its great weight ground down to a very fine powder which was deposited all over the plain. This formed a clay that still prevents drainage, which is why the fields are often flooded and where the meres and pools come from.

Oak wasp galls.


Very unusual to find farm buildings of wood here. Almost all the farm outbuildings are solid brick or sandstone. The feeling it gives is one of great permanence and dignity, something I always found lacking in Canadian rural areas, other than Quebec. These people have lived here a very long time and clearly intend to remain another thousand years or so.

A case in point. This little barn was clearly expanded at least twice. You can see the places where the newer brickwork was added to the older building in two stages.

Being chased by the weather as I climb higher up above the plain. Gorse bushes always remind me of the Winnie the Pooh story where Bear tries to get to a honey bee nest with the help of a balloon lent to him by Christopher Robin. The plan failed when Bear found that, although he could see the bees and smell the honey, the necessity of holding onto the string meant that he could not reach it. The problem of how to get down became serious. Christopher Robin was, sadly, forced to shoot the balloon, which deposited the hapless Bear into a Gorse bush.

We have to go up there?!

Yes. But not before we get a pint.

Some of the farms on the way to Burwardsley.

Other walkers, complete with all the Walker Geek Gear, looked decidedly long-nosed at me in my sturdy tweed skirt and wellies. I let them get well ahead before I started talking to myself again.

It seemed like miles and miles. One of the things about walking everywhere is that it gives one a deep appreciation of the seriousness of the land. In a car, one just whips past it, careless and unheeding like Toad in his automobile. Walking forces one to take seriously the distances and matters like food and water, tired feet and hills to climb.


Burwardsley cottages.

Everyone was out digging the gardens.

Many cottages have brightly painted doors. Often this particular shade of blue or bright red. And don't you love the name?!

Daffs are everywhere.

I fell instantly in love with this cottage. The chap who lives there sold me ten bags of fire logs at 50p per bag less than I was paying. Delivered the next day.

The last stretch of the hill before gaining the top of the ridge. But not yet. Onwards, to the Pheasant!


The seething core of metropolitan Burwardsley. The shop was closed (Sunday), but it had a lot of useful and interesting notices and a nice bench to sit on for a rest.

This little cottage, just before the Pheasant, was once a Methodist chapel. So many of these are now converted into flats or cottages, one wonders if there are any Methodists left. The one in Tattenhall has been changed into very uncomfortable looking flats and it makes me sad when I remember that it was once host to the great John Wesley himself who preached in the village in the late 1700s.

1843

The Pheasant at last. My mum's favourite pub in all Ynglonde.

The walker's reward. I ate my tongue sandwich, cheese and sausage rolls, but it was too cold and windy to stay on the patio. I moved inside where the pub was full.

The next stile is the entrance to the Sandstone ridge and the beginning of stage two.

Oh poor, lovely England!

It makes you weep.

I actually rather approve of the Wesleys, and wish that the Methodist thing had had more traction in the Anglican Church. I think things would have gone better in the long run had the Anglos taken the Wesleyan thing on board. Which would have meant that things would have gone better for England in general.

The part of Cheshire my family is from has lots of Methodist chapels and Methodism was quite a force up there among the labouring classes. In fact, my Mum and Uncle Mike were both baptised and raised Methodist, and I think it did a lot towards making them both the deeply kindly and essentially true-hearted and innocent people they grew up to be.

Tattenhall, of blessed memory, has a large and very beautiful Methodist chapel on the High Street that has a plaque on the front saying that John Wesley himself once preached there. In the year I lived there, it was converted into an expensive semi-detatched. I peeked in the windows and the person who lives there seems quite posh, as one might expect in that part of Cheshire. Furniture very modern.

Poor, poor England.






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Why England is better than Italy

Well, it's not full of foreigners, to start with.

But this is the really big one.

Chester:

High 18°C

Low 10°C,

Current 15.9°C

Conditions Cloudy, Recent showers



Santa Marinella:

High 33°C

Low 22°C

Current 31.0°C

Conditions

The right way

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What did you have for breakfast today, Hilary?

Fried tomato, three slices of good English bacon, two eggs on toast and a nice little slice of black pudding.

Oh YES!



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Visit to England I

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Went shopping in Chester, almost as my feet touched the ground. The charity shops are going to have to restock before I hit them again later this week. I feel like the Visigoths must have felt on arriving in Rome.


Auntie Gill at a tea shop on the first shopping day. All tuckered out and ready for a little sit-down.


Proper tea with scones and clotted cream, for €30 £5.


Uncle Mike, driving me to Crewe this morning to catch the train to Birmingham to go see an old friend who's staying at the B. Oratory.


Fr. Dan Utrecht in front of the sign that says that J.R.R. Tolkein lived in this house. Down the road a bit from the Oratory. He showed me the book he's working on about the Lion of Munster, Blessed Clemens August Graf von Galen, a Catholic hero of WWII who needs to be more famous in the English speaking world. Fr. Dan made me a fan.


Caught me with my eyes closed. And looking a little bedraggled after getting rained on. Ooooohhh. Lovely lovely English rain! How I have missed you so!


Sorry about the poor light, but this is the famous turn in the refectory at the Birmingham oratory into which the Tolkein brothers used to place the community cat, as well as each other occasionally.


St. Philip, whose fault it all is.


Newman's relics, in their chapel in the Oratory church.


More to come...



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A Seemlie Feast

From reading Lark Rise to Candleford, it became clear that bacon, and pig products in general, were the main staple of the English peasant class. Examination of the early laws of England, back to the time of Alfred and before, show that the family pig was the most important food item for the whole year and the loss of or injury to a pig was a serious matter. In later, post-Catholic England, when the Church no longer had the power or the will to care for the poor, the peasant classes lived very close to the edge of disaster and the difference between subsistence and the workhouse for the whole family could be decided by the fate of the pig.

One thing that LR. to C makes abundantly clear is that the Protestantisation of England, followed by the Enclosures that so coloured the post-Catholic economy and social system, was devastating to the landless peasants. The feudal system of which the Church had been so much a part, certainly allowed for many abuses, but it is a Victorian/Protestant myth that the peasants under that system starved or lived in misery. A scurrilous lie, in fact.

The importance of bacon in the peasant diet is demonstrated by the large section in the book Good Things in England showing a few of the many ways English housewives prepared it for their husbands and sons who worked in the fields and took it with them for their lunch.

[Remembering of course that English people have two kinds of bacon; regular bacon and “streaky” bacon. Their streaky bacon is about the same as N. American bacon you buy in those flat plastic packages. But eaten much more regularly is what we N. Americans might call “English bacon”, slabs of yummy cured pork with very little fat in pieces about four mm thick and the size of the palm of your hand. This might be substituted with “back bacon” in Canada, which is (oddly) called “Canadian bacon” in the US.]

More from the very charming Good Things in England:

Yorkshire way of cooking bacon:
Mr. A. Dupuis Brown writes:

‘Recollections of my boyhood in Yorkshire remind me of the method of cooking the breakfast bacon, which was always roasted in an oblong tin dish suspended by hooks from one of the bars of the open fire range. It was not fried.’

Another bacon method:

If you have any cold cooked bacon, you may make a very nice dish of it by cutting it into slices about ¼ inch thick. Grate some crusts of bread and powder the rashers well with it on both sides. Toast them in front of the fire (or under electric grill). They will be browned on one side in about three minutes. Turn them and do the other.

While cooking bacon by frying was not recommended, it describes the frying pan that is quite different from our modern ones.

“Good frying is in fact boiling in fat, and the frying pan should be perfectly flat with a thick bottom, 12 inches long, 9 inches broad, with perpendicular sides and must be half-filled with fat.”

I have seen these pans for sale in Italy where many old domestic customs survive from earlier times (you should see the ladies out on washing day at their outdoor sinks scrubbing their husbands’ shirts with a soap stick). The pans referred to in the book would, of course, be cast iron.

It also describes a “Double Hanging Grid”:

“Wherever there was an open range with bars, sprats [a kind of fish like a sardine], bloaters, fresh herrings, dried or finnan-haddock, as well as sausages, kidney and bacon, chops etc., were all beautifully and easily cooked between the wires of a double grid which possessed a tin tray underneath to gather the ‘drips,’ and hooks on top to attach to the bars. There were hooks on both sides and a handle on top by which the contraption could be easily turned completely round when one side was sufficiently cooked; the double grid was kept together and the food kept in its place by means of a strong, wire band which was fixed on the handle side and slipped over the other.”

The book adds a NB:

“This is worth mentioning because it required less attention and gave better results than a frying pan, and we are apt to think the 20th century takes the palm for labour-saving! It is also worth noting because a correspondent writes, ‘my mother used to say ‘good cooking in England went out when closed kitchen ranges and stoves were introduced and generally adopted’.”

Homesick

Just been wasting a bunch of time looking at old blog posts I wrote in England


I miss my little house.


And I miss the fam.

and yes, quite honestly,


I miss the food too.

The Weather,

or "Another thing I miss about England":

The sense of self-deprecating humour.





and Anglicans

or at least, their stuff.

Ahhh, Anglican chant.

I've been listening to the BBC's Choral Evensong tonight.

As a friend once said, "So it is written: We will bring them back in wearing chains, and their stuff we will have in carts".

Missing England

I was sitting in the St. Philip room the other day, casually surrounded by Renaissance splendour, when I found myself suddenly longing for a fry-up in a cafe in Chester. For the sound of Cheshire accents. For an afternoon spent stomping around the fields in my wellies. For a day book shopping on the Chester wall. For crumpets. For a beer in my aunt's kitchen.

...

I'm homesick.

* ~ * ~ *

Things I miss, (not in order of precedence).


Proper manly Norman ruins. (Not these yippity-skip fluted columns and fat baroque flying infants.)


Beeston


Beeston again

The wildflowers:

Cowslips


Lesser Celandine


Wood Anemones


Daffs in March


touch-me-nots

Being at home:

Christmas in my little house.


and with the mad fam.


Uncle Mike on the Pontycyllte aquaduct

Stomping around the country in my wellies:



on the Sandstone ridge


on the Sandstone Trail


more of the trail


from Maiden Castle


pheasants



The village:

The village


St. Alban's


row cottages in the village

Random things:

the deanery of Chester Cathedral


the nicest English nuns in the world


Nice English friends.

The canals:



narrow boats

The Food.

Ohhhhh! bacon and black pudding! Yes, I miss the food. Something fierce!


Oh, how I long for a fry-up!