Thursday 25 June 2020

Swapping a crab for a ram


The old Wedgwood Institute in Burslem is a lovely building, built in the Venetian Gothic style.
As you can see, it has an ornate frieze around its top depicting the astrological signs of the zodiac named with their corresponding months and a scene referring to the sign.

But... the makers got muddled up.
As you can see in centre of the the photo, the roundel at the top depicts Cancer The Crab (June 22 to July 22), the month says June, but, er, the scene depicts a man holding down a ram (March, Aries!). 
Where is the usual scene for Cancer, a woman collecting crabs?  Yep, you guessed it: over where the ram should have been.
Somebody clearly wasn’t concentrating.

Wedgwood himself seems unbothered though.

Friday 12 June 2020

At the heart of Croxden

Croxden Abbey ruins

After his death in 1216, King John's body was carried cross-country for burial from Notingham (where else?!) to Worcester Cathedral via Staffordshire, where his heart was supposedly left, en route, with the monks at Croxden Abbey in the moorlands here. 
(The bits and pieces of royals were regularly extracted from their corpses before burial and distributed. I am not sure why this practice ocurred...)

However, Croxton Abbey (you can see how the confusion arises...) in Leicestershire also claims to be the burial place of the heart.  The various commentators get in quite a spat about it.

Unfortunately Croxden was largely dismantled following Henry VIII's destruction of the monsteries, and is now a ruin as you can see.  So if there was a marker giving proof that this is where John's heart was interred, it was no doubt expropriated or broken up about that time.

But we know for sure that John did not leave his heart in San Francisco.

Saturday 6 June 2020

A chapel for the Devil



Lud Church (or Lud's Church) is a natural cleft in the rock, about forty feet deep, in the Peak District. A sort of small chasm. You can clamber down into it from entrances at both ends.

It is the supposed setting for the Green Chapel, which features in a scene at the end of the medieval poem, Sir Gawain & The Green Knight, which, it's thought, was written by an (anonymous) monk based at an abbey in nearby Leek.
It is an astonishing poem, and it would be sad to go through life never having experienced it.

On a gloomy day, the place can be very gloomy indeed. Sunlight never reaches certain parts of it ever, which is why the sides are covered in slime of moss.

Can this be the Chapel Green? 
O Lord, said the gentle knight. 
Here the Devil might say, I een,
His matins about midnight!


For more about Lud Church, click here and/or click here