Not romantic ruin

 

A photo for gloomy January.  The abandoned Victorian factories of the Potteries are perfect examples of 'ruin porn', which we've covered already once or twice.  In the Middleport district, abandonment is more evident than usual.
These old buildings have a great resonance of the area's deeply industrial past (for which there is a strange, but understandable, local nostalgic pride) - but what does one do with them?

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Towers ruins

Alton Towers, the palatial stately home which nowadays gives its name to the amusement park in its grounds, looks – from a distance – to be still the once grand aristocratic home it once was.
You’d never guess it is largely a ruin.

After the earls left in the early 20th century, it fell into disrepair, then dereliction.

If you walk up close (as any paying visitor to the park can do), you can see the crows flying in and out of the unroofed rooms. And there is no access, even to spaces that still have decoration (the chapel for example) because of how dangerous the state of the fabric is.

 

To be fair to the owners of the park & estate, what is left is kept in some sort of order, and repairs to the building did go on apace for over ten years from 1999 when there were even tours of the safer parts, but it all seems to have slowed a bit.
The restoration project still is alive, but, as I say, it moves slowly.

At the heart of Croxden

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.

It's not what it seems

Local maps simply indicate that this building in fields near Creswell is an 'abandoned chapel'.  To my untrained eye, it looked like an old brick barn which had collapsed.  It just seems to be sleeping, somehow.

In fact, it is the remains of an ancient, twelfth-century chapel.  But there is no sign to indicate such; it is just standing on its own, away from any passing contact.  Its history seems largely lost.
I find that lack of recognition very odd.

Ruins for a poet

The poet Richard Barnfield was born here - at Norbury Manor.  As you can see, the building has beens torn down and all that is left is this ruined site, although the moat that surrounded the old manor-house is still here. It’s green in this photo, because of all the algae in it.

Richard Barnfield, as the phrase goes “did not fulfil his early promise”.  Born in 1574, two of his sonnets were good enough to be accidentally ascribed to Shakespeare, but he seems to have stopped bothering with poetry by the time he was twenty-five. 
Pretty much no-one has heard of him; and there is no memorial to him, either here in Norbury, or in nearby Stone where he lived most of his life.
Shame.

These ruins are reached on a public footpath about three hundred yards from Norbury Junction  They are not easy to reach by car

Roman Wall

The village of Wall (near Lichfield) is very old settlement – it dates back to Roman times, and you can see here in this photo the remains of the 3rd century town (then called Letocetum), which are preserved to this day by English Heritage.

Though there is a fence around the site, there is open entry through the gate and one can just come and go freely. It’s kinda nice just to sit among the ruins whenever you feel like it.

Link: Wall Remains

Gothic abbey scene

These wintry days create some (literally) Gothic looks. The ruins of the medieval Croxden Abbey in east Staffordshire near Hollington are ideal for a good 'horror' photo, especially as light is falling (which it does around now at 4.00pm).

Croxden is a great set of ruins incidentally.
In the middle of a large tract of open country, one can just walk on to the site easily, as, even though it's owned by English Heritage, it is open for members of the public to access freely.

Link: Croxden Abbey