Brick marks

I'm afraid this is me being a bit self-indulgent.  After I saw an art-work by the artist Mark Wallinger which consisted of 1000 bricks all with his first name chalked on them, I thought I'd extend the idea - by marking a number of brick walls in my locality in much the same way. My first name is Mark too.
The photo you see is a montage of some of my efforts.

Of course my work is temporary (the marks were gone after a week of rain) and Mark Wallinger's pieces are a lot more valuable... but I enjoyed the experiment of the comparison.

Thou wall, O wall

I was walking along this road for about a mile - and this wall and I stayed together nearly the whole way. 
It struck me that I had never come across a wall that was so long and straight (ie without a corner).  It is continuous - apart from just a couple of small sections where it had crumbled.
The wall borders one edge of a large estate in an area called Fisherwick.

Surely a wall as long and straight as that must be setting some sort of record (?) - for the region at least...

Living wall

This is a 'green wall' - at Staffordshire University.  There are a number of these around the site.

They are part of a project to see if the plants in them, which are irrigated through small pipes in the trellis, can help reduce pollution in the urban environment.  The research is also looking at which plants can do the job best.

I guess the idea is, once that research has been completed, that they will encourage us all to put them up on our houses (etc).
Sounds good to me.

Dry stones in the Peak

Dry-stone walls are a feature of the landscape in the Peak District, and the Staffordshire part of the Peak District abounds in them.

Simply, dry-stone walling is the art of building a wall out of the natural bits of rock lying around, but fitting them together so snugly that the structure has no need of mortar (thus 'dry' stone walls) to hold it firm. 

I tried doing it once. It's like trying to build a 3-D jigsaw.  It takes a real eye to see what stone best fits what space - without using up all your 'best' stones immediately.

Watling Street goes on (and on)

One of the great things about just wandering-where-you-will is that you often come face to face with things you never expect.

Here, in the middle of countryside near Lichfield, I just came up against a modern street sign. There is nothing unusual in that, except that “Watling Street” is a route that is at least two thousand years old, and I'd read about it in history books. This ancient trackway across England (from Dover to Shropshire, cutting through south Staffordshire) was named Wæcelinga Stræt by the Anglo-Saxons; and then the Romans developed it, since when we know it as Watling Street.  Basically, the A5 follows the same route.

It’s weird suddenly realising that you are on a piece of earth that has been tramped for millennia, and is probably full of ghosts. It’s even weirder seeing a modern street-sign … as though history had never happened.

Supporting walls

Walls that need this sort of support are clearly ones to walk well clear of. The odd thing was that they looked so solid.

As I've mentioned before, a poem I'm really fond of is the one by Robert Frost 'Mending Wall'. It seems relevant. In it are these lines:

"Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down!"

Clocked in Saverley Green

Clocks on exterior walls - as in this photo - are a curious thing. You don't see many of them. In fact the number of exterior clocks in general is declining. People don't need them any more I suppose.

In small villages like Saverley Green, a clock was often attached to the Post Office, especially if there was no church around. But nearly all small post offices have been closed.

Now and again, as here, they crop up again (usually with a temperature gauge on the other side). I'm not sure if they are old clocks re-located, or just modern 'antique-style decoration'. But I like them.