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.

As in Shakespeare's day

 

A traditional sight in English summers - outdoor Shakespeare. This time we are on the village community green in Dilhorne, with the audience in socially-distanced spots.

It's interesting to think that this situation is also exactly how it was in Shakespeare's own day: a group of touring players have arrived, to perform for one evening, on their way around the country.

Legend fades away

This innocent looking mound on Tittensor Chase in the centre of the county has been known for centuries as Saxon Lowe. The word lowe indicates a burial chamber,  so... could it be the burial place of the most illustrious of Middle England's Saxon kings, Wulfere??? He did have a fort nearby.

Probably not.
Archaeologists can be kill joys sometimes. They think it's just a natural hillock.

Welcome back, ale-houses

In the miniscule village of Dodsleigh, which is off any beaten track, one will find a whitewashed building facing its tiny village green.   On it is this stone plaque, which reads:
Walk in my friend and Drink with me / Here Ale as good as e’er you fee* (see)
Refresh yourself is no CRIME / Stay not too long to spend your time 
Francis Sherratt 1751
(When Francis says “stay not too long”, he means “hesitate not too long”)

So I’m guessing that the building was once an ale-house.
It was opportune spotting it, as the government recently allowed pubs to re-open (after three months!) and many of us have missed them.

In England (mostly because of the weather), pubs are the only public spaces in which local people can freely meet and talk and socialise at any time. 
There is a sociology thesis to be written on how this fact has influenced English society.

* in the English of 300 years ago, an s was often written in an f shape

Where sheep may safely laze

April & May were distinguished by sunshine and heat – July by rain.  It came in swift grey torrents and made the gutters gurgle.
These sheep have grown so wary of the rain’s sudden downpours that they have retreated to the cover of an overhanging hedge, so as to be sure of being out of the wet.

Muse shows a leg

On top the Colonnade in the gardens at Alton Towers is a line of statues of which this is one.

In her pose, she rather confidently 'shows a leg'; resting her right arm on her thigh, with her right leg stepped up onto a support of what might be small rocks. 

I was surprised, as you rarely see the legs on modest Graeco-Roman sculptures of women - unless it is of Diana, goddess of the hunt (who needed a short skirt in order to run), or, erm, nudes. 

In the catalogue, she is named as Melpomene, the muse of Tragedy, though traditionally it would be her left leg raised. The object she holds is the Mask of Tragedy.

But nowhere can I find the significance of the raised leg. I wonder what its import is?

Elephant ready for grinding

Well, museums should be re-opening this month... if, that is, they have met the Covid-prevention conditions imposed by the government.

This means that you will once again be able to view these grisly elephant bones at Shirley's Grinding Mill Museum in Etruria. They have been preserved there for over one hundred years as a sort of odd trophy.
The mill ground flint and bone to be used in the china-making process.

Quite how the mill got the elephant bones is another story.

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.

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.

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