Golden hour...

Cannock Chase is not my favourite beauty spot in Staffordshire - it is both too bleak AND too undemanding.  Bit dull really.

However, when the sun is at its 'golden hour', the chase does give great light effects.

Digging India

This JCB excavator in the streets of Mumbai, in India, is another of my photos of 'Staffordshire abroad'.

The world-famous JCB company was born and fostered in East Staffordshire, and its main factories and World HQ are here to this day.
Whenever in the world I see a JCB - with its bright yellow livery - I always remember home.

Boswell - in with the traders

James Boswell looks rather cheeky, and rather pleased with himself in this statue-portrait in Lichfield's Market Square.  Some people say he probably was just that, though this likeness was made some hundred years after Boswell had actually died.

The link between Boswell and Lichfield is a little tenuous.  James Boswell wrote the biography of the great eighteenth-century literary man, Dr Johnson, basically by hanging around with him and writing down a lot of what he said.  Dr Johnson was, of course, born in Lichfield.

I like this statue. James, who is up on a plinth, appears to be glancing down at the market traders in a seemingly wink-and-a-nod way...

The Green Man grins

Yes, Spring has sprung!  There are green buds appearing everywhere; and the birds are making a huge racket, and running around grabbing bits of garden debris for their nests.
There is even the sound of lawn-mowers in the air - a sure sign of Spring.

Under the circumstances, a photo of a grinning Green Man (from the doorway arch at Wolstanton Church) is very apt.

Sun dial gets busy

At last this sun-dial has some work to do! Yes, it's properly Spring at last, with three days of warm sunshine in a row, and the croci and daffodils blooming.

The sun-dial is quite special, being dated 1624, as you can see - though the central gnomon is clearly much newer than that.
You can see it on the side of Castle Church in Stafford, just 100 yards from the Castle itself. Curiously, it's always called Castle Church, rather than by its dedication of St Mary's.

Unused grit

Poor old Staffs County Council...  After the winter last year, when we were under snow and ice for virtually two months, it laid in loads of grit, and ordered extra grit bins for side-roads, all ready for this winter.
And what did we get this winter?  Rain, rain, rain - and hardly a flake of snow! 
Who'd be a planner?

This grit-bin is at Draycott-in-the-Clay, and has the usual Stafford Knot, symbol of the county.

Horrifying statue

To me, this carving is one of the most horrifying sights in the whole county.  It stands in a secluded spot on the far side of the canal in Stone - and it is quite unmarked, with no sign to explain what it is, which almost makes the more horrifying.

The piece remembers the murder of Christina Collins, a young woman who was raped and killed by some boatmen as she travelled with them on a narrowboat along the canal in the nineteenth century.  Her body was found in the water further south, at Rugeley.

This terrifying sculpture, with its twisted neck, naked torso, missing arms, large pudenda and strange jagged line down its centre, seems to point to the agony of her last hours; and I find it difficult to look at.

It is sobering reminder - on the day before International Women's Day - of the horrors that women go through.  

Remembering Sir Robert

There are Peel Family monuments littered all through St Peter's in Drayton Bassett, but don't get mixed up - this is the one to the great man, who was the prime minister of the country in the early half of the nineteenth century.

The 'People' raised monuments to him because of his courage in defying his own party, when he went about repealing unfair laws.

Hollington weave

The markings on gravestones can be a bit of a mystery to the uninitiated (such as me).  This weave pattern on a stone at St John's in Hollington was, I thought, a graphic design based on the deceased man's name (Samuel Smith) - but it doesn't compute.

It's not a common pattern.  What does it signify?

Sign reflects Victorian confidence

This marvellously intricate piece of wrought-iron work hangs outside Tunstall Library, and says on it 'Tunstall Free Library'.  Quite why the sign is needed is a mystery as Tunstall Library, a great piece of Victorian Gothic architecture, is absolutely massive, and you couldn't miss it if you wanted to.

However, such a grandiose piece of artwork (and the library building itself) shows the huge confidence of those late Victorians. Tunstall was then an important industrial town, in the middle of a country that commanded the largest empire ever seen on Earth. I guess this sign rather reflects that feeling.