Monumental

Here's a selection of sticky-uppy things to fit with this week's Sepia Saturday theme.

In the summer of 2005 I escorted my son and a friend to England for a few weeks. We were staying in Oakworth - a suburb, if you will, of Haworth, which is where I spotted this abandoned woolen mill near the steam railway.  Ruin or not, it enhanced my sense of time traveling.

Haworth, 2005

The kids demanded a daytrip to Blackpool and I was happy to oblige.  While they went on rides I wandered the town and beach, as is my wont. While we were here, bombs were going off in London around the corner from what was to be our hotel in a few days.

Blackpool, 2005

Earlier the same year, I'd accompanied my son on a school-sponsored trip to Italy, a highlight of which was an all-too-brief (though stiflingly hot) afternoon in Pompeii. Antiquity which outstrips Yorkshire by a couple of millennia. That's the dreaded Vesuvius looming in the distance. I was struck by learning that, eruptions aside, the Pompeiians suffered many deaths from lead poisoning from their plumbing system which, although comparatively innovative, in an ironic twist was constructed of pipes made from lead that their British slaves had been mining - in Yorkshire.

Pompeii, 2005

I returned to Italy in the winter of 2007 with the whole family, and again those under 20 strongly urged visiting Citta della Domenica, a zoo and amusement park outside Perugia, as a break from cathedrals and museums and tiny hibernating hilltowns. Billed as a rival of Disneyland, it fell several leagues short but provided an interesting afternoon. These towers are new constructions but are reminiscent of the myriad ancient campanili in Italy.

Citta della Domenica (Perugia, Tuscany) 2007

Sweet

Mister Softee meets Mister Death in Haworth, Yorkshire, 2005.

Raise from your bed of languor
Raise from your bed of dismay
Your friends will not come tomorrow
As they did not come today

You must rely on yourself, they said,
You must rely on yourself,
Oh but I find this pill so bitter said the poor man
As he took it from the shelf

Crying, O sweet Death come to me
Come to me for company,
Sweet Death it is only you I can
Constrain for company.

- Stevie Smith

North Yorkshire Railway

Haworth, England, has not changed a lot since the Brontes lived there.



But if you'd rather ignore the Bronte trail, you can just watch the steam trains.

First Week in July, Part 4

Terror at a Distance

Writing this a week after the fact -- Thursday July 7 as we headed north to Ingleborough Cave we heard the BBC News report of multiple bomb blasts across London, including King's Cross train station, Russell Square tube station, and a bus in Tavistock Square, all near our hotel-to-be.  By now they seem to have identified the bombers:  one from Luton (we drove through it yesterday due to an error in navigation by Nick) -- because of roadworks were forced to detour through the Muslim part of town, which had been featured on the news the night before; one from Leeds, near where our friends' architectural office and former home are located; and one from Dewsbury, through which we'd driven only days before en route to Haworth -- I recall seeing several Muslim women walking about veiled and black-robed.  One of the bombers was a primary-school teacher with a young family.  The brain reels.

 

Anyway, we kept on driving through the dales to what we thought was the town of Clapham, which turned out to be just a small collection of shops and a cafe or two.  From there we walked an easy half a mile uphill through the woods to "England's greatest show cave."  A hardhatted young woman led us diffidently down the tunnel past a colorful collection of stalactites, stalagmites, and other bizarre formations, all given names such as Queen Victoria's Bloomers, Grandpa's Teeth, The Elephant's Legs and Tail, etc., based on their appearance.  We had to duckwalk in a couple of places to avoid cracking our noggins on the ceiling. All along the path there ran a stream, which reportedly contained cave shrimp, but we didn't see any; at one point the water poured down a "gill," or hole, in the floor of the cave, only to reappear somewhere down the mountain. The air temperature was about 50 degrees, the water colder, which was refreshing since the weather was pretty warm.

 

Upon returning topside, we walked a ways up a sheep-prowled trail to Trow Gill, through a narrow passage between the limestone cliffs. The kids blazed a trail up the hillside and thistles; from the top we got a stunning view of the hilltops and valleys, dotted with sheep and chunks of broken limestone.  No sound except for baas and a few bird calls.  Then we walked, thankfully downhill, to the car and a lunch at a homey cafe in town (hot rhubard 'pud' for dessert), chatted with a woman in the local wool shop, and drove home listening to BBC updates.

 

Not content with wearing the kids' legs off in the afternoon, I persuaded them to walk after dinner to Damems Station, across the Worth River, and up the other side of the valley, at dusk.  This exposure to nature was to counter the effects of Friday's daylong excursion to decidely unnatural...

 

Blackpool

 

at which we arrived after a not-too-long drive through Lancashire.  Thanks to Mrs Brunskill we had a 2-for-1 coupon for the Pleasure Beach, so a mere $60 bought a whole day's worth of rides for Nick and Bentley.  I left them to it in two-hour chunks while I explored the town, from the goofy to the seedy, plus  needless to say, the beachy.  I lunched in a very simple little cafe with a charming gran-type for a waitress, and a view of the street, where colorful daytrippers and not any less colorful native Blackpoolers walked. At one point there was an awful racket and a large tank clattered up the road. This had nothing to do with bombings, just the army putting on a jolly show for the tourists.   The promenade was lined with hotels, as were all the side streets -- an amazing amount of lodging available -- as well as fortune tellers and pubs.

 

There were three piers filled with arcades and kiddie rides, as well as more adult entertainment, if you know what I mean, and scarier rides such as 90-foot-tall bungree jumps.  I refrained from paying 12 pounds to ascend the Blackpool Tower, but I did break down and take one very tame ride with the boys and visit the ever grimly fascinating Ripley's.  We dined in a large, clean and rather Americanized fish-and-chips restaurant. Upon return to our cottage we were exhausted but packed up for our imminent departure for Suffolk.

 

 

 

First Week of July, Part 1

Bronte Country

 

I'm writing after a week's delay from Diss, in East Anglia. We have been without Internet access since we left Barnsley.

 

July 2, we drove over hill and down dale (such as Airedale and Wensleydale [Gromit!] and Calderdale) to the village of Haworth. We lunched at a shady table outside the Black Bull pub (one of many across this part of Yorkshire, but in this case the one frequented by Charlotte "Wuthering Heights" Bronte's sot of a brother, Branwell) and explored the steep main street and the park, where there were several heated lawn bowling matches taking place. The boys were attracted to a model shop, so we stopped in; I mentioned that we were to be staying in nearby Oakworth and it turned out that the proprietor knew our landlord, who had been his mailman, and pointed us to our cottage on a map.

 

Oakworth is only a mile away, on the other side of the Worth River (HaWORTH, OakWORTH, get it?) at the other end of a quite narow, twisty road by one of the defunct woollen mills in the area.  At one point, around a hairpin blind corner, someone has spraypainted "HOOT" on the wall to let oncoming traffic know you're approaching. Our cottage, rather rudely but accurately named "Bottom Cottage," is at the end (the bottom) of a lane that starts out disappointngly with modern houses - but was built in the 1500s and had a sweeping view of the valley, with the city of Keighley (pronounced "Keithly") and the Ilkley Moor in the distance.  Our landlady, Mrs. Brunskill, was pottering in the large flower/veg garden when we arrived;  tubby and middle-aged, with a halo of fuzzy grey hair, she was very friendly; she lives next door -- there are three cottages together. She and her husband spent 18 months restoring the buildings and have done a great job.

 

The boys spent much of the next week petting Prince, the horse next door, who would stick his brown bearded head over the stone wall, and there were several cats about as well.

 

 

A Day on the Trains

 

We walked down the hill to the smallest working train station in England, Damems Station, and took the steam train (!) down the line past Haworth to Oxenhope, a journey of perhaps 20 minutes.  There were several working-class commuters as well as a tourist or two.  We were lucky enough on this Sunday to catch the annual Straw Race, for which the whole town turned out.  This involved pairs of men, often in costuime (such as fully accoutered knights, and memorably a couple of grossly overweight tattooed guys naked except for undershorts, with large stuffed penises, complete with fuzzy brown hair, strapped to them [quite a roar of approval from the crowd]) running from pub to pub drinking pints while carrying a bale of hay, in their preferred method, up a nearby hill in the blazing sun.  A brass band played fairly badly while sitting in an open truck trailer in the Bay Horse pub's parking lot..

 

How to top that? We trained back to Haworth and had lunch in the Wharenui (odd name), walked through the fields in search of another deserted mill, watched the steam trains for awhile (great hoots, puff of hissing steam, and clouds of foul coal smoke) and trained to the Oakworth station.  Then we walked across the fields (black-and-white cows, tan goats, black-faced sheep) to our cottage in Goose Cote Lane. Whew!