Hanging Stones

July 4, 2025July 5, 2025 ~ stephentomlin ~ Leave a comment

When it comes to rest and recreation it pays to walk. The health and wellbeing benefits are obvious. It’s not so often though that you pay to walk. But that’s what we did a few weeks ago. And for a very good reason.

The Hanging Stones art project is unique. Ten restored or rebuilt former agricultural buildings, each containing a bespoke art installation, situated in the heart of the North Yorkshire Moors National Park, all linked by a 6 mile walk. It’s the creation of one of the UK’s – and indeed the world’s – leading sculptural landscape artists, Andy Goldsworthy. His long working relationship with stone dates back to time spent as a teenage farm labourer, maintaining and repairing dry stone walls in his native Yorkshire.

Our party of five was one of four groups of no more than six members booked each day. The trail begins and ends in the village of Roseland Abbey. Parties set out every two hours along public paths, tracks and bridleways into the increasingly steep sided valley that is Northdale, defined on both sides by high bare moorland. At the highest point we saw the group ahead descending and those behind us ascending.

In his 2018 prospectus Goldsworthy wrote: ‘The walk is an integral part of Hanging Stones, the artery by which people will give life to the buildings….It will be both discreet and dramatic. Visible to those who know it is there and hidden to those that don’t’.

The Roseland Abbey area has a long history of mining and quarrying although tourism, agriculture and field sports appear to provide most employment income these days. The highest part of our walk was on a permissive path that threaded through the source waters of the north beck, on whose steep bracken and heather clad slopes stand a dozen or more shooting butts. Returning along the lower valley floor we skirted an immaculately kept shooting lodge, currently under wraps, awaiting the open season in August.

This project clearly could not have happened without the approval and financial backing of the area’s main landowner, the Rosedale Estate, a 4,000 acre commercial grouse moor. Most of the North York Moors is owned by the King as Duke of Lancaster but this particular holding belongs to Carphone Warehouse founder David Ross. His philanthropic foundation supports arts, educational and sports activities. http://www.davidrossfoundation.co.uk/

With the buy in of the local community, the foundation and the National Park Authority, Goldsworthy’s vision and consummate skill has harnessed all the necessary elements to produce an outstanding example of renewal within a protected upland landscape. Work started in 2019 after a struggle to accommodate the proposal to the strict planning laws governing national parks it was given permission to proceed. The result is emotionally charged and thought provoking in its playful linked exposition.

Goldsworthy says: ‘One of the rationales for working with buildings is that sound, atmosphere and materials are amplified when experienced inside a confined space’ That sense of theatre, which also invokes the atmosphere of a shrine or chapel, is the hallmark of the most effective of the interiors. Dramatic use of natural light and intense application of materials or textures onto the building fabric is fantastic.

From weave of rusted barbed wire to powdered ochre paint, burnt boughs to woven logs or light bending thicket of poles in gravel – each environment works its rough magic, drawing you into a sensual response.

The barn that displays the eponymous hanging stone – all 11 tonnes of it – is brilliant testimonial to structural engineering that teases visual perception of mass in space.

Elsewhere a new build barn traverses the ruin of an old farmhouse floor where the mosaic of concrete and broken flags yield clues of former occupation. This put me in mind of Thomas Hardy’s poem ‘The Self-Unseeing’ whose opening lines run: Here is the ancient floor / Footworn and hollowed and thin,/ Here was the former door/ Where the dead feet walked in.

We enjoyed our packed lunches at the ramble’s half way point, following a steep upward scramble through swathes of bilberry covered moorland slopes. Here a large table sits in a little house perched on the open moor’s cusp. Through the open door on a clear day we enjoyed fine views across the high moorland plateau and cleave of dale spread out below.

Passing the shorn trunk of a wayside ash at one point I noted the cut section and wondered if this was an incidental wayside art work or just some essential tree surgery.

Goldsworthy’s attention to detail helps seal the overall impression. His way markers are subtle oval metal markers set into stone gateposts, some of which also feature small square through holes.

We spoke to a friendly farmer who asked if we were enjoying the art works. Later we saw him rounding up sheep with his collies astride a quad. I suspect he, like many here, are pleased to see redundant buildings restored and repurposed. Later, passing by another farm, we were presented with a picture book collection of ducks, geese, lambs, calves, dogs and goats, all putting up a cacophonous chorus of sound, much to our delight.

Cistercian nuns founded a priory in 1258 at Roseland, establishing the wool trade which sustained them up to dissolution in 1539. In more recent times, from the 1850’s – 1920’s, high quality magnetic iron stone mining became the principal industry. On leaving we passed abandoned roasting kilns atop the valley’s precipitous Chimney Bank road, but with gradients of up to 33% it felt wise not to stop.

I came away from this remarkable walk with a deeper understanding of how Goldsworthy and his collaborators created these amazing site specific art works, utilising natural local materials to complement and enhance a sensitive and highly protected rural environment.

It proved a memorable immersive experience in which we as visitors are part of the synergy generated within each of those boxes of delight. Like all great art the effects are cumulative, resonating and lingering in the imagination long after actual contact.

The complex, often contradictory issues and compromises involved in the planning, funding and execution of this project has intrigued me almost as much as the actual installations themselves. I feel that’s worth a tenner of anyone’s money, to allow one the chance to walk in wonder, to witness and reflect on a particular genius of place and time.

If you are able to experience Hanging Stones for yourself I’d urge you do so. Along with a set time on the allotted day you get a map and key that unlocks each building. Moderate map reading skills and stamina are needed, depending on seasonal weather conditions. Demand is high though. We hear that there’s no availability until February 2026.

More information and to book: https://hangingstones.org/

Apart from Plants

June 29, 2025 ~ stephentomlin ~ Leave a comment

But the Glory of the Garden lies in more than meets the eye. (Kipling)

My wife’s the gardener and I’m staff. It’s an old joke and together we love and care for our horticultural patch all year round. The never ending work generates pleasure and many rewards in its wake. Small corners of our spread add up to a whole box of garden delights, especially now in mid-summer when everything is so lush. Ornamental additions enjoy a special status, being either useful or decorative and are rooted in time and place.

Garden seat. There are a few different sorts set around the place which get used regularly. This old metal one I moved to the ponds earlier this year has not been used, as you can plainly see. Nevertheless the incidental invasion of monkeyflower and woundwort in a benignly neglected corner draws and cheers the eye.

Julius Ceaser We go back a long way, from when I bought my last house in Lancaster a quarter century ago. His handsome bust, made of something akin to coade stone, is a class act and he remains eternally contemplative and unfazed. The emperor cheered my tiny terraced house yard garden in Lancaster and here a few miles north of the Roman wall he lives discreetly amongst fern and hosta under a potted apple tree by our own stone wall.

Stave Basket. A gift for the gardener a few years back to remind us of times together in my home county of Devon. The maker has his workshop and 10 acres of ancient coppice woodland which he works with heavy horses on the other side of Dartmoor from where I grew up. Traditional Devon stave baskets come in different sizes for different tasks. This one has ash for handles and fixing of fir splints. We gather apples and other fruit with it, or in this case a mixed cut of elderflowers for the annual making of cordial.

Wooden Henge Another pressie for the gardener. This I got from a friend whose garden was playfully adorned with wood and metal salvaged pieces. I asked him to keep an eye out for something grey and weathered which I knew would appeal and he turned up one day with this jointed piece of oak beam from a ruin. It now stands embedded in the lawn bank border by stone steps. It’s favoured by opportunist robins keeping an eye on gardening activity in hopes of a juicy worm or two surfacing.

Watering Can I was thrilled to inherit a vintage BSA air rifle a few years back and have subsequently relived those far off days with my brother shooting tin can targets with his identical gun. Visitors these days – especially the younger males – like to try their chances hitting the old watering can, which resides on the field gate post. It gives a satisfying resonating ‘thung’ when hit and doesn’t topple over.

Green Man. Like Julius, he sits tight in a mass of greenery and represents the spirit of nature and seasonal renewal in our happy half acre. Delighted to come across him when last on holiday in the county of my birth, in an artisan workshop cum gift shop at Polperro.

Heart’s Wave We were blessed with a lovely range of thoughtful generous wedding presents in 2021. This distinctive gift was extra special because the young forester, son of one of our farming neighbours, tasked with clearing dead timber at work cut this section for us as he could see the heart and/or wave in the stump and thought we might like it. Like it? We love it and it’s out there every day, weathering nicely….A little like the pair of us, I hope

A Nest of Singing Birds

June 10, 2025June 10, 2025 ~ stephentomlin ~ Leave a comment

‘Years ago every village in England was a nest of singing birds and the folksingers of today are the last of a line that stretches back into the mists of far off days…an unbroken survival of pagan observances and a musical inheritance of priceless worth.’: Cecil Sharp

I love what is termed ‘retirement’ and all the pleasures and opportunities for activities and socialising that it brings. But, every now and then, a work project comes out of the blue and the most recent proved more leisure than work, a unique opportunity to re-visit a happy past and bring it to life in a new way.

In 2008 I was employed to play the folk music and dance revivalist Cecil Sharp in a Heritage Lottery funded project in the village of Winster in the Derbyshire Dales. Sharp had travelled by train from his home in London in June of 1908 to research the Winster Gallop and other Morris tunes peculiar to the village and practised by the lead miners who made up most of the local dance team.

I was friends with fellow actor David Frederickson, a former resident of Winster. We’d met when working together on an ITV Docudrama about the 1984 IRA Brighton Bombing and he’d also performed as Polonius in my company’s production of Hamlet at Lancaster Castle. David thought me a perfect fit for Cecil Sharp so I joined him and another locally based colleague, Sue Daniels, to put on his play ‘A Nest of Singing Birds’ as part of Winster’s ‘Look Sharp’ weekend festival.

David’s play covered not only the great man’s visit to the village but the story of his interaction with those singers, dancers and fellow travellers who featured alongside in the revival of folk song and dance during the early years of the 20^th century. Cecil Sharp (1859- 1924) collected some 5,000 songs and tunes over 20 years and despite the contradictions and personal conflicts over methods, attitudes and philosophy which typified the age he left a priceless musical legacy to the nation.

‘Look Sharp’ was a very successful community celebration in 2008 and our fully integrated participation as performers replicated most of what had happened a century previously, including a steam train arrival at nearby Darley Bridge station, Sharp’s introduction to lead mining history, a carriage ride up the hill and visit to the local school. The festival went one better in showcasing not only the village Morris side but five more from around the country who’d travelled to join us.

Our good friends and collaborators at Buxton based theatre company Babbling Vagabonds had fashioned the fabulous giant stick puppets, likenesses of traditional characters associated with the Morris, in association with local primary schools, and students from the local secondary school made a great short film documenting the event. The giant puppets headed the street procession to the playing fields where the entertainment, including our play, was performed in and around the big tent.

Seventeen years on from 2008 – in late May this year – our company was re-united to make a live recording of David’s wonderful entertainment in front of a live audience in the village hall, the Burton Institute.

The locals had secured extra Heritage lottery funding to ensure a permanent record of ‘A Nest of Singing Birds’, professionally staged and recorded, would be held in local archives available to all.

Our brilliant sound engineer, based at an arts centre in Derby, was Richard McKerron and his high spec recording equipment impressed us all, along with the skill he demonstrated as a musician himself rigging and recording our live event on the night of Saturday 31^st May..

The musical element of our show was of course key. Re-joining David, Sue and myself to perform were our original musicians – folk concertina player Keith Kendrick and partner and co-singer Sylvia Needham. Funds allowed us on this occasion to be joined by Josh Wood. (He as it happens was one of the children involved at Winster school back in 2008).

Josh’s piano accompaniment was the perfect companion to Keith’s concertina. Sharp’s dilemma as collector and propagator lay in transposing the authentic folk music accompaniment -represented here by the concertina – to that of the drawing room or classroom, and the piano in our production would speak eloquently to that transition as well as providing underscoring of text at key moments.

During breaks from rehearsal David – now back as a resident – showed me around Winster. Its attraction for me lies not just in the grander wide main street with its varied multi-storied older properties but in the three dimensional interlocking of domestic buildings on the steeply rising hillside behind.

The village has an integrated fabric of stone structures with a maze of lanes, paths & ginnels between them. Today’s restored cottages once housed extensive families of miners, quarrymen, labourers and artisans. The verdant valley location sets the whole off perfectly.

Like many other Derbyshire Dales settlements Winster has a remarkable community spirit. This is exemplified not just by our one off production but by the shop and post office, community run for the past two decades. Wakes Week and Secret Gardens open days were in the offing and David told me that the village used to feature regularly as location in the TV soap Peak Practice.

We ambled down a pretty lane lined with terraced cottages to the valley bottom and tried out the impressive outdoor gym equipment (perfect for pensioners like us) and admired the fine community orchard and pond beyond. The former boasts local varieties of fruit, the latter alive with tadpoles wriggling in the shallows while a family of moorhens were splashing over lilies or diving between stands of flag iris.

Another ramble of discovery led Sue, Richard & myself above the village to gain panoramic views over meadow rich grazing, tumbled stone walls and ruined barns. Our gradual descent brought us by rambling roses and dense bushy thickets. Nearby were remains of the lead workings which fuelled the 18^th century industrial boom that made Winster the biggest, most prosperous town in the Dales at that time.

After three days of rehearsal and setting up we played to a fabulously receptive full house on the Saturday night there in the Burton Institute and despite a couple of technical hitches, which required some re-recording, it went with a swing. Words and music flowed and built beautifully, creating a great atmosphere that left everybody happy as could be, as the applause and sea of smiling faces at the end testified. A pint at the Bowling Green pub afterwards went down a treat as the performance had left us all with a fine thirst!

Bumped into more audience members the next day as we indulged in a leisurely breakfast in neighbouring Elton’s village hall. Local volunteers cooked and served a superb fry up in a bunting draped Victorian hall; visitors and locals alike full of laughter, chatter and general bonhomie.

Later, back in Winster, I joined Keith and Sylvia for tea and cakes outside the parish church. Both catering events are regular Sunday summer dates to raise funds for their respective heritage buildings.

I came home on the train from Chesterfield comforted and grateful for such a joyful and welcoming immersion in community culture, thankful for the rarest of treats as a performer in being re-united with colleagues to record a piece performed all those years earlier. It also amused me that for the first time ever a character I played would feature on the publicity poster and tickets…a career first!

Dingle: Dun, Bee & Boat

June 6, 2025 ~ stephentomlin ~ Leave a comment

The distinctive peninsulas that characterise this south west corner of Ireland present challenges to the modern day tourist, with cars and coaches traversing narrow twisting roads. Meanwhile the locals have to put up with peak season congestion as they go about their everyday business. It’s lucky then that nobody seems in a hurry to get anywhere fast.

The Dingle peninsula boasts over 2,000 historical monuments and that reflects its remote location and farming way of life over thousands of years. Rocks cleared from patchworks of land built drystone field walls and farmhouses that distinguish this rugged landscape.

The ancient inhabitants of the peninsula were skilled in using the water as their sea roads. These would also have been trade routes and their culture and artefacts reflect that. We were lucky enough to get some sense of their world from the handful of sites visited on our traverse of the 38k/24 mile circular route marketed for tourist purposes as the Slea Head Drive. As advised we drove clockwise, with the traffic and not against it.

A Mountain range dominates the centre of the 48k/30m long peninsula, ending at the westernmost point in Ireland around Dunmore Head. It was here in 1588 that two of the remaining ships of the Spanish Armada’s failed invasion of England were tragically wrecked. The narrow road in and out of Dingle town, its busy main population centre, hugs the jagged coastline by cove cliff and beach.

Dun Beag (‘small fort’) on the cliffs at Fahan has a beautifully created visitor centre inspired by traditional vernacular design. Here we watched an introductory film while sitting in the dark on animal hides in an intimate environment, suggesting the domestic interior of the 5,000 year old promontory fort below.

The streamside path leading to the fort with its massively wide dry stone walls is unexpectedly graced by lilies, while the bare sea cliffs below sport patches of thrift.

Storm damage this century has been extensive and fences now secure the site from over enthusiastic exploration but it still exudes a strong sense of its ancient role guarding the wild sea ways. This once formidable stronghold created was in the Iron Age, though archaeological evidence suggests Dun Beag remained in use between 8^th – 11^th centuries.

A short drive westwards brought us to the a group of Clochlans, better known because of their shape as beehive huts. Dating from the early medieval period they were home to Christian communities of farmers and fisherfolk and are remarkably well preserved. We learned that although significant historic monuments like these belong to the state, owners of the land have the right to grant paid access to the public.

Here the huts are part of a wider offer by Aiden, the occupying farmer and his family, to feed lambs and watch sheep dogs at work. A nice line in farming for tourism in the C21^s. Good on them.

Beyond this compact set of interlinked dwellings I glimpsed another cluster higher up the hill and the farmer’s dad (who it turned out had spent most of his working life in England as a labourer), told me access rights were in dispute and the owners were keeping it as was and unvisited. He felt those buildings were even more complete and whole than their own.

Our trio of antiquities was completed by a visit to the early Christian oratory at Gallarus. Dating from around 500 AD and fashioned in the shape of an upturned boat, the chapel is lit only at the far end by a simple window. An austere and striking symbol of the Celtic Church overlooking a harbour that has outlasted Viking raids, Norman conquests and everything the weather has thrown at it.

Made of gritstone the oratory measures 8m long x 5m wide and 5 m high. Some graveyard stones remain, like this simple cross inscribed in stone.

Thought of the skill seen in constructing beehive huts when viewing this little church, as the stones of various graded sizes meet to form the roof ridge. Also bore in mind that the central aisle of a church is called the nave because of that upturned boat shape, from Latin ‘navis’ for ship.

We left Dingle entranced by the extraordinary sights, sorry not to have time to do more but glad to have sensed the life of the past through wonderfully well preserved examples of its fortifications, homes and churches.

The Burren

June 1, 2025June 1, 2025 ~ stephentomlin ~ Leave a comment

There is a world apart, / of elemental beauty carved by glacier, / where tiny wildflowers/ pierce through limestone. (From The Breathing Burren by Maureen Grady)

Living as I did for decades near the Silverdale & Arnside AONB on the Lancashire/Cumbria border I got to appreciate limestone pavements and the flora and fauna that thrive there. Coming to the Burren in County Clare for a day gave an even greater appreciation of such a landscape at scale and extremity. What at first looks like a barren and otherworldly landscape is in fact quite the opposite.

Much of the Burren (Irish Boireann for a rocky place) is a national park, part of the UNESCO Geo-park along with the Cliffs of Moher. 1500 hectares of karst limestone, calcareous grasses, hazel scrub, turloughs (lakes) petrifying springs, cliffs and fens. Limestone formed from sediments millions of years ago has been further ground and compressed into fractured state by glaciation. In those gaps or grikes plants thrive in their mini eco chambers.

Some 70% of plant species found in the island of Ireland are represented here and 23 of the land’s 27 native orchids too. Most excitingly for botanists it’s party time for the world’s plants as flora from Arctic, Mediterranean and Alpine environments all thrive here and the grasses between rocks are species rich, providing quality grazing.

People have lived on this plateau for many thousands of years, and the wider area boasts some 3,000 registered ancient sites. We were fascinated to find out more when visiting the Burren’s best known dolmen, or burial chamber, at Poulnabrone. This striking structure is the oldest dated megalithic monument in Ireland. A portal tomb type it has two capstones, although at some point in the past the rear one had collapsed.

Archaeological excavations in the 1980’s revealed that 33 people had been buried here and that the tomb was in constant use between for 600 years between 5,200 and 5,800 years ago. This visit to Poulnabrone put me in mind of another dolmen of similar design and age I have visited often in the past; Pentre Ifan in Pembrokeshire.

Early purple orchids were growing in abundance through the short wiry sward around the tomb and the grikes were full of ferns grasses and other calcareous loving plants. The land about was also dotted with erratics, large rocks left by glacial action. These are mostly limestone but some, being carried from a distance away, are of gritstone and granite.

A local we spoke to bemoaned the huge rise in tourism in the age of social media and the problems caused by it. Although the majority of the thousands of visitors here each year respect the place a significant minority do not, he said. They camp here, leave rubbish or worst of all attempt to make offerings or cremate remains in the tomb. One such misguided event a while ago caused cracks in the structure and visitors are urged to tread lightly, with care, less we damage the things we’ve come to admire.

A Cromwellian officer in 1651 captured the paradoxical nature of the Burren when he reported ‘A country where there is not water enough to drown a man, wood enough to hang one nor earth enough to bury one… yet their cattle are very fat’. I was fascinated to read up later about the ways that traditional agriculture and contemporary conservation have learned to partner here in the 21^st century. Farming families on the Burren practice husbandry that runs counter to conventional cattle management in putting their beef herds – mainly shorthorns, but also Herefords, Dexter and other breeds – onto the exposed high land in winter as opposed to taking them off. In so doing they are key maintainers of an eco-system famous the world over.

Winterage, as this practice is known, ensures dead herbage is grazed off and creeping hazel scrub contained, thus preparing the ground for spring flora to flourish. The calcium and mineral rich grassland pockets between rocks provide healthy bite, with water from renewed springs and the well-drained stone ground, heated through the summer months, giving a dry lay for the beasts. The cattle have clearly learned to be nimble footed too, avoiding leg breaking crevices as they forage and roam.

Today this outstanding example of transhumance is increasingly appreciated by the wider public and acknowledged by the authorities through a custom made subsidy basis. Every October The Burren Winterage Weekend Countryside Festival culminates in the participating crowds following farmers as they herd their beasts up along the ancient drove roads to those winter pastures. What an unusual and heart-warming sight it is.

Cliffs of Moher

May 27, 2025 ~ stephentomlin ~ 2 Comments

You know that Ireland’s road infrastructure has improved dramatically in the 21^st century when you see day trips offered in Dublin to this tourist mecca in County Clare on the ‘Wild Atlantic Way’. That’s a 3.25 hour coach journey to cover the 268k (166m) trip, mostly by motorway, and the same back. One very long day out. And there are no shortage of takers.

We visited on a weekday evening after the park had closed and crowds had left. To my mind this has to be the best time as the setting sun was starting to illuminate to great effect the 8 Km (5 miles) of high cliff faces, 214 m/700ft at their tallest, to dazzling effect. The place lives up to its hype, especially on yet another glorious blue sky day, offering sublime views over becalmed seas towards America way out west. The sheer cliff faces, eroded by wind and water into caves and stacks in places, providing a wealth of different breeding sites for over 20 species of sea bird and we watched some of them wheel about us in the golden light.

The cliffs consist of carboniferous rock, including shale and sandstone, and once formed part of a delta system 320 million years ago, carried up here from the equator on vast tectonic plates; broken, fractured and stratified on its snail’s pace journey north.

We climbed and descended the cliff tops on wide black marble like steps, tucked in behind a protective barricade of grassed flagged bank, preserved to accommodate the thousands who pay to visit each day. These handsome steps are fashioned from locally quarried Liscannor stone and I loved looking closely at them as they contain a wealth of fossils: crinoids and ammonoids and other unidentified creatures whose trails are preserved for eternity.

The Cliffs of Moher are named for a deserted prehistoric fort on a headland that once stood here before being replaced by a look out during the Napoleonic wars, when national defence was key. In peace time the invasion has been internal and despite concerns about road congestion and overcrowding the locals we talked to welcomed the income tourism brings in its wake.

Reflecting the intrinsic importance of music in the culture buskers have pitches set aside for them at key points along the walks and the nearby village of Doolin is acknowledged as a centre of traditional Irish music.

A far sighted local landowner built a viewing place in 1835, now named after him – O’Brien’s Tower – to help foster a growing trend and provide local alternative employment for the remote rural community of the day. Since 2011 The Cliffs of Moher have been part of Ireland’s latest UNESCO Geo-park, along with that most remarkable of internationally renowned landscapes, The Burren….More of which in the next diary.

Thoor Ballylee and Coole

May 22, 2025 ~ stephentomlin ~ Leave a comment

Our recent holiday with family in Ireland threw up the opportunity to visit two inter connected places in the Galway countryside associated with two of the country’s great cultural figures.

An ancient bridge, and a more ancient tower,
A farmhouse that is sheltered by its wall,
An acre of stony ground,
Where the symbolic rose can break in flower,
Old ragged elms, old thorns innumerable,
The sound of the rain or sound
Of every wind that blows;
The stilted water-hen
Crossing Stream again
Scared by the splashing of a dozen cows.

W.B.Yeats ‘My House’ (1928)

Thoor Ballylee is a C14th Hiberno-Norman defensive tower on the gentle banks of the Streamstown river in the west of Ireland built by the De Burgos, or Burkes, a Norman clan whose power base was in this area. It had fallen into a state of decay when the poet W B Yeats first saw it in 1898 while staying with his friend and artistic collaborator Lady Augusta Gregory at neighbouring Coole Park.

Eventually, as a newly married man with two children wanting a home away from Dublin in the west from where his own family originated, Yeats bought the romantic though ruinous structure for £35 in 1916. Working closely with local craftsmen he and his wife George carefully restored the structure to make it habitable as their summer residence through the 1920’s.

Interesting to note that neither he nor fellow protestant notable Lady Gregory were directly threatened by either of the feuding sides during the rebellion against British rule or the bitter civil war that followed. As respected cultural icons they were otherwise shielded from the violence and atrocities that marked the ‘Troubles’ across Ireland.

It’s not hard to see why the tower became the Yeats’s happy place, acting as both a refuge and an inspiration. George decorated and furnished rooms in the arts and crafts style while also developing the skill of fishing from the windows! Friends visited regularly and everyone enjoyed the socialising. Yeats wrote some of his best poetry here; work that appears in the collections ‘The Tower’ (1928) and ‘The Winding Stair’ (1933).

Yeat’s deteriorating health, along with the damp and damage wrought by winter floods eventually caused the family to sell up and move away. Summers were increasingly spent abroad in France, with its kinder climate, better suited the ailing artist, but he never forgot this place or its importance in his life. Nor did admirers of his work forget him when in the summer of 2015, to mark the 150th anniversary of Yeats’s birth, the Yeats Thoor Bally Lee Society re-opened the tower to visitors and have continued to do so each season ever since. It is now a thriving cultural centre offering courses, talks and literary themed events.

We loved chatting with the cheerful knowledgeable warden and exploring all four floors of the tower. Intrigued by the stack of crow’s nest below one of the slit windows and surprised by the alarmed cries of a returning parent just as I caught sight of the fledglings within.

From the top, I took in extensive views over surrounding pastoral landscape rich in hedging, banks, woods and fields. The white flood of flowering hawthorn everywhere. Curiously the gentle sparkling stream below literally disappears within these woods. This distinctive Karst limestone country is known for its turloughs – intermittent lakes that fill with water from streams like this one that drain back into the water table, having no surface outlet.

Under my window ledge the waters race,/Otters below and moor-hens on the top,
Run for a mile undimmed in Heaven’s face,/Then darkening through ‘dark’ Raftery’s ‘cellar’ drop,/Run underground, rise in a rocky place/ In Coole demesne, and there to finish up/
Spread to a lake and drop into a hole./What’s water but the generated soul?’

( W.B. Yeats ‘Coole Park and Ballylee’, 1931)

We followed the hidden line of flow on leaving Yeats Tower and within a few miles were at Coole Park, now a national nature reserve stretching over 1,000 acres (400 Hectares). The woods here have been attracting visitors from when they were first developed by the Gregory family in the late C18th. Coole Park was home to Lady Augusta Gregory (1852-1932) and in her widowhood her genius for inspiration made it a centre for the movers and shakers involved in the Irish Literary renaissance, from Synge to Shaw, Casey to Yeats.

“These woods have been well loved, well-tended by some who came before me, and my affection has been no less than theirs. The generations of trees have been my care, my comforters. Their companionship has often brought me peace.” ( Lady Gregory, 1931)

We were quickly enfolded into that peaceful, unhurried arboreal world and instantly appreciated the spell it must have cast on others. Although there was no time to discover the lakes with their swans or walk the woodland paths beyond the centre we did find the famous autograph tree – a venerable copper beech – where the great men of letters carved their initials during their frequent visits. Their incisions now stretched and compacted by growth and stoutly defended from further additions by the public by railings.

‘Here poet, traveller, scholar take your stand / when all these rooms and passages are gone’ (Yeats)

The Georgian house was demolished in 1941, although the handsome restored stable block has a museum, facilities and excellent tea rooms serving imaginative good quality food, so a most enjoyable lunch was had here.

Yeats had first arrived at Coole in 1897, physically and psychologically exhausted and was nursed back to health and a more sustainable lifestyle by Lady Gregory. As he described: “I found at last what I had been seeking always, a life of order and labour” Lady Gregory prescribed for him a balanced regimen of work and relaxation. It was the beginning of a lifelong friendship that saw them in 1904 co-found with others the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. In so doing they were preparing the ground for independence by writing, producing and performing plays about Irish life for Irish people.

More here: www.yeatsthoorballylee.org and https://www.coolepark.ie

Towton Field

May 1, 2025 ~ stephentomlin ~ Leave a comment

‘Recall the cold of Towton on Palm Sunday before dawn…fastidious trumpets shrilling into the ruck: some trampled acres, parched, sodden or blanched by sleet, stuck with strange postured dead. Recall the winds flurrying, darkness over the human mire.’ (Geoffrey Hill: King Log)

On 29^th March 1461 two great armies met in battle outside the village of Towton, on the high wide limestone ridge country between Leeds and York. This was to prove a watershed event in the intermittent C15th civil conflict known as the ‘Wars of the Roses’. A dynastic power struggle between the aristocratic affinity who supported the pious Lancastrian King Henry V1, led by his fearsome warrior wife, Margaret of Anjou and the charismatic Yorkist claimant to the throne, Edward Earl of March, heir to the rival house of York

The Lancastrian forces were mainly northerners, the Yorkists drawn mostly from the south and midlands. The 19 year old Edward had lost both his father, Richard Duke of York and younger brother Edmund, Duke of Rutland at the Battle of Wakefield three months earlier. Edward’s revengeful victory at Towton lead to the deposition and imprisonment of Henry, the exile of Margaret and to him being crowned as Edward IV.

The weather played a key role in determining the battle’s outcome that fateful Palm Sunday. A snowstorm blinded the oncoming Lancastrian forces and the mass of Yorkist arrows borne on the bitter wind inflicted heavy losses on their tight battle formations. This pressurised the Lancastrian host to advance through the teeth of the storm, which in turn pushed the Yorkists backward. Only the last minute arrival of reinforcements from the south, led by the Duke of Norfolk, halted their slow retreat and raised the morale. After yet more fierce hand to hand combat the Lancastrian army finally broke. Panic and hot pursuit ensued. The main line of retreat for the fleeing soldiery was on the old London road towards Tadcaster, over a narrow bridge crossing the Cock Beck below, to the west.

Some escaped that way while others, the mass of lightly protected infantry and archers, were not so lucky. No quarter would be asked or given. Jammed with the dead and dying, a desperate brute slaughter took place, the beck running red with the blood of butchered bodies that piled up, damming its course. Towton would go down in history as the biggest, longest and bloodiest of battles to be fought on British soil.

The late April day we visited was clear skied, cool and fresh. After a good pub lunch at the Rockingham Arms in Towton village we drove down the B road to where the official ‘Battlefield Walk’ started, by a simple monument known as the Dacre Cross, named after a Lancastrian lord killed in the battle. A weathered wreath of red and white roses left at its base to mark the anniversary a couple of weeks earlier lent the exposed spot a melancholy air. The path sets out alongside fertile soil recently sown and banked, Toblerone like, for potatoes. One couldn’t help wondering if the blood and bone spilt here, albeit centuries since, makes for a good crop year on year.

The lie of the land proved crucial to the course and outcome of the fighting and the locally based volunteers of the Towton Battlefield Society have done a great job in establishing and maintaining the 2.5 mile trail, complete with information boards at key points.

On one side stretches the undulating main battlefield site, where thousands of soldiers fought in hand to hand combat. Recently unearthed archaeological evidence points to the use of small cannon on the field of battle, a first for any in England. Excavations on private land around the village property of Towton Hall thirty years ago also revealed 50 skeletons dated to this period, packed into a mass grave, all displaying signs of injury or violence.

Today this section of the former great field system has been sown for what we took for either barley or wheat, surrounded by headlands of some kind of green manure, then grass banks or wire, with hardly a hedge in sight to break or block the overview..

On the other side of the path the land falls suddenly and steeply down to the narrow winding Cock beck, a tributary of the River Wharfe.. Here we gazed over a typical pastoral scene of deciduous woodland within pastureland on which ewes and lambs were grazing, with willows, alder and poplars hiding the waterside at bottom.

I’m struck by the mass of white flowers we passed – dead nettle, stitchwort and crab apple blossom, combined with the presence of those Spring lambs, that somehow, unconsciously adds to the symbolism of the Yorkist victory here at the heart of the White Rose county.

The warfare these days is between landowners and poachers, as the vehicular concrete barriers we came across at roadside field entrances testify to. Whether poaching of gamebirds, deer or hares (or all) remains unknown.

Towton Battlefield walk is an engaging accessible circuit, rarely busy one suspects. We encountered only four people on our stroll, all dog walkers, and the way is clearly interpreted and cared for. It has a particular atmosphere and ably communicates the brute horror of medieval warfare, made more so when seen against an overlay of the modern day farmed countryside. Well worth a visit, especially at a time of year somewhere near the anniversary. Find out more at the Battlefield Society’s website: www.towton.org.uk

Cause for Celebration

April 16, 2025April 16, 2025 ~ stephentomlin ~ Leave a comment

John Dubbin’s painting is the basis for this animated panorama at Hopetown

Fifty years ago I was living and working on Teesside as an actor and drama workshops organiser for the Billingham Forum’s Young People’s Theatre Co. We enjoyed free outdoor events marking the 150^th anniversary of the opening of the world’s first public passenger steam railway train between Stockton and Darlington. A souvenir from that time is this little China mug, now sadly minus its handle, but otherwise intact and very pretty.

The long train of 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd class passengers, preceded by a rider on horseback for safety reasons, set off from Shildon in Co. Durham on the 27^th September 1825 travelling the 21.5 miles to Stockton, via Darlington, at an average speed of 9mph, cheered on by crowds of excited onlookers.

Skerne Bridge, seen in the painting above, is still there today, part of the Hopetown site. The oldest railway bridge in the world still carrying a working rail route.

George Stephenson and his son Robert were the Tyneside engineers who gave us ‘Locomotion’, the engine that pulled those carriages on that triumphant day. Edward Pease, a leading Darlington Quaker (member of the Religious Society of Friends), was a retired wool merchant who had the time and capital to head the consortium of local businessmen were behind the scheme. The original plan was for a horse drawn tramway to transport coal from the mines in the Durham hills to the estuary port of Stockton-on-Tees where it could be shipped to the rest of the country. Stephenson Snr. persuaded the money men to opt for his newly invented coal fired steam engine instead. Adding passengers to commercial goods and loads of coal was something of an afterthought, but would have the greatest of consequences.

‘Locomotion’ replica on display at Hopetown

All this and much more my friend Rob and I learnt when we visited Hopetown in Darlington last week, in the year that sees the 200^th anniversary of the Stockton & Darlington. Formerly known as ‘The Head of Steam’ museum at North Road railway station, the 7.5 acre heritage site has been transformed with a multi-million pound investment programme to make it a major regional tourist attraction and educational resource. Entry is free (donations welcomed) and the amount of digitalised interactive displays shows the ethos is about engaging with families and school parties to tell a spirited, many layered story. Exterior soft play areas and an adventure playground are other family attractions that help justify the public investment and draw the crowds.

We didn’t quite know what to expect but quickly became engrossed with what was on offer. The interactive stuff – being addressed by station master and engine driver holograms for instance and having our photos taken with them – sparked fun and laughter. Think the planners have got the mix of serious study material and simpler, bold displays about right, opening vistas for the curious and engaging visitors in the interplay of man and machinery.

The Hopetown site, roughly triangular in size, consists of the original engine shed (1833) now the shop and café (above); station hall and offices (1842) now an exhibition area with locos and carriages, the Carriage Works (1853) with its huge open archive and large exhibition hall with awesome replicas of early engines, part of the ‘Railway Pioneers’ exhibition currently showing.

Completing the building line up is the new, purpose built Darlington Locomotive Works where 21^st century steam locos are being made by a charitable trust and volunteers, the workshops overseen from a tower housing public viewing gallery.

Highlights? I think anyone who visits a heritage site is invariably fascinated by the unchanging necessities of everyday living and how each generation deals with them. That’s why the original station toilets were fascinating. Cast iron urinals, tiled walls and cubicles. Throw in the reputed ghost of a porter who committed suicide here in the 1840s that is believed to still haunt the place and you’ve got it made.

The simple elegant design of the original early Victorian station (above) entrance and its extension reflect the world view of those local Quaker company directors. The exuberant emerging Gothic style was not for them.

Britain being Britain the three original carriages on display remind us of rigid social and economic classification. First class enjoys padded seating and privacy while third class (above) is an array of hard benches and a hole in the roof to let out smoke and/or let in light. Second class a mix of both.

My favourite museum story happily fits the ‘Country Diary’ title for these occasional notes. We learned that it took three concerted attempts over many years to get the Stockton and Darlington railway up and running. At its heart was the struggle between the inherited wealth and influence of the landed gentry and the new money of the non-conformist urban business elite.

Henry Vane, Earl of Darlington, resided at nearby Raby Castle, the centre of his great estate. A fanatical fox hunter who maintained two packs of hounds, he was determined to stop ‘bankers, merchants and others wishing to employ money in the speculation’ from ruining his sport by running their rail road through his fox coverts. He and other country landowners successfully led the opposition in parliament to defeat the initial proposals. A contemporary petition, drawn up by a top London law firm for anonymous clients, makes fascinating reading. It objects to the railway proposal as being ‘harsh and injurious to the interests of the county through which it is intended to pass’ and will ‘spoil lucrative arable land’ splitting profitable holdings in two and be ‘detrimental to the profits of the turnpike road’ running parallel with it.

In March 1819 Quaker banker and line supporter, Jonathan Backhouse, got wind of a plot by the earl to bankrupt his business and so de-rail the financiers. Back then a bank’s promise to pay the bearer on demand the value of a note in gold inspired the disgruntled aristocrat to get his tenants and associates to turn up on a set day at the bank to demand just that. The resourceful Backhouse immediately took flight to London and had a whip round with other Friends in finance, loading the loaned bullion into his carriage and returning at fast as they could back up north on the new turnpike roads to Darlington.

He made it as far as the river crossing at Croft, three miles short of home, when the axle on the hard driven coach broke under the strain. The quick witted banker and his servants redistributed the heavy load and slowly hedged their way back into town, with time to spare, before the Earl’s steward came to call at the bank. Backhouse had raised £32,000 worth of precious metal, more than enough to meet the withdrawal threat. He reportedly saw off the Steward with the words ‘Now, tell thy master that if he will sell Raby, I will pay for it in the same metal’….A great story, which no doubt has improved with re-telling down the years.

The Backhouse family bank prospered greatly thanks to the transformational economic prosperity the railway revolution engendered. Eventually, in the 1890’s, the business would merge with other Quaker founded financial institutions to form Barclays Bank. The bank branch (above) is still there, on its original site in the town centre and about to undergo a refurbishment. Ironically, given the simple design of the original North Road station, this building is a fine example of imposing gothic architecture by Sir Alfred Waterhouse (1864).

Arriving and leaving Darlington via Bank Top – the mainline east coast station (1887) – we’re delighted to see that it too is getting a long deserved restoration. Looking up we take in the heraldic decoration and rhythmic flow of ironwork gracing the roof of this secular cathedral, fitting tribute to a wonderful railway history and the town’s proud role in it.

Linnell, John; Richard Trevithick (1771-1833); Science Museum, London ; http://www.artuk.org/artworks/richard-trevithick-17711833-179865

Footnotes: The current ‘Railway Pioneers’ exhibition at Hopetown features superb life size replicas of key early locomotives. One is the unnamed engine (below) invented by Cornish mining engineer Richard Trevithick to transport iron from the Penderryn works in South Wales in 1804. In 2001 I had the pleasure of playing the obsessive charismatic inventor, in the BBC Radio 4 drama, ‘A Magnificent Prospect of the Works’ by Peter Roberts. The action was set in Coalbrookdale, the heartland of the industrial revolution on the river Severn, where Trevithick developed the prototype engine that would became the world’s first steam railway locomotive.

The Friends of the S & D Railway have produced an excellent illustrated introduction which you can download here: https://www.sdr1825.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/stockton-and-darlington-railway-key-facts-booklet.pdf

Stitch in Time

March 23, 2025March 23, 2025 ~ stephentomlin ~ Leave a comment

In an hour and a quarter we are over the border into Scotland and our destination of Galashiels. Glad to sense the place looking brighter and more uplifted than on previous visits 15, 20 years ago. The textile industry was once the area’s biggest employer – as many as 20 mills, mostly water-powered, flourished here at its peak in the 1880’s. Those businesses that remain today have had to specialise to survive and the area remains famous worldwide for its tweed and tartan production. A fitting place then to give a home in 2013 to the peripatetic 21^st century popular artwork known as The Great Tapestry of Scotland.

We didn’t quite know what to expect so were delighted to be immersed in what was on offer in the purpose built visitor centre standing proudly in the town centre, which opened in 2021. Having lunch at the friendly café broke down the hours so we could more realistically take in the 160 panel display. It splays across a spacious light filled first floor, depicting Scotland’s story from prehistory to the opening of the new parliament building in 1999.

Most panels are a metre/3’ 3” square and because they are not glassed over they appear even more immediate and fresh in their depictions of people, places and events, divided into seven triangular shaped time zones. The whole work stretches for 143 meters/ 469 ft. Informative brief text beneath each work with maker credits.

We are struck by how truly this is a people’s project, reflecting all that’s good in the character of the Scottish nation. A meritorious, interconnected, life affirming achievement. The combined work of a thousand volunteer stitchers in a range of community groups from Galloway to Shetland who put in some 50,000 hours of sewing using 300 miles of yarn. The movers and shakers of this national project were the author Alexander McCall Smith, artist Andrew Crummy, historian and broadcaster Alistair Moffat and head stitcher Dorie Wilkie. Between them they set framework for the stitchers to create and their formidable teamwork got the show on the road – literally!

Having the leisure to view the work in such a wonderful permanent setting opened new perspectives on our neighbouring land. This engaging way of presenting that narrative – of individuals, movements, beliefs through a unique synergy of history, culture and art – makes you wonder what an English, Welsh or Irish equivalent would look like. How would they define and reflect themselves through this form of craft based storytelling?

Scenes of conflict and warfare are vividly played out here. The sacking and pillaging of Holy Island in AD 793 in the Kingdom of Northumbria marked the arrival on these shores of the dreaded Vikings in their dreki – dragon ships. Subsequent colonisation along the Scottish coast saw these remarkably adaptable boats being hauled across narrow necks of land between inlets, giving rise to the place name ‘Tarbert’.

‘Is this a dig at the Bard I see before me?”…One particular panel reminds us how the genius of dramatic licence can run counter to historical truth. The real life Macbeth who ruled in the 11^th Century and the character created by Shakespeare to flatter Scots King James 500 years later could not be more different. Macbeth was King of Moray, defeating and killing King Duncan of Alba in battle to become King of Scotland in 1040, ruling unchallenged for another fourteen years. A contemporary source tells of of ‘the red, tall, golden haired one…Scotland will be brimful west and east during the reign of the furious red one’ and that physical description gives character definition here.

Another tableau I liked was the one depicting the Invergarry ironworks. Here in the 1720’s the Englishman Thomas Rawlinson, a Quaker industrialist from Lancaster, encouraged his workforce to adopt a shorter kilt for work purposes. The body wrap style of traditional highlander wear being too encumbering otherwise for industrial labour. A new form of Scottish dress that would eventually become standard wear.

The Jacobite uprising of 1745-6 and Bonnie Prince Charlie’s role in it is a familiar narrative, poignantly and powerfully expressed here in a poignant bitter-sweet design as a ‘vine-line’ linking romanticised landing in Eriskay to final devastating defeat at Culloden.

There’s wit and humour running through the whole exhibition, and that gets more pronounced as the later 20^th century chapters unfold with the increasing importance of the arts and popular culture in enriching the national picture, from major festivals to all forms of media .

The exhibition demands a return visit so we no doubt will be back. A great day out for us as borderers on the English side and essential viewing for anyone with an interest in Scots history, art and culture. If you’re planning a visit yourself there’s more info here: http://www.thegreattapestryofscotland.com