Sue Vincent's Blog: Echoes of Life, page 1043

Writing fire

The mysterious Charles James Fox had taken some tracking down, but we had finally arranged a rendezvous and the three of us hunched over our beers in the corner of the Waggon and Horses in Langsett. My companion had taken me once before to see foxfire beneath the Hunter’s Moon. This, however, was something different. We had been granted the singular honour of being invited to a rehearsal meet of the Foxes, held at a secret location to preserve their anonymity. No-one, after all, knows who they are…. So to see them dance unmasked to pipe and drum was a real privilege. We were to go from here…

Crows patrolled the ancient stone of the roof tops; dark guardians of a magical dance. We felt their permission to pass within to a different world, older and deeply connected with the life of the land. We watched the honed precision of the dancers’ weaving, knowing that when next we saw them, they would be hooded and masked and in their hands the flaming brands that menace the night.

Drums would be beaten with fire, poi would paint arcs of light against the blackness and the music would call to something deep and primal within that rises to answer the rhythm of the dance.

Charles James Fox met our eyes.

“Write the legend,” said the Silver Fox.

And so we did…

Mister Fox: The Legend

Sue Vincent & Stuart France

A new Graphic Novel

Available in Paperback and for Kindle

On Amazon UK, Amazon.com and worldwide

We might as well call …

It had taken longer than I had thought to get to Bradbourne. It is odd, but that last hour of the journey north seems to take no time at all. I don’t mean it seems short… but that there is no time-to-destination. I am already ‘there’. So it had been a bit of a surprise how long it took driving the same road southwards instead. Rather than ‘waste what was left of the afternoon, therefore, we decided to take the main roads back.

Now, by main road, I do not for one moment mean motorways… just a road with a single lane wide enough for traffic each way to pass in comfort. It still snakes through the hills and villages, passing the ancient barrows and mounds. And, critically at that point of the day, I happened to know there were one or two hostelries likely to be open for lunch. So, we thought we might as well call in at one in search of sustenance. We chose the Bluebell just outside Tissington and, after looking out over sunlit fields to snow crowned hills, we settled into the warmth of the old inn.

Of course, we were technically in Tissington, though we weren’t. The village itself lies off the road and through what appear to be the gates to a private demesne much to my companion’s consternation. We passed through the ancient ridge and furrow  fields and dropped down into the village, parking by one of the wells for which the place is so famous.

Each year the well dressings draw thousands of visitors to see the petal pictures and many come to see the old Hall. It always reminds me of a phrase I once read… ‘England is a land of chimneypots’. In winter you have the place almost to yourself.

We were not here for the Hall, no matter how much history resides within its walls. We crossed the stream that runs through the village and headed up towards the church. In the field is an ancient earthwork of which little is known. It has been established that it was used during the Civil War around 1644 when Tissington Hall was besieged, but it may be an ancient earthwork that was reused.

The light was amazing… blue skies on one hand that looked like spring, dark clouds on the other rolling in. The colours changed with every step as we walked up to the tall memorial cross of Celtic design that stands in the churchyard. It is a modern thing, of course, but the pattern is the Irish one and we have wondered where the stonemasons get their designs… are they replicas of ancient crosses or modern interpretations?

A more ancient base for a standing cross lies forlorn in the grass beside banks of snowdrops and aconite. I had been here once before but had not explored the churchyard that time, though the snowdrops had been in flower then too. I did, however, know what we would find inside…

Black Beast

Some Black Beasts we dread

Some bring only their delight

Laughing every day

(This game can go on for hours… or until she ‘kills’ the duster by pulling its head off…)

Ronovan’s Haiku Challenge

Dear Don XVIII

Morning Don,

Well, as you know The Legend came to birth and is taking its first foray into the world. I am so pleased with the way it has turned out! My copy finally arrived this morning :)

The Saltire has been wandering through my dreams in geometric form. You remember that it was the flag of Mercia, gold on a blue ground? It brought with it the Chi Rho symbol of course, which I know referred to the six directions and something about Time. Wasn’t the symbol of Chronos very similar? Anyway, I recall understanding it perfectly and the whole thing was quite a revelation. Of course, dragging myself out of bed to walk the Fell Beast the dreams dissipated before I could catch them so I have no idea what the revelation was. Hopefully it will re-emerge from the depths  at some point if we tempt it with enough symbolism… Ever been to Rome….?

Aerial view of St Peter’s Square, Vatican Image: airpano.com

Have you thought, too, about how the Chi Roi maps onto the enneagram…and the Tree, fot that matter? It would have to be centres on Tiphareth…or Daath, revealing the hidden Paths… I have symbols jostling around my mind this morning.

Speaking of which… we started out with the whole floating head thing and the symbolism of those saints martyred by beheading and the cephalophores. Which tied in nicely with the Brythonic/Celtic connection, of course. Then there was… and is… this whole recurring question of the Twins…

Have you noticed the new theme that seems to be rearing its head, so to speak? We are now onto Devouring Beasts. We seem to be getting an awful lot of them… from the ones we saw on Scotland to the font at Tissington and the door at Bradbourne..

You will have to bend that powerful and marginally tangential mind to that. The obvious Christian symbolism has Man overcoming the beast of his animal nature. This is something very different… I have vague intimations wafting around, but not quite there yet.

The Beast, by the way, has a new toy. Bad mistake… it squeaks. Constantly. You may be lucky… it may have been ‘disembowelled’ before your next visit.

Love,

Wen and Anu x

Back to Bradbourne

You wouldn’t have thought it was the same day that had thrown all that snow at us, albeit briefly. By the time we had traversed the hills and watched the buzzards wheel overhead the sun was shining and the skies were blue. Bitterly cold, of course, but you can’t have everything.

I had been to Bradbourne before, a tiny hamlet these days with some wonderful old buildings reflecting a long and more illustrious past. There had been a priory here, once upon a time and the land had been held by Norman nobility. Before that there had been the Saxons.

It was one of the places I had been castigated for ‘finding’ on my way… this of course, is not allowed. My contention is that as it was never lost, I had never found it. Just happened upon it. Not the same thing at all… Be that as it may, I had wanted to bring my companion here for a while as there were some remarkable things to see.

The first of them greets you as you walk up the drive towards the little church and the fact that there is a 1200 year old carved cross in front of an obviously Norman church on a hilltop carries a certain promise. Personally, I was feeling a little like a magician with a rabbit, having been here before.

The cross, though incomplete, still stands tall. Much of it is weathered to the point where the panels are barely decipherable from having been used as the stones of a ‘squeeze’… a narrow gateway through a wall… for many years before it was recognised and reinstated. And once again, all the panels showing figures showed them as twins… while the twin ‘suns’ of the crucifixion scene posed questions of their own.

The outside of the church still holds, apparently, other pieces of the cross…or of other crosses perhaps. There are old carved heads above the doorways and beside the windows and, once inside, Saxon stonework in the nave. A huge 17th century Italian Adoration of the Shepherds graces one wall whilst opposite an unusual, almost Moorish wall painting from the same date spells out its message.

There are two fonts… one carved of a single block of square stone and highly unusual, thought to date to around the 13th century. It is all in the details in these little churches which may look unremarkable given a cursory glance.Look carefully at the screens of the Lady chapel and there are some centuries old carved wooden panels hiding behind the chairs. Little is known of their origins but they are thought to be of Scandanavian origin.

The stained glass in the east window over the altar is overly bright and rather gaudy. In the lancets either side of the altar, however, are fragments of 14th century glass, though I personally prefer the very unusual south window about which I can find little information at all. But lovely as it is, it wasn’t the interior which had drawn me back. The church incorporates stone from the even earlier Saxon church but the new church dates back to the 1100s and its tower is worth a trip from anywhere to see.

Around the top of the tower a row of heads of man and beast look down. A Norman arched window pierces the side and the view over the landscape is stunning, even in February. But it is the south door that is the jewel. The carving is so fresh and crisp I had almost dismissed it as a copy on my first visit, but a closer look and the work and weathering are unmistakeably original.

Twin beasts, entwined creatures, the beast that looks back and a man devoured … all symbols we have seen over and over and which occupy our minds with their pictorial riddles. It is an incredible thing to see.

Walking back to the car we passed yet another calvary cross base that has been turned into a sundial plinth and pondered the shape of the landscape and wondered why this place had been chosen by its first settlers, possibly thousands of years ago.

You get a real sense of the continuity in such places and time ceases to be the fragmented affair we know, flowing instead across the face of some greater canvas than we can encompass. But time was on our side that day… we still had most of the afternoon to explore and there was bound to be a pub on the way…

Entwined

Missing…

Nothing. Zilch. Silence.

Now, much as I appreciated the chance to get organised for a long day at work this morning without having to worry too much about it, it was going to bug me all day.

My inboxes are never empty. Ever.

Morning coffee sees me sit down to at least sixty emails… and an early night will take it to three figures as a rule. A goodly number of them areWordpress notifications for the blogs I follow but even they were missing. It seemed a little coincidental that nobody had written anything at all overnight… especially as there was nothing from anywhere else either.

The only things in there were a handful of mixed emails from friends, students and people trying to sell me weird and wonderful things I am the wrong sex to require.

I gave up on it after a reboot and went to work. Periodic checks via the phone throughout the day were no better. Emails were getting through, but only an infinitesimal proportion of what should be there.

Which seemed weird. Was there something happening in the world I had missed? A major disaster, a holiday I’d forgotten about? Had I inadvertently blocked incoming mail? No, not that… there was still the trickle…

There is something completely surreal about that level of silence when you are used to the constant ‘noise’ of incoming mail.

By the end of the afternoon, when I should have dealt with the best part of two hundred at least, I’d had a mere dozen emails. And, though I complain like hell about the state of my inboxes, the hush was really getting to me.

Had I published something that had offended hundreds of people? Had my account been tampered with? Blocked? Cancelled? Something had gone cockeyed somewhere along the line and I really couldn’t get to grips with it. It just goes to show how much we have come to rely on the contacts we maintain through the aether… and by now I was gnawing the proverbial fingers to the bone.

Of course, the phone is elderly and unreliable. I couldn’t check any where else to look for an explanation. It would all have to wait till I got home, walked the dog and sat down with a coffee.

I thought I’d do the obvious and clear things a bit… the cache, history etc…you never know… and while I was at it empty the spam and trash folders. Which is where I found the three hundred missing emails… and heaved a sigh of relief. Call me an idiot, I never thought to look in the spam folders.

How they had ended up there I do not know, but at least I now know where to look if they disappear again! Of course, I have to go out again shortly, so it looks like a long evening when I get back. I may be gone some time…

Of Pups and Patience

Originally posted on The Silent Eye:

Ani, my dog is in the mood for play and has been since I got up at half past five. It is not unusual. Her needs are simple, food, play, walks, lots of love and somewhere warm to sleep. Usually the sofa, in spite of all my efforts to convince her otherwise.

By six am we had done sleep, food and walk… cuddles are always the first job, before even the kettle is switched on. After all, she hasn’t had a cuddle for at least five hours. Now I need to work, and she wants to play.

She understands that when I am at the computer I am ‘unavailable’ for ball throwing and tug of war. But understanding doesn’t necessarily mean not trying. She will hopefully bring me a toy and carefully insert it on the shelf below the keyboard, sitting with her tongue out and tail-end wagging, looking at…

View original 452 more words

Yorkshire weather…

Saturday dawned bright and sunny; a promising start to the day. Of course, we had no idea quite what it promised as we headed out to the post office, but the hills are a mere ten minutes away and that is always a good place to start. My companion got back in the car after posting the proof copy of the new book to the mysterious Charles James Fox and we set off up the long hill towards the moors.

“It’s raining.” There was a vague accusation in his tone.

“No, that stuff’s solid,” I replied, watching the tiny pellets of ice bounce off the windscreen and get increasingly bigger and whiter. From sunshine to blizzard in minutes… we could barely see the road ahead let alone the hills as the landscape opened around us. We were nearing the top, about a thousand feet up when we came to a decision… it was not a good idea to go much further. We needed a pub where we could see how the weather played out. But first…“Lunatic…” he said as I parked the car and got out with the camera.

We couldn’t believe how quickly and completely the world had turned from spring morning to winter white. It had only been snowing for about ten minutes, if that, but the moorland roads are not the place to be when the snow settles. And now, of course, there was nowhere to turn the car around so I had to drive further along the road.

“There’s a pub at the end, we might as well go there.” The Fox House at Longshaw… well that was a perfect pub for the day, considering the title of the new book. The old stone pub was named after Mr Fox of Callow Farm in Highlow and was built in 1773 in a style that seems to epitomise the architecture of home. It looks out over the moors towards Carl Wark, the ancient hillfort that rises from the heather like some mythical castle.

We parked and my companion headed sensibly inside while I, of course, wielded the camera… talking to his absence all the while. It happens a lot… Of course, by this time the snow had stopped here…in fact, there was far less snow than there had been half a mile and a couple of minutes away… and the clouds had moved to settle around Carl Wark, shrouding its parapets in white. This too is a mystery, a site unlike any other in England and although it is generically classed as an Iron Age Hillfort, its purpose is unknown and the subject of much debate.

We keep saying we have to get up there. Not today though. Definitely not today. Though I might well love that walk through the snow it really wouldn’t be as a sensible move with the weather so changeable. So we retreated to the pub for as long as it took to down an orange juice. We were probably no more than fifteen minutes before we left… walking out into brilliant sunshine with not a trace of snow to be seen. Such is the weather in the high places of Albion. Still, it did mean we could actually go off and explore after all…

Silk