LIFE ON A BORROWED CAMERA

Not that people with perfect vision will be seeing much these days.
A few moments earlier, this was a moderately open view. A few moments later and everything was hidden behind a fast veiling, white curtain.

The default weather here is currently 'mist'. This somewhat reflects my own state of joyfulness - which could be more nearly described as - 'fog'. It will be another two weeks before my camera is returned from the menders; and just when I was thinking after the demise and replacement of my laptop, the demise and not-replacement of my music speaker, the smashing of my mobile phone (I tripped over a low concrete barrier) - there's nothing else to break . . . my glasses frame has suddenly and unaccountably bent and an arm is falling off so it's not just that the world is out of focus when looked at through a broken lens - I'm walking around with crossed eyes, constantly angling my head up and down and sideways to see if there's any way I can make things look better.

On the up-side . .  I've borrowed a camera.

On the down-side . . . although pictures taken with it may theoretically be in focus I have no idea whether they are or are not. (Broken glasses!)

I hope by now, you are completely overcome with sympathy, fighting back tears and playing violins.

Friends don't necessarily help. "I know!" said one. "Come with me for a walk. That'll cheer you up!" After quite a long trek across the grey wastes of an abandoned Park-and-Ride, and after falling up a muddy, brambly bank because everything was so wet, we could see acres of brown reeds sticking up through invisible water-logged ground. I could tart up this picture. I've tried. So I know. With a bit of adjustment I can make it brighter and clearer. But to blog it like that would be to lie. What lay before us was a landscape of stripy murkiness. Which, I hope, is how you see it here.

Fortunately, I was not invited to put on waders to see if we could get through, nor given an axe and a canoe. Instead, my guide diverted us between clumps and bumps of tough grass, along muddy paths and deep puddles so I could experience the pleasure of cold brown water flowing happily into my only presentable pair of shoes.

But even in the murk of a warm, dull spring, there are moments of hope . . . 

Last week I reviewed a book on how to cheer an urban landscape with flowers. . . and brightened the post with an illustration from it of a balcony crammed with plants. I was in Southampton yesterday and as I climbed despondently up the hill from the station into town (wondering how much joy I could summon up from admiring concrete blocks of flats built to resemble ocean liners) I glanced up (never forget to glance up) and saw this. One Cordyline on one balcony. Is this a cheerful reminder that not everything is as bleak as it seems? Or does it emphasise that apart from itself everything is, indeed, bleak?

I've not yet decided.

(I hope you're enjoying this post!)

Here's a bit of light:

Earlier this week, I was going from house to house, posting leaflets through letter boxes suggesting - that plans to close the children's ward and neo-natal unit at our local hospital are not a good idea (that's not the light) when I came across this car. In some ways it could be a sad car. But it wasn't. It wasn't muddy (unlike my shoes) and the paintwork was shiny (unlike my shoes) and growing in the slot where the wipers swish - there was this plant. The photo isn't in focus . .  grey day, broken glasses, unfamiliar camera . . . but it brought - I wish I could say 'leap of joy' into a bleak and un-imaginative heart  (more violins please) . . . but it inspired a little spark of 'oh, look at this!'-ness A man emerged from the house opposite. After all, I was cavorting in his neighbour's drive, taking photographs of his neighbour's car etc. etc. But I couldn't summon enough enthusiasm to call him over to see . . just nodded, put my camera away and went to push the next leaflet through the nest annoying draft-excluding bristles in the letterbox of the next door along. But a bit of my brain (the tiny part spared from moaning about broken glasses) has, since then, been going around almost on its own - singing a little song.

Tweet

PORTLAND BILL IN WINTER

Rain.

That's what this winter's been about round here.

And wind.

And high tides.

And floods.

So I've been indoors and, on the whole, have kept away from the cliffs and the sea (they could be lethal) and from the rain which would finish off my camera.

Thus - silence.

Here and there, hawthorn leaves open, alexander seedlings spring up and . . . and I expect all sorts of other things are happening which would be interesting to notice if I could see anything beyond my streaming spectacles. Even when the rain takes a rain break the wind carries on and everything not set in stone keeps dancing. Nothing is still. So it's all a spin of water here and everything's blurred and not very blog-friendly.

But I wouldn't want you to think I've dissolved or have been swept out to sea - so I went to look at Portland Bill. My intention had been to walk between the rock gullies where plants are stiff and protected from the wind. I've been there before. It's interesting to see change . . . or lack of it . . . Except on that side of the headland the sea was rougher than usual and I was scared. It wasn't going to leap over and 'get' me - not at that moment, it wasn't - but there are big rocks missing from the sea, shattered by recent storms. I didn't want to go missing from land. The waves coming in were fifteen or twenty foot high. A ship was ploughing along, dipping in and out of view as it hit even bigger waves further out.

Erigeron glaucus  (I think).
(I'll take its picture again when it flowers.)

Being a coward . . . I pottered round to the other side of the lighthouse where everything was much calmer than it often is in winter and found . . . not a lot.

Which isn't quite true. There probably was a lot but I didn't stay long enough to do much more than photograph a few plants a million times so something would be in focus - and come home.

Proves I exist though!

* * *

Burdock (Arctium)

PHOTOS TAKEN on 28th January 2013

Portland Bill is the southernmost tip of the Island of Portland - which isn't quite an island and which is joined to the mainland of Dorset by a causeway and a bridge.

Other Portland Posts on Loose and Leafy:

The Last Plant in England

Lights and Bells, Mists and Flowers

Sea and Sea and Rocks and Stones and Sea

Tweet

THE LAST PLANT IN ENGLAND

If you keep walking and walking in England, you will eventually come to the sea.

If you arrive at the Welsh or Scottish border first, keep going - and the same, eventually, applies.

In some places, land takes a while to dissolve and you will find yourself sinking before you get to the swimming. In others the swimming is pleasant. You arrive, take off your clothes, put on your swimming gear, paddle out - and off you go. (Assuming you can swim.) In others, if you don't stop, you fall off.

Portland Bill is the fall off variety. There are a couple of boat cranes but no way down for swimmers. Which is lucky - for you'd be sucked under, drawn out or smashed up if you tried. The sea here is dangerous. The waves can be massive. The waters are always strong and choppy. The currents famously powerful. Do not be deceived by that blue view.

If you arrive by walking along the East Cliffs, you can find yourself ankle deep in flowers. Keep going, past the last lighthouse . . . and you are in one of the Dorset other-worlds.

I did that. I kept walking till I had to stop. If you look up to the right (in the picture above) there's a fence. This part of the world is popular with industries like the navy . . . QinetiQ  . . . I'm not sure who's up there (though I expect there's a notice) but . . . even if I could get over those rocks, I would have to turn back.

But I can't.

Which is why I am searching here for the last plant in England. In other places, geographically, the first is also the last, but at the end of Portland Bill - it is definitely the last. You can come from only one direction . . . then, unless you are to dry out or bake or freeze (not literally - but it does get very cold in winter) or be blown into tatters . . . you have turn back.

But where is that plant? How can I find the last plant in England if there isn't a plant in sight?

Scan round.

Nothing.

(The lighthouse isn't a plant.)

I walk ahead . . . and look behind in case there's something I've missed. Yes! There's a splodge over there - about a foot of something flat on the ground.

I go closer. A plant!

By putting the camera behind it, we can see the world as it sees it.

But only at home, when we are out of the glaring light . . .












have enlarged the picture . . .

and have zoomed in . . .

do we really see what's really there

I'd missed what I'd walked on.

Do you know the poem 'Cats Sleep Anywhere' by Eleanor Farjeon? . . . 'Cats sleep anywhere, any table, any chair. Top of piano, window ledge, in the middle, on the edge . . . '? That's what plants do too.

And the plant? Greater Sea-spurrey - Spergularia media 

And, even though they are small . . . they flower . . . which is what this one was doing, all to itself and to a multitude of little, easily walked on, neighbours. (Not that the place was exactly crowded with people - for all that a few minutes walk away there's a cafe where you can buy a cup of tea and an ice cream.)

Tweet

HOME IS WHERE WE KNOW

When we set off for our exploration of England and Scotland, I'd imagined I'd come home with lots of photographs of plants.

I didn't.

It rained. My, did it rain! You know the myth about people who live in snow-filled worlds having an almost infinite supply of words to describe the consistencies of snow? I now wish I had words for rain. Never previously have I realised how many kinds of rain there are. Some are beautiful. Some are as hackneyed as buckets of water thrown into the set of a B movie. But through all the kinds of rain we travelled, never did I find one which would make friends with my camera.

There were other disincentives too. Telling the people one is travelling with (Esther Montgomery and her family) to stop posing for holiday snaps and get out of the way of a leaf - isn't friendly. Nor is expecting them to wait while you crawl through the undergrowth. But these are not the only reasons for my empty handedness. Nor are they the most interesting. For I have learnt the value and importance of familiarity.

August 8th 2011

This is one wonderful landscapes we found ourselves walking in while we were away - part of the Goyt Valley in Derbyshire.

Fortuneswell (Dorset) Portland Harbour, Chesil Beach and The Ridgeway.

This is what I am used to.

Standing where I stood to take this photo, I am close to the Young Offenders' Prison, the stone quarries and the Old Railway Line I described in THIS post. The great bank of pebbles stretching into the distance (Chesil Beach) is pictured in THIS one. Most of the hedgerows featured in this blog are straight ahead. I live in an especially plant-rich environment - but people who live in the hills and the moors would say the same of the land around their homes - for they know what they are looking for.

If it hadn't rained so much, I would have learnt what to see. As it is - I re-learned the value of 'home'. Context is crucial. Familiarity opens our eyes.

August 8th 2011

This is the tent we travelled with - set up on Cold Springs Farm, right next to the Goyt Valley (pictured above).

Here are the plants we came home to.

The ripened sloes.

Little yellow daisy flowers. (The blue dots are the remains of Vipers Bugloss, still not quite over.)

The seed of Alexanders. (Which, to my embarrassment, I used to think belonged to Ground Elder.)

Brambles and willow herbs.

Seaweeds.

Fossils which emerge from the rocks, almost as I watch.

And the sea, the sea, the wonderful sea. It's the Isle of Portland, straight ahead. (I was standing on the highest point you can see here when I took the second photo of this post. If I had still been there, and had binoculars, I could have waved to myself.)

I'll show you more from our adventures as the weeks go by. But first, I celebrate 'home'.

(All local photographs were taken today, September 17th 2011.)

Esther's posted about one of the places we visited while we were away - Little Moreton Hall in Cheshire - HERE.

Tweet

SEA AND SEA AND ROCKS AND STONE AND SEA - THE NEXT CONTEXT POST FOR PORTLAND

There’s a lot of sea around Portland. Lots and lots of sea and lots of sky and lots of light - and I can never get it right when it comes to photographs. Detail is often blurred out and I rarely get things perfectly in focus.

But then . . . maybe this is precisely how the photos should turn out. Because this is how we do (or, rather don’t!) see here. We nearly always have to squint. The light is bright and stark and white - except on the days when it is dull and misty. It swings between the two.

Portland has its own weather system. You can see it from miles away in each direction - sitting in the sea with clouds making a bee-line for it. Often its top wears them like a hat.

This contrast of light is echoed in the landscape. The Grove (the Young Offender’s Prison I mentioned in my last post) is on the Eastern Cliffs. Just around the corner, you come to this 

on your left

straight ahead - this

(If you peer into the picture, you will see, in the straight-ahead distance, one of the lighthouses I showed in a previous post.)

and, on your right - is this.

Fishing and quarrying have been the main industries on Portland for centuries. The sea remains the sea but the quarries have changed and defined the landscape. Some are still working. Still they churn up and dig out - and magnify the glare which comes down from the sun (and the mist!) and the sea.

Portland is shrinking, cutting bits off itself and sending them away. It’s been doing this for a long time!

When London had to be re-built after the Great Fire in 1666, stone quarried on Portland went to re-build St Paul’s Cathedral and many other grand buildings which are still there today. (Christopher Wren was the local MP!) London wouldn’t be the same without them. One almost might say London wouldn’t be London if it weren’t for Portland.

It is a particular feature of Portland stone that it works well in big blocks but not so much in small ones. The hacking and lowering and transporting of these huge rocks was a time consuming business - expensive too!

Looking over the edge of the cliff . . . this is where the stone went from, lowered by crane into barges. This kind of crane was used for boats as well as stone - and there's one down there still. (Though not left over from the seventeenth century!) In an earlier post, I published a photo of one at Portland Bill. Taking a look at that might be easier than peering into this picture but there are other things of interest down there too - a ‘pillbox’ from World War Two (a concrete hut with slit windows to see through when guarding the coast) and great hunks of abandoned stone. These hunks add to the lunar nature of some of the landscape. On the western side of the island, so much un-needed, waste stone was tipped over the cliffs, it has accumulated into a great slope which looks almost as if it is a natural feature of the scenery. (I know I am building a great list of items for future posts - but this will feature in one.)

There’s an old quarry railway down there too - at least, you can see the long, straight, white line where it used to be.

To give an idea of scale -
there are two people standing on the track.

It was not easy to construct this railway - one of the great challenges being to build a cutting (now filled in) on a gradient gentle enough that engines could climb to the little town of Easton - but it opened in 1901 and for fifty years the trains transported passengers as well as stone. Freight trains continued until 1965. The rails have gone now and it has become a good flat track for walking. (Once you get down to it!)

There are wild goats here; and fulmars were swooping around their nests while I was taking these pictures. (They build them in the vertical faces of the cliffs, inaccessible to humans.)

And as for plants - they get everywhere!

Whether to the right

or to the left

People come in coaches to see the lighthouses of Portland but there are few visitors along here. There are enough walkers (mainly local with dogs) to make you feel safe - you are not too remote. Sometimes they will stop to talk (one told me there are sometimes ravens in these cliffs . . . ) but, mostly, people will smile, call a short, quiet greeting and continue on their way. It’s a good place to think. There will be a long gap before the next passer by.

Sometime, when the weather is sunny and warm, I’ll take you down to the old railway track and we’ll look up - and probably say ‘Surely this can’t be England?!’.

* * *

Special thanks to Stuart Morris for the friendly way he helped with information about the railway. He is the author of

Portland, an Illustrated History.

(You can buy this through Amazon. Here is the link.)

For a Link Page to lots of Portland Material - Click HERE

For Photographs of Stone Quarries on Portland - Click HERE

If you’d like to find tourist information or where to stay on Portland - Click HERE

To see where Portland is on a Google Map - Click HERE

* * *

All these pictures were taken within a twenty minute span on 27th May 2011.

Tweet

NOTHING LOOSE AND LITTLE LEAFY

Remember Oscar Wilde and Reading Jail ? Probably. The ballad too?

Do you know who the Governor was while he was there? Probably not!

Sir Evelyn Ruggles-Brise, that's who. And if ever you visit the village church in Finchingfield (Essex) you'll find a plaque to his memory, praising him for founding the Borstal system.

The way teenage criminals are dealt with in England has swung around through history. At the beginning of the twentieth century, boys were put in ordinary prisons alongside older, harder men; men more experienced in crime. Sir Evelyn Ruggles-Brise decided this was inappropriate and set about reform and, in 1908, the first official 'Borstal' was established. (In the village of Borstal, hence the name.)

When I was growing up in the 1960s, going to a borstal didn't seem much of a big deal. It was a sort of Approved-School add on; as much a natural progression through life as prep-school to public school to university is for many children in wealthy families. Maybe this was a local attitude and demonstrates little more than the kind of area I grew up in. Maybe the boys who were sent there took it more seriously than I did (I didn't know what happened to criminal girls) but I don't think they saw it quite as 'prison' - not like the Young Offenders Institutions we have now.

AN ASIDE
This article on borstals points out that they were not necessarily humane places and says not to confuse them with 'approved schools' - which might more warrant the boarding school analogy. Certainly, I was surprised when I first saw the plaque in memory of Sir Evelyn Ruggles-Brise. To have invented Borstals didn't strike me at the time as something to be proud of. It's difficult, this. There are often contradictions between what is intended and what actually happens. (Just as Secondary Modern Schools weren't planned to be what they developed into.) Bravado has to be taken into account too. And, as time goes by, ideas change about what is harsh and what is helpful.

* * *

This morning, I spent a pleasant hour rifling through the find-a-camp-site page of ukcampsite.co.uk which tells you where you can pitch your tent or park your tourer in England and Scotland. This afternoon, when preparing this post, I came across Her Majesty's Prison Service  Find-a-Prison page. What a turn up!

I was looking for information on the Grove YOI (Young Offenders Institution) on Portland in Dorset.

Here's what it looks like across old quarry ground.

This is its page.

Between 1848 and 1921, it was a 'convict prison'. Then it was a borstal until 1988 when it was changed into a YOI. It now houses 483 young men between eighteen and twenty-one. (2010.) Borstals no longer exist. They were abolished during the changes brought in with the Criminal Justice Acts and their revisions in the 1980s.

Another prison service page explains

'Prison life for a young offender held in a Young Offenders Institution (or YOI) isn't that different to prison life for adult prisoners, however there are some differences in the way YOIs are run.'

Prisons are, of course, very different from what they were like in Oscar Wilde's time. None the less, I wonder what Sir Evelyn Ruggles-Brise would have made of this. His idea was that young people need something specially formulated for them. That doesn't seem unreasonable. Secondary schools are different from Universities and Universities are different from paid-work places. Different ages need different environments and levels of input.

I don't know what it is like to live in an institution like this; nor what it feels like for families when they come to visit. It is a long way from nearly everywhere and must seem very remote. It's on a semi-island, joined to the rest of the country by a nine mile long bank of pebbles and by the causeway (which I described in a previous post).

There are, of course, brilliant views from beside the prison  . . .

. . . but for a young man used to the bustle of city life, I imagine emptiness must come as a bit of a shock. The sea can be as bleak as it is beautiful. Families who make the trek to visit must sometimes wonder if their sons and brothers have been sent to the end of the world.

I have nothing to say here about what it's like inside the prison but I do know this is meant to be the beginning of a new life for the people locked inside it. The information on the find-a-prison page says it does not accept anyone whose sentence is longer than ten years. Ten years is a long time - some of the young men here may have committed pretty serious crimes. But whatever they have done (and some, I would guess, in the scale of criminality - not a lot) this will be their home for a while and . . . we are getting to the point . . . most readers of Loose and Leafy will have an idea that what grows around our homes profoundly affects what goes on in our lives.

This was the scene yesterday (May 27th 2011) when I walked along the prison wall.

As you will know from previous posts, I do not recognise the conventional distinction between weeds and the wild plants of the streets. Some young men are allowed 'out' to help in a community garden. Could they not have been asked to pull out these plants? To do a bit of light weeding? Clearly not. Someone has been the length of the wall (and this is only part of it) with poison. This is what you see when you arrive - a high wall and a great line of dead plants.

People arriving in prison vans won't have time to look up, except perhaps to glimpse the razor wire.

But those of us at liberty to stop, will see plants, not many of them, but plants, gripping into the crevices between the stones.

And the lichens and woodlice and clumps of leaves lower down.

Life is so encouraging.

So far, no-one has killed the plants along the more recently built bank which holds up a lawn nearer the prison gates.

Did they leave these bits of grass and barley because there is a poppy - or is the poppy on the list for next week's weedkiller?

This is not a post about how young people should be treated when they break the law. It is post that says what we see has an impact on how we are; that seeing dead vegetation is unlikely to be an inspiration to live a better life or to put your trust in the people who will be caring for you (guarding you!) over the months to come; that killing plants without need is . . . well, I think it is wrong.

Tweet

LIGHTS AND BELLS, MISTS AND FLOWERS

This is a mixed post to match a mixed season.

The month began grey and cold. We'd missed out on March winds - but having grown up with the idea that 'rain' is almost a synonym for England and Wales it never struck me that April might be without showers, let alone that the blazing summer weather of June should be relocated to spring.

This is the lighthouse at The Bill (the tip of land at the end of the 'Island' of Portland) as it was in cold and hazy weather at the beginning of April.
The lighthouse in the picture was built at the beginning of the twentieth century
but its history goes much further back. You can read about it
here.
This picture also shows how strip farming (elsewhere more associated with the middle ages) is still practised.

So, here we are in the third week of April, smothered in suncream and wearing shorts (well, not me personally - at least, not the shorts). Hawthorn bushes are only just coming into flower (the blackthorn being mostly over) - and it's quite disconcerting. This isn't how it's 'meant to be'. The season seems all 'wrong'.

There's a common saying

'Ne're cast a clout till May is out'

and, at this time of year, it seems to be discussed almost as much as the weather and probably more than who hears a cuckoo first (which is another tradition). Is the saying referring to May the month or May the blossom?  ('May' is another word for Hawthorn.)

You'd have thought we would have decided by now! It's a bit like the commercialisation of Christmas - an issue that is never settled and which gets re-chewed each year.

May Blossom - the flowers of hawthorn trees and bushes.
(Sometimes it is deep pink.)

The 'clouts' are the cloths we wear as clothes - which, in the 'old days' were much harder to take off and on. Some people would be sewn into them for the winter.

And those 'old days' lasted until not very long ago.Take a look at this page of the Ambleside Aural History Project.

This is the Higher Lighthouse - Marie Stopes (famous for promoting birth control) lived here in the 1920s. One of the buildings in this little group can be rented to stay in for a holiday.

My mother (who was born in 1920 and grew up in London) told me newspapers were sometimes stuffed  between layers of winter clothing to provide extra warmth.

Nowadays, of course, most of us are able to fling clothes off and on again with each passing cloud!

* * *

Even when the seasons flow according to plan, this part of South Dorset has its own range of surprisingly different climates. Portland Bill, exposed to cold winds and salt spray, is a harsh environment. A few miles to the west, there are Sub-tropical Gardens at Abbotsbury. The spring flowers in this post are located somewhere in-between!

The lighthouse pictures were taken on April 5th. 

The flowers yesterday (April 22nd).

The Lower Lighthouse, like the Upper Lighthouse, has its roots in the eighteenth century. It is now a bird observatory where a track is kept of birds returning from their winter migration.  There is a bookshop, field courses and day events too. (It's run by the RSPB.)

Here you get a glimpse of why lighthouses were built here!

Close up of the
Black Backed Gulls
on the stack.

Throughout the centuries, Portland has been a tough place to live. Even now, those prepared to go onto its seas have to be skilled and brave and know the waters well. Boats like the one in the photo below have to be lowered by cranes.

The obelisk in the background warns that there is a low shelf of rock extending thirty metres into the sea.

As you can see from this photo, plants in the immediate, rough and rocky, area above the water are not bluebells! Here is another highly specialised context to bear in mind!

So, swinging between the beginning and end of the month, switching seasons in the way the weather is itself switching back and forth, flitting between the sheltered areas with dips and bushes - and the exposed land jutting south . . . we go from the harsh to the flowery and end with . . . this . . . there are lots of them . . .

Toffee Apple, Rob and Michael Peverett have identified
this plant as Green Alkanet - thanks folks!

I don't like this plant (others do; I've even seen it in gardens) but, since this is a blog to document what's here not what I'd like to be here, . . . well, here it is!