Geese

My computer is a bit glitchy today so I turn quickly to some recent photographs of geese.  Here are a pair of greylag (ancestors to most domestic geese) surveying their domain. 

Meanwhile the Canada Geese are prowling along the expanding edge of the lake

while keeping an eye out for the local humans who often appear with some easy eating.  I think they might be disappointed 

because nobody will be sitting on this green lakeside seat.  Its rather ironic that boating on the park lake was cancelled in the summer

 and the boathouse closed because of low water levels however in the springtime

 I was amused at this group of five children on a pedalo who were not shelling out for two boats when they could cram onto one.   No need to guess where the weight is concentrated and the life jackets in the back might come in handy.  

An entry to ABC Wednesday, a journey through the alphabet, this week sojourning at the letter G here

j

Fairy Steps

A path that has been trodden for hundreds of years passes through this limestone fisure known as the Fairy Steps.

The legend is that if you can climb the steps without touching the sides then you will see a fairy and they may if asked grant a wish (although I would be wary as fairies are notoriously tricksy). I think only a fairy would be able flutter up here and accomplish this task as not only does it narrow in there is also a high step in the middle that requires leverage unless one has extra long legs. In past times this was the old coffin route between Arnside and Beetham and the iron rings through which ropes were threaded to haul the coffin up are still visible.  There are many coffin or corpse routes throughout Cumbria as although there were many churches in remote areas only certain ones (the mother church) held burial rights so the corpse had to be transported, sometimes long distances across wild country, and of course they all have legends of fairy folk or devils associated with them.  From Arnside to Beetham I would guess the distance would be about five miles and it is wooded and not  particularly wild or exposed (depending on the season)  but manoeuvring a coffin would certainly slow one down. Apart from not touching the sides of the Fairy Steps it is said that if you have the second sight then you will be able to see them.

Fairies looking through a Gothic Arch (1864) by John 'Fairy' Fitzgerald

An entry to ABC Wednesday, a journey through the alphabet, this week sojourning at F here 

     

Excavation

As the saying goes - I love work and could sit and watch it all day - or in my case take a photograph.  Highway Maintenance are on the corner of one of the narrow streets of Broughton in Furness and begin to dig off the surface to excavate the road. Of course there is the obligatory

huddle to discuss the job in hand or perhaps the latest gossip.  But no, roll of drums and dramatic music,

here comes an elephantine earthmover.

An entry to ABC Wednesday, a journey through the alphabet, this week sojourning at E here 

Duck Dabblers

The Open Eye Gallery displays photography on the Liverpool Waterfront but when passing by last year, out of the corner of my eye, I spotted giant ducks in the entrance hall and of course I had to have a closer look.  There were a couple of people busy painting what I suppose you could only float in a giant bath.  They were intended for a Duck Trail across the city and themed on the history and sights of Liverpool.  As can be guessed from the horsey eyes this one is the Aintree Race Course, and the jockey silks are on its chest 

Taking a break to have a chat with his companion who is painting one on a more nautical theme

The eyes show a ship's captain and even little ducks get a look in.  The Duck Trail was part of the Cunard Liners 175th Birthday Celebrations which took place last year so I imagine this one would not move far from here to waddle by the liner terminal or perhaps outside the old Cunard Bulding.

This one with a parrot was a bit of an enigma as my first thought was, pirate, but then it has three stripes and a collar and tie.  A browse around the internet found it as Airport Duck and it will eventually have an airstrip tongue and wide open eyes (the latter a must for any airline pilot I hope).  The two ducks in the background are still waiting for their makeover.

An entry to ABC Wednesday, a journey through the alphabet, this week sojourning at D here

   

Candy Baa

I am not sure which is the more colourful, Shaun the Sheep as Candy Baa, the little girl dresses for sale in the background or the floral handbags to the right.

But Shaun in his guise as Candy Baa does look good enough to eat as painted by Emily Golden (see Painting Candy Baa here).  This was temporarily on display at Covent Garden before a gathering of 300 different Shauns arrived in the Piazza and they were all sold off for charity.

The west Piazza is also where street performers come to put on a show and here the crowd is enjoying the sunshine and those on the balcony of the Punch and Judy pub, the beer.  It is thought that the Punch and Judy pub takes its name from the puppeteers who put on performances here and indeed Samuel Pepys makes mention in his diary of 1662 of "Italian puppet plays".  For this reason Mr Punch's birthday is celebrated on the 9th May (the date of Pepys entry)

The annual gathering of Punch and Judy Professors (as the puppeteers are known) takes place by Covent Garden's St Paul's Church at the same time as the 'May Fayre and Puppet Festival'.  The pub sign (where you can spot another 'C') shows when the pub arrived here, 1787, which would have been when Covent Garden was famous for its flower sellers and

although the wholesale of flowers moved location in the 1960s to the New Covent Garden a few miles away, the statue to Flora the Goddess of flowers and Spring still reigns supreme on the roof top

The statue is by Robert Sievier (1794-1865) and is made of Coade stone, an artificial but hard wearing stone resistant to both frost and heat created in 1769. There are many statues made of the material around London which Eleanor Coade called  Lithodipyra (Greek for 'stone fired twice')  and promoted heavily for its ability to be able to be moulded into complex shapes. Eleanor died in 1821 when the factory passed to other family members but ceased to trade in 1840. It was said the 'secret formula' had been lost at this time (although people knew that one of the main ingredients was Cornish white china clay) but this is not true and Wikipedia lists the ingredients here but marvels at the skill needed to manufacture it which is probably why the Coade factory was the only one to produce it.

An entry to ABC Wednesday, a journey through the alphabet, this week sojourning at C here

Beetham Hall Farm

This is a place I would love to have a wander around inside and out, Beetham Hall.  Its span of history means that it has evolved, crumbled and expanded through the centuries.  Today it is a private dwelling and farm owned by the Wilsons of Dallam Tower.  The buildings to the right have not been lived in since the 17th Century but its origins are a 14th Century hall-and-cross-wing house.  There may originally also have been more storeys carried up into towers. This is the view from the footpath that runs behind the buildings however

Photo from: Old Cumbria Gazetteer

 for those coming in to the south Lake District Peninsula the view from the A6 road is the most familiar and it also gives a better view of the Barmkin Wall, which is a defensive enclosure around Pele Towers.  Not to be confused with Barm Cake, a large soft bread bun found in Lancashire or the slang term 'you barmpot' when someone has done something idiotic.  No-one knows the origin of any of those words, like the building they have just evolved, but Barm itself is a fermenting yeast.

Here you can just make out the arrow-slits for any marauders coming into the area and the sturdy chimneys on the house for those cold winters of the past.

Here is the full patchwork of buildings with the farm buildings on the left.  There are blocked doorways, doorways that used to be windows and dates inscribed of 1693 and 1799 and so much going on that the description in  Pevsner Architectural Guide to the county calls it a "complicated site" 

Photographs taken it was time to resume our walk and we left behind the limestone farm and stronghold and headed for the woods.  Matthew Emmott of 'Castles, Towers and Fortified Buildings of Cumbria' took a more detailed close up photographic trip around the site here

An entry to ABC Wednesday, a journey through the alphabet, this week sojourning at B here

 

      

Analemmatic Sundial

No watch or mobile phone and wondering if the Lady Lever Art Gallery pictured in the distance will be open yet?  No problem. At ones feet is an Analemmatic Sundial.  Stand on the appropriate month on the marked

  indentation and a shadow will be cast across an hour pillar.  The inner circle is British Summer Time and the outer circle is winter's Greenwich Mean Time.  This analemmatic sundial was installed for the Queen's Diamond Jubilee in 2012 at Port Sunlight on the Wirral and was, I thought, the first I had seen, although that was not true, it was just that I didn't know they had a name.  Here is my assistant demonstrating the one near the Houses of Parliament in London 

 where his shadow tells us it is 11 O'clock (my camera's date stamp may be a little more precise at 11:30).  

An explanation of the word Anelemmatic without any bamboozling mathematics:

 "The more common sort of sundial has an angled post (usually called the gnomon, or sometimes the style) which casts a shadow on a circular dial. Its analemmatic cousin, on the other hand, has a vertical gnomon, which casts a shadow on an elliptical scale. For it to tell the time with adequate accuracy (you may recall Hilaire Belloc’s verse complaint: “I am a sundial, and I make a botch, of what is done much better by a watch”), the gnomon must first be moved to the correct position along a north-south axis according to the season. Though a small sundial of this type is rather fiddly to make and use, large ones laid out on a flat area permit a person to act as the gnomon (my local one is of this sort). Earnest enquirers after chronological intelligence then need only position themselves at the appropriate spot along the axis for the time of year and — weather permitting — they can then read off the time by noting where their shadow falls on the scale".  Source: World Wide Words

 An entry to ABC Wednesday, starting another journey through the alphabet here