I’m awash to the gunnels with prep for this coming weekend’s ‘On the Pictish Trail’ weekend, based in Inverness and a few points north; eventually, (with a whittled-down group) ending up in Orkney, one of the most naturally spiritual landscapes I’ve even visited.
All those will be reported on here, and at the Silent Eye in due course. But for now, couple of photos from yesterday’s PotFest, held at Hutton -in-the-Forest in the heart of Cumbria’s most verdant countryside.
The show alternates between being under a hard roof, in the covered Penrith pens, and out in the open, under canvas, here. Usually the weather forecasting is good, and they take the chance. Yesterday, we arrived to a downpour and were sliding through mud across the field and into the gardens of Hutton Hall.
The show is all about artisan pottery; not the kind you’ll normally find in the shops, but the kind for which one-off potters are famed, often taking weeks or even months to finish a piece.
(Above: the great house at Hutton-in-the-forest)
I nicknamed the opening photo ‘The Hoot’. I loved the piece, immediately. It’s wacky and unusual. It’s also beautifully made by hand. Here are two more ‘baby hoots’.
(Above: Two baby hoots from the same stable…stable?)
I’ll be doing a full blog on the PotFest show when we get back from Scotland, along with the Scottish trip’s photo-diaries, of course. There will be a lot to cover, all of it reflective of that part of the wonderful Highlands.
I see you’re willing and able, You have your faded work- jeans on and you can borrow my older safety helmet. It’s a bit squeaky, but perfectly functional. We have two hours to paint Salty Pete between squares 1 and 19. See the ‘Lucky Bag’ diagram, below .
During the last hour before you arrived, I’ve been stirring this huge pot of white emulsion paint – essentially, bringing it back to life from ten years ago. I’m as surprised as you are that it worked… and it’s free, of course. If we use it up – which is unlikely – there’s another, identical tub sitting in the darkness close to where the rat was last seen…
(Above: Apart from the pallet wood of the garden tools rack, we’re about to paint the whole perimeter of the Saltpetre – as long as it’s wood and connected directly to the stone.
‘Roddy’ – Salty Pete’s newly-named resident rat – has not been seen since our fateful meeting in the dark and dingy recess under the old vice. I have to say, we must have been feeding him well because his coat and eyes gleamed with health. I’m not entirely happy with his (or her?) presence. How do you ‘sex’ a rat? Very carefully, I imagine, especially a wild one, living in your future man-cave.
I decant the first measure of thick, white paint into two old mugs and hand you a medium sized brush. We set to… The brief is to paint everything above waist level that is wood and connected to the old stone – with the exception of the now-completed garden tools racks, made from the old pallets. The contrast of aged wood and white will look good.
I’m after a cheap effect; what Bernie and I once named ‘North California Shabby Chic’. In the 1990s we spent many weekends motoring along the Pacific Coast Highway (also known as PCH and Highway 1) and further north, following the roads as far as the stunning Oregon coast. The computer-based world we worked in was centred on technology from one of the Silicon Valley companies, and we took every opportunity to tag a few days’ adventure onto each of our quarterly business trips.
North of San Francisco, it’s quite sparsely populated. You can drive for hours before finding that much-desired cafe, tucked away down a backroad. When you do, there’s a good chance that the decor will be ‘North California Shabby Chic’. This consists of rapidly-applied rough strokes of thick, white emulsion, resulting in a rich coat of white, underpinned by occasional glimpses of the wood beneath. It doesn’t come into its own until you put colourful things on it, of course…
It’s easy, error-proof and fast. It doesn’t matter what else you paint in the process because it can all go in the mix. We’re talking casual painting – a style to go with the organic nature of our restoration of Salty Pete… It’s also fun, and we’ll end up spattered with white. But your old jeans and my old jeans have seen it all before.
Music… we’ll need music. So here is one of my favourite Jackson Browne tracks to keep us rhythmic and motivated.
Perfect music for driving… and speed painting
Off we go…
Two hours later, singing and, occasionally, giggling, we have finished. Our arms ache with the constant brush strokes, and we’re a bit of a mess… But it’s been fun. Salty Pete – at least the wall between squares 1 and 19 – has been completely transformed.
(Above: The long section of what was Peter’s Pride Radio Shack is now a bright white section of useful pedboard, with a set of thoughtful shelf supports for the perfectly-fitting step ladders)
One of the long sections of pegboard still has shelf supports fixed in place. They’re drilled into a batten that’s is fixed into the stone at the back, so they’re very solid. Not waiting for the paint to dry, I reach for the step ladders and try them for size. They hang, perfectly, leaving ample space, below, for other fittings to be attached. Doing this gives me an idea about the many bicycles…. but more on this, later.
“Suddenly, it’s bright!’ says Bernie, arriving with three mugs of steaming tea – we’ll have to be careful not to confuse the various mugs, going forward…
She examines what we’ve done… “North California Shabby Chic!” She says it with a chuckle. It’s all the approbation we could wish… The day has begun well, and it’s about to get better.
(Above: North Californian Shabby Chic at its finest…)
There’s one shelf I’m in a hurry to see dry. It’s right in the middle of the main section and I want it to be the home of a bluetooth-based portable speaker to which I can ‘beam’ music while we’re working in here. Having quality sound is a key step. I place an old tile beneath the speaker to protect it from the drying paint, and connect it up to the phone. The well-constructed cabinet space – a survivor from one of Peter’s radio shacks – makes its sound rich and resonant.
Above it are two more shelves. I put the large, outdoor extension leads into these, and the whole arrangement seems to snap into life. Directly above this are the twin feeds from the dual power sockets on the main beam, so we’ve aligned form with function.
Let’s bring it to life… Here’s an appropriate song from John Miles:
(Above: The vitally important ‘power and music shelves’ – that bluetooth speaker sounds great in there)
USOs… it’s not a typo. Unidentified Structural Objects… There are two of them; the smaller one, here, Square 11 – beneath the music and power shelf, and a bigger floor to ceiling one on the back wall, Square 19.
(Above: The first of the USOs. Unidentified Structural Objects. What on earth did it do?)
The smaller one, beneath the music shelf, is about the depth and height of a kitchen unit, which is why we placed a broken and surplus kitchen unit next to it, years ago. We had a vague plan to make it useful in the future and it currently houses chisels and an old jigsaw. The USO is made of pale brick and serves no visible purpose. Perhaps it supported something vital in Peter’s day?
Whatever it was, it’s about to become something new, for I can’t make progress along this most important of walls without resolving its use. It is too big and intrusive to ignore, and I’d just fall over if it stayed unchanged. So I have to make it part of something functional.
Thinking furiously, I assemble some bits… which turn out to be an inspired collection…
(Above: the odd-placed and singular USO finds itself the cornerstone of a pincer movement…)
There’s a Black and Decker ‘workmate workbox’, a plastic tray, a pen and pencil drawer insert, two pieces of MDF – one raw, the other covered, a scrap halogen light fitting from my old office desk, and, finally, a small ‘modeller’s’ vice.
I push the old (and door-less) kitchen unit up snug to the USO. A short stride to the newly commissioned Drill Cabinet sees me equipped with two ready-charged drills – pilot drill and power screwdriver locked and loaded. Five minutes later, I’ve drilled the two pieces of MDF into place. In the process, the kitchen unit has been secured into the whole. I’m looking smug…
By some miracle of good fortune the white plastic tray fits snugly behind the MDF, tidying the gap to the wall. I place the pencil tray into its white brother and rotate the ‘workmate workbox’ into one of two orientations it will have, long-term.
(Above: the USO has become the basis for a neat workspace)
Things are looking good. But this workplace will be used for detailed things, and I need the footless halogen light resolving…
(Above: Finally, bright light to work by!)
The small vice comes into play: it fixes (at a right-angle to the usual orientation) to the music shelf, above. The arm of the broken halogen lamp is fastened, horizontally, so that the head can be rotated to the workbench, below, or just about anywhere else for contributory illumination.
Our working day is ending. I have one final thing to do. We have a plethora of old, plastic, petrol cans, and I suspect they’ll make useful storage – sawn in half. The first one is in the above photo, mounted on the pegboard. We’ll look at what it does, in the next post.
The left wall is looking purposeful. But behind me the central part of the floor is still chaotic. I will need a bold move for the next step, if I am not to continue to spend the start and end of each day carrying things out to the lawn and back again.
I stare up into the dusty heavens and wonder… dare we?
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness, a not-for-profit teaching school of modern mysticism that helps people find a personal path to a deeper place within their internal and external lives.
The Silent Eye provides home-based, practical courses which are low-cost and personally supervised. The course materials and corresponding supervision are provided month by month without further commitment.
I’ve written about the new one – a slinky DeWALT with a noise that makes you shiver with DIYlight. The other two are older versions by the same maker.
Buying the new one was prompted by the failure of both my re-chargeable batteries, when I tried to use the drill after a year of idleness… So, technically, I had a spare drill – but I had purchased only one battery with the new device… Two drills, one battery…hmm.
Prior to the destruction of Salty Pete’s old interior (the ‘radio shacks’), I stored my personal protective gear – safety helmet, armoured gloves, eye-protectors, long waders for the pond, etc – in a large plastic box that was loosely jammed on to the main cross-member that supports the upper part of the building. The middle of the former Saltpetre was so cluttered that I needed somewhere with easy access to my most precious life-protecting gear. Being high above, I only had to arrange the pink ladder (more on this later) to access my essential gear.
Before I swung the sledgehammer at the entire left side of the interior, I shimmied up the ladder to retrieve the box before the start of armageddon. The box contained a surprise: all my expected stuff and, underneath, another drill case. It was old and dirty, but inside was a drill and two batteries… presumable dead ones.
(Picture: One drill plus two batteries… Literally, a gift from ‘above’)
In a state of disbelief, I did a quiet calculation on my fingers and realised I now had – at least potentially – three drills and three batteries – assuming the older ones worked.
It was too good to be true. Hardly daring to hope, I stretched a power line up to the only socket in the place and used a multi-plug to connect the two chargers. There was a satisfying clunk as the batteries dropped into the charger’s housing… and then both red lights began to blink, indicating they were charging. Disbelief… and a silent thank you to the fates.
Within a meagre half an hour, they were fully charged, tested and ready for action. Two of the drills were mine; the other was a mystery. Five years ago, we had some structural work done to create an interior loft within the Saltpetre; but no-one had contacted us about a lost drill case and contents.
I made a phone call to check. Nope… said the roofer and builder of lofts. The drill kit was not his…. A mystery; but in these circumstances, a delightful one. If anyone else who’d worked here came to mind, I’d come clean.
If not, I had three drills…each with a battery.
A drill saves hours of work, but what slows you down is having to change the ‘bit’ from, say, a thin pilot drill – used to make sure the final screw doesn’t split the wood, to a bit that functions as a powerful screwdriver – driving a long, high-tensile screw home in a few seconds, where it would have taken long minutes by hand. The small, dedicated ones are useful in a house, but, for serious stuff, get an adaptor for your drill…heaven!
(Above: Square 1, now almost finished. The storage rack made from old pallets would have taken hours to ‘fix’ onto the battens without the twin drills, one in each hand… okay, slight exaggeration…)
The only reason the ‘long-handled garden tools rack’ had been finished in the short time available was the double-act of two drills, functioning as described, above.
The main problem when working on Salty Pete’s interior was the low level of light- there are no windows. When we bought The Wharf, ten years ago, there was no electric to the ‘shed’. While having the contours of the future garden carved out of the muddy building site, we had an armoured cable routed under what would become the main lawn. For the first few years, we survived off this, and the single plug near the door, barely visiting Salty Pete during the dark months. Eventually, we had a overhead set of sockets and a strip light put in, but the light was in the wrong place – on the side of the lintel and not its lower face, where it would light up the intended (future) workbench, below.
(Above: The interior of Salty Pete as a Lucky Bag word square – see previous posts – Squares 14 and 6 were today’s targets for development)
I was going to need a lot of light for some of the work I had planned, so I disconnected the fuse, then the light-fitting, before stretching the existing cable to allow for it to be mounted directly over the central part of the building. The spring days were bright, but that little extra from the overhead helped a lot.
(Above: the newly positioned strip light in the centre of the space)
Having relocated the main light, I took stock of what the rest of the day might contain. There was another ‘easy win’ for Square 14: an object that would add both hand-tools and liquid storage beneath the long-handled tools rack. For years it had served as a shelving unit in the larder of our former house. It was made wholly of plastic and I hated it… But it was free.
(Above: the sawn-off shelving unit was a perfect fit beneath the tool rack)
The plastic shelf was too tall. The top of this unit had to be level with the base of the tools above it. A hand saw made short work of the adjustment in height. Minutes later, minus its top shelf, it was functioning as a container for the petrol, two-stroke, white spirit, turps and various other liquids that normally take up flow-through space on a garage floor.
(Square 14 now re-used as our ‘liquids store’ and complete, or were they?)
The new structure was beginning to emerge within the dusty cube of the Saltpetre. Its functions and forms were nascent in what was included and excluded so far. This wall was to be dedicated to garden tools and liquids at one end; and ‘tall power tools’ at the other, with drills taking a central place in the middle. The ‘tall power tools’ had no common home at present and were a damned nuisance. Incorporating them into the wall would free up much of the floor and provide a wonderful feeling of walkable space.
I was starting to realise that this was not just a physical journey, but a psychological one, as well. Much of my personal past was being confronted, here… Contradictions have a habit of being exposed in such a process.
Enter contradiction…
(Big, red, ugly and plastic – the useless ‘tools cabinet’)
It’s about four feet tall, garish red with grey trim, and had large castor wheels. It’s all plastic, and often bends in all the wrong places. It’s useless and Bernie couldn’t wait to get rid of it!
(Above: Four large castor wheels… and that floor. I ask you…)
It’s a tool chest – but was never strong enough to do its job. I used it for years in my office–but not for anything heavy. Since then, it had mouldered at the back of Salty Pete, buried under a mountain of other, unlikely-to-be-reused stuff.
But my ‘gift from above’ drills were sitting, quite nicely, on it. Moreover, it could be rotated into the corner of Square 6, where it would take up the minimum room and not block access to the ‘long power tools’ that had to live on the adjacent and recessed Square 19. Reluctantly, I could see the potential for it to be dedicated solely to the drill-related part of my hardware. And I had just redeemed and re-used Bernie’s nasty plastic shelves. According to the verdict accompanying the last mug of tea, she was ‘well pleased!’
There was a trade, here… And I knew just how to sweeten the deal. On her last mercy mission with the tea, Bernie had remarked that it was a pity that we couldn’t re-use the severed top of the plastic shelves. Two drills at the ready, and armed with my large plastic jar of may-come-in-handy bits, I fixed the old top, vertically to the side of the renewed liquids rack and, using long screws, locked it tightly in six places against the verticals of the shelving. The hard ‘webbed’ surface was perfect for the use of plastic ties. A short time later, we had a place where shorter garden tools could be slipped into strong plastic loops and tightened… all made from scrap pieces of plastic and large-packet Amazon wrapping.
(Above: Not pretty, and would need some cleaning, but the ‘Liquids Shelving’ had acquired a side wall for smaller garden tools… Bernie was delighted!)
Returning to the other side of the left wall, there was a problem with the tool cabinet’s feet – four large castor wheels, allowing it to be pushed around on a hard level floor. But on cobbles from 1820! Even Hercules would shudder… Removing the wheels was a matter of sliding the casings out of the ‘loose from new’ plastic housings. I put the heavy castors to one side. They were the best made part of the cabinet and would possibly come in handy within the house. Wheel-less, it stood more firmly on the ever-present, ever uneven cobbles.
“If it were snowing, we could tow it away on a sleigh,” I heard myself mutter. And then thought about what I’d said. Flat runners would at least average out the effects of the cobbles. I scrambled to retrieve two lengths of scrap wood and one of Peter’s old jam jars in which he had stored a selection of basic washers. The cabinet’s plastic was flimsy, but I suspected that the right fat-screw and washer combination would fix it to anything below. I could drill through the cabinet anywhere I liked, there was no strength in any of it…
(Above: Mounted on wooden runners and drilled into the back wall, the all-plastic tool cabinet began to behave itself for the first time since it entered Salty Pete, many years ago)
I examined the interior of the cabinet to check where the structure was weakest. Pulling my head back to the daylight, I noticed that two of the older timber battens ran down the wall at the back.
Thirty minutes later, the ugly red box was not only secure, it was drilled and screwed so tightly into what was around it that it had become an integral part of Salty Pete’s structure. I grunted in triumph. I wasn’t just remodelling the interior, I was building a Favela!
(Above: Requiring only a good wash – which was pointless at this stage – I now had a level-ish ‘Drill Station’ cabinet screwed so firmly into the walls, it had become part of the structure. My very own ‘Favela’ was taking shape!
Keen to keep the momentum going, I located everything I could find related to my drills: bits galore (thank you, Dad), plastic plugs of all sizes, the lot. I stuffed them all into their new home, with the twin drills on top and… and stood back; looking from garden tools, across the expanse of the left wall to the new, bright red, ‘drill station’.
It felt really good, until I focussed on the actual wall between these twin triumphs. Before me was a patchwork of ancient red pegboard, slotted-in timbers for support, and a wealth of old MDF pieces to fill the gaps. Each was a different colour. The effect wasn’t vital, it was ‘dead’ and old… Whatever happened next with that important central section, I didn’t want it backed by such a sad base…
We needed a break from the past, and colour was the most powerful technique I knew. But the spirit of the project was to do it by re-use and upcycling–spending no additional money in the process.
(Above: At the back of one of the nastiest recesses of the Saltpetre were two large drums of white emulsion paint, surplus to requirements in 2012. Would they still be usable?)
I knew that, in the back of one of the nastiest corners of the building, (Square 5 on our map) buried beneath a pile of other things – including our ‘bagged’ Brompton folding cycles, were two ten litre plastic drums of white emulsion paint. They had been left over from decorating the house when it was finally complete, back in 2012. I doubted they would still be usable… But they were the best chance I had of changing the ‘feel’ of Salty Pete… without spending a penny!
But, first, I had to dig my way to them…
Twenty minutes later, sweating profusely with the effort of shifting enough stuff to get in there, I located them in the near darkness. They were as far back as they could be, and against the old stone of the back wall. As I inched towards them, I looked sideways, for motivation, at the shining red side of my new ‘Drill Station’…. and saw the remarkable blue eyes of a large rat looking back at me…
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness, a not-for-profit teaching school of modern mysticism that helps people find a personal path to a deeper place within their internal and external lives.
The Silent Eye provides home-based, practical courses which are low-cost and personally supervised. The course materials and corresponding supervision are provided month by month without further commitment.
The posh one, a nice DIY model from DeWALT, was bought because both the batteries for my previous drill failed at the same time, after lying idle in their case for nearly a year… My fault. So, with lockdown looming, we dashed out to Wickes in Morecambe and got a new one.
(Above: the drill… Mr Versatile)
Portable drills have come a long way from the early ‘Black and Decker’ days. Just pressing the trigger on this one and hearing that incredibly potent zzzsweeeesh gives me a rush. I’m a bit odd, Bernie says. But she loves the results.
There’s something about the relationship between man and drill… Women and drills, too, as a growing number of ladies are focussed and proficient DIYers.
You can do with a drill. You can do amazing things that a Leonardo da Vinci could never have envisaged. A simple spinning piece of metal – in various forms – together with that triumph of engineering – the modern screw – can perform miracles… and even transform an interior as hostile as The Saltpetre: Salty Pete’ as we have affectionately come to call it.
(Above: The interior of Salty Pete as a Lucky Bag word square – see previous posts – The green, although, at this stage still space, was beginning to make an impact)
My developing man-cave, is definitely a ‘he’, I thought, that bright morning after the bonfire of Peter’s Pride.
For two hours, and wearing an essential dust mask, I had swept out the cobbles along the entire left side of the emerging space with an industrial brush: squares 1-19 if you’re following this on our ‘lucky bag’ square diagram, above. I dumped the resulting buckets of the black dirt on the compost heap in the lower level of the garden – the ‘U’ shape that used to be the canal basin.
(Above: the compost heap (two bins) can be seen just right of the wall of Salty Pete, at the end of the garden)
I came back to take a deep breath and surveyed the long and narrow corridor in which I intended to construct the first section of our storage – and the new life of Salty Pete.
The requirements were simple: I needed space and functionality for gardening tools, woodworking tools, a woodworking bench (to be made as part of the project), decorating storage, general tools – car, bikes, motorbike and the like.
I also needed space for four pedal bikes. Before getting our Collie dog, we were passionate cyclists – often taking our summer holidays as cycling trips to France, Italy and Croatia. We have Brompton folding bikes, too, so the bike storage was going to have to be cleverly planned.
Then, lawnmowers… three of them. One is my beloved Honda, bought as the main machine for the Wharf’s large lawns. It’s large but not a ‘sit-on’, as I’d kill myself on the slopes that run down to the old canal bed – see photo below.
(Above: a lot of lawn to look after… machinery is essential. You can’t really see it from the photo, but there is a ten foot difference between the upper levels and the old canal bed… It didn’t look like this back in 2010 – see below))
Another is the mower from the previous house, which makes a good standby in the event of the primary being serviced. The third is not actually a mower, it’s a petrol-driven scarifier. Used only a few times a year, it saves days of raking and is an essential tool to get air into the soil and eradicate the winter moss. Lakeland’s wet winters make much moss…
There were other, smaller, categories, but each one was important in its own right. Liquid storage, for example. We needed a whole shelf system, at low level – because liquid is heavy – just to cope with two and four-stroke petrol for the strimmer and lawnmowers, white spirit and rubbing alcohol and the like.
(Above: The old canal bed as it looked when we bought the place, ten years, ago)
Most of these things come in multi-gallon containers that are useful but take up a lot of space. They are also difficult to move around, so this part of the storage had to be close to Salty Pete’s door.
(Above: six of the ‘rough’ DIYer’s best friends: mitre saw with portable bench, visor and gloves, trusty hat, wheelbarrow and giant bulk bags…)
Bernie’s words rang in my ears… “Well, how about not spending any money at all?” It had seemed a fun challenge at the time, but fulfilling the above list of requirements without buying anything new was going take ingenuity… and saws.
Saws are almost as useful as drills. I knew I had a plethora of hand saws… somewhere. My parents spent half their working lives running a greengrocer’s shop along one of the busiest arterial roads in Bolton. When Morrisons supermarket demolished the old factory opposite to build their new superstore, the days of their business were numbered. Mum was near to retirement age and had every intention of, as she put it, ‘not freezing her fingers off, every winter’. Dad didn’t want to stop selling things… he liked it. So he switched the shop’s remit be a to a general gift, handy things and tools shop.
Every birthday and Christmas, I’d be given something new with which to re-model the physical world. He was much better at engineering than I was – he’d been an aircraft factory fitter at the local De Havilland factory in his youth. I think he felt that his love and gifting of tools would result in me getting better at using them… Hmmm.
I knew that Salty Pete contained a lot of these tool presents… I just wasn’t sure where. The one thing I had found was the mitre saw. Old by today’s standards, it was clunky and very heavy. But its motor was as strong as an ox. After much physical exertion and grunting, I had dug it out of one of Salty Pete’s corners the day before, before remembering, with sadness that it was broken. The blade had started making noises because it was slowly working its way off the shaft that should have held it rigid. I’d taken a cursory glance at it – even taken it apart – but, when I tried to bolt the deadly blade back in place, it wouldn’t tighten.
It was a shame, because, in its day, I had used it more than anything else he ever bought me (apart from my first motorbike, but that’s another story…) Reluctantly, I took it around to the ‘crash and burn’ tip behind Salty Pete at close of business that day.
But then I had the dream… and in the dream the axle for the blade had a black line along its length. Waking, I remembered the dream, but none of the details. But, sipping my tea, I got a flash of that black line… and knew what to do to fix it. I walked with confidence to the ‘tip’ behind the shed and retrieved it from the old bin. With a small toolkit in hand, I laid it at an angle on the grass to test my theory. Sure enough, the cutting blade was ‘keyed’ and had to be re-fitted along a line that would allow it to sink deeper towards the base of the shaft.
Five minutes later, I had a mitre saw, again, zinging like it was new… and Dad was smiling from somewhere… I know he was.
A mitre saw is wonderful and deadly. The rules are simple: if you’re wearing armoured clothing, including gloves, you can instantly cut anything wooden or plastic that will fit into its jaws..
There were a few sections of pallets that needed the mitre saw treatment, and the clock was ticking.
Sitting on the box, looking at the now plain walls of the left edge of Salty Pete, I knew I needed a ‘quick win’. Two hours from now, our lockdown ‘working day’ would be ending. Bernie would return with the final mug of tea, and I didn’t want the wow factor to fade. Apart from anything else, the emotional effect of getting a pat on the back was of critical importance at this stage of such a big project, with so little to see so far, apart from tearing things down.
(Above: the brutal base structure was never far away!)
One of the raw materials I had plenty of was a pile of well-used pallets on which various gardening deliveries had been dropped off by brave lorry drivers, at the end of our narrow and long lane. The key to their usefulness lay in something that Bernie had said when she started her horticulture course in Penrith–back in 2013.
“Pallets…” She said, arriving home at the end of her first day to lavish attention from me and the Collie dog. “Are magic! Cut them to size and stick the handles of spades into them, with a twist.”
It took me a while to grasp it. In fact, it was only sitting there on my box with cold tea that triggered the need to make it work. But it did… I fired up the mitre saw and grabbed a hand tool or two for the difficult bits… Oh, and the two drills. I forgot to explain why I have three. Better leave that for next time as the hour is late…
I had two hours to get something useful on that wall. I had a working, if ancient, mitre saw. And drills… and those wonderful long screws that will just about join anything to anything else.
(Above: a gift from heaven – a pre-battened wall had emerged beneath the ruins of Peter’s Pride)
The revealed wall behind Peter’s Pride was already battened… That, alone, would save me hours of work. I dragged the best three of the pallets to the saw. Then, like some desperado, I set up the two drills; one with a long narrow bit to cut the pilot holes, and the other to fix the chopped and chosen pallet to the internal skeleton of Salty Pete with a triumph of gusto over accuracy.
It worked.
Two hours later, I wheeled the motorbike and large mower back into Salty Pete, looking for all the world as though I had been through another day of drudge. Bernie was coming up the drive with that final mug of tea.
“Better call it a day,” she said, consolingly, “Another one tomorrow… make more progress, then”
I nodded, taking the tea, gratefully, and looking over her shoulder to what she hadn’t yet seen.
“Push and twist… the handles?” I asked, cryptically.
She turned, then smiled. It was a moment I will remember for a long time.
“Oh, yes!”
Salty Pete now contained an organised storage system for our long-handles garden tools. Squares 1 and 14. Something was real. Something was done… and it hadn’t cost a penny.
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness, a not-for-profit teaching school of modern mysticism that helps people find a personal path to a deeper place within their internal and external lives.
The Silent Eye provides home-based, practical courses which are low-cost and personally supervised. The course materials and corresponding supervision are provided month by month without further commitment.
Several hours after I began swinging the sledgehammer, there was finally peace from the destruction. I pulled up a wooden box and sat on it, wiping the congealed sweat from my forehead onto my arm.
The Lucky Bag ‘number square’ idea from the last post seems to have caught the imagination, so I’ve updated it, below, to reflect the actual dimensions of the Saltpetre – or ‘Salty Pete’ as we have come to know it.
(Above: The ‘Lucky Bag’ map of the Saltpetre was getting greener. The motorbike and lawnmower normally take up squares 20 and 9, but they were parked on the gravel drive, leaving squares 2 and 15 from which to swing the mighty sledgehammer)
My wooden box/seat was located at 2.
I was sitting, gazing at three mountains of shattered and fragmented red pegboard, broken spars of ancient wood, and the surprisingly intact skeleton of an old wall cupboard. This pile of re-organised carbon took up squares 1, 14 and 11.
Hearing the temporary cessation of the apocalypse, Bernie had taken pity and brought me a large mug of steaming tea. I sipped it gratefully and looked around at the remains of Peter’s Pride…
“Wow,” she said, leaving hastily, before the tall red pile could begin sliding towards her.
(Above: The Wharf just after we bought it, in the spring of 2010. Phone cameras have come a long way, since!)
Peter’s Pride: I had better explain… We bought ‘The Wharf’, as the property is named, in December 2009, during one of the coldest winters on record. On December 23rd, we literally slid along the pavements in Kendal to collect the keys from the seller’s estate agents, keen to, at least, take possession of what would be our new home – once we had thrown our life savings into rebuilding it.
I clearly remember coming back to open our own front door for the first time. The property was a 1960s single storey bungalow with a large plot of land, the plot running along the line of the old Preston-Kendal canal. The canal had been drained in 1958, but the waterway had been unused for decades before that. A man named Peter and his wife had built the house, and brought up their children there. Their son, Richard, still lives in a cottage next door, gifted, by his mother, to him and his wife before, sadly widowed, she moved south to live with her daughter in Cheshire.
The Wharf was left to its own devices, eventually being bought by an ‘investor’ and becoming a rental cottage. It was overgrown, run-down and had a poor bathroom. The place soon got a bad name in the holiday trade market.
On the Sunday when we deliberately got ourselves lost in the car and inched down the tiny lane with the ‘For Sale by Auction’ sign, we found a very dilapidated house on a large and potentially beautiful plot of Lakeland soil, just outside Kendal. The house was behind a huge stockade fence and unoccupied.
As we approached in the car, a man came out of the adjacent cottage, looking a little hostile. We didn’t know him, but it was Peter’s son, Richard. Seeing we were genuinely interested he spent a few minutes telling us the history of the place. He was eager to have someone ‘real’ take over the property that had been so important in his life. Ironically, the house had failed to sell that very weekend. A local builder had been interested but wasn’t prepared to pay the ‘Investor’s’ asking price. For the sake of about ten thousand pounds, the deal had fallen through. Later, we found that the ‘Investor’ had money problems…
(Above: The Wharf in the spring of 2010, just before work began on its partial demolition and re-making)
The run-down ‘Wharf’ had potential, but you had to have a lot of imagination to see what it could become. Bernie and I got back in the car for a chat. After a long discussion lasting six minutes, we decided it was our big chance to have our own ‘Grand Designs’… On the following morning, we made an offer, subject to survey… and waited.
Several weeks later, the deal was done. It was two days before Christmas when we entered our new house. It was freezing – the heating had failed – something it did all the time, according to the holiday lettings company. We made some tea with the supplies we had brought and explored, with that lovely feeling that we finally had a Lakeland home – no matter how much needed doing to it!
We didn’t need to stay, as we still had Bernie’s house in Chorley to go back to. But we wanted to have good look round what would one day be our dream home. As darkness was falling, we managed to reset the boiler before we left, wishing our new home-to-be a happy Christmas.
Just before driving off, I said to Bernie that I wanted to stick my head into the old outbuilding. We had no idea, at that time, of its importance in the village’s industrial history. It wasn’t a listed building; we could have just knocked it down… but something said, “No…. wait and see.”
(Above: The Saltpetre, as it looked in the spring after we bought the plot. A sad and neglected outbuilding with a leaking roof, no driveway and a jammed door!)
The old door was rusted and hanging off. I managed to prise it open and stuck my head in. It looked to be full of rubbish, but when I peered into the gloom, I could see that all the rubbish on the left side of the building was a faded red colour.
There was no power, so I had to switch on my phone light to take another look. As my eyes got used to the gloom, I could see what looked like a string of cubicles made of red pegboard and hung together with an assortment of cast-off timbers. Months later, I was to find out that Peter – the father of the man next door, who had sadly died five years prior, was a keen radio-ham. The ‘cubicles’ were his radio-shacks, and had been connected to a complex arial system. Each of the huts had a specialised function, but they had fallen into disuse a long time ago. Even his son, Richard, had no idea what they did.
(Above: the entire length of the left wall, and the first square around the corner, had been freed up by the destruction of the ‘radio-shacks’. Now we could begin the work of reconstruction and organisation)
At that point none of this was known. I knew that, whatever the red cubicles were, I would one day have to knock them down. Now, ten years later and sitting on my wooden box, sipping tea, I looked with satisfaction at what the necessary destruction had wrought. The entire length of the radio-huts had been reduced to rubble, and there was an emotional feeling that the ghost of the second Peter had been finally ‘freed’ from the place.
There would be a bonfire that evening. The shattered bits of the old radio shacks would burn brightly in the canal basin. Later, in the smoke-kissed morning, I would have the luxury of the entire left wall to begin my ‘organic reorganisation’ of Salty Pete. Even at this stage, I could feel the place beginning to breathe… though it was still laughing at me. “There’s only so much you can do with a hammer, little man,” it seemed to say.
Giant hammers, I mused–thinking of my boyhood love of the Norse tales–are mighty things. But they are not the only tools in the box…
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness, a not-for-profit teaching school of modern mysticism that helps people find a personal path to a deeper place within their internal and external lives.
The Silent Eye provides home-based, practical courses which are low-cost and personally supervised. The course materials and corresponding supervision are provided month by month without further commitment.
“If I had a hammer…” The words rang out in my head. Peter, Paul and Mary giving it their all with one of the most memorable protest songs of the 1960’s. Now, I did have a hammer – a rather big one – and I was striding up the garden path towards an unsuspecting ‘Saltpetre’ with a hefty degree of intent…
(Above: Oh, yes, do I have a hammer!)
Bernie’s words rang in my ears… “Well, how about not spending any money at all?” The challenge, designed to inject some humour and purpose into the Covid-19 lockdown period, had been accepted over one too many white wines the previous evening in the amber light of the sunset.
I was about to begin the work… but where to begin?
The problem was one of space… To deal with the jam-packed interior of an old and dank stone building (built in 1820 as a gunpowder store for the canal that used to be half our garden) required workingspace… and that was precisely the problem: there was no space left, inside. Aside, that is, from the tailored holes that remained when you wheeled out either the lawnmower or my motorcycle.
(Above: The ‘Saltpetre” – a former gunpowder store from 1820, known in those times as an ‘Expense Magazine’. It had seen me fail, before. But this time I had intent…. and a big hammer… A kind of High Noon, but it was ten in the morning)
When it comes to tidying, I have what Bernie calls an ‘organic method’. You would have to study her facial expression when she says this to understand the subtlety of the remark. She will approach a similar task with a mental fork-lift truck, wearing battle fatigues and brandishing a couple of litres of bleach wired to the end of a long mop… But me, I prefer to get close and personal and work around the space I’m in.
I don’t mind getting down and dirty… the dark and dubiously-speckled detritus washing off my body in the shower at the end of such a day is all the testimonial I need that it has, indeed, been well spent.
When it comes to working within a confined space, I’ve developed a nimble and strength-inducing set of arm movements that simulate an octopus. In fact, when armed with one of my favourite drills, I can guarantee that…
But we’ll get to drills later. Drills rule, drills are killer-diller old school tech modernised with freedom-bestowing, long-life batteries.
(Above: the drill, the mighty, finger-lickin’ drill… stay tuned)
Ok, later then… I say (in the now) to the sequence-loving muse on my shoulder as I type. I’m all right now… Back in the story, I unlock Salty Pete, as we have come to know it. Later in the story it will come to have another name, earned in the battle of the drills… Ok, I know, I know…
(Above: Salty Pete leers down at us. “Oh yeah?” it seems to say…)
The newly funded door swings up and in. Don’t let it fool you: what’s inside isn’t related to such efficiency. The dark interior sneers at us. “Oh, yeah,” it seems to say. Clearly, we’ve been here, before. But never with a hammer this big. You’ll note I’ve switched to the present tense. I’m taking you with me… kindly buckle up! Those of delicate sensibilities better leave now, I drawl, nodding at the side door and sounding Welsh rather than Texan. It’s the fault of Tommy Lee Jones, always wanted to be able to do his voice at moments like this… Never works, but you’ve got to keep trying…
(Above: the Saltpetre’s side door. “Last chance to leave,” says Tommy Lee Jones)
The only accessible space is occupied by the lawnmower and the motorbike. So, as two of the most precious objects in here, we wheel them carefully, backwards, to stand on the garden path, where they will be safe from everything but Cumbria’s dubious climate. Later in the project, the supportive neighbour who’s so adept at DIY he’s just fitted a galvanised roof on his shed, confesses that he knew ‘something was up’ when I did this. One object ‘on the lawn’ he could understand; two meant business…
The effect is electric. Even sneering Salty Pete is considering his options. It’s the hammer in the right hand… Great track here (Jackson Browne) about how the ‘hammer shapes the hand’. It’s dark work, but somebody’s got to do it…
(Above: The ‘Lucky Bag’ number square – undoubtedly toxic and one of a nastiest devices ever inflicted on children. Source Pinterest)
Your childhood may well have been later than mine, but one of the little toys we used to be able to get for sixpence was a ‘Lucky Bag’. Apart from dodgy sweets, they sometimes contained a plastic square of numbers or letters that you needed to slide into new positions to make, say, a chosen word or to allow a line to add to a specific total. It was an intensely frustrating experience, because the initial state of the square had only one blank. Play with it in your head and you’ll see the problem.
We’ve just created two squares… Two squares of space makes all the difference in the world. No wonder Salty Pete has fallen silent.
I pick up the huge sledgehammer and brace my legs across both squares. “I’m comin’ for ya!” Tommy Lee Jones says. It’s getting better… at least it’s not Welsh this time.
We swing the mighty hammer. No going back now… The colossal head arcs, neatly, through the old and dusty air… towards a tall target selected in the dying light of the previous day.
They’re not laughing now, as the comedian Bob Monkhouse used to say…
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness, a not-for-profit teaching school of modern mysticism that helps people find a personal path to a deeper place within their internal and external lives.
The Silent Eye provides home-based, practical courses which are low-cost and personally supervised. The course materials and corresponding supervision are provided month by month without further commitment.
I am not a tidy person. My wife, Bernie, is much better than I am but even she admits that, as a couple, we have to work at it.
At the bottom of our garden is a large stone building called ‘The Saltpetre’. Built around 1820, this ‘expense magazine’ (and no, I haven’t just made that up) used to house gunpowder awaiting transportation the following morning via the canal that was once next to it. I’ve mentioned it before, but this post is nothing to do with the history of the village… other than the legacy of caring for something that old.
(Above: The ‘Saltpetre” – a former gunpowder store from 1820, known in those times as an ‘Expense Magazine’. Photo taken from what was the canal bed before we wove it into the garden)
The ‘Salty Pete’ as we’ve come to know it, is not a particularly pleasant place to inhabit. The old stone walls are unrendered and it’s cold and draughty in winter. If you wanted a classy man-cave, you wouldn’t start here.
(Above: the old walls are as originally constructed)
The floor still comprises the original cobbles, which are impossible to sweep clean. They are also the reason there isn’t a truly level surface in the whole edifice.
(Above: the Saltpetre’s old cobbled floor from 1820)
My study in the house is much more hospitable… but you can’t drill, saw and sing Meatloaf to yourself in a study. And, somewhere in the old ‘shed’ near the back wall, was a set of power tools my father bought me for assorted birthdays and Christmases… He used to sell them in what had been a converted fruit and veg shop, driven out of business by Morrison’s supermarket opening across the road. So there was some buried sentimental treasure in the dark stone interior of the Saltpetre… which may feature later in our story.
We’ve lived here for 10 years, and each year another layer of our stuff has been pushed into this cavernous storage space. I did have the decency to fund a new roof and door, and at the same time took advantage of somebody else’s building skills to have an interior loft installed, thereby increasing the already vast storage capabilities for yet more stuff…
Year on year, as it filled, the task of cleaning it out ballooned in my consciousness, as things do when put off for a decade…
Then came March’s virus lockdown… But that wasn’t an immediate problem, as there was a list of ‘unperformed other jobs’ that were actually much easier – like power washing the flags around the house. That took two days. Then we had the major task of tidying up the study (me) and the next door room (Bernie) that looks out, via a tiny balcony, over the garden, and which we always planned to use for a morning coffee on bright summer days… That took two weeks, but both rooms looked wonderful when we’d finished…. Which had the unfortunate consequence of giving us an appetite for getting things done. Hmmm, dangerous that!
An assortment of sweaty garden jobs in the hot sun followed, but finally, there was nothing left of the list but the Saltpetre. Bernie assured me that I would at least have a true man-cave at the end of the job. I saw through this shallow ploy, of course..
Desperately seeking reasons not to begin, I clutched at “But it will cost a fortune!” She just smiled at me – with that inmate skill that women have – and said, “Well, let’s make it a double challenge: don’t spend any money at all…”
She watched the cogs work… I do like challenges.
The day was ending. We had been successful in our work in the garden and opened a bottle of New Zealand white wine. We sat at the garden table, watching the sun descend behind the ash trees and discussing the feasibility of doing ‘Salty Pete’ at zero cost.
An hour and a bottle later, with Bernie agreeing to lead the charge by sorting out the gardening tools, we agreed that it would be fun to try.
(Above: the first of four simple photographic techniques for making local walks very special…)
From a photographic perspective, we live in a wonderful age. Even the most humble of today’s mobile phones boasts a decent camera. Used within their limitations, we can achieve an amazing record of our days – even locally to our homes – with the use of a few simple techniques.
My wife and I, plus our cat and dog, are lucky to live in the countryside, just south of Kendal, in Cumbria. Like everyone else we are ‘locked down’ except for buying food and exercising our Collie dog. The emergence of the spring has been a welcome respite, and has enabled a wider choice of photographic opportunities.
In my experience, taking photographs is a deeply therapeutic activity. It gets you out of the house, and makes you focus on something very positive. For the shots I’ve used in this blog my criteria were:
1. To walk only a short distance from home. A typical morning dog walk takes us about two hours and sees us less than two miles away, as we meander and the collie gets lots of ball-chucking.
2. To photograph only objects that are commonplace. The essence of this kind of challenge is to find something special in the ordinary.
3. To use only my mobile phone to take the shots, leaving cameras with more sophisticated lenses at home. Generally this means that the emphasis will be on the close-up shot, but, as we shall see, there can be exceptions.
The opening shot, above, is at the farthest point of our walk. The path along the old canal bank takes a sharp left and dives down into a field with sheep. This removes the middle ground and opens up the perspective available. A few seconds spent exploring the composition through the viewfinder can reveal a pleasing mix of foreground and distant background – in this case, a faded view of the Lakeland hills to the north-west, contrasting with the old limestone and aged wood of the fence.
(Above: Sedgwick House – once a gunpowder mangate’s mansion)
The second image, above, is of Sedgwick House, in the middle of the village. Once the palatial home of a local gunpowder magnate, the gothic-style mansion has seen many roles; including army base and children’s home. Following a recent building conversion, Sedgwick House is now divided into luxury apartments.
I’ve photographed it many times, but today was the first time I’ve seen the light so perfectly balanced between the dappled area beneath the trees and the brighter approach to the building. The two tall trees should have interfered with the shot but, due to their helping frame the light effects, they have actually enhanced it.
(Above: the ‘skewed bridge’ in the centre of the village – this once carried the full weight of the canal across the main road)
The third shot is of the ‘skewed’ aquaduct in the centre of Sedgwick. What is now known as the ‘Lancaster’ canal once ran all the way into Kendal. The canal-carrying bridge was built using advanced stonemason techniques that allowed the shape to be bent. This avoided having to reshape the road into a ‘z’ bend. The photo deliberately emphasises the skewed right arm of the structure, thereby demonstrating its length. The tiny view into the continuing main street is a visual surprise in something so massive and dense.
(Above: the final shot – nature bursts out in the very special hue of spring green)
The final photo is simply a tree bursting with the unique green hue of the spring. It’s impossible not to feel joy in its presence – especially after such a long and muddy winter. Always look for the dappled light at the base of the tree – it’s a joyous as the green on a lovely day like this.
Four simple techniques and sample shots. Anyone can take such photos, and come back home feeling something deliberate and mindful was achieved in the daily exercise walk. In addition, the air is clear and beautiful, given that there is so little traffic on the roads. Get your camera out and take advantage while it lasts… It will give you a record to discuss with your grandchildren, if nothing else!
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness, a not-for-profit teaching school of modern mysticism that helps people find a personal path to a deeper place within their internal and external lives.
The Silent Eye provides home-based, practical courses which are low-cost and personally supervised. The course materials and corresponding supervision are provided month by month without further commitment.
(Above: our garden, larger than most in the village because its right half was the bed of the Preston-Kendal canal. The large stones forming the boundary between the two were part of the old wharf)
(Note: republished from my Mac laptop as the latest version of WP on the iPhone 11 Pro has crashed itself, repeatedly, and appears to have taken the original post with it… I’ve had to recreate this from a (mercifully) still open window that allowed a cut and past of the whole thing… Apologies to those whose links arrived at nothing!)
We have a somewhat unique connection to the history of our tiny village of Sedgwick, near Kendal and on the edge of the English Lake District. The village of only 350 residents has neither shop, nor pub nor church. But its location, four miles south of Kendal is an ideal basis for Lakeland life and also gives easy access to the M6 motorway – a mere fifteen minutes away.
The village has no shop, no pub, no church and about 350 residents. But it’s a gently attractive place to live…
Our home is one of the few properties which still bear the imprint of the old canal which ran from Preston to Kendal in the early years of the 19th century. Our neighbour, Richard – who has lived here all his life – remembers being allowed to stand on the deck of the maintenance barge as the water was finally drained from this stretch of the canal in 1958. The maintenance boat is buried on our side of the property, some ten feet below the lawn (see photo above) that now abuts the large stones that were the original wharf – the ‘dock’ – for Sedgwick’s interaction with the canal… and the canal, or rather, the reason the canal came here, is what created Sedgwick.
In the sixty years from 1770 to 1830 canals were the height of innovation. They helped fuel the industrial revolution. Each one required an act of parliament for its creation. They, plus the long barges that floated on them, were very important forms of transport, known as ‘navigations’, which gave the name ‘navvies’ to the labourers who dug them out by hand from Britain’s rugged landscapes.
Their reign was brief. Britain’s growing network of railways meant that the slow transport by inland boat was made obsolete within thirty years of the canal’s height of success.
Sedgwick has few claims to fame. One is the former canal; but a far more important reason is how and why the canal ever ran through this tiny place at all…
Let’s tell it as a bit of a mystery – by way of a walking tour and easy reading.
(Above: from the top lawn the extent of the old canal is apparent. As the stones indicate, it was wider here to provide a docking wharf and a turning point for the larger boats returning to Lancaster or Preston (and on to the sea))
We have a large garden. It’s taken us ten years to transform it from the run-down wilderness we inherited when we decided to blow most of our savings designing and having built a home on the edge of the Lake District.
(Above: How the old canal bed looked when we bought it!)
At the end of garden, on the south side, is a stone outbuilding known locally as the ‘Saltpetre’. It’s quite well known in the village and forms a key part of the industrial history of the place. A sign on the canal path about a hundred metres away describes it. It was built in 1830!
(Above: ‘The Saltpetre’ is a large stone outbuilding at the south end of our garden. As its name implies, it played an important role in Sedgwick’s link with the manufacture of gunpowder – its only industry!)
Historic gunpowder (also known as ‘black powder’ to distinguish it from modern smokeless powder) is the earliest known means of creating a chemical explosion. We associate gunpowder with war and aggression, but far more of it is used in mining, quarrying and other peaceful endeavours. The canals, themselves, were created by the use of gunpowder to blast away rocks that would have prevented the straight lines necessary to create the economic route.
Gunpowder was made from a mixture of sulphur, charcoal and potassium nitrate. The latter was known as saltpetre – pronounced ‘salt-peter’. The sulphur and charcoal are fuels for the core ‘burning’ reaction, while the saltpetre injects a literally explosive reaction of rapidly expanding oxygen, catalysing the ordinary burning into something entirely different…
No saltpetre, no bang…
Saltpetre is known, historically, as the ‘white mother of gunpowder’. We will explore its relationship to Sedgwick and the strange naming of our outbuilding in the next post.
(Above: The side view of the Saltpetre, with the steep slope down to what would have been the canal bed)
The interior of our Saltpetre building is still floored in the original limestone ‘cobbles’ once used throughout Cumbria.
(Above: Limestone ‘cobbles’ form the floor of the ‘Saltpetre’)
For now, let’s climb out of the old canal bed, through the gate and up onto the original canal path – still in use as a footpath and right of way. The immediate area is heavy with trees which follow the steep bank down to the adjoining farmland.
About a hundred metres along the canal path we get to the old bridge that is the centre of Sedgwick. The bridge is an aqueduct – designed to carry water over a roadway. Its strength is demonstrated by the fact that it’s still here, and still carries the bed of the long-drained canal through the centre of the village. A special national authority still exists to protect and maintain such structures.
(Above: the steep and irregular stone steps lead down to crossroads which marks the centre of Sedgwick)
The bridge is of the ‘skewed’ type. This allowed the existing track or roadway to operate directly beneath the ‘bending’ stone bridge. Without this design, the road would have needed alteration to become a ‘z’ shape.
(Above: Sedgwick’s Skewed bridge allowed the road to pass directly beneath the aquaduct)
The other side of the skewed bridge allows descent via a pedestrian slope. The village hall is directly ahead at the base of this pedestrian slope.
From here, continuing on the canal path, we walk southwards for a few hundred metres until we come to the edge of the village.
(Above: The old canal path is intact, and provides the basis for many local walks)
Eventually, after another five minutes’ walking, we come to one of our most iconic and mysterious structures: a ‘bridge to nowhere’ that crosses a canal that is no longer there. In this view you can see what happened to the canal along most of its length; it was sold off and filled in to create agricultural fields – as it was with the piece that is now our garden.
(Above: one of the many ‘bridges to nowhere’ as we call them!)
At this point, we can look down the slope to see a very different face of Sedgwick. There, set in its own grounds, is the largest building for miles around. Its present name is Sedgwick House, but originally it was named Wakefield House. ‘Wakefield’ was the family name of a man whose industry was to transform the landscape of Sedgwick; and connect it with the beating heart of the rest of industrial Britain.
(Above: Sedgwick House… but it didn’t start off that way)
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness, a not-for-profit teaching school of modern mysticism that helps people find a personal path to a deeper place within their internal and external lives.
The Silent Eye provides home-based, practical courses which are low-cost and personally supervised. The course materials and corresponding supervision are provided month by month without further commitment.
