I’ve written about Kirkby Lonsdale, before. This lovely market town, on the border between Cumbria and Yorkshire, has many faces, some of them well hidden…
A photo-tour is a good way of sharing these…
Our journey starts with Devil’s Bridge, located below the town, and the old crossing point for the River Lune. This used to be the main road to Yorkshire…
The way down to the River Lune is steep and treacherous. People jump off the bridge into the river, here…
It’s a popular spot with canoeists. This is a regular group who appear to have ‘hexagonal’ canoes.
The Old Mill at the bottom of the steep lane from the town centre is one of the most photographed buildings in the town. But seldom seen by those who only take the tourist route.
Climbing Mill Brow, which is very steep, we come to what I always think of as the ‘Jane Austen’ house.
Looking back down Mill Brow, we can see how steeply the road drops off to the river.
There is a ‘secret road’ through the town that used to be the main thoroughfare. Here, hidden near the summit of Mill Brow, is the old market square. Market in this context meant ‘Cattle Market’.
From the market square, the ancient lane runs in a dog-leg towards the church.
St Mary’s Church is located at the Kirkby Lonsdale’s highest point. It is one of the oldest part of this landscape.
The oldest parts of the church are Norman. Three doorways and the inner north arcade date from the early 12th century. The church was restored in 1866. The ceiling was raised, giving the outer north aisle a separate roof,
The old door of St Mary’s Church. The main entrance is to the right.
The interior of St Mary’s is simply beautiful.
St Mary’s supports a popular children’s group.
The far end of the church yard is the gateway into the town centre.
©Stephen Tanham 2022
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye, a journey through the forest of personality to the dawn of Being.
http://www.thesilenteye.co.uk and http://www.suningemini.blog
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And do you slither hither…
When soft and dozing, August finds
My sleeping skin beneath your sun
My mind soft dulled with wine, and
Sky so blue it sings like life
Reborn…
————-
When winter’s bite’s so long forgot
Yet present in your kiss
Drink this, drink deep, the she-snake smiles
Let this be all there is
And hither to my opened lips
You slither…
————-
Image from Instagram – Winter storm.art
©Stephen Tanham 2022
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye, a journey through the forest of personality to the dawn of Being.
http://www.thesilenteye.co.uk and http://www.suningemini.blog
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The River Kent forms a natural heart to the village of Sedgwick.
The river has many faces. In 2015 it saw some of the worst floods in the region’s history. But most of the time, it’s peaceful and beautiful.
It has some special moods, but you have to be there to photograph them. Not a matter of skill, rather right place at the right time.
Which is to say that I was lucky with this one. The perfect summer day, the dog walk that took me to the river…and then this view of late summer’s splendour.
What did we do before popular photography? Forego the ability to share such moments, I suppose… Poets might disagree!
©Stephen Tanham 2022
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye, a journey through the forest of personality to the dawn of Being.
http://www.thesilenteye.co.uk and http://www.suningemini.blog
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In parts one and two, we looked at the relationships we build with the world and each other. We see that how we ‘relate’ to the world is coloured by many factors in our early development.
Is there a single technique that will help correctly align us in relationship with the world — with the Universe of our world? Can we really call on any kind of truth to guide us?
There is… and it begins with investigating ‘where’ we live in our human ‘selves’, and taking back responsibility for our worlds.
The anatomy of ‘us’ is quite simple: we have a body and a mind. The mind is not easy to define, but the body is where ‘we’ end and the ‘out-there’ begins… or so we think. Our body is chock full of sensors that relate to us a ‘picture’ of our world and our interaction with it. The body really perceives many ‘grey areas’ but we allocate them the colour of ‘received wisdom’.
Some people even kill for such beliefs, the obvious face-to-face value of compassion and companionship forgotten, in favour of a lethal dogma. Dogmas needn’t belong just to the poor and fanatical. They belong just as much to blind capitalism, which confuses might with right…
If I put my hand on a hot pan, I’ll get burned. So I learn not to. It’s not a matter of opinion, its a matter of physical truth. But the mind is full of opinion, much of it garnered from people we trust and respect. But those opinions – which go to form much of our character – have seldom been tested as truths in our own lives.
Our society is based upon thinking. Thinking is what differentiates the beastly from the elevated and civilised. Only the attempt to shut out half of our real natures leads to the ‘eruption of the untended’ in our consciousness. Freud recognised this and designated it the ‘id’ – the it. The id is the beast. The thought-driven puritan with uncompromising ideals is the ‘superego’… the other end of the psychological self.
Both are false prophets. Our poor egoic selves – holder of the ‘I am’ – are left to wander our lives in search of the truth that harmonises them. It gets hurt, and turns much of its nature to ‘stone’.
There is only one truth worth having and that is our own. It takes a brave soul to say that, and an even braver one to practice it.
To find our truth we need to forget ‘sin’. We need to cast off those old clothes and recognise that we have all we need to find our truths – and that those truths should become our ‘goodness’. We have feelings of goodness and sharing, just as we have temptations of selfishness. We have an inherent gasp of kindness and compassion. We know that they feel like. They come from a place that is more deeply anchored in our truth that our society is.
When we are ready to make the journey towards the real Self, it is powered by the growing certainty that this is the only good that matters. What then springs free in us is an intimacy, a personalness that we have begun a quest which is more important than anything else we could be doing.
As Shakespeare’s Polonius says in Hamlet:
This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.
In the last part of this series, next week, (yes I did extend this in the writing of this part, in not wanting to put too much into any one post!) we will look at the journey into our own consciousness in search of the real nature of a deeply personal awareness – and the dramatically different picture it paints of our lives.
End Part Three.
Previous posts:
©Stephen Tanham 2022
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye, a journey through the forest of personality to the dawn of Being.
http://www.thesilenteye.co.uk and http://www.suningemini.blog
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Set in Stone
by Steve Tanham
The Silent Eye’s Landscape Weekends were born from a mad-cap day on Ilkley Moor and a number of subsequent events up there.
Join us on Sue Vincent’s birthday (14th September) for lunch and a short walk to one of Ilkley Moor’s ancient monuments as we remember our former colleague and fellow director in the landscape she regarded as her home.
Meet: Noon at The Cow and Calf hotel and restaurant on Wednesday, 14th September 2022.
You can contact us via email at rivingtide@gmail.com.
©Stephen Tanham 2022
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye, a journey through the forest of personality to the dawn of Being.
http://www.thesilenteye.co.uk and http://www.suningemini.blog
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It had been a long, hot day…
A trip from Kendal to Leeds to catch up with our three-month old grandson.
A walk and some street food in the eclectic Oakwood district, then a gentle stroll back to their house.
We hit the busy time coming back, and decided to give Tess one of her favourite walks by the river in Kirkby Lonsdale.
Walking down from the market town into the valley, we passed the view above… and stopped to take the photo, and… store it in our minds.
The heat (31 degrees C) didn’t diminish the specialness of the moment. We have long and wet winters. When it’s cold it’s very cold.
So, we’ll have a piece of warm heaven to nourish us in January…
©Stephen Tanham 2022
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye, a journey through the forest of personality to the dawn of Being.
http://www.thesilenteye.co.uk and http://www.suningemini.blog
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In Part One we looked at the anatomy of relationships, in a general sense. We considered how the birth separation from our mother sets off a chain of reactions that strengthen us – as individuals in the world – but isolate us in a bubble of self, from which we form more distant relationships, perhaps only really opening ourselves to our world and others a few times in our lives…
Does our self’s journey hold an invitation to do more than this? There is a contradiction in our lives: the developed sense of self protects us from, among other things, emotional hurt. But it also ‘numbs’ the quality of experience, since everything is seen with reference to this self rather than being experienced for what it is.
Philosophers have always postulated that there is a world ‘out-there’, but that we abstract it within the mind and so deal only with a copy of reduced intensity; our minds filled with ‘routines’ that recognise a situation and replay what we historically feel about it.
In this way, we live in the past rather than the present. It’s a sobering thought…
To consider that there might be something that ‘is’ beyond the ‘me’ is challenging. The me has been carefully nurtured into our maturity so that we have fortress of self, where only what we choose can reach us – in the sense of affecting us. Even those choices become habitual, resulting us being almost machine-like, though few of us are brave enough to contemplate that.
There are various methods to loosening this barrier of self and world. One of the simplest is to learn to look again. Consider an object; say a flower. Let yourself look at it in the habitual way, but then go back, a second later, and look again. Deliberately pick out details that you missed in your usual cursory inspection. The changing hue of colour, the fragrance, the nature of the flower’s centre… Make them all vivid and challenge your mind’s usual perception.
With a little practice, you will be able to literally ‘lose yourself’ in the flower or whatever object you’ve settled on. Traditional approaches to consciousness state that we create an internal representation of the flower in our minds. The flower has reality – it’s really ‘out there’, but our consciousness of it is largely historical. Our look-again flower has much more vividness than before.
At this point, we face a challenge: do we content ourselves with the brightening of our world by doing more of the look-again process? Or do we plunge much deeper into ourselves to discover some startling truths about the very nature of awareness, itself.
In the third of this series, next week, we will look at the journey into our own truths… and where that lives.
End Part Two.
©Stephen Tanham 2022
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye, a journey through the forest of personality to the dawn of Being.
http://www.thesilenteye.co.uk and http://www.suningemini.blog
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Our two-week trip, ending in the Hebridean Island of Lewis, was coming to an end. The following morning, we would be on a ferry from Stornoway to Ullapool, then a fast route directly to Inverness, where we could pick up the main A9 to Perth, stopping in a travel motel, before setting off early for Cumbria and home.
We decided to spend our last day in the Western Isles (we had adopted the native name for this beautiful place) exploring the island of Bernera. Two of the party had a specific interest in the story of the Picts, a tribe of skilled and artistic people who settled across northern Scotland in the period 200-800 AD. We were intrigued to find that a Pictish settlement had been uncovered and excavated on Bernera.
We hadn’t taken the title ‘Isle of ‘Bernera’ too seriously, but, arriving at the long stretch of ocean in our path, the dramatic presence of two bridges, one built in 1953, the other recently, brought home to us the changes made to life by such structures…
The two bridges literally cross the Atlantic- a part of it – and say so on their notice boards!
Having ‘crossed over the Atlantic’ we now stood on Great Bernera, looking back at the ‘mainland’.
The welcome board gave a helpful greeting:
‘Having crossed over the Atlantic you are now standing on the beautiful island of Great Bernera. There is much to see and explore on this small island, starting with the unique semi-circular standing stones just above Bernera Bridge here at the southern end, and ending with the Iron Age House and village site at Bosta Beach in the north.
Along the way there are marked walks to Dun Bharabhat (a well-preserved small broch), the renovated Norse Mill and the west coast circular walk starting at the Community Centre and going via Bosta.
The scenery is amazing with moorland, lochs, coves, hills and cliffs to find and watch out for some truly wonderful wildlife including Otters, Seals, Dolphins, Golden and Whitetailed Eagles and many bird species.
The Community Centre, café and museum are centrally located and are open during the summer season. There you will find more detailed information on places to visit on the island.’
Once on the island of Bernera, we headed for the small village of Bosta, (see map, above) on the north coast and opposite the smaller island of Little Bernera. Beyond here is only the Atlantic Ocean.
We were here to see the ancient Pictish village, but the first thing we noticed was the quality of the many beaches; even better than those at Uig!
The Labrador and the Collie loved the beaches. Getting the ‘Lab’ out of the clear blue sea was a challenge. Tess the Collie is more of a paddler…
Then it was time to make our way along the path to the Pictish village we had come to see…
The Pictish house that can be visited is a reconstruction based upon what is known about the tribe, plus artefacts found at the site.
The guide explained that the Picts’ closeness to nature is helping archeologists understand that style of living, which may prove useful to mankind’s future!
The reconstructed house is made in such a way that you can see how it was built. Certain sections are left bare to emphasise this. The house is a reconstruction of one of the late Iron Age ‘jelly baby’ houses excavated nearby. It was built using the techniques that were available in Pictish times. The excavation site is not yet open to visitors.
No physical evidence of the design of the original roof survives. The style of the roof was dictated by the shape and strength of the walls. For this reason they were built high, so the roof could be kept simple. Also, high walls, surrounded and banked by earth, would keep the interior warmer in the winter.
The dividing walls between the two ‘cells’ of the interior would have been too weak to support a superstructure. The ridged roof found in Pictish houses of later periods is a major departure from the circular roofs of the wheelhouses and brochs of the earlier Iron Age, and a precursor of the traditional ‘roof’ was we know it.
The entrance passage was curved to break the strength of high winds and sloped from ground level to the interior floor level. The purpose of the small secondary chamber is unknown. The main living space may have been subdivided into living and sleeping areas. The small space may have been used by the women for their work.
The central hearth is aligned north to south. This may have been for practical or ritual purposes. It is not known if there was any form of lighting. The summer nights are very long, the winter darkness can be total. This was – and is – a place of beautiful extremes… Parts of the roof may simply have been lifted – or not – to suit each day.
The ridged roof is a major departure from the circular roofs of the wheelhouses and brochs of the earlier Iron Age, and a precursor of the traditional blackhouse roof.
Soon it was time to go. We had spent half our time on the wonderful beaches, and the dogs were delighted and sleepy. Tomorrow would see the start of our long journey home.
©Stephen Tanham 2022
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye, a journey through the forest of personality to the dawn of Being.
http://www.thesilenteye.co.uk and http://www.suningemini.blog
Part One: https://suningemini.blog/2022/05/24/a-poolewe-diary-1/
Part Two, https://suningemini.blog/2022/05/31/a-poolewe-diary-2/
Part Three, https://suningemini.blog/2022/06/06/a-poolewe-diary-3-the-loch-on-the-back-of-the-oats-box/
Part Four, https://suningemini.blog/2022/06/14/a-poolewe-diary-4-once-upon-a-time-in-the-far-north-west/
Part Five: https://suningemini.blog/2022/06/21/a-poolewe-diary-5-over-the-minch-to-lewis/
Continuation onto the Hebridean Island of Lewis:
A Hebridean Diary: Part One – Impressions of Lewis
A Hebridean Diary: Part Two – Long Road to Uig
A Hebridean Diary: Part Three – Of Coats and Kings
A Hebridean Diary: Part Four – The Drowned Lands
A Hebridean Diary Part Five – When power is unchecked
This is Part Six the final post in the series.
©Stephen Tanham 2022
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye, a journey through the forest of personality to the dawn of Being.
http://www.thesilenteye.co.uk and http://www.suningemini.blog
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Norfolk and Cumbria are both famous for having ‘big skies’. I’m sure there are others, but over the years, I’ve had the best summer sky shots from these two places – each one vast in its own right.
August has long been my favourite month for shooting photos of such splendour. The one above was taken near where we live, on the edge of Kendal, Cumbria.
There’s nothing remarkable about the photo, but I love how it shows the sheer scale of the cloudscape, stretching from the horizon to nearly overhead.
©Stephen Tanham 2022
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye, a journey through the forest of personality to the dawn of Being.
http://www.thesilenteye.co.uk and http://www.suningemini.blog
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Defining Relationships (1)
by Steve Tanham
We treat the word ‘relationship’ casually. We don’t mean to – we probably don’t know we are dealing with one of the most fundamental parts of our existence. If we could see the full implications of the idea of relationships, we might be better equipped to see how much symbolic ‘gold’ there is in them.
To consider this, we should step back and examine how we come to have any relationships at all…
Relationships, as we know them, exist because of certain assumptions we make from our early years onwards. We are born into a world where an unthinkable separation is happening, The mother that has nurtured ‘us’ as part of her, must, for our own future, distance her body from ours; connecting us, instead, with warmth and sustaining milk as substitute for a shared existence.
Our lives in the world begin with a biological separation, and, though we are not conscious of it at the time, there is already a duality which, until we mature, spiritually, will never equal that former unity.
This is tightly related to the mystery of the feminine principle and its power in our consciousness and our relationship with Nature.
If I didn’t have a strong sense of ‘me’, there would be no-one else with whom to have a relationship. Because I am certain there is a me, and that this me is separate from everything around me, I create an other, which is not-me.
From that point on, I live in a world which is largely body-centric – the body being the identified boundary between the me and the other.
The adult has fixed this into a world-view. The child, however still lives in a world where there is magic…
That magic is part their sense of connectedness with ‘out there’, which is seen as far closer (particularly emotionally) than the adults’ picture where ‘me’ ends with the edges of the body- or the body of a lover. For the adult, the majority of ‘food’ for the soul comes through the senses and the intellect, leaving a chasm of ‘hunger’ at a deeper and unconscious level of the self.
Early psychologists, like Carl Jung, made much of this archetypal ‘diving feminine’, and its part in each of us in the shape of the anima and animus.
But not everything begins in the body.
‘I’ have the keenest senses to tell me what are my thoughts, emotions and hungers – all of which have a self-evident nature, and what are the secondary things that emanate from the world around me – the other.
Much of my education in life is about learning the logic of how other things affect me, in-here, from sources in the apparent out-there. There is great wisdom in investigating these channels of perception and finding the truth about what we actually know of the out-there objects, and what is the automated result of our world-picture…
The generic ‘relationship’ has a central part to play in our understanding. It could be said that having any relationship has the capacity to put the magic back into our world-view… That is, if the relationship is explored to the full, in a spirit of self-truth.
End Part One
©Stephen Tanham 2022
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye, a journey through the forest of personality to the dawn of Being.
http://www.thesilenteye.co.uk and http://www.suningemini.blog
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Coughton Court in Warwickshire, fifteen miles from Stratford-on-Avon, is the ancestral home of the Throckmortons, one of the UK’s oldest catholic families and a place of great intrigue during the time of religious persecution. It still possesses some of the best concealed ‘priest holes’ in the country.
It also boasts a beautiful walled garden, worth visiting in its own right…
The name Coughton (pronounce “Coat-un”) is believed to mean a settlement or farm known for the hunting of game birds. I’m no fan of the hunting-shooting-fishing brigade but I can separate out the experience of the beautiful gardens from such traditions.
It is believed that there was a medieval house on the site when John de Throckmorton arrived in 1409 to marry into the de Spiney family. Since that time, Coughton Court has been home to the Throckmortons, one of the UK’s oldest catholic families and a major name in the City of London’s development as one of the world’s most important financial centres.
Coughton Court still has many of its original features including its flamboyant sixteenth-century gate tower. It is one of the last remaining Roman Catholic houses in the country to retain its historic treasures, housing one of the very best collections of portraits and memorabilia of one family from the early Tudor times.
Alongside family items on display, there are pieces such as the chemise reputedly worn by Mary Queen of Scots when she was executed and a bishop’s Cope, with intricate needlework, believed to have been worked upon by Catherine of Aragon.
I will do a separate post on the interior of the house. We were so impressed with the gardens, I felt it was worth a photo-tour, if only to show the best of the photos taken on the day.
Coughton Court was gifted to the National Trust in 1946 by the Throckmortons, the family continues to live there, extending a staggering six centuries of unbroken tradition.
©Stephen Tanham 2022
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye, a journey through the forest of personality to the dawn of Being.
http://www.thesilenteye.co.uk and http://www.suningemini.blog
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We’ve known each other for just over a decade, though the oak has lived for at least ten times that.
It’s a tree and a very special place in the landscape. It’s conveniently at the end of our shorter dog-walk, so I get to see it in all seasons. This time of year is mellow, and the colours in the landscape reflect that.
Soon, we will enter the pre-autumnal days, and the full and deep greens of summer will fade and die – a poignant time of year.
Nature’s round…
But the oak will still be here. And we’ll still be talking to each other at the farthest point of walking the dog.
©Stephen Tanham 2022
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye, a journey through the forest of personality to the dawn of Being.
http://www.thesilenteye.co.uk and http://www.suningemini.blog
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