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Gallery: a farewell to a monarch
You must have been living on Mars, or as a hermit, not to have heard that Queen Elizabeth II passed away last week. Here in the UK we are in a period of official mourning such as most of us have never experienced. Whether you are a fervent monarchist, staunch republican or (like me) somewhere on a scale between those two extremes, it’s hard not to be fascinated by the sense of history that surrounds us right now.
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Gallery: an August selection
Although August has been hot, mostly sunny and very dry, I can already sense that summer is closer to its end than its beginning. The lights are going on earlier each evening. The warmth of the sun is tempered by a cooling breeze. And a few showers, and one day of steady rain, have started to re-green the weary grass in our parks.
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A stroll around Fountains Abbey
In 1132 a small group of monks left their Benedictine Monastery in York, fed up with the extravagant and rowdy lifestyle of the monks there. Seeking a more devout and simple way of life, they were granted a parcel of land by the River Skell where they built a small wooden church and applied, successfully, to join the Cistercian order.
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Radical Horizons: the Art of Burning Man at Chatsworth
Burning Man is a unique event that takes place every year in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, USA. But we are not in the deserts of Nevada; we are among the green hills of England’s Peak District.
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Eyam, home to the original lockdown?
When Alexander Hadfield, a tailor, ordered a bale of cloth to be sent from London to his home in the small Derbyshire village of Eyam, he cannot have dreamed of the dreadful consequences. Nor could he have dreamed that this simple action would be remembered centuries later.
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Gallery: on the trail of Knaresborough’s Town Windows
How many windows is too many? That was the question facing many seventeenth century property owners. In 1696 a window tax was introduced in England and Wales. The more windows a building had, the more its owner had to pay.
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Summer in East Anglia
While the flat lands East Anglia may lack scenic drama the big skies that arch overhead are often awesome. As we drove up to Norfolk at the end of July the silvery tones of a dappled mackerel sky begged to be photographed. But we had a party to go to and no time to stop. The following day, disappointingly, the sky was a uniform grey and a little drizzly after overnight rain. Today’s photography was clearly going to be all about details and subjects to be found at ground level!
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More Cambridge colleges and other sights
I left you all at the stunning Kings College chapel. Now let’s continue our walk. From Kings we walked past the Old Schools which house the Cambridge University offices and formerly housed the Cambridge University Library.
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A visit to King’s College Chapel, Cambridge
When I was a child my mother, despite being the most unreligious person I know, would always insist on listening to (and in later years watching) the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from King’s on Christmas Eve. That pause for beautiful music amidst the frenetic preparations for the big day was as much part of our family’s Christmas traditions as Mum’s recipe for Christmas pudding and the Morecombe and Wise show in the evening.
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A sunny day out in Cambridge, part one
The universities of Oxford and Cambridge (often shortened to ‘Oxbridge’) are known the world over for the quality of the education they provide, their many illustrious alumni and their long history. They dominate the towns in which they are based, giving each a unique atmosphere. Both towns are within easy reach of London and make for an interesting day trip from the capital.
