the octave of the 3-Day contest

A week later and I am mostly recovered. As you may have noticed, dear reader, I was not able to post updates during the 3-Day Novel contest. That was in part because on Saturday and Sunday, my eyes were closing and my head was tipping forward by 8:30 pm, though I managed to struggle on past 9 pm.
Ah well, I told myself. I'll get an early night and start off all chipper by 5 am (my usual time of getting up). Did I? Nope, I lay slugabed until 6:30 am.
On the Monday night, when I had to chuck it in at midnight no matter what, the story (finally!) came together, I was full of caffeinated energy and could have kept going until 2 am. Instead, I forced myself to let it go at 11:30 pm, with a brief read-through.

Tuesday morning I compiled from Scrivener, emailed it to myself, and spent part of my lunch-hour trying to submit it through the Geist website. This worked better once I realised that the submission page only accepted pdf, doc, docx and odt, and re-saved the file as .doc.
Excuse me while I express astonishment that .rtf is not one of the accepted formats. What the hell?

Then there was more muddling about because I also needed to submit a signed statement from someone that I wrote the whole thing during the allotted time. Or rather, a scan of said statement, saved in one of the admissable formats, which do not include jpg.
The submission directions, by the way, were barely adapted from the hard-copy snail-mail directions, and included an admonition to not send in your only copy of your ms. because it would not be returned. It's been so long since I've seen that note; I don't think I've subbed hard-copy for  two or three years.

So. Anyways. Story.
Wordcount came out short of 15k, which is the lowest I've had, though I've never got much above 18k. Even with the old trick of expandable middle, some scenes are seriously skimped.
Saturday I started out with an exploration, discovering the setting for myself as much as for the hypothetical reader. Little Cressida wanders through the huge, ever-changing house that she has lived in for as long as she remembers. She needs to find someone who will listen to her news:  that she has seen a stranger--a young boy--in the untended gardens. The others who are usually present in the house are the cook, Betta, and the librarian (never named). The other she doesn't know about is Granda, the old woman spinning in the topmost tower. Granda dreams of a dance on the eve of war, and waking sees the smoke of battle and destruction from her high window.
Sunday I picked up the boy's storyline, making him a refugee from an internment camp with traumatic memories of escape. I also inserted segments of two undergrad girls discussing the Heroine's Journey and its application to fiction. I'd meant to have them discussing what was happening in the story, but somehow the talk wouldn't go that way--it felt too blatant, so I went for echoes instead, discussing the books that inspired aspects of the storyline, like The Secret Garden, The Princess and the Goblins, and Gormenghast.
This is where the absence of an outline really hit me. I knew in a vague way that Cressida needed to go through the house, with different rooms providing experiences--a choice of fates or paths--that would take her through the heroine's journey, and that the boy would take different roles in each of them, such as brother, consort, opponent, child. But I couldn't get them started. I set up the scenes in Scrivener, but other than a confrontation with the Sphinx and a ballroom scene, they were barely sketched, and I couldn't get enough of a picture in my head to do the in-media-res opening that I usually do when I don't know what's going to happen (it saves me the work of figuring out how they got there in the first place, which in this case would be by opening a door).
Monday I could see the ending. Cressida, charged with closing off the paths/doors that connected the house with the world, so that it would be protected from the war that was engulfing said world, decides that she won't close off the last one, which is where the boy Alph had come through, because if the house didn't provide a refuge, at whatever risk, it would wither. But how to get there?
Mark, when I went downstairs to whinge, pointed out that I usually wrote the ending Monday afternoon, and why didn't I do that now and see if the middle came in after that. So I did--and the ending expanded, because once Cressida (now about 20 yrs old, as both children grew up in the course of the journey, time being flexible in the house) understood what Alph had come from, she couldn't just let it go. So there was a rescue and escape of those in the internment camp, which I tried to play low-key so that the kinda-magic-realism story wasn't overtaken by an action movie.
Then I whipped back and started filling in the interior journey, full of caffeinated energy (non-decaf coffee supplied by supportive husband, thank you) but time was ticking on, and at 11:30 I had to accept that I wasn't going to finish the fill-in to my satisfaction.

What with low wordcount and skimpy middle, I doubt this one will hit the shortlist. I might take the concept and mess around with it some more, maybe for Nanowrimo. But I can't do Nanowrimo until the Cost of Silver revision is done.
So, back to the salt mines of revision I go.

putting things away on shelves

New stuff!
For Christmas I got a hand-me-down Mac Mini and keyboard, and a monitor twice the width of my previous one. Through the successive efforts of my son, my husband, and even me, I have Snow Leopard loaded and have downloaded some necessary applications (Scrivener, Bean, Dropbox). This all took a while, because I'm dilatory and disorganised. But here I am now, posting from the new machine.

On the less technologically advanced side... As I bicycled to work one dim grey morning, I was distracted by a looming darkness on the sidewalk. Because I'm a natural scavenger, even of looming darkness, I stopped, and discovered it to be two wooden bookcases (about 7' tall and almost 4' wide, maybe 8" deep) leaning against a power pole. That is tall, actual wood not particle board, shallow bookcases meant to contain books rather than sculptures and curios. Exactly what I need to get the stacked books and papers off the floor of my study.
You'll have noticed that bookcases of that size and presumed weight are going to be awkward loads. I was on a bike. So bungy-cording them, even one at a time, onto my bike-basket was not going to be an option. I stood pensively for a bit, thinking of my sleeping husband, and whether I should bike to work and phone him to bring the van and fetch them, or go home and wake him up to help me fetch them home. And what if someone else came along in the interim? If I'd had a cell phone, I might have called right then, but... Or was I overestimating the eagerness of the visible traffic - people heading in to work in compact cars - to load themselves up with two large bookcases?
Since I'd been on my way to a morning weights session, it was still pretty early. Soon traffic would pick up. Seize the day, I thought, and turned around. I bicycled quickly home, got the van and drove back. The bookcases were still there, hurrah!
Unfortunately, I could only park about 4 car lengths away (see: early morning, people not left for work yet). A challenge. Next question being whether I had overestimated my personal carrying capacity? I tipped the first bookcase and walked it down to horizontal on its side.  Oh good! It wasn't taller than me or my shoulder-height, sideways. I put myself midways of its length, tucked my shoulder under the uppermost side, and lifted.
Good thing I've been working out with weights.
If you find yourself doing this, gentle reader, be cleverer than me and fold something up to protect the bony point of your shoulder. I collected a nice dark bruise to mark the spot. The other bruise I acquired was at the upper curve of my calf, where the lower side of the bookcases bumped with each step. I proceeded to the van with a sort of chicken-hop, unable to take long steps because my knee would bump the shelf (this was on my left, because that's the good knee and I was reasonably sure it wouldn't buckle unexpectedly). Anyway, I understand why chickens don't routinely carry awkward loads on their nonexistent shoulders.
I couldn't set the case down, for fear I couldn't hoist it back up again, so finally reaching the back of the van, where I could prop one end up, was much relief. Pushing it into the van was dead easy. Pant, pant.   Then trotting around to the side door to move Mark's swords & stuff over so they wouldn't be trapped, then climbing into the van to push and pull the bookcase over to where I could slide the next one in beside it. Minor adjustments.
Back out for case number two. With really no excuse now for not having something over my shoulder to cushion, except that I didn't think of it until I found the bruise the next day. Case number two was heavier, subjectively, and I was slowing down. But! I reached the van, rested the top of the case and slid it in horizontally to lean against its twin. Hurrah!
Except that due to the width of the cases, and the aerodynamic slope of the van's back door, I wasn't going to be able to close the door. Not so hurrah.
Okay, we can deal with this. So I climbed into the van, moved the bag of swords again, and started wrestling with the bookcases, trying to lean them over enough that the upper back corner (of their current alignment, not their functional, upright alignment) would be low enough to clear the doorway. If you've ever, in a confined space, tried to manoeuvre two objects larger than yourself, one of which is leaning on the other, you may guess my degree of success. Fortunately, partway into this, I realised that they were both pressed against the back of the passenger seat--which can be moved forward. Hurrah!
So, I drove home, parked the van, and grabbed my bike. It says something about the subjective nature of time that I was still able to fit in a slightly abbreviated workout.
I left both cases in the van, so that Mark and I could share the fun of getting them up the twisty stairs. This involves a sort of slow-motion bootlegger's turn on the landing, with one person backing into the bedroom, then the other towards the bathroom, so that the long object can be aimed towards the study. In, and stood against the wall, repeat with next object.

All that though was nowt, nowt, to the fun of the next bookcase, oak veneer (if anything is heavier than oak, oak veneer would be it) and more like 5' wide, bought on usedvictoria. Mark and I together could barely get it into the van, and the counsel of wisdom would probably have been to say 'Um, no, this isn't going to work for us, sorry'. But I am not wise and dammit I am going to have bookshelves.
This case was too wide to lie flat in the back of the van, and lay a few inches above the floor, propped by the wheel-wells and creaking gently with the motion of the vehicle. Where it could not stay, for the van was needed immediately for loading other things. We got it haltingly out of the van, along the walk, and up the porch steps, where it stood oakenly.
Fortunately the next night people were over for dinner, and there was enough enthusiasm and muscles to get the behemoth bookcase up the stairs and into my study. Where it effectively blocked access to my desk for another week. But now it is upright, and braced against the wall (all credit to Mark the Wonder Husband), and books are moving into it.

I've thus been able to clear away the boxes of books and papers that were waiting for shelves, and reveal more floorspace. I brought out the blue-and-white oval rug and put it under the blue chair to mark out the reading space as distinct from the writing space, and I can pin up the maps and posters that were waiting for confirmed wall space.

Pics to come.

TMI about bruising

Leg latest: I am now permitted to unvelcro the immobilizer briefly and gently bend my knee. The first thing I did was wash my leg. Mmmm, warm water, soap. Mmmm. Not that the leg was grubby or itchy or anything, since the immobilizer breathes quite well, nothing like a cast. But it was good to be clean. It will be some weeks before immersion is possible, or showers, so I'm making the most of the pleasures of the sponge bath. (Wash down as far as possible, then wash up as far as possible, then wash possible.)

The bruises are now yellow and purple, with a particularly vivid saffron and deep rich purple on the back of the thigh, really quite beautiful. (I wonder if it could be tattooed?) The outside of my knee is more drab, with a speckled stripe of brown-purple and green-yellow.
The thigh and calf look almost normal, though the calf is flabby (uck!) and I'm looking for some isometric exercises for it. There's a band of swelling across the knee, so the kneecap is utterly without knobbiness. And the knee is very stiff. I managed a slight bend on Monday, and about a degree more today. I'm hoping it progresses through the week. I tried a cold pack while bending, and that seemed to help.

 Taken the next day - a bit faded, but look at that yellow.

Recent big achievements include figuring out how to lie down on my other side, and going up and down our front and back steps with Mark acting as spotter instead of hoister. 

Other than that, I keep thinking I've got my energy back (after all, I'm not in actual pain), then having to nap for 3 or 4 hours. It's difficult to judge, because I feel quite lively until I fall asleep. Mark has been a hero, bringing me washing water and tea, changing the bed, and nagging me to write. Plus keeping up with his orders, casting more pieces, cooking, washing dishes, and defrosting the fridge (a job both of us put off until the glacier knocks in the cupboard.)

Last week men came and took away two of our upstairs windows to be disassembled, repaired, and returned in about two weeks. So my writing room and Mark's office are without natural light, and much of the furniture has been moved into our bedroom, which was already crowded with my books that have overflowed the available shelving. On the whole, this is probably a good time for me to be confined to downstairs.

Writing is slow but steady. I'm near the point where I should start integrating Storyline Two into Storyline One, which means also majorly revising the timeline of Storyline One. On the one hand, that's going to be a lot of to-and-froing, and on the other hand it will be reworking stuff I've already written, which will be a nice change from actual writing.


Problems one doesn't think of ahead of time: Having (realistically for a modern setting) created an ethnically diverse cast, how do I kill anyone off without falling into 'Black Guy Dies First' or similar? I may have to write in a disposable default character. Sigh.
Oh, yeah - TV Tropes warning for above link!

walking into the books

This is the post about Hemingford Grey Manor that I promised weeks ago.

First, background: the Manor was built in the 1100s, of stone, and is perhaps the oldest continuously inhabited house in England. It has been adjusted in various ways over the centuries, most notably in the Tudor age and the Georgian, when it belonged to the Gunnings (of the 'beautiful Gunning sisters') who completely covered the Norman stone with a symmetrical (and much larger) Palladian exterior--which burnt down in the late 1790s.
In 1937, Lucy M. Boston bought the Manor, and spent the next two years restoring it. At the time it looked like a 'semi-derelict Georgian farmhouse', only one Norman window showed and only two rooms were livable. But she had fallen in love with it, and decided 'if this should prove to be all there was, I would yet live in a house that had a window into the twelfth century.'

The Manor became her muse. 'All my water is drawn from one well,' she said. 'I am obsessed by my house. It is in the highest degree a thing to be loved.'
At the age of sixty she began to write, and her first novels were published in 1954. The Children of Green Knowe was illustrated by her son, Peter Boston, and her publisher explained that they did not illustrate books for adults. So it was published as a children's book, and became the first of six Green Knowe books.
The Manor, under various names, features in all her novels except one (The Sea Egg), always as a haven, sometimes an ambiguous or embattled one. The countryside around the manor plays its part, from the winter flood that The Children of Green Knowe opens with, to the river Ouse (in the picture here) that is the setting for The River at Green Knowe.

The books: In the first book, young Tolly (Toseland) goes to stay with his great-grandmother, whom he has never met. He arrives during a flood, and is rowed to the doorstep. I want to quote swaths of this, because it is beautifully and sensually written, from the train crossing railway lines covered with flood water, to the entrance hall 'hung all over with mirrors and pictures and china'. But I'll try to restrain myself.
'Toseland waved the lantern about and saw trees and bushes standing in the water, and presently the boat was rocked by quite a strong current and the reflection of the lantern streamed away in elastic jigsaw shapes and made gold rings around the tree trunks.'
He meets his great-grandmother: 'She had short silver curls and her face had so many wrinkles it looked as if someone had been trying to draw her for a very long time and every line put in had made the face more like her.'
Tolly's father and stepmother are in Burma, and he feels alone and placeless. At Green Knowe he finds his family's past, in a place where past and present are not so easily distinguished, where he is welcomed to both.
While Tolly has an ancestral claim, his mother's family of Oldknow being descended from the Roger d'Aulneaux who built the Norman house, the other child who finds a place there is Ping, a refugee child who arrives in the third book The River at Green Knowe. By the fifth book, An Enemy at Green Knowe, Ping and Tolly stand together to defend their home against the conniving Dr. Melanie Powers.
'Green Knowe was full of mysteries. Certainly it was welcoming and comfortable and rejoicing and gay, but one had the feeling that behind the exciting colours and shapes of its ancient self there might be surprises from the unknown universe; that the house was on good terms with that too, and had no intention of shutting out the un-understandable. Of course, it was largely Time. Surely Now and Not-now is the most teasing of all mysteries, and if you let in a nine-hundred year dose of time, you let in almost everything.'
The house: With the aid of Peter Boston's line drawings and scraperboard illustrations, I knew Green Knowe as well as my own home. The nursery with its angled ceiling and rocking horse casting shadows across the wall, the Knight's Hall with its arched windows and high ceiling, the entrance with carved cherub and witch-ball. The thick stone walls that had withstood centuries, and the river that ran quietly alongside, sometimes waking and spreading across the fields.

Before taking up writing, Lucy Boston was a painter and musician, and along with her writing, she was a remarkable quilter and gardener. The fictional topiary garden of Green Knowe and the actual topiary garden of the Manor grew alongside each other.
Here is Mark taking the path through the gardens to the river walk. We came in November, when the gardens weren't at their best--they are famous for roses--but the topiary remained stalwart.
The weather had turned bitter cold and windy, and when we reached the house, Diana Boston told us to come in even though we were early. Mark said he'd be glad to come in out of the cold. She laughed and said 'Out of the wind, maybe. Not out of the cold.' Stone houses are not known for their insulating and heat-retention capacity.

No pics of the Manor, sorry, but you can see a little in their gallery here. Outside it was too bloody cold to stand about, and inside they ask that you don't take photos--though I expect there are plenty on flickr, taken with cell phones and all.
I had been to Hemingford Grey in '04, but without Mark, and since he was also a fan of the Green Knowe books, coming to them as an adult, I'd wanted to visit again with him.

Visiting the Manor is like walking into the books. Over the years, as Lucy Boston describes in her memoir Memories in a House, she collected things that had appeared in the books, and added them to the house. The most recent addition, Diana Boston told us, was the Saint Christopher statue that protects Tolly from demonic Green Noah. Lucy Boston based it on one in a nearby church, and when The Children of Green Knowe was filmed for British television, the company created a statue, which Diana managed to acquire rather than letting it go into the rubbish.
The first time I visited I was in a constant state of 'oh look, there's the Green Deer! there's the window Tolly and Ping look out of at the end of Enemy! there's the carved cherub!' and when Diana Boston put Tolly's carved mouse into my hands (close your eyes first) I was in something near book-ecstasy.
I managed a bit more restraint this time, but it still taps into that childhood imagining that if somehow I could manage to want to enough, I could get into that other world, step through the looking-glass, open the wardrobe door, climb into the painting, shrink to toy-size and catch the dolls moving.
I don't know of another place where the walls between real and imagined are so thin, as thin as the walls between past and present are in the fictional house of Green Knowe.
The nursery is the exemplar. In the photo linked, it is tidy, but depending when you visit, the toys may be put away in the chest or strewn about the house, being played with by visiting grandchildren, great-nephews and nieces, or recently rescued from dogs--the wooden doll has had its arms chewed off--because it is part of a living house, and at the same time it is the very room in Peter Boston's illustration.


Hemingford Grey village is madly picturesque. Here's just one of the thatched timber-frame cottages. Up the street is the post office, which came near being closed down for lack of funding, but was taken over by the parish church.
The colour of the plaster is Suffolk pink (though this is Cambridgeshire), it and yellow being favourite colours of plaster in East Anglia. (They were made with local ochres originally, and you can now buy housepaints in the same tints)
The village does manage to support a gastro-pub, the Cock, where I had the local cider, Cromwell, and the pigeon breast pictured in a previous blog entry.
Hm, I think I should leave the Ghost Story evening to another post, since this one is already longish.

island of eels cathedral

From Cambridge, I made a day trip to Ely. It's only about 15 minutes by train, and I might have been able to bus there. I'd been briefly in Ely a few years ago, and wanted to spend more time looking around, instead of rushing through.

Like Lincoln, Ely is in the midst of fenlands, very flat fenlands. Like Lincoln, it's a town on a hill that used to be an island. The name (pronounced Eel-ee, not Ee-ly) means Eel Island, so you can guess what the waters were full of.
Fortunately, Ely isn't nearly as steep as Lincoln, with only a bit of a climb from the railway station. The day began gray and chilly, as you can see from this photo. What you can't see is the wind, which came pouring through the cathedral doors and made me stop and push them shut again.
What you might be able to see is that the wall leading up to the cathedral has little gargoyle heads along it, some knocked off over the years, many still in place.


I had somehow forgotten that Ely Cathedral has a maze. It's Victorian (1870), not medieval, and lies just inside the entrance. The guide pamphlet suggests you use the labyrinth to concentrate your mind and consider your path in life and your way to God as you enter the house of God.
Naturally I walked it, with due concentration. This pic was taken from the centre, just before I walked out again. (I'm so glad my new camera doesn't need a flash--flashes inside a church just feel rude). I was surprised by the number of people who didn't notice the maze, but just walked over it as if it were an ordinary bit of floor.


You can perhaps see from this that the maze isn't the overused Chartres design (she said sniffily) or the standard Cretan labyrinth, but an original design by Gilbert Scott, who restored much of the cathedral in the 1800s.
Like all labyrinths, it is a long journey in a compact space, and takes more time than you would think to complete. I stopped in the centre, wondering if there would be any resonance between the maze under my feet and the maze over my spine, but no. It was a cool moment, all the same.



From the maze I went on to the Stained Glass Museum, housed in an upper gallery of the cathederal. It's a well-done small museum, with a good sampling of glass from early medieval to modern, and decent explanations of the revival and the different schools and movements. Plus dioramas of glass workshops showing the cutting, painting, firing, assembly and so on.
The only problem was that no photography was allowed inside the museum--and the catalogue pictures were small and did not include measurements! So I put my hand alongside the pieces I was interested in, as a measure, then sketched my hand beside the catalogue photo.
The pic here is from outside the museum, of the Victorian glass which fills almost all the windows now, the original glass having not made it through the centuries. While Victorian glass is not hugely appealing to me, I have to admit that it makes a brave show in the sunlight--which had appeared by then, though the day was still not warm.
And again, reason to love my new camera, as it was able to capture the light through the stained glass windows falling on this pillar.
After the Stained Glass Museum, I wanted a cup of tea, and perhaps a scone with clotted cream. I was cold. But! That morning a water main had burst, and Ely had no water. Thus no tea. Also no lavatories.
Rumour had it that the Costas had water, but rather than chase rumour about, I walked over to the Oliver Cromwell House and took the tour there, where it was warmer, being a timber-frame plastered house that might even have been stuffy on another day. Oliver Cromwell's life was represented by mannequins rocking cradles or sitting at writing desks, some with unnerving head-tilting action. Then to the Ely Museum, a cooler (stone) building that was once the gaol, and had a suitably depressing (distressing) display of mannequins chained to the wall and floor for violent crimes, and a despondent family of debtor mannequins. None of them had convincing hair, but perhaps that can't be helped.

Finding no water nor tea, I returned to the cathedral, and visited the Lady Chapel, which has an unusual modern statue of Mary, but I admit I was more stirred by the discovery in an aisle window of fragments of medieval glass, patched together into roundels. Here's a closeup of one such. The diamond quarries around it are about the length of my stretched out thumb and index finger, if that helps. The fragments look to be late 14th to late 15th century.
I also photographed the 13th or 14th c. wall paintings of the martyrdom of S. Edmund, but those aren't visually exciting unless you're already a wall painting geek, so I'll skip those here. If you are a wall painting geek, you would probably have shared my fangirl moment in Lincoln when I discovered that Eastbridge Hospital had an E. W. Tristram copy of its much faded Majesty painting--I'm not sure which I was more excited by, the original or the Tristram.

This head is one of those decorating the Prior's Door, which dates from about 1150, elaborate Romanesque carving. Very flash. I'd expect it was painted originally.
It was after 3 by then, and I was wanting my tea, so I decided to walk down to the river and see if the water main had been fixed.
Outside, I saw that the slanting light had turned the cathedral stone golden, and stopped to take even more photos. I'll spare you most of them, and only observe that the stabilising feature is a wonderful, wonderful thing. Also the larger screen, which makes it much easier to tell if a photo is blurred or out of focus.


Here's the pic I think came out best. The zoom feature is so good, and the screen so large, that I was pretty much using the camera as a telescope, to show me details I couldn't make out by eye alone.
Ely has a great collection of gargoyles. I don't know how many are restorations, but there are so many! I could probably have populated this blog post entirely with gargoyles.
However, I finally tore myself away and headed downhill.


Reaching the bottom of the hill, I found the riverside walk, and strolled along it. A couple of fishermen stood on the paved bank, and one brought in a fish as I walked past him. Ducks with bright red beaks stomped over to him, perhaps wanting their cut, or protection money. They didn't really look like law-abiding ducks.
Here's a swan and a canal boat. If I ever end up with time to spare in the UK, I want to ride on a canal boat. One of my cousins lived in one for a year or so, but that was long ago.



Alas, the restaurants and pub along the river were also closed, though the pub hoped to be open for supper soonish. But I didn't want supper on my own, just tea.
So I explored the riverside walk a bit more, and found several massive willows, any of them big enough to be the one from Willow Knot, sheltering the little cottage under its leaves. The trouble is that the massiveness just didn't seem to come across in the photos. This one is the closest to showing itself properly.

walled town to university town

Writing now from Cambridge, but of Lincoln. Reunited with me EEE, hurrah!

Lincoln is another walled town, medieval walls on top of Roman walls. Here's a nice bit of Roman wall, the North Gate, on Northgate. The sign nearby has a fine b/w photo of a goods lorry stuck midway through the arch, with a stone block (on the upper right, you may be able to spot it) crunching its corner.
The b&b was pretty nice, recently redecorated I think, firm bed and pillows rather hard, and no smoking signs just everywhere you turned, including a dire warning about sensitive smoke detectors connected to the fire station and the penalty for false alarms.
A good full English breakfast, with slice of black pudding (research!). Visited the Museum of Lincolnshire Life, which has some thorough dioramas of stonemasons, basketweavers, tilers, and other things I had to take photos of (for research!). May put up pics later, but for now only brief postings.

Lincolnshire is flat fens. Lincoln is a hill. A steep hill (the name of one of the streets). It is remarkably like Nelson in that way, that one can't really get lost because there's always the slope to orient yourself with. Plus Lincoln has a large pointy cathedral at the top of the hill, so you can orient yourself by whether the cathedral is at your right hand or your left.
Walking in Lincoln is a good way to stay fit.

Here, in St. Mary le Wigfort's, oldest church in Lincoln, right next to the railway station, I had tea with fellow ABE forumites Rocambole, Ferret, and 2manybooks.
After that we climbed up nearly to the cathedral and had lunch at Brown's Pie Shop (details to be filled in later and photo added), then descended bookshop by bookshop. I had to be removed from the Lincoln Historical Society bookshop so that Roccie and Ferret could catch their train.
It was a pity Zolah couldn't be there, but in another two years there may be another chance...

Somehow, yet again, I did not make it into the castle, but here is a picture taken while leaving.
The night before, I walked about Lincoln in the dark, while belated Bonfire Night fireworks went off scattered about the town. I stood in the courtyard of the medieval Bishop's Palace, old stone walls all about me, and a skein of geese flew overheard, gabbling and barking. I looked up and saw them as a frayed bar across the deep blue sky, like a single ragged creature.
Then I walked to the Church of St. Mary Magdalene to hear a concert of early music. Do feel free to envy me.

tea and painted walls

UK 08, the never-ending ....

And on we pedalled, as mentioned, to South Elmham Hall. To be accurate, we walked the bicycles through fields until we found a paved road, muddled about with the OS maps, then pedalled on.
Circuitously, we found the entrance, with a little wooden sign saying OPEN. This was a relief, as we'd not managed to make contact with the Hall by phone or email, but were chancing it since we were close by.
Hm, no vehicles in the gravelled parking lot. Hm, no bustling staff. There was Bateman's Barn, though, and the door open. We poked our heads in. A fellow with a short haircut and squared-off build that suggested ex-military was mopping out the hallway.
"We're closed," he said.
We explained that the gate and sign said otherwise. He took pity on our windblown state and offered tea and sweets, which we accepted gratefully. I had a brownie, which was very good, even discounting for exercise & hunger.
You can see more about Bateman's Barn here, where it's ready to receive guests, but I couldn't resist a few pictures of the beams OMG the BEAMS! they are huuge. Even if it is 16th century, and therefore late by my standards.
My cunning husband explained that we'd hoped to see the wall-paintings, because I was an enthusiast of wall-paintings, and mentioned our visits to Hoxne and Thornham Parva for the sake of their wall-paintings, all said in the best-buttered 'no pressure, mind' way.
And because the owners of South Elmham Hall are terribly kind people, and have their own enthusiasm for their home (and no wonder!) by the time I'd finished the brownie, we had an invitation to see inside.

John gave us a brief background as we walked across. The Hall is a 13th century hunting lodge for the Bishops of Norwich, and the surrounding land was a deer park, set in a moated enclosure that's older still. Ruins of a gatehouse remain, and parts of the chapel and cloister were incorporated into later farm buildings. The 13th century hall was swallowed by a 16th century farmhouse, which is itself a listed building.
The remaining wall paintings are foliate and floriate repeat patterns, nothing figural, but done with some skill and grace, considerably pricier-looking than those at Thornham Parva. John was concerned that they were fading slowly, exposed to the daylight, and indeed the section painted in (what was now) the loo did seem deeper in colour.
Mark took many more pictures--he has a steadier hand--and John mentioned that he didn't have that many photos, so we promised to email ours when we got back home.

Less impressive to the eye, perhaps, but hugely interesting to me, were rows of what looked very much like the sinoper (the sketch or underdrawing usually done in charcoal or lead and fixed with a mix of red & yellow ochres) left unpainted. Because process is more interesting to me than product, especially in medieval painting, where there's often no description of process, and it must be guessed at.
I didn't want to go sticking my face into the wall to check for pinpricks that might be compass marks, though. It seemed more polite to stick my face into the enlarged photos, afterwards.
After many thanks, we bicycled away, and turned the OPEN sign around to CLOSED as we left, just in time to forestall a small tourist party.

So, past the Church Farm moat, past where St. Nicholas used to be, on through St. Margaret Green, up Wash Lane and to St. Peter's Hall, an extensively moated site with a 13th century building (renovated extensively in the 16th century, using bits probably looted from the nearby priory and church).

You can see a bit of the moat here. There's a good deal more of it, though some has been filled or lost over the years.
Presently St. Peter's is a brewery (you can buy the ale at our local liquor store) and restaurant. A good thing, since however impressive the moat complex (and it is) one needs sustenance. The day was clear, bright, and windy, and we'd been cycling rather a lot. Also my rear tire was deflating slowly, and the pump didn't seem to affect it one way or the other.
Here's the front entrance. Nice porch, isn't it?
Some very thorough restoration work has gone on here, and given the hodgepodgey nature of many older English houses, restored and reworked and gutted and recovered over generations and wildly variant theories of architectural style, the looted ecclesiastical bits don't look out of place. It's a good idea to have done your looting a few centuries ago, and let the mellow aging settle things down in the meantime.


This is not the part we ate in, because we weren't there for dinner. We ate in the bar, which has booths and comfier benchs, having what my notes describe as a 'sumptuous lunch'. Mark had steak & ale pie, and in the interests of research I had smoked eel salad & potatoes. Smoked eel tastes like a mild white fish. The flesh is white and flakes apart easily. The skin was very slightly scaly, a little shiny. It was tasty, but not really distinctive.


Despite the sun, no one was eating outside. I found out why when I went to take photos. The Saints being on a sort of plateau (to strain the word a bit, since East Anglia isn't all that tall to start with) there isn't anything more to stop the wind than there is on Salisbury Plain.
I had my jacket tied around my waist, and very nearly lost it into the moat, tugged off by the wind.
Standing by the wall overlooking the moat was rather like standing abovedecks on the BC Ferry, the wind banging at you from all around and the sun slapping off the water. So I stayed out for a while, because I like that sensation.
Afterwards we had a walk around the brewery and the shop. Unfortunately what we'd really have liked to buy would have been difficult to bring home safely on the plane. But it was still interesting. Not often one sees a brewery with a thatched roof, after all.

Because of the troublesome rear tire, we decided against continuing on to St. Andrew's Ilketshall, even though it has wall-paintings. One mustn't be greedy.

Yes, we did see more churches, about half of the Saints that day, but this post is long enough already, so I'll leave that for another. Because I know you want to read more about moats.

ruins amid the Saints

Simon's entry on South Elmham Minster is here, for supplementary reading.


Leaping ahead in chronology, because this site deserves its own post. We visited it on the day we meant to see as many of 'the Saints' as we could. The weather was bright and windy. With the help of our OS maps (#230 Diss & Harleston, and #231 Southwold & Bungay) we reached the plateau (relatively speaking) and found Mundy's Farm, the first landmark.
A signposted right-of-way led across the ploughed field, straight into the woods. We briefly considered finding somewhere to lock the bikes, but the only structure was the signpost, so we set out walking the bikes across the flinty field. The woods, as you can see, are open and sunny. It is very quiet, easy to believe yourself alone for miles.
Side note: I can lift a bike over a fence more easily than I can lift a bike over a stile. I have no good explanation for this.

Then, past hedges and a stream, we came to South Elmham Minster, as it's called. Flint-core ruins, roofless, with trees growing around and among them.
It's probably impossible to describe the place or the atmosphere of it without invoking Tolkien. Twisty trees. Inexplicable ruins. Deep in the English countryside. It only needs someone in a cloak, to tell you by what names this place is known to the elves and the ents.



In the first picture (up top), you can see the edge of a bench. That and a sign giving the probable history of the site are (thankfully!) the only overt modern additions. Mostly you can wander without speaking, imagining almost any sort of past use and purpose: castle, chapel, temple, manor, even cathedral. The name 'South Elmham Minster' comes from the belief that it was a cathedral, for all the small South Elmham churches. But apparently that Elmham Minster was in Norfolk.


Another theory is that it was a pagan temple, and it is surrounded by earthworks, which might be the remains of a Roman encampment.
Presently, though, it's believed to be a private chapel for a Bishop's residence, dating to about 1000 AD, built for the first Bishop of Norwich, Herbert de Losinga. (If anyone knows what name the Elves knew him by, I'll add that here).
It's easy to believe that the site had a religious purpose; even now (even more so now?) one wants to be still, whether to pray or meditate.

The trees (beeches, I think) are very nearly as striking as the ruins. Several are intertwined in this loving yet Laocoonish fashion. Perhaps it was the influence of the Minster, but I saw them as more intriguing than disturbing.
As many times before, I wished I were a better sketch artist, with much more time. But that's where photographs are useful.
We leant our bikes against a huge fallen tree that had begun to sprout upwards. I almost took a picture of it, and discovered later that the same view was for sale as a postcard--also that most of the pictures I'd taken were from the same angles & places that the postcards were taken from.
I'm not sure what this says about my eye for photos, whether good or just predictable. Or simply that it isn't possible to take really bad photos of some place this beautiful and mysterious.


Our next stop was to be South Elmham Hall, but I'll save that for another post. Since I neglected to take any pictures of the right-of-way across the fields, entering, here's a pic of the way out (to South Elmham Hall) which shows, maybe, how miles-from-anywhere the Minster seems to be.

I could have stayed longer, just sitting and being quiet amid the trees and stones, but South Elmham Hall has secular medieval wall-paintings, not to mention a caff, and biking does make for an appetite. So through the fields we trundled, following the footpaths from the eleventh century to the fourteenth century.

a little Diss and mostly Eye

UK 08, continued.
Already I've fallen somewhat out of chronological order, and into rough subject categories. But there you go.
After our Wingfield visit, Lucia, Mark and I visited Diss, specifically the Tourist Info Centre, which you should always visit first in any English town, because with few exceptions (Cambridge) they are marvellously helpful places, stuffed with maps and bus schedules and postcards and walking tour maps and lists of B&Bs and booklets of local history... Really you could just visit the tourist info ctr and be done.
We bought Ordnance Survey maps. Because OS Maps are vital in the countryside. Doing without them would be like doing without a London A to Z in London. Mark and I also bought oil for the bicycles and a lock. Diss has a bicycle shop and repair, and we took note of this for later.

This is the only picture I took in Diss (more later) and it is just crying out for a lolcats caption:


A few days later Mark and I had to bicycle to Diss to have a puncture fixed, and more pictures were taken of St. Mary Diss and so on. But I was still fumbling about with the camera at this point, and missed taking any pics of the ducks crossing the street. They did use the zebra crossing.

To file under things that make you realise you're not in North America: while shopping, finding a chub of rabbit-meat dogfood. I wanted to bring one home, but there were logistics issues. I did bring back a foil packet of beef 'n' rabbit flavoured cat treats, from London.

Here we are in Eye, picture taken looking at St. Peter & St. Paul, Eye. This being after Thornhams Parva et Magna, we were a bit tired and hungry, and asked an older fellow who was leaning on his garden wall, about places to eat. He turned out to be an amateur historian of Eye, and as well as giving us a potted history of the town's growth, suggested a fish & chip shop in a 14th century building, or Beard's teashop, in a 15th century building.

But first, a look around St. Peter & Paul. The building just beside it is the Guildhall, fifteenth century timber-frame, nicely restored. The timbers are filled in with wattle & daub (something like lath & plaster, only muckier) and plastered over. Sometimes there's decorative patterns of bricks between the timbers, and that's called brick-nogging (I'll try to post a pic sometime). Suffolk and Norfolk are short of building stone--flint and chalk don't make for strong walls--so you'll see a lot of half-timbering, brick, and thatch.
The plaster is decorated in a couple of ways (it's vernacular architecture, it will be decorated). One is by colour, the Suffolk pink or yellow, originally ochre (earth pigments) mixed with size distemper and painted over the whitewash. Supposedly ox-blood was mixed in the wash, but no one's proven this, so it may be one of those stories you tell the gullible cityfolk. Nowadays you can apparently buy Dulux 'Suffolk pink' in tins.
The other decoration is pargetting, building up designs in the plaster. Ancient House in Ipswich went mad with this technique. The Eye Guildhall has a more subdued variant, 'pinking', which in this case means impressing or scratching designs into the plaster. You can see it next to the cornerpost here, a slantways row of quatrefoils between two incised lines.
Also nicely visible here is the difference between the restored and unrestored sides of the cornerpost. The ornate pinnacles and tracery between the dogs are what you'll see above arches and niches from the 14th and 15th century, carved in wood, painted in glass, cast in bronze, embroidered in gold thread.
This restored side of the post gives you an idea how it would have looked new, though it might have been painted, too.
Down the street you can see a Dutch gable (that curly brick house-end) another characteristic of East Anglian architecture. I've seen some different explanations for its adoption, but all related to the ties between East Anglia and Flanders. Introduced by homesick Flemish weavers or builders, or by East Anglian merchants impressed by the style in Flanders, at any rate it stayed.

There's a brief history of the wool towns and the links between Flemish and East Anglian merchants and weavers here.

Diss and Eye aren't very large now, but they were important in the middle ages, and the size of Eye's church is a good indicator of status. The De la Poles seem to have had a hand in the building here as well as in their own little church in Wingfield.
My main interest was in the painted dado screen, done by a local craftsman about 1500, and somehow surviving the time in between without the saints' faces being scratched off or any other pious damage. It's pure folk-art, and I've stuck my sample picture of two of the saints (John and Catherine) next to two of the saints (Dominic and Catherine) from the Thornham Parva retable. You can see the difference between court art of 1330 and folk art of 1500 (as well as how the arcading over the saints has become more elaborate) even though the basic design is the same.





















And yes, food! We'd been meaning to have something to eat. The fish and chip shop was pretty greasy-smelling (as the old gent had warned) so we went on to Beard's, rather more upscale. I had leek soup, tea, and chocolate-nut pie with clotted cream. Clotted creeeeaaaammm.

Sorry, back now.
Beard's is a bed & breakfast as well as tea-shop, but doesn't have a website. On the other hand, we had such a lovely berth at Gables that I didn't mind missing out on yet another choice. (And in the heart of Eye--the nightlife might have kept us awake half the night).
Still, the beams are awesome. I took several pictures of the interior, with its beams and plasterwork, but I'll only push one on you here.

Through that door is the back garden, with an outdoor privy that looks as if it might have been a WWII air-raid shelter, which would make the privy historic as well. History is thick on the ground in the UK.

This was our last day with Lucia, and I don't think one could ask for a better travelling companion. We discussed climbing up the Castle Mound, but it was late in the day and there wasn't much medieval on the top, only a 19th century folly and a few stones of the former tower.
Back to Gables to say our goodbyes.

the first few churches

UK 08, ever-continuing.

Over that day-and-a-half,, Lucia, Mark and I explored. Not wanting to go too far afield after the long drive from Lincoln, a tour of Wingfield College and St. Andrews, Wingfield, we plumped for Hoxne (pronounced Hocksen), which has St. Peter & St. Paul church with wall-paintings, and a moated vicarage. Not to mention the Swan, a pub in a 15th c. Bishop's Lodge. In an omen for our timing in other instances, we came along just before closing time, and had to be satisfied with an ale for Mark. One of the locals actually spotted his accent as Canadian (Vancouver, which is awfully close), winning a beer to be collected next time we saw him.
Hoxne is known for having one of the better historical claims to a connection with the martyred King Edmund, including (gone now) the tree he was supposed to have been bound to. Mark remembered the name because of the Hoxne Hoard, a Roman find.


St. Peter & St. Paul, Hoxne, has been restored by the Victorian hand, though not as splendiferously as Thornham Magna below.
Pictures of the moat were taken later. On this visit, we noticed first the lovely lychgate, which is, yes, where corpses are brought in for burial. In case you wondered.
The graveyard is somewhat overgrown, and I took photos of leaning gravestones and ivy-covered tombs. There's a surprising variety of types through England. East Anglia has a number of what look like above-ground, oversized stone coffins, usually with a head and foot-stone. There's probably a technical term, but I don't know it.
I also took pictures of trees, but that may warrant a separate post. Or several separate posts. Or just keeping that sort of thing to myself.

What I really wanted to see, though, was the wall paintings. Three large paintings had been recovered in this church, and I just wish my photos hadn't been so blurry. Simon's are better, over on the Suffolk Churches page.
The first one you see is a St. Christopher, usually painted right across from the church door, because if you see St. Christopher first thing in the morning, you're safe from violent death for the rest of the day.
The other two are the Seven Acts of Mercy, shown as seven figures holding scrolls (and possibly insignia). This one is the Seven Deadly Sins, depicted as a tree. There was probably a larger scheme, with more moral lessons, but these are all that survive (or have been able to be recovered so far).
The paintings are as high as possible on the walls, and must have been impressive when all the colour was present and fresh. They're still impressive, damaged as they are.

St. Mary, Thornham Parva (which means Little Thornham) was top of my list of Churches To See. Simon waxes eloquent about it, and with good reason. That was our first church next morning.
It's a proper parish church, layered with history, so that the 14th century wall painting scheme is broken by 15th century windows, an 18th century gallery and 20th century plaques. A cardboard box holding copies of the church bulletin sits on top of the medieval font.
And it's thatched! It has a thatched tower! St. Mary sits, like a few other East Anglian churches we were to see, in the middle of fields. One thatched cottage nearby, but otherwise it's clearly a ways from any parishioners.


The interior is simple, too small to have aisles, but with a restored rood-screen, and a few pieces of rescued medieval glass tucked in the window tracery.
This picture, while giving you an idea of the small compass of the church, hides the two things that make it really remarkable.
One is a rare survival of an almost complete wall painting scheme, the sort of thing that almost every medieval church once had, destroyed in so many cases by later fenestration (sorry, putting in windows), or well-meaning Victorian restorers wanting to reveal 'the beauty of the stonework' by knocking off the plaster. The Puritans, ironically, did more to preserve the paintings: whitewashing over them and painting improving mottoes on top.
But I digress (cries of No! Really?).


The wall paintings tell two stories. One storyline is the martyrdom of St. Edmund, including his flight, the body found guarded by a wolf, the removal of his body to the shrine in Bury. A doorway arch stands in for the bridge that the cart bearing his body was miraculously able to cross (it was too narrow for the cart). The picture here is described as Edmund's head being reattached to his body by monks.

The other storyline is the Infancy of Christ. The Annunciation is missing, but the Visitation, Adoration, and Presentation are all surviving. The paintings are much more intimate, obviously, than the Hoxne paintings. They're at head-height or just above, and the style is simple, almost cartoony to modern eyes. This is not the art of the court.

The art of the court is represented by the other treasure of Thornham Parva, which is the retable. Excuse my blurry and partial photo, as I'm not good at photographing through glass. (Mark took better photos, and I may post them later).
The retable was probably the property of a noble family, hidden away and perhaps part of a secret chapel during the Reformation, then forgotten, eventually found in a stable loft and donated to this little church.
It shows the Crucifixion, with four saints flanking it on each side, holding their insignia. The background is gold leaf, and the figures are painted in oil, which pegs it as an English production. There's a sister panel, identified as being from the same oaks, now in the Museum at Cluny (and which I used as a model for a panel painting I did some years back).
The figures have that dancer's grace of early 14th century painting, with exaggerated hands and length of limb, to give them more gesture and emphasis. The modeling of the draperies is ... just so beautiful that I think I have to shut up about it now.
I'll post Mark's pictures later.


St. Mary Magdalene, Thornham Magna (Big Thornham) is appropriately much grander. It's the church of an important family (as St. Andrew was) rather than a parish church. And it has been restored most impressively, with the brightest Victorian touches of glass and paint.
Jane led us unerringly about, and we found a lane to park in, a raised cart-track alongside the road, paved with dead leaves. It had the air of being left over from the past, though I suppose it was in use enough not to be grown over.
This tree caught my attention on the way in, for its wild exuberance in a clipped and trimmed context. (Look, it's the only tree picture here, and there were some awesome trees at Thornham Parva, but I have some self-control, whatever you might think.)
The grounds are beautifully kept, and there's a fine Victorian angel in the graveyard.
There was one other church, I think, that had as impressive a restored interior (judged purely on its Victorian merits). I'll have to find which it was in my notes.

The day was cloudy while we were there, so I didn't try to photograph the stained-glass windows, which were lovely Pre-Raphaelite style, designed (I found out later) by Burne-Jones.
The hammerbeam roof may be medieval, but overall, it's best to just consider this Victorian Gothic and enjoy it for that.

I have to remind myself just how far up ecclesiastical interiors go. It surprises me each time I enter an old church, that there's so much air enclosed. Modern churches don't seem to reach quite so high.

Our room marked with an X

UK 08 continued.
Have I mentioned that the plan for the first part of this visit was to spend time in one place? Specifically, to stay in some part of East Anglia and bicycle around to moated sites. Because on a previous visit, I'd picked up a map of Moated Sites in Suffolk, and had noticed how close together they were.
(Yes, I am just that much of an anorak--and you're reading me!)
While researching it, we'd spent a fair bit of time on Simon's East Anglian churches site, and discovered the Saints, several of which are moated or near moats. Much of this within bicycling distance.
So where to stay? Well, how could we resist staying at a 16th century timbered farmhouse on a moated site? The Gables Farm looked perfect. And yes, it was. (Only a brisk walk or short cycle from Wingfield College too.)
Our room is the furthest right window, upper floor. Looking out onto the moat.



The other side of the house lets out to the drive, and to the farmyard. The chickens that provide breakfast eggs (and eat the breakfast scraps) are only a few paces away.
Breakfast is generous. Even when Mark and I got to the cycling about, we found that breakfast and one other meal carried us through the day.
I must say, food in England has improved massively since we visited in the 80s. On the downside, many village pubs have closed (many villages have become bedroom communities, and long commutes don't make for going down the pub after, apparently). On the upside, those that survive have become gastro-pubs, which is a dreadful word but a fine concept.


The breakfast room. The picture on the wall is of the restoration of Gables, which was in sad shape when the Herveys bought it (very nearly sight unseen) and devoted themselves to freeing the original timber-frame farmhouse from a few hundred years of overbuilding and neglect. As you can see, it's gorgeous now.
It's funny how much of restoring is similar, even to the 'and then we found this old bit still under the wall' and 'they'd chucked that into the ditch/moat' and 'some fool had cut away half the supports and plastered it over' anecdotes, regardless of whether one's restoring a Victorian house, or a Norman stone manor, or a Tudor timbered farmhouse.
One notable thing about Gables is that (like many timbered houses) it wasn't built for people much over 5 foot. Several times in the next couple of days it will be Mark's habit of leaving his bike helmet on until reaching the bedroom that will save him from knocking his head on one particular beam. Mike Hervey is pretty much the same height as Mark, so I have to guess he's had time to practice.



This is Daisy, one of the two dogs. You can see Poppy in the picture at the top of the Accommodations page here. Poppy (black spaniel) is a complete moocher, who stares soulfully at you while you eat breakfast. Well, soulfully at me, because however much I inform dogs that I don't like them and am in fact a Cat Person, they unerringly realise that I am still a soft touch.
Daisy is a rather cat-like dog, as you can tell from her perch on the back of a chair, where she watches for arrivals. She is conveniently lap-sized, and I spend an hour or so one drizzly afternoon napping in an armchair with Daisy.



The view from our room, which is the Mullion Room. Every morning I took a photo from this window, and called it the Many Moods of the Moat series, but I won't inflict that on you. You can see a nice picture of the room on the website, but here is my blurry one.


On the upper right, where you can't see, is a television on a mount. And to the right where you can't see at all, is a lovely bathroom. With lots of hot water, and no tricky switches or taps hidden away that need to be dealt with beforehand.
Lucia had the Gable End Room, I think.

After Wingfield College, we drove to Hoxne (pronounced Hocksen) and reached the church just as it was being locked up, but the sexton(?) kindly let us in for a quick look round at the wall paintings. The lych-gate is quite fine too, and I have a picture of Mark and Lucia standing at it, but I'll save that for a churches post.
Mark had a drink at the Swan, a 15th c. pub, and we determined to return another day, earlier in the day.
For supper we followed Sue Hervey's recommendation and went to the Crown in Weybread, good pub food more than gastro-pub, and I had excellent fish & chips.
Seated across from us at the Crown were a father and son also staying at the Gables for a bicycling holiday, though a considerably more strenuous one than ours. That day they'd cycled to the coast and back--my tone of slightly-fearful awe doesn't seem to have an appropriate font, so I'm going with the italics.