From Pyrenees to Pennines

A church for a murdered son

Christ the Consoler, Skelton-on-Ure. Wikimedia Commons

Here is a tale of a murder. A murder which led to the building of a very fine church not many miles from here.

In 1870, Frederick Vyner, son of the Marquess of Ripon and Lady Mary Vyner, travelled to Greece with a small band of English and Italian friends and servants. They were set upon by brigands who had probably been tipped off, and who demanded a huge ransom: £50,000. Women, children and servants in the party were regarded as useless bargaining tools by the brigands. They were released. But five men remained captive, including Frederick. The money was found to pay off the ransom, but before it could be delivered, the Greeks sent in the army, and in the resulting battle, soldiers, brigands and four of the hostages were killed, among them Frederick Vyner.

Vyner’s mother, Lady Mary, determined that she would build a church in her son’s memory on the Newby Hall estate which was their home. Her sister, Lady Ripon, was at the same time engaged in a project to build a church at Studley Royal, Fountains Abbey, Ripon. William Burges , noted Victorian architect, obtained the commissions for both churches in 1870.

I’m going to get to know St. Mary’s Church, and the work of William Burges very well over the weeks and months to come, as I have just been accepted as a volunteer for the National Trust at Fountains Abbey, where one of my duties will be as an Information Assistant at the church. Yesterday though, as part of our training, we were taken to see the church at Newby, which was until the 1990’s, the parish church of the village of Skelton-on-Ure.

It’s clearly Saint Mary’s sister church, yet more stolid, more weighty in appearance. Originally to have been called St. Michael and All Angels, the church has a unique dedication – to Christ the Consoler. Wander round the outside, and you’ll see over the door Christ the good shepherd with some of his ovine flock: a complement to the sheep in the field beyond, at the moment nursing their young lambs.

Christ's flock above the church door. — Christ’s flock above the church door.

Within and outside the church Christ is omnipresent, perhaps most spectacularly in the rose window which portrays Him at its centre. The several ages of man are illustrated on an inner wheel of glass, and the various occupations and conditions of man on an outer wheel: noblemen at the top, working types below. Curiously, being ‘negro’, seems to be a job in itself. All turn their gaze upon the risen Christ the Consoler as they go about their business. It’s easy to imagine this spectacular window being a teaching aid to any cleric needing material for his sermon.

Christ the consoler

Infancy.

A fisherman and a hunter.

A negro.

Walk down the nave and you’ll witness the miracles of Christ on one side, his parables on the other, each complemented by the event from the Old Testament which is traditionally held to be the precursor of that in the New Testament. This one was my particular favourite: the Annunciation, whose forerunner was the story of Moses and the burning bush.

The dominating view as you enter the church is an almost overwhelming sculpture above the entrance to the chancel. Here is Christ’s Ascension with a crowd of 12 looking on. These are the disciples of course: but not Judas. His place is taken by Mary: a very mediaeval take on the event.

The chancel itself forms an intimate place for the Vyner family. Heraldic misericords record the arms of close and more distant branches of the family, all surrounding as if to embrace the memorial to the murdered young Frederick in a private and understated way. It’s decorated, as is St. Mary’s, with columns in Irish marble: dark green, plum red, greyish-white. More stained glass windows of Christ carrying his cross, then crucified, each with a number of Old Testament precursors.

Detail from the organ housing.

Angels rise above the chancel.

There’s more. There’s a glittering reredos with the Magi. There’s a spectacular organ casing set before the chancel. There’s detail to keep you happily busy and exploring for hours. Newby Hall and its gardens ought to be on your tourist map if you explore our area. Don’t leave the church out of your itinerary.

As for William Burges, and the story of the two churches he built here near Ripon… well, there’s plenty here for another day

The sheep and lambs of Newby Hall, glimpsed from the churchyard.

A cautionary tale

Saturday night. All dressed up and somewhere to go: friends in Ripon – good company and good cooks – had invited us over. Malcolm popped out to the car, leaving the keys in the ignition, then came back into the house. Two minutes later, we left together …. and found the car firmly locked. It had done it all by itself.

We peered in, we rattled the door, we shook the car. Nothing. No spare key. We lost that years ago, and never got round to replacing it. The car defiantly remained unusable.

Distinctly disgruntled, we shelved the problem and ordered a taxi. And had a good evening.

The next morning, there we were, prowling round the car once more. Our neighbour and Malcolm mulled over and rejected various strategies. I walked into West Tanfield for a newspaper. The shopkeeper there knows everyone. He was sure to come up with someone who could help. He couldn’t.

The internet revealed a couple of businesses who would come and help: at a price. £100? We didn’t think so.

But several hours later, we were forced to admit defeat. The man we rang said he charged no extra for Sunday work, and would come in an hour. He thought he’d have us sorted out within seconds. But he didn’t. He struggled with ever more sophisticated gizmos until finally, after about 20 minutes, the lock gave in, and opened once more.

And this is his advice, which I share with you. You’re welcome.

Never leave your key in the ignition unless you also turn the key. If the car doesn’t ‘know’ you’ve put the key there, it may lock automatically as one of its safety features.
If you normally ‘zap’ open your car by using the remote control button, the lock may eventually clog with dust and so forth. About once a month, open your car the old-fashioned way by inserting the key and turning the lock.

What with his visit, and two taxi fares, this little incident cost us £130.

I think it may be time to replace that lost car key.

Spanish as she is spoke

We’re off to visit daughter Emily in Barcelona soon. And it’s about time we stopped being so dependant on her to be our mouth-piece when we’re there. It’s about time we stopped expecting her boyfriend to make all the effort of speaking in a less-than-familiar language. It’s about time we took a grip, and learned some Spanish.

Yes, I know. In Barcelona, Catalan is the preferred language. But if we want to travel more widely in Spain, given that everyone in Barcelona speaks Spanish too, Spanish it’s going to be.

I looked for Adult Education classes to help me. There was nothing for beginners here in Ripon, and I didn’t fancy a 35 mile round trip to Northallerton or Harrogate for a weekly session. The U3A here in Ripon has a class, but they’ve been going quite a while and are on book two of their chosen text-book. In any case, there’s not a native speaker in their midst to correct idiom or accent.

So I’ve looked to the internet. And being a tight-fisted sort, I’ve looked at what’s out there for free. There’s quite a lot. The advantage for me has been that the lessons these courses provide come in bite-sized packages, which encourages me to learn little and often. The big disadvantage is that I don’t really get to speak: and if I do, there’s nobody to correct me.

There’s Duolingo, which takes me through families of words, using simple sentence structures, and testing my ability to understand and to remember. I’m not likely to forget about that crab that drinks milk, or my brother (haven’t got a brother) who wears yellow trousers.

Then there’s Games for Language. American David, who has a Spanish dad, is travelling round Spain. Through ‘virtual’ card games and arcade-type games, I’ve learnt the Spanish I need to understand his travels.

FluentU is good. From Lesson 1 it uses short video clips from Spanish TV commercials, children’s broadcasts and so forth to teach Spanish…. as she is spoke: that is – fast and furious. I can tell you all you’ll ever need to know about Maradona eating at MacDonald’s.

And my latest discovery is Memrise: this offers you structured sentences and vocabulary, and makes you repeat them and repeat them till you jolly well get it right. And then, a few days later, it’ll be checking to see if you’ve forgotten.

You must think I spend my whole life slogging away at Spanish. I don’t. It’s 10 minutes here and there. But it IS every day. I’ll let you know whether it’s paid dividends when I’m back from Barcelona.

Loafing around in Harrogate

Up betimes, in order to be at Harrogate Hospital by 7.30 a.m. Yesterday was a day of white-coat-syndrome-induced high blood pressure, insensibility whilst under the knife, and not a little discomfort for Malcolm. He’s been waiting for months for some minor surgery, and now he’s had it, his life should get a lot more comfortable.

I, meanwhile, had to spend the day in Harrogate waiting for the call to go and collect him. I had quite a few errands to run in any case, and after that it wouldn’t have been worth traipsing back and forth from North Stainley.

So I did my jobs, and then had plenty of chance to loaf about. I’m not the world’s keenest shopper, but I do have a favourite charity shop in Cold Bath Road. Our friend Jonet volunteers there, sifting through and sorting donated books. I love the serendipity of looking along the shelves crowded with fiction old, new, English and foreign, next to an eclectic collection of non-fiction. As usual I left the shop with a satisfyingly large pile of reading, and this time, a new-to-me summer dress.

Then I headed for green space. What makes Harrogate a special town is its area of open parkland in the centre of the town – the Stray. It was created from common pastureland in 1778 to link most of Harrogate’s springs (it’s a spa town after all) and an Act of Parliament preserved its size at 200 acres. Even now, if part of its area is lost due to, for example, road widening, it must be replaced elsewhere. It’s pretty unique to be able to step directly from busy shopping streets straight onto a vast green area unbounded by railings or fences. Paths and roads will lead you through this green space to other parts of town. Like me, you could walk across the Stray to get to the hospital, or to reach the community round Cold Bath Road with its neighbourhood shops and Victorian housing. And yesterday, you could enjoy, as I did, the crocuses which have burst forth in their hundreds and thousands in glorious lakes of colour – purple, mauve, sunshine yellow and white. They’ll be followed in a week or so by an equal multitude of daffodils, and then avenues of cherries will blossom in all their pink finery. Here’s a few shots of Harrogate Stray on the warmest day of the year so far.

View from the Stray to Harrogate.

I know grey squirrels are no better than rats with tails, but they still cheer me up as they scurry up and down trees.

Easter eggs on display at Betty’s, Harrogate’s Top Caff.

Walking on the Stray

Haulage logistics, 18th century style

A sunny morning on the River Ure, just before we reached the Canal.

We went for a walk along the Ripon Canal the other day, starting from the point where it meets the River Ure. Back in its heyday during the Industrial Revolution, busy as it was then, the rural towpath we walked along might not have looked so very different. Back in its heyday, keels would have hauled coal northwards from the Yorkshire coalfields, and lead and agricultural products southwards. The canals were the freight-haulage routes of their age, and even though they were busy thoroughfares, the whole business of passing vessels through the three locks in one direction at a time limited the flow traffic to levels well below what those of us who’ve ever been stuck in a bad-tempered rush hour traffic jam on the M1 have experienced.

Ripon Canal is not one of the country’s great canals. There are water super-highways such as the Grand Union Canal linking London with Birmingham. That’s 137 miles long. There’s the Leeds-Liverpool Canal. That’s 127 miles long. The Ripon Canal runs for just two miles, from Ripon to Oxclose Lock, where it links with the River Ure. Like many of the country’s canals, it was built in the latter part of the 18th century, between 1767 and 1783, opening up water traffic between Ripon and York, and it eventually put the products of the Durham coalfields within Ripon’s reach.

The railways proved to be the death of canals all over England. Ripon’s withstood the opening of the Darlington to York railway in 1841, but the Leeds and Thirsk Railway finished it off. The railway company actually bought the waterway, to ensure local support , but they then neglected it, failing to dredge it, so that it became less and less useable. The canal was abandoned as a waterway in 1906.

But its fortunes have changed again. No longer a tool of the industrial revolution, the canal has become a playground for people who like ‘messing about in boats‘*. The Ripon Canal Trust spearheaded its restoration from the 1960s, and now the whole thing is managed by the Canal and River Trust. So whether you like boats, barges, or a stroll along a quiet backwater near town, Ripon Canal’s worth a visit.

One of the canal bridges.

Barges on the canal.

The towpath again.

Walking the towpath

*That’s what Ratty used to like to do in Kenneth Grahame’s ‘The Wind in the Willows’

A is for ‘acorn’, B is for ‘buttercup’, and C is for ‘conker’.

Blackberries? ............ (Wikimedia Commons) — Blackberries? …………
(Wikimedia Commons)

…. or alternatively, A is for ‘attachment’, B is for ‘blog’ and C is for ‘chatroom’.

Somehow, back in January, I missed the fuss that surrounded the publication of the updated edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary. I caught up with it today, when reading an absorbing article in today’s Guardian by landscape and natural world enthusiast Robert Macfarlane. This is what he said.

‘The same summer I was on Lewis, a new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary was published. A sharp-eyed reader noticed that there had been a culling of words concerning nature. Under pressure, Oxford University Press revealed a list of the entries it no longer felt to be relevant to a modern-day childhood. The deletions included acorn, adder, ash, beech, bluebell, buttercup, catkin, conker, cowslip, cygnet, dandelion, fern, hazel, heather, heron, ivy, kingfisher, lark,mistletoe, nectar, newt, otter, pasture and willow. The words taking their places in the new edition included attachment, block-graph, blog, broadband, bullet-point, celebrity, chatroom, committee, cut-and-paste, MP3 player and voice-mail. ………I was dismayed by the language that had fallen (been pushed) from the dictionary. For blackberry, read Blackberry.’

I too was dismayed. Everywhere there is evidence that children are playing out far less than they used to, seeing green space less often than their parents did. Perhaps more than ever they need a dictionary to help them know about chestnuts and clover. Since the Second World War, there have been regular complaints from teachers and others, that there are city children who don’t know that milk comes from cows, or potatoes from the earth, or that blackberries are for gathering and devouring. Best not cut them out of works of reference too.

But then, I’m not sure how many children use dictionaries either. I’ve seen lots of young people, including our own daughter, who will turn to an online source rather than the dictionary when needing to check a spelling or a meaning. But really, what can be more fun than turning to a dictionary to look something up, and then becoming distracted, for more than 20 minutes at a time, by reading about words you never knew, or knew you needed to know, like ‘pursier’, or ‘grager’, or ‘chip breaker’ or ‘squaloid’?

All the same, I’m glad and relieved that my grandchildren know the meanings of all the words Macfarlane singles out, both the new edition inclusions, and the ousted ones from, apparently, a bygone age.

....or BlackBerry? (Wikimedia Commons) — ….or Blackberry?
(Wikimedia Commons)

An afternoon with Barbara Hepworth

I lived in Wakefield for a few years, in the 1970s. Back then, it was a gritty industrial town, surrounded by pit villages such as Crofton, Sharlston and Lofthouse. It was the home of Double Two shirts, and the administrative capital of the now-defunct West Riding. You’ll still find Wakefield Prison here, the largest high-security prison in Western Europe. And Wakefield is still part of the unique ‘Rhubarb Triangle’, an area between Wakefield, Morley and Rothwell where, in the cold early months of every year, delicate pink forced rhubarb is grown in darkened sheds for a public still eager to buy.

Wakefield had its elegant quarters too, largely built round the Georgian St. John’s Church, and there was a decent market as well, and a good Art Gallery and Museum.

What it didn’t have in those days was the Hepworth Gallery. So we paid it a visit on Sunday. It’s on an unpromising site by a fairly unlovely stretch of the River Calder, alongside a busy dual carriageway and various semi-industrial sites. But with its austere pigmented concrete facade, the building itself rises energetically and imaginatively from the midst of the industrial landscape in which it’s situated. We went inside, to a cool, clean and calm space. With an excellent café. This did seem promising.

Houseboats on the river.

A worker’s cottage? Or trompe-l’œil?

Rain on the outside walls.

Neither of us liked the current exhibition showcasing Lynda Benglis. But we’d really come to see Barbara Hepworth’s work. She was a Wakefield lass, a contemporary, friend and colleague of Henry Moore. I’ve known and admired her work for much of my life, but most enjoyed it when visiting St. Ives some years ago. Hepworth lived there from the 1950s till her death, and much of her work is exhibited at the Tate Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden. It was the sculpture garden that did it for us then: plants and sculpture co-exist in intimate harmony, each enhancing the other in ways that have stayed with us in the years since we were able to spend time there.

The time we spent with her work in the Gallery was enhanced by glimpses of her working life: the tough and workmanlike bench with its tools laid ready for use; the videos showing her working, or her pieces being prepared for casting in bronze in busy foundries.

Hepworth's workbench. — Hepworth’s workbench.

What makes this exhibition interesting is that most of these works are full-size prototypes, in plaster or aluminium of works that would later be realised in bronze. It’s clear that she needed to work even at an early stage on the same scale as she would on the finished article. What could she gain by trying her ideas out in miniature?

These pieces are reminiscent of the rolling character of the Yorkshire landscape round Wakefield. To achieve them, Hepworth chipped, carved, smoothed and worked away at her pieces: it was solid manual labour, not so very far removed from the labour of the miners and workers who also lived in the community where she grew up. It’s a man’s world, and Hepworth was extraordinary not only for being a woman studying sculpture, but for reviving the art of carving her own work. In the Edwardian age, sculptors had merely moulded their maquettes and left masons to do the hard graft.

I love this juxtaposition of the Hepworth sculpture with the Euan Uglow portrait behind.

Yet her work is sensual and invites contemplation. I relished the chance to do so in this light and airy gallery, with its backdrop of the city of Wakefield seen through the vast windows, allowing the daylight to illuminate her work.

Wakefield from the windows of the Hepworth Gallery.

Snowdrops: this year’s final curtain call

I know I’ve mentioned them already, but this year’s crop of snowdrops has been quite astonishing. Maybe they weren’t quite such a feature of our local landscape in France. Maybe when we last lived in England, because we were in town, we saw them only tucked into quiet corners of suburban gardens, or on occasional weekend sorties. Perhaps snowdrops round here are always this special. But for us, this year has been a real treat.

Snowdrops have been almost the first thing we see as we set foot outside the house. They’ve been in dense groves in nearby woodland. They’ve been on sheltered verges. At first slender, pointing their sheathed leaves upwards in search of light, now they’ve opened their petals into blowsy bells and flattened their leaves gently towards the ground beneath. This is the sure signal that they’re on the way out. Gardens are displaying the first of the early crocus, and even daffodils are opening in more sheltered spots. I think snowdrops prefer to be the centre of attention, prepared to share the woodland only with occasional patches of aconites. Now that spring is really on its way, and the birds are honing their voices in preparation for their courtship rituals, the snowdrops are preparing to allow their flowers and leaves to wither and die, as the bulbs enjoy their long and nourishing hibernation below ground.

Nation swap…. house swap.

Until the early years of the twentieth century, there had been thousands of Greeks living in Turkey, and Turks living in Greece, preserving their own culture and ways of life over many centuries. But by the 1920s, both Turks and Greeks had been through a period of real upheaval, with a series of wars including the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-1922. Senior politicians in both countries could see problems ahead if largely Muslim Turks remained in Greece, and largely Orthodox Greeks remained in Turkey.

Their solution though, was a shocking one. Following the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, thousands and thousands of Turks and Greeks were in effect deported from the lands where they and their ancestors had been living for centuries, back to their country of ethnic origin. They were given almost no time to prepare or to pack belongings: they were displaced refugees. Large Greek communities such as Smyrna were quite simply emptied of their citizens, to be stocked with Muslim Turks and re-named Izmir . The regional ethic mix which had prevailed for centuries ceased.

Greek refugees from Smyrna arriving at Thessaloniki 1923 (unknown source)

Though it’s hard to regard what happened then as anything better than ethnic cleansing, many Turks nowadays will say that now the dust has settled, and with the passage of time, both Greece and Turkey are the better for it. Greco-Turkish relations have often been poor, and with the two populations now separated, there’s one less thing to fight over.

It’s a hugely complex issue about which I know next to nothing. What I do know is that we spent the last morning of our Turkish holiday in Şirince, one of those villages that was forcibly de-populated, then re-populated, in this case by Turks moved out of Thessaloniki in Greece. It’s a charming place, set on a hillside amongst olive groves and orchards; a tourist trap for Turks and foreign tourists alike. But on a quiet warm morning in February, it was no hardship. We used the time to sample the fruit wines for which the village is noted: mulberry, peach, morello, quince (no, we didn’t try them ALL). We bought last-minute souvenirs: local olive oil, honey, pomegranate vinegar. It was easy to feel, strolling through the narrow streets, that we might be in Greece rather than Turkey, even though we didn’t hear, as promised, any of the older inhabitants speaking Greek.

A quiet street in Şirince.

The church has seen better days.

A quiet bar: a good place to sample some of those fruit wines, or an apple tea.

Village life.

Local textiles on sale.

Bazaar in Şirince. Easy to see it’s part of Turkey now.

Fruit wines waiting to be sampled.

Retail opportunity outside the now disused church.

A mosque has now replaced the church.

It was a peaceful way to end our holiday. We’ll be back, as independent travellers next time. And from now, it’ll be posts from misty moisty England. For a while at least.

An everyday story of Turkish folk

Turkish flag painted on the side of a building.

The Republic of Turkey has only existed since 1923, and rapidly transformed itself under Kemal Atatürk from a failing Ottoman Empire with a glorious past, into a modern nation, looking towards Europe as it pushed through a programme of reforms. Then and now predominantly Muslim, it became an uncompromisingly secular state, in which religious symbols in schools and public buildings were forbidden, and women achieved universal suffrage by 1934. These days, you’ll see fewer veiled Turkish women than in the average British city centre.

Look below the surface, however, and Turkish life is centred round the extended family, as it has been for centuries.

When they’re 19, Turkish young men go off to do their National Service for two years. Those from the west serve in the east of the country, and those in the east go west. What they’re hoping for is a nice post as a jandarm (army police) in a quiet country town, though they’ll lie through their teeth and tell anyone who asks that they were posted to the borders with Syria, Iran or Iraq. No internet, no mobile phones, no wild social life: it’s not fun, and they count the days till their discharge, aged 22.

Back home, mother has no time to indulge in ’empty nest syndrome’. She has her son’s marriage to arrange. She trawls through likely candidates, looking for a young woman from the same caste, of good family, aged about 17 – 19. She’ll check out whether the girl can make a decent Turkish coffee and a good pilau rice, and even get the chance to appraise her naked body when they go to the Turkish baths together. Her son will almost certainly fall in with her choice, and the girl’s family too usually agrees.

Father’s role in all this is to foot the bill for the wedding, which is cripplingly expensive, so he’ll have been saving all his married life. Average wages in Turkey are low, and after regular bills have been met, don’t allow much slack for buying or building a home complete with fixtures, fittings and furniture, much less a new car. This is where the wedding comes in.

The guest list for the ceremony will include about 2000 of the couple’s closest friends, of whom about 1,500 will actually come on the day. And they will bring gold, which they’ll pin to the couple’s clothes. Nobody will dare to offer a smaller amount than the person in front: social death. This gold will be transformed into a new home, a car and all the other things the young couple might need. Now their modest income will be enough for day-to-day life.

After the marriage, the young woman leaves her family behind. Her new life is with the extended family of her husband. They will all live together. We saw whole blocks of flats, maybe 4 storeys high, which our guide assured us were likely to belong to a single family. People buy from developers or build for themselves: renting is almost unknown. As are planning regulations. You can build what you like, where you like, on land that you already own or have acquired. Surveys of the land are unnecessary, so in this earthquake prone land, many buildings are destroyed by ‘quakes or landslip, or subsidence.

Earning a living is paramount for the men. While communities will be proud of those who make it into the professions, there’s no shame in, for instance, washing cars at a petrol station: it may in fact be more lucrative than say, teaching. Many families find ways to earn their living together, by running a shop or garage, or by working the land together. Almost every block of flats in Turkey has shops on the ground floor. You can be sure the business is being run by the family who lives above.

Traditional Turkish tea house: men only. (Reuters/Umit Bektas)

When not actually working, men retire for the day to a tea shop. The woman’s domain is the home, all day, and woe betide the man who reports home sick at 2.00 in the afternoon. The average family has about 5 children, and life expectancy is 61 for men, 67 for women. This is because health services are rudimentary and expensive. Most families are dependent on traditional remedies, or failing that, the pharmacy. A stay in hospital is an unthinkable expense for much of the population.

The family groupings apply to to the very many nomad familiies who still exist in Turkey. Some families are still entirely nomadic, whilst others have a nomad existence in summer, and return to a more low-lying village in the colder months. Most rear stock, especially sheep and goats.

A nomad tends his flock outside Bergama.

I’m sure Turkish life is changing. We certainly saw many Turkish women working outside the home. But walking about the streets in the evening, it was clear that home and family is still central to everyday life here.