Roads, gates and winter views

click photo to enlarge

Newcomers to the Lincolnshire Fens often comment on the word "drove" that frequently forms part of the name of a road. Thus, a road leading north out of a settlement may be called "North Drove". I've written elsewhere about the derivation of this word and how it tells us something of the Fens' past. In fact, names of all kinds are often of much longer standing than is generally appreciated and can tell the inquisitive researcher much about the people who lived in an area long ago.

Today's photograph shows, in the foreground, a road that goes by the name of Low Gate. It runs from Quadring Eaudike to the village of Gosberton. In the vicinity are other roads with the word "gate" as part of their name: Sarah Gate, Bow Gate, North Gate, Water Gate, etc. The word gate in this context doesn't usually have the meaning that we would expect today. Rather, it comes from the Old Norse word, "gata" meaning "a way, a path or a road", and was brought to the area by Scandinavian settlers who arrived in the ninth century. Its definition was later expanded to include "a right of passage". Some field names also include the word. When I lived in the Yorkshire Dales, an area that was settled by Norwegian Vikings from Ireland, I knew a street called Kirkgate. This is a combination of Old Norse"kirkja" (a church) and "gata" (a street). In other words the incoming Viking settlers' equivalent of what is now the most common road name in England - Church Street.

I took my photograph from this particular point where vehicular traffic had gouged out depressions to left and right of the road because it gave me some foreground interest. The fact that water had collected here and nowhere else by road sides probably reflects the accurate naming of this road: here the land is likely to be lower than the surrounding area. In the flat expanse of the Fens the early farmers would have been very attuned to the slight depressions and prominences ("holmes") in the landscape. The former would have standing water in winter whilst the latter would be dry and suitable not only for livestock grazing in the colder months but also for siting permanent dwellings.

photograph and text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 40mm
F No: f8
Shutter Speed: 1/50 sec
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation:  -0.67 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Gosberton, Lincolnshire

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The recent hot spell has given way to pleasant summer temperatures and the unremitting blue skies to soft broken clouds. Just the weather, we thought, for a morning cycle ride through the golden wheat and green vegetables of the late July Fenland landscape. Our route took us to Gosberton, a village whose medieval church has a prominent spire that acts as a lighthouse to cyclists navigating their way through the complex web of lanes north of the settlement.

We had no particular destination in mind as we cycled along, but the sight of the spire set me to thinking what I'd recently read about the name of the village. The Domesday Book of 1086 apparently calls it by two slight variations of the same name - Gosebertcherche and Gosebertchirche. In 1177 this had become Goseberdechirche, and in 1180 Goseberchirche. All these variations, it seems, derive from the joining together of the Germanic personal name Gosbert and the Old English word cirice, "a church". By the 1200s the Old Norse kirkja ( also meaning "a church") had replaced the second part of the name and Gosseberdkyrk, Goseberdkirke and Gosberkirke are found. Right through to the eighteenth century a name ending in the word "church" in one form or another was used to describe the village. Yet, in 1487 the first use of the suffix -ton is found in Gosburton. The ending -tun, with slightly different pronunciations, is Old English and Old Norse for enclosure, farmstead, village or estate.  The current spelling of the village name dates from around the seventeenth century. Such changes in the name of a settlement are not unusual in England. What I found interesting in this instance is that the "church" part of the name should disappear when the parish church of St Peter and St Paul has, for centuries, remained the largest and most prominent building in the village, and the one that still, to a large extent, defines it.

I took my photograph as we cycled in from the north east, and it captures the way the pinnacled tower with its elegant spire dominates the surrounding houses and trees.

photograph and text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 45mm (90mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f6.3
Shutter Speed: 1/800
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -0.7 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Elephants in England

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The first elephant that was brought to England during historic times came in the Roman invasion of AD43, and is noted as being at Colchester. No further records of elephants in these islands exist until 1255 when Louis IX of France gave Henry III one for his menagerie that was housed at the Tower of London. Matthew Paris drew this animal for inclusion in his bestiary, and a contemporary carving of it can be seen on a misericord at Exeter Cathedral.

It is unlikely that too many elephants found their way across the English Channel during the Middle Ages, but the beast certainly became known through bestiaries similar to Matthew Paris's. These volumes collected drawings and writing about real and mythical animals. In particular they described the peculiar features of each animal, and what they symbolised. Church sculptors, painters, carvers and glaziers, as well as illustrators and writers made extensive use of these descriptions. Thus, the pelican represented Christ's sacrifice because it was said to peck its own breast and feed its offspring with its own blood, and can frequently be seen in church fittings doing just this. The Christian triumph over death and Christ's resurrection were associated with the phoenix, the mythical bird that rose from the dead in flames. Elephants often had a long entry in bestiaries, and were illustrated in warlike postures with small castles (howdahs) on their backs. They were described as intelligent, with a prodigious memory, gentle, afraid of mice, and protective of their comrades. However, this particular animal is more often associated with eastern religions than Christianity, though occasionally they can be seen in churches trampling snakes and representing Christ overcoming death and evil.

Today's photograph shows an elephant gargoyle on the church of St Peter & St Paul, Gosberton, Lincolnshire. It is the only gargoyle that I know in this form, and is contemporary with the tower which probably dates from the late 1300s. Did the people who carved this head ever see a real elephant? It's unlikely, but they would have been familiar with its illustration in the bestiaries, the inspiration for many of their grotesque and fantastic gargoyle faces. The lead spout formed into the animal's trunk catches one's eye when you look upwards, and probably dates from the church's Victorian restoration. However, I like to think that it was the medieval sculptors who first fitted one when they placed the head here as the exit for water draining from the top of the tower.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 150mm (300mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/1600
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -1.0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

History and The Fens

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Historians, like many people, often look for the easy life. When they come to write about a subject they tend to favour those that are well documented by contemporary primary sources and extensively covered by subsequent secondary sources. You might think that there is nothing wrong with that providing it produces useful additions to our understanding of the past. But, there is a danger, particularly when looking at a subject over a period of several centuries, that the later phases, where extensive written documentation survives, are given an emphasis and importance that isn't always warranted.

Take the draining of the Fens. Many people's knowledge of this undertaking begins with the "adventurers" who, in the seventeenth century raised money and made use of Dutch and English engineers to build large drains, such as the one in today's photograph, and ends with the conversion of the marshes, meres and seasonal pasture into some of England's most productive arable land. What is less widely appreciated is the fact that this was the third phase of drainage and "improvement". The Romans began the project, but their causeways and the Carr Dyke constitute the few remains of their work in this area, and there is no contemporary documentary evidence. The medieval monasteries undertook the building of extensive embankments and drains, the scope of which we don't fully appreciate. There are those who believe that their contribution to the conversion of this "waste" into farmland was at least as significant as the work of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, and possibly more so. Rather more of the medieval work can be seen in the form of, for example, old sea banks and the Midfen Dyke, but little documentary evidence remains, and so it is given much less emphasis than the later works.

The South Forty Foot drain was begun in the 1630s and extended and enlarged in subsequent centuries. It is a conduit that takes the water from subsidiary drains and deposits it in The Haven at Boston, where it joins the flow of the River Witham out into The Wash and the North Sea. My photograph shows the Drain at a point next to Neslam Bridge, half way between Billingborough and Gosberton. The inlet on the left is the waterway, called Billingborough Lode, feeding into the canal-like watercourse. I stopped to take a photograph from the bridge, but noticing a track to the water's edge, perhaps made by an angler, I went down into the vigorously growing reeds. The quality of light there was different, vivid and wonderful, and intensified by the yellow flowers of oilseed-rape growing along the top of the bank. I returned to the car happy to have secured this shot.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 11mm (22mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/640 seconds
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -1.0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Shots I've missed No. 172

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About a week ago as I was driving along the main road through Gosberton, Lincolnshire, I glanced across at the 160 feet tall spire of the medieval church of St Peter & St Paul. Fortunately the road was quite clear because I took my eyes off it for longer than I anticipated as I did a "double take". I'd spotted, half-way up the spire, the outline of a man climbing a ladder that had been fixed to it. Across his back, at right angles to his body, was another ladder. The man was a steeplejack, and I immediately knew what he was doing. A few weeks previously I'd been to the flower festival at the church, and a parishioner had told me that a new weather vane was soon to be fixed to the top of the spire. This man was clearly starting the preparatory work of assembling sections of aluminium ladder that stretch from the top of the square tower, up the tapering spire to its very tip. Once that was completed a scaffold platform would be erected around the top of the spire, allowing the work to begin.

My heart sank. Why? Because I didn't have my camera with me! One of the reasons I use Olympus cameras is the relatively small size of their bodies and lenses. That makes them easier to carry, and therefore much more likely that I'll have it with me. But, here I was with a wonderful photo opportunity and no camera. I could have wept! However, my mission was the weekly shopping, so I gritted my teeth and drove on, cursing my ineptitude. Yesterday, as I drove along on this week's shopping expedition, I looked at the spire expecting to see the weather vane in place. But, work had proceeded slower than I anticipated, and the men were in the process of assembling their work platform. Determined to seize the moment this time I took a small detour and grabbed a few shots of them about their business. Compared with the workers who construct the gleaming towers of Shanghai or Dubai, these men weren't very high above the ground. But unlike their high-tech counterparts they had the major disadvantage of working on an inclined stone surface that was built 500 to 600 years ago, and which has been subject to a damp climate for all of that time. Furthermore, a fall from the top of this spire would leave you every bit as dead as a fall from the latest Middle Eastern mega-tower. It certainly isn't a job that I'd relish.

My photographs aren't much to write home about, and, at the risk of sounding like a fisherman, can in no way compare with the one I missed. However, the subject of the images will be unfamiliar to many, and you might find them of interest. The moral of this tale is, of course, always have your camera with you because you can guarantee that the best shots will present themselves the moment you leave it at home. And the title of this entry? I thought it would make a good companion piece for Photographic Tip Number 127.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Image 1 (2)
Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 40mm (142mm) (80 (284mm)mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f7.1 (7.1)
Shutter Speed: 1/800 (1/1250) seconds
ISO: 200 (200)
Exposure Compensation: -0.7 (-0.7) EV
Image Stabilisation: On

A November landscape

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A Victorian writer who knew him, says of the English poet and humourist, Thomas Hood (1799-1845), that "his existence was a long disease rather than a life", plagued as he was by ill health from childhood. However, by the time of his early death at the age of 46 Hood had endeared himself to the British public through his satirical observations on contemporary life published in "Punch" and "Comic Annual". His novels, such as the romance, "Lamia", were bought in respectable numbers, as were his volumes of poetry. Some individual poems such as his "Song of the Shirt", a piece of social commentary about the working conditions of shirt-makers, were highly acclaimed, being translated for European audiences as well as finding wide readership in Britain.

Today Hood is recognised by many but revered by few, his work slipping back into the second tier of Victorian writers. Nonetheless, as I cycled through the Lincolnshire Fens late in the afternoon of an overcast day it was his poem about the month of November that came to mind. I heard it as a schoolboy and enjoyed its simple structure. Back in those days we hadn't heard of SAD (seasonal affective disorder), but as I re-read the poem for the first time in decades I did wonder if it was one of the afflictions that poor Thomas Hood bore along with his other illnesses! But no, it was probably just his reaction to drab, damp, smog-wreathed London in the year's penultimate month.

No!

No sun—no moon!
No morn—no noon!

No dawn—no dusk—no proper time of day—
No sky—no earthly view—
No distance looking blue—
No road—no street—no “t'other side this way”—
No end to any Row—
No indications where the Crescents go—
No top to any steeple—
No recognitions of familiar people—
No courtesies for showing 'em—
No knowing 'em!
No travelling at all—no locomotion—
No inkling of the way—no notion—
“No go” by land or ocean—
No mail—no post—
No news from any foreign coast—
No Park, no Ring, no afternoon gentility—
No company—no nobility—
No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member—
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds—
November!

I was propelling my bicycle homewards, through the winding lanes of the flat landscape, when the sun made a brief appearance over the the village of Gosberton, and I stopped to compose this landscape using the spire of St Peter & St Paul to balance the illuminated clouds.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 48mm (96mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/320
ISO: 200
Exposure Compensation: -0.3 EV
Image Stabilisation: On