Author: Tish Farrell

Looking Out From Wenlock Edge ~ One Subject Two Formats

You can see why this part of Shropshire falls within an Area Of Outstanding Natural Beauty. These shots were taken on the viewpoint just past Hilltop on Wenlock Edge and I’m looking south-west towards the Shropshire Hills. You can see, too, why poet, A E Housman called them ‘blue remembered hills’. They seem like a memory even if you have never clapped eyes on them before.

And so when presented with the kind of blissful panoramic views that the Edge provides, it is tempting to try to capture all of it. And that usually does not work, not unless the light is perfect, and your photographic skills are considerably greater than mine. Even this landscape view is only a small segment of the 180 degree vista. I chose it because I liked the visual flow of man-made fields towards the grassy uplands, and the here-and-there accents of hedgerow and woodland; the many shades of green. Also, despite the millennia of human intervention here, you can still discern the landscape’s natural rhythms beneath the pastoral surface.

It’s a soothing scene to look AT. But the portrait version, I feel, is doing something rather different. It invites you into the landscape as if stepping through a door; it is therefore more actively affecting. Just my thoughts anyway. Also a thank you to Paula for stirring us up to think about the different effects of landscape and portrait composition.

Thursday’s Special: Portrait vs Landscape

All Friends At Nairobi’s Elephant Orphanage

When it comes to the survival of orphaned elephant infants, loving friendship is the only thing that works. Baby elephants need continuous loving, tactile affection as much as they need food. Without it they quickly die.

Kenya’s Dame Daphne Sheldrick, pioneer in elephant orphan rescue and rehabilitation, learned this the hard way. For years she strove to create a rich formula to substitute for mother’s milk. But in her efforts to keep orphans physically alive, she also learned that the emotional ties between baby and surrogate mother were crucial to the baby’s survival.

At her orphanage on the edge of Nairobi’s National Park she has developed an astonishing survival regime for all the young animals brought to her. Every orphan has its ‘mother’ i.e. one of the green-coated keepers seen in the photos. Every keeper is on full time duty with his charge, and this includes sleeping with the baby in its stall.

By day there is feeding, mud bathing and playing to be done. The blanket strung on a line in the top photo is there to simulate the overshadowing side of an elephant mother. The keeper feeds his baby, holding the bottle down behind the blanket. The babies are also wearing blankets – at 5000 feet above sea level, Nairobi can be cool in July when this photo was taken, and in the wild small babies would anyway have the constant warmth and shelter of mother and aunts.

The ultimate objective of the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust is to re-introduce the orphans to the wild. This is a painstaking and precarious procedure, recreating communities in the absence of wild matriarchs who are the custodians of herd memory.

Tsavo East National Park is one of the main locations for the rehabilitation process. This is the park where Daphne Sheldrick’s husband, David, was warden until 1976. During their time together at Tsavo, the Sheldricks pioneered the rehabilitation of many wild animals that had been reared in captivity. On David’s early death in 1977, Daphne set up the Trust in his memory. Forty years on some 150 elephants have been saved, along with rhinos and other species.

If you want to read about the elephants in detail there are keepers’ daily diaries HERE. You can find out what is going on in the nursery with the youngest orphans, or discover how the adolescents are faring at various forest locations as they learn to live again in the wild. A study of dedicated friendship in action then.

If you are ever in Nairobi, then the orphanage is open to visitors for an hour each day. You can also donate to the Trust or foster an orphan. There are more details HERE.

Daily Post: Friend

Through A Glass Darkly ~ Looking Out With Henry James’ Eyes?

Faithful followers of this blog will know that my home town of Much Wenlock was host to writer Henry James on three occasions. He came as guest of local worthies, the Milnes Gaskells who owned both the Prior’s House (which they called The Abbey) and Wenlock Priory ruins.

Adjoining the house is a beautiful ruin, part of the walls and windows and bases of the piers of the magnificent church administered by the predecessor of your host, the abbot. These relics are very desultory, but they are still abundant and testify to the great scale and the stately beauty of the abbey. You may lie upon the grass at the base of an ivied fragment and measure the great girth of the great stumps of the central columns, half smothered in soft creepers, and think how strange it is in that in this quiet hollow, in the midst of lonely hills, so exquisite and so elaborate a work of art should have arisen.

Henry James Portraits of Places

I imagine the Priory remains were more romantically ruinous in James’s time, lacking the custodial tidiness of English Heritage, whose property it now is. Those lofty Corsican pines in the background would have been saplings back in his day. All the same, at least once during his visits, the writer must have stood where I was standing when I took this photo – gazing through the old glass panes of The Abbey’s Great Hall, where, in the 1500s, the Prior of Wenlock did his most lavish entertaining.

Local legend has it that James was working on his novella The Turn of the Screw during one of his visits. We know from his accounts in Portraits of Places that he was struck by the antiquity of the place, and much interested in its ghost and tales of haunting that drove the household staff to spend the night in their homes. and not under The Abbey roof.

There’s more about Henry James and Wenlock in my earlier post When Henry James Came To Wenlock

By now you may be wondering how come I’m looking out of the Prior’s window. The Abbey is still privately owned, now the home of artist Louis de Wet. Last summer we were treated to a private tour by Gabriella de Wet : Going Behind The Scenes in Wenlock Abbey. There are more of Henry James’ descriptions in that post.

And now please head over to Lost in Translation where this week’s theme is windows. As you can see, my interpretation is somewhat oblique. Paula, though, presents us with some very unusual windows.

Black & White Sunday

The Abbey, Much Wenlock, once the Prior’s Lodging. It boasts a host of windows:

Thursday’s Special ~ Pick-A-Word At Penmon Point

This buoy at Penmon Point, on the Menai Strait in Anglesey tells shipping to be vigilant – the channel between the main island and Puffin Island is too shallow for passage. The lighthouse says so too in a big notice on its topmost white stripe (out of shot):

This month Paula’s pick a word at Lost in Translation includes: branching, vigilant, pomp, hooked and continual. So I’m laying claim to them all – distantly branching wind turbines off the Great Orme, the need to be vigilant in these waters, the hooked profile of the bay, and the continual ebb and flow of the tide. And as for pomp, well I think the lighthouse has plenty of it.

But for a truly outstanding interpretation of these prompts, please visit Paula, and enjoy her Venetian gallery.

Oh No! The Poppies’ Frocks Are Blowing Off

Last night as I was snapping the foxgloves outside the garden, a keen wind blew up. Inside the garden the oriental poppies were in complete disarray – a veritable strip-tease was going on. Of course it often happens – just when the poppies are looking their best, we have gale or deluge, and the garden party ends up a complete wash-out: everyone with draggled skirts, hair-dos shot and mascara smudged.

But the good news is – when I got up this morning…

…there were new girls on the block, including one in lipstick pink. How could I have forgotten that she would be coming along? Although how she got herself in with the salmon pink crowd I do not know.

While I’m here, I’ll pass on an oriental poppy gardening tip for those of you that grow them, and may not know: if, when the poppies have finally finished flowering, you cut the plants right down to the ground, you will be treated to a late summer flush.

Cee’s Flower Of The Day Please visit Cee to see her lovely flower shots, and leave links to your own.

Tonight Over The Garden Wall ~ The Foxglove Garden

A week ago the wilderness garden behind our house was all columbines. They went to seed very quickly and now it’s the foxgloves’ turn – along with the Dame’s Violets and the slender spires of purple toadflax. All self-sown and grown. I’m rather taken with the foxglove on the right, the one with creamy lips. I must remember to collect some seed, though there’s no knowing how its offspring will turn out.

The white foxgloves are lovely too. They have lime green speckles inside each flower.

And finally a view looking out over the garden wall as the sun goes down over Wenlock Edge.

The Big Digger Driver And The Kindness Of Strangers

I think I’ve mentioned that here in Much Wenlock we’re in the throes of having a couple of attenuation ponds dug above the town – this in a bid to reduce flood risk. We are in what the Environment Agency calls a ‘Rapid Response Catchment Area’. This means that if a severe storm hits our part of Wenlock Edge, then we have about twenty minutes warning before a flash flood reaches the town. There are other factors involved too. Flash flooding is more likely if the ground is already sodden from periods of prolonged rainfall. Or if it is frozen hard.

Our last bad flood was in the summer of 2007 when over fifty homes were affected. Due to the steepness of our catchment, any flood is usually quick to leave, but even so, it can cause a lot of damage.

One of the attenuation ponds, currently nearing completion, is in the top corner of Townsend Meadow behind our house. Earlier in the year, and in preparation for the excavation work, a number of small trees were felled and shredded into heaps around the pond perimeter. Yippee, I thought on discovering them by the path on the long way round to the allotment. More chippings for paths and weed suppression.

I duly went to collect a few bags full, but it was harder work than I expected. For one thing there is quite a haul up the path from the pond, and then once at the top of the hill and into the wood, another haul down the field boundary to the allotment.

Meanwhile, my chippings collecting habit had not gone unnoticed. Late one afternoon in April, and after the working day was over, I was plodding up the path with a full bag when a truck pulled up on the field track that the construction crew were using. It was the digger driver in the photo. A very Welsh digger driver. At first I didn’t quite grasp what he was saying. I thought he’d come to tell me off. But that wasn’t it.

When I explained what I was doing and where I was going with the chippings, he said it would be no problem for him to move the chippings piles to the top of the hill. In fact I think he would have delivered them to the allotment if there had been suitable access. He drove off down the track, and I carried on with my bag, and rather forgot about the digger man.

Sometime later (I was pottering around in my polytunnel) fellow allotmenteer, Dave, came to tell me that he had been surprisingly hallooed from the neighbouring field by a very Welsh man who was going on about chippings and some woman he’d met on the path. After some thought, Dave had concluded I was the woman in question, and so we went up the field to investigate, and there at the top of the track was a huge pile of wood chips – enough for all my paths, and more to compost over the winter. There was no sign of the digger man. I expect he’d gone home for his tea, but Dave helped me fill my big blue IKEA bags and carry them back to the plot.

So lucky me! Two very kind men in one day. And a nice new path between the polytunnel raised beds, which incidentally were made by a third kind man who lives in my house.

Black & White Sunday: After and Before This week Paula asks us to give a colour shot a monochrome edit.

Sun And Rain In The Seychelles

We were living in Zambia at the time – in Lusaka, a city that in 1993 was beset by cholera from infected boreholes, rumours of military coups, incursions over the border by predatory gangs of Zairean military making up for lack of pay, and the populace being structurally readjusted courtesy of financial rigours visited on them by the International Monetary Fund. Elsewhere in the country, people were starving due to severe drought and high maize prices; there was an outbreak of swine fever that caused small farmer chaos, and reported figures for HIV infection were sky high.

It was thus a relief to leave for two weeks of quietness on Mahé, the Seychelles main island. The place was blissful, but there were twinges of guilt nonetheless as we wandered barefoot on near empty beaches: we had the means to take a break from Zambia when most of Zambia’s ten million citizens did not.

For more of the Zambia story: Letters from Lusaka part 1 and part 2,

Once in Zambia: in memoriam

Ailsa’s Travel Theme: Rain

Six Word Saturday