photography

Bridge, what bridge? Only the world’s first cast iron one

I love the way this little girl is much happier to play on the railings than notice the wonder of this bridge, a bridge that in its day was considered a world wonder. Nothing like it had been constructed before. It was opened to the public on New Year’s Day 1781, and right from the start was a visitor attraction, seized on by both coach operators and hotel proprietors to boost their trade. In the summer of that year The Swan Inn (which is still in business today, and for much the same reason) pronounced in an advertisement that is was:

situate near the most incomparable piece of architecture, the Iron Bridge.

One of the companies for the Shrewsbury to London route also made much of the fact that travellers would be passing:

that striking specimen of Art and so much admired object of travellers.

Today the bridge may seem quaint, and the manner of its construction somewhat bizarre, since it utilises wood joinery techniques in its iron rib-work. But for all that, we are talking major, life-changing innovation: something akin to the technology boot-up begun in Silicon Valley. Here, though, we have a rural Shropshire valley, otherwise known as the Severn or Ironbridge Gorge in Coabrookdale. It is just a few miles from my house and, with its steep banks of hanging woodlands, and the mostly tranquil river below, it seems an unlikely location for epoch-changing events.

Yet this bridge was the first of its kind in the world, and thus a proving ground for what could be achieved with hitherto untried applications of cast iron. It led to the iron framed factories of the Industrial Revolution, and was a step on the way to the sky scraper. The growth in demand for iron and steel products for shipping and steam engines and weapons put the great in Great Britain. Iron made the country rich, and gave it the wherewithal to set off conquering the planet.

From the outset then, the Iron Bridge was very much as a PR stunt, and although there were practical considerations – including replacing a very dangerous ferry crossing wherein Severn coracles were used to transport people (mostly large numbers of workers) between the town of Broseley on one bank and Coalbrookdale on the other, the main object was to prove the worth and usefulness of cast iron. Its builder was Abraham Darby III, the third generation of the Quaker iron founding dynasty that operated in Coalbrookdale from the early 1700s . The other Darby family claim to fame was Abraham I’s discovery of how to cast iron using coke instead of charcoal, which did much to halt the decimation of the nation’s forests, and was a piece of technological mastery that had been called for back in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. In fact she offered a prize for anyone who could do it. She needed timber for her navy. She did not want it going up in smoke in furnaces and forges.

But back to the Iron Bridge. The design was roughly based on drawings by Shropshire architect Thomas Farnolls Pritchard, but there were many changes in the course of construction, and he did not live to see the finished project. The site was not only difficult, but the bridge builders had further set themselves the task of creating a single span that was high enough to allow large Severn sailing trows to pass beneath without the nuisance of lowering their masts as they had to do for all the River Severn’s other bridges. This objective alone could have scuppered the project. The raising of the iron ribs proved an epic undertaking on a river that is prone to massive floods, and whose banks are not stable.

Visitors came from all over Europe to see the finished product. They included artists, princes and Swedish industrial spies. The Severn Gorge was likened to Hell with its burning lime and coke kilns, furnaces and forges. The eighteenth century tourists came and gawped with horrid fascination. I will leave you with one such response made in 1801 by popular song writer, Charles Dibdin:

…if an atheist , who had never heard of Colebrook Dale, could be transported there in a dream, and left to wake at the mouth of one of those furnaces, surrounded on all sides by such infernal objects, though he has been all his life the most profligate unbeliever that ever added blasphemy to incredulity, he would infallibly tremble at the last judgment that in imagination would appear to await him.

This post was prompted by Sally at Lens and Pens Phoneography & Non-SLR Digital Devices Challenge. Week 5 of any given month is about editing/processing images on a theme of choice, in this case architecture. The first image was cropped and then played with in Windows Photo Gallery. I rather like the sepia version. I included the final image to show the construction techniques in more detail. It was taken in ‘Dynamic Monochrome’ on my Lumix point and shoot, and then cropped and histogrammed to achieve this final look. Given the subject, it thus makes a virtue, I think, of the sunburst on the bridge parapet. It makes me think of blast furnaces and the way the iron was produced.

In my garden change happens

The showy petals of Patty’s Plum oriental poppy give way to the tight buds of Black Elder (Sambucus nigra). And so it is that one thing leads to another. And although the prospect of change often worries us, there can be great beauty in transience. There is excitement too, if we allow it: of a ‘what will happen next?’

Ephemeral

Flamingos in the Mist ~ Dawn on Lake Elmenteita

The light changes every second across the lake. From dawn till dusk there is always something to watch at Elmenteita in Kenya’s Great Rift. There are over 400 species of birds to spot for one thing – among them the endangered white pelican that breeds there. The main stars, though, are the surely the huge flocks of flamingos, both lesser and greater varieties, that turn swathes of the lake to rose-petal pink. Even a passing glimpse from the nearby Rift highway is enough to catch the breath. A pink lake – how can that be?

This story continues at: On watch at Elmenteita – the lake that blows away

Over at Paula’s Lost in Translation the challenge for this Thursday’s Special is ‘multitude’

Kind of Mauve not Blue at Plas yn Rhiw

Looking back, it was a mauve sort of a day, the day we went to visit the old Welsh farmhouse of Plas yn Rhiw on the Llyn Peninsula. The sea in the bay below the house was peaceful, and the air still and dreamy. If you listened hard you might hear echoes of the past along this ancient pilgrims’ path to Bardsey Island, the place the Welsh call Island of Currents. It was late September, and Wales was very much in end-of-season mode with many places closed; or if they were open, then looking as if they wished they were closed. It’s often like that in Wales. Even the stalwart National Trust, that now has care of Plas yn Rhiw, was slow to open up. We had to go away and come back. In fact that was a bit of good luck. Further down the peninsula in Aberdaron we were taken by surprise at Y Gegin Fawr, The Big Kitchen cafe, where the owner was enthusiastically hospitable.

It turned out that she was keen to uphold a 700 year-old tradition of feeding pilgrims. We had some very excellent hot chocolate there, not something the saints would have recognised. Or if they had, and if they had seen Graham’s mug overtopping with whipped cream, they would surely have pronounced it a sin of the flesh, and to be eschewed at all costs.

Back at Plas yn Rhiw we stepped into another time-warp.

Here, the seventeenth century farmhouse had been lovingly restored from ruin by the three Keating sisters, who at the urging of friend and architect, Clough Williams-Ellis (he of Portmeirion fame) scraped up the funds to buy the place in 1938. They lived there until they died, filling the house with personal treasures. When you wander from room to room, there is a feeling of benign, if eccentric spirits. They don’t seem to mind us peering at their books and nick-nacks…

For more of this story:

Gazing into Hell’s Mouth at Plas yn Rhiw

Jennifer Nichole Wells One Word Photo Challenge: Mauve

Eclipsed in Much Wenlock on World Happiness Day and Taking a Solar Selfie

Here I am on top of Windmill Hill, Much Wenlock’s landscape landmark, and this is the only way I could see the partial eclipse – with my back to it, and camera at the ready. We had such clear skies, and the sun was so bright that we remained bathed in sunshine throughout this cosmic event, although it did seem very cold. Lots of people who were out walking their dogs had gathered at the windmill too, one lady monitoring the process through a pin-hole viewer. This is the scene before me as I take the photo over my shoulder: windmill and pointer. Had the eclipse actually happened? Aftermath. I caught the sun in the trees as I walked home across the Linden Field. This, incidentally, was the place where the Much Wenlock Olympian games were, and are still held every year. They were devised in 1850 by the town’s physician and herbalist, Doctor William Penny Brookes, and went on to inspire the founding of the modern Olympic Movement. Windmill Hill provided the natural viewing platform where spectators sat to watch the events. See how this little town of ours spread its good hearted influence around the world. Wishing everyone joy on this, International Day of Happiness #eclipse #International Day of Happiness

Elephant tribe versus Man tribe: and how the bees are helping

We’ve been watching a very heartening series on BBC i-Player The Secret Life of Elephants. It followed the magnificent conservation work being carried out by Save The Elephants, a charity that operates in Samburu, Northern Kenya, and relies on the cooperation between the nomadic Samburu people, local smallholder farmers and scientists from Kenya and beyond. One of the key initiatives is to put tracking collars on the matriarch leaders of particular elephant clans, and also on the large bulls who, outside the breeding season, lead more solitary lives.

Elephants may cover vast distances in the course of their annual migrations. But once they leave the national parks they are more vulnerable to poachers, and also to irate farmers who are tired of having their year’s livelihood consumed in a single night. By tracking and mapping the herds’ movements on computers, and maintaining channels of communication with the pastoralists and farmers, Save The Elephants researchers are working out ways to lessen conflicts, and present solutions, and above all, to secure the future for wild elephants.

The Samburu pastoralists have always been wise enough to respect elephants, and are now anxious to do what they can to protect them. This is their view on the matter:

The first man said the elephant is like us, like our brother, and we have to live together, not hunt elephant. That’s what we say we were told at the beginning. That’s what we still believe. The elephant has always been, and will always be, special to us. This is why we protect it now.

Samburu people on the importance of elephants

For farmers it is a very different matter. People are often killed trying to drive elephants out of their crops. And so one of STE’s objectives is to work out the best place to erect elephant fencing so that elephants can be channelled away from farming communities as they pass by on their seasonal trek between the river where they congregate to breed, and the mountain forests where they go to browse.

Fencing, though, is not always the total solution it seems. Elephants are not daft. The old bulls have learned how to open gates onto the vast European wheat farms that lie to the west of Mount Kenya. But while the large-scale producers can tolerate some elephant grazing, smallholders cannot. For them it is a matter of living or starving.

One of the STE researchers, Dr. Lucy King has come up with a very simple, low-tech and productive approach to keeping elephants out of Kenyan farmers’ cabbage fields. It began with the discovery that elephants will move off if they hear the sound of bees buzzing. African bees are especially aggressive, and on a very short fuse temper-wise. She thus came up with the notion of placing beehives around farm fields.

Traditional African beehives are made of lengths of hollowed-out tree trunks that are then suspended in trees. These were hung at intervals on the field perimeters, and connected up by tripwires. When the elephants tripped the wires, the hives were duly shaken and out would swarm the angry bees. Elephants would then beat a retreat, leaving farmers with both their crops and a new source of income from the honey.

As Colonel John ‘Hannibal’ Smith was so often wont to say in The A-Team: “I love it when a plan comes together.” In this case, though, it is clearly the work of the B-Team.

I’ve written more about elephants in Elecommunication: So Many Connections

And last but never least, thanks to Paula at Lost in Translation and her guest challenger, photographer Guilhem Ribart. TRIBE is the prompt. For more interpretations, please also follow this link. I should add that my photos here were taken in Lewa Downs which is part of Save The Elephants’ sphere of operations. The original negatives are very degraded, but seem to have a new lease of life translated into B & W. In fact they also seem to capture the elephantness of elephants rather better than the colour originals, which is interesting when you think about it.

Thinking of Sheilagh

Our sense of belonging ripples out from our homes to our village, street, town, county, region and country and helps to shape our identity.

Sheilagh Jevons, Artist

Night-time on Broadway ~ look out, the music’s escaped…

This week artist, Suzanne Miller, is Paula’s guest at Thursday’s Special, and she has challenged us to think and look at our photographs in a more abstract way. This photo was taken after a trip to the New York Ballet at the Lincoln Centre. I’m rather fond of ballet, and had been very much looking forward to the show, but after the first forty minutes, I was so bored I succumbed to rather more than forty winks. It was far more exciting out on Broadway.

To see Paula’s and others’ response to ‘abstract’ go to her post at Thursday’s Special

Pondering on what makes us human: that would be shopping, then?

So what does make us human? What differentiates us from our closest relatives the great apes? These were some of the questions posed to us as students of Prehistory & Archaeology way back in the 1970s. Naturally, the philosophical framework of a course with such a title is going to be artefact-driven. Archaeologists deal in physical remains. Prehistory means there is no written record. Mostly all we are left with are bones, stones, post-holes, hearths, bits of wood (if we’re lucky), stains in the soil, and that prehistorian’s joy of joys – the rubbish pit and/or midden.

(After all, there is nothing so fascinating as poking through other people’s garbage – as long as it doesn’t smell too much. Just think what future archaeologists will make of our landfill sites, and what their contents will say about us. See WALL.E the movie for starters.)

But back to that ‘what makes us human’ question.

In the early 1970s it was widely thought that the appearance of tools was a key criterion. Their construction suggested evolving cognition and the ability to forward plan. Tool-making further presupposed the facility to walk upright, thus leaving hands free to access materials, and to fashion them for preconceived purposes.

For a time this seemed a useful marker, but then as palaeontologists delved ever further back through the remains of our pre-human ancestors (mostly in Africa’s Rift Valley) it became clear that even by 2.5 million years ago, pre-humans were making tools. The picture was further confused by the realisation that chimpanzees also make tools, albeit crudely fashioned ones – e.g. hammers to crack open nuts, or break into bee hives.

Large brain size was another criterion (judged back then on the basis of the cranial capacity of skull remains), this supposedly indicating a well developed intelligence. I’ve never liked this much, feeling it had a whiff of eugenics about it. I also remember finding it perplexing to discover that Neanderthal brains were apparently larger than those of modern humans even though Neanderthals were supposed to be ‘inferior’.

None of this seemed to advance my understanding at that time, and besides, now we find that back in the Paleolithic, and in two distinct phases hundreds of generations apart, humans of the northern hemisphere interbred with Neanderthals. The evidence is there in our genomes.

I left Prehistory behind long ago. As a discipline, I felt it never would be capable of revealing the aspects of humanity that are truly important. And while inferences might be drawn (read: guesses made) about social, religious, political and economic systems from the fragmentary remains of ancient humans, archaeology alone cannot retrieve the all important drivers of human development, the intersecting sets of shared beliefs that create human culture.

After all, we do not know why Stonehenge was built, or what people actually did there, or who organised its building and the activities that took place within the great stone arcades. We never will know. But we can date associated remains, source materials, conjecture on construction techniques, work out how long the place was used, and then we can admire it as an astonishing edifice built by people with an apparently limited technology.

The physical remains,then, are indeed important, but what I really want to know is what was the intention of its builders; what beliefs led to Stonehenge’s conception and realisation.

By now you may be wondering why this post includes scenes from Dubai, including the 9th century pot above. Here’s a clue from the bazaar:

And another from the Gold Souk:

And at the Dhow Harbour:

And in the mall:

Yes, you have guessed it. Trade is the clue. And so, having ruminated on archaeology’s limitations, I can say that one of the things it does do well is reveal ancient trading patterns across the globe. In fact only last week it was announced that a study of sediments from a waterlogged 8,000 year-old Mesolithic (ostensibly hunter-gatherer) settlement in the English Channel contained introduced wheat grains that suggest trade with European farmers.

In this regard then, the movement of goods, the origins and spread of food species can be tracked across the millennia. We can thus surmise that even 8,000 years ago humanity was already out shopping, and that, down the ages, this would seem to be one shared behaviour pattern that is exclusively human. We all do it, and probably always have, because whatever territory was commanded on a day to day basis, it probably did not provide for all its inhabitants’ wants and needs.

There may have been the need to share with other groups a particularly good source of flint for tool making. Inland and maritime communities would have met to exchange materials and foodstuffs. There would also have been the pressing need to find mates well outside the group of related family members. And there might have been a yearning for salt or, in season, for honey or for a particular fruit, all of which might have involved negotiation with outsiders. Fresh water sources might also have been at issue, or the need for extra hands for some seasonal hunting or farming pursuit. And so, for these reasons and more, we would have traded, bartered, exchanged, made treaties and contracts, formed alliances, given and received gifts. This was also probably how some us of ended up with Neanderthal DNA in our genomes.

From the historical record we also know that when it comes to dealing in resources and commodities, hostilities may be instigated, or suspended depending on those whose interests rule. Safe havens, forums, fairs, markets, shopping centres, bazaars, souks, malls are places we all recognise. In the past such gathering points would have also provided venues for song and dance, spiritual and ritual observance, political rallies, exchanges of information and specialised services, the telling of tales.

Dubai, these days, is one of the world’s shopping capitals, reinvesting its wealth from oil refining and trade in the ’shop till your drop’ model. It brings together the concepts of the marketplace and the caravanserai, but on a mega, upmarket 5* scale. Yet it also draws on ancient roots, and on actual trade routes that go back to at least 3,000 BCE. Back then copper and the pearls dived for off Dubai Creek were the stock in trade. Later, as commerce between the Mediterranean and the East began to thrive, dhow merchants made the most of Dubai Creek’s favourable geographical position. The trade continues, only now it is western cars, refrigerators and Coca Cola going east, while the spices, as they have for centuries, come west.

Shopping then, provision and consumption, is, I suggest, what makes us uniquely human. And while I admit that this does not seem a particularly elevating pursuit for our time on this wonderful planet, it nonetheless engages pretty much all of us, from Manhattan bankers to Congo hunter-gatherers. Multifarious mechanisms of exchange bind us in relationships of largely peaceable cooperation. The squabbling over resources, and corporations’ drive to make profits at others’ expense threatens us and our planet. But either way, it is hard to see where this never-ending shopping spree will take us. Maybe we need to take a hard look at those landfill sites of ours, and consider what future archaeologists will have to say of us. I’m not sure we will want to hear it.

Inspired by Jennifer Nichole Wells and her One Word Photo Challenge: teal

Life Imitating Art Imitating Life…?

I snapped this the other morning with my little Lumix ‘point and shoot’. It’s the view from our bedroom window. The light was extraordinary, and when I looked at the image again it reminded me of René Magritte’s The Golden Legend – also a view from a window, although with the interesting addition of flying baguettes. What do you think?

You can find out more about Magritte HERE. I like the way he challenges our ingrained perceptions.

Tish Farrell

Writer on the Edge