Bench

 My mission to find Ebenezer Elliott's stone took me past this seemingly unremarkable bench high above The Rivelin Valley. Except - it wasn't unremarkable at all.

It is a memorial bench, sited here in memory of Sheffield man Nigel Bruce Thompson. He was thirty three years old when he died.

He was cruelly murdered by Islamic terrorists on the morning of September 11th, 2001. He worked for finance brokers Cantor Fitzgerald in New York City. This company occupied four floors of  The World Trade Center's North Tower. It lost 658 of its employees that fateful morning.

9/11 was not just an attack  on America. It was an attack on civilisation itself. The pain of what  happened rippled around the world, touching the lives of so many including the Thompson family in Sheffield.

And what did those cowardly attacks achieve? What did the wicked terrorists hope they  might achieve? Looking back, it all seems even more pointless than it did at the time. Nigel Bruce Thompson would have been 54 years old this year.

Nigel was a graduate of York University here in Yorkshire

Pilgrim

Look closely

You might remember the poem "Footpaths" by Ebenezer Elliott. I posted it on Monday of this week.

You may also remember that I referred to Elliott's Rock and my ambition to find it. Allegedly, back in the 1830's, he would walk out of the city to a secret place by a tumbling stream  where he found peace for contemplation and the churning of creative juices.. There was a particular rock in the stream upon which it is claimed that he carved his own surname: ELLIOTT.

Well, I found that rock after carefully making my way down a precipitous path to the bottom of a little V-shaped valley that carries Black Brook down to The River Rivelin.

If Ebenezer did carve his name, it would have been one hundred and eighty years ago. Though the stream ran gently today there will have been many occasions when water flowed over Elliott's Rock with frothing ferocity.

Because of this, the carved name is not as clear as it once was and I am sure that in another fifty or sixty years it will be totally illegible.

I sat for a while in that verdant dell, beside the babbling brook making observational  notes as a cloud of tiny may flies danced upon the water's surface in a shaft of amber sunlight.

With Clint's kind co-operation, I decided to press on with my Elliott-inspired adventure and headed back into the city. I made for 22 Blakegrove Road in the Upperthorpe area. It is where Elliott lived between 1834 and 1841 and there is a blue plaque there to confirm that fact. He didn't own the house - he just rented it. In the early 1980's I visited the house several times. A man called Bill lived there with his disabled wife. He was a leading light in The British Humanist Society and we were friends for a while.

Poem

 

Ukraine May 11th 2022

Summer beckons  and white storks return
Daintily picking their way  through reeds
Revealing not one smidgen  of concern
Re. visiting warriors’ barbarous deeds...
“There are no threats to the civilian population”.
 
Mykola always left them sticks for nest construction.
Often they would build on the harvester shed
Making intricate moves  of balletic seduction
Or dolorous dances to honour the dead...
“There are no threats to the civilian population”.
 
The sweet stench of putrescine cannot be forgotten
One’s neighbours interred by  concrete scree
Though their cadavers are turning  rotten,
On the wings of storks  their spirits fly free...
“There are no threats to the civilian population”.

© Photo - RSPB

Diversion

 

Exactly two weeks after transporting Simon to hospital, I took him home today. He still has his two silicone stents in place - one in his trachea and the other in his oesophagus. I have no idea how long they are going to sit there, facilitating his breathing and his consumption of food. Similarly, I have no idea what the next hospital steps might be, if any, and I remain in the dark about the previously intended removal of one of his kidneys. He can be very evasive and snappy.

Anyway, he's back in his draughty old cottage now, glad to get away from bleeping hospital machines, other patients and bothersome medical staff. The nights were very long and his sleep was always fitful. He is used to his own company and quietness. The first thing he did when he got in was to roll up a cigarette. Yuk!

Travelling back through Beverley, I saw a sign up ahead nor far from Beverley Minster at the end of Keldgate. It read, "ROAD CLOSED" and there was also a yellow "Diversion" sign. Stupidly, I followed it, imagining that the diversion would be short, soon bringing me back onto Keldgate.

On the diversion by the aptly named Long Lane

Maybe I missed one or two of the yellow diversion signs or more likely they were never placed in position but I found myself on a ridiculous five mile diversion via Woodmansey and the new Beverley by-pass.

It was one of those situations where doing the right thing was not necessarily doing the best thing. I have the strong suspicion that if Clint had dodged the road closure sign we could have driven along Keldgate with no bother. After all, residents still have permission to access their street and their houses. The reason for the road closure remains a mystery.

Next time I meet a yellow diversion sign, I will have second thoughts about following it. Today's diversionary route must have been dreamt up by a practical joker. However, it wasn't funny. Fortunately, I wasn't in a particular rush to get home.

The diversion took me to Woodmansey

Footpaths

Statue of Ebenezer Elliott in Weston Park, Sheffield

- Funded by public subscription after his death -

I have been interested in Yorkshire poet Ebenezer Elliott for quite a while now. He lived in a time of great social upheaval between 1781 and 1849. Whereas many poets of his era lived remote lives of leisure crafting their words like potters at wheels, Elliott was a champion of the poor and downtrodden. He was angered by social injustice and spoke up for change and the betterment of ordinary people's lives.

In the 1830's his fame grew  - spreading to continental Europe and North America.  I suspect he was seen by authorities as a dangerous man who had the ability to stir up social unrest. His most famous collected work is "Corn Law Rhymes" . The very title suggests his mission - to challenge unfairness and the suppression of the poor by the landed gentry. Ultimately, he was put out to grass on Hargate Hill near Great Houghton.

In "Footpaths",  the poem I have chosen to share with you this evening, Elliott appears to be referring to the curtailment of historic freedoms.  A man might work like a dog  in the past but at least he could find solace in walking. His way was never blocked. 

Throughout his life, Elliott himself found pleasure in walking and I understand there is a rock by a stream just west of Sheffield where he used to ponder and write after walking out of the city with its belching industrial chimneys and beehive-like activity. I have never seen that rock with the name "ELLIOTT" carved upon it but before too many days have passed I hope to find it. Maybe I will sit there and write a poem of my own. We'll  see. Through the mists of time, here's "Footpaths:-

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Footpaths

 The poor man’s walk they take away, 
 The solace of his only day, 
 Where now, unseen, the flowers are blowing, 
 And, all unheard, the stream is flowing! 

 In solitude unbroken, 
 Where rill and river glide, 
 The lover’s elm, itself a grove, 
 Laments the absent voice of love; 
 How bless’d I oft sat there with Fanny, 
 When tiny Jem and little Annie 
 Were fairies at my side! 

 O dew-dropp’d rose! O woodbine! 
 They close the bowery way, 
 Where oft my father’s father stray’d, 
 And with the leaves and sunbeams play’d, 
 Or, like the river by the wild wood, 
 Ran with that river, in his childhood, 
 The gayest child of May! 

 Where little feet o’er bluebells, 
 Pursued the sun-bless’d bee, 
 No more the child-loved daisy hears 
 The voice of childhood’s hopes and fears; 
 Thrush! never more, by thy lone dwelling, 
 Where fountain’d vales thy tale are telling, 
 Will childhood startle thee? 

 The poor man’s path they take away, 
 His solace on the Sabbath day; 
 The sick heart’s dewy path of roses, 
 Where day’s eye lingers ere it closes!

by Ebenezer Elliott

from "Corn Law Rhymes" (1834)

Heads

Apart from travellers and hobos, we all live in spaces. And when we live in a space, we make decisions about it - about how it will appear. Many of these decisions emanate from the sub-conscious and some are evolutionary - taking years to manifest themselves.

I guess that in places like The Hollywood Hills or Monaco or Surrey in England, some wealthy homeowners bring in interior designers to professionally style their private residences. Maybe these "homes" end up rather like pages from a Sunday magazine - more akin to luxury hotels than places of habitation. Nonetheless, even in such spaces, as time passes, the human presence will generally  intrude and reveal itself .

I snapped the top picture in the main bathroom of the house where I stayed on Friday night. It belongs to My friends Pauline and Tony. She has lived there for thirty years. Every time I have been in that house over the past six years, those heads have been there, taking up bathroom floor-space.

I have never asked Pauline about them. Such a question might appear quite nosy. However, I appreciate their presence - gathered  there like  lost figures that could not secure admission to a museum - now trapped in an early Victorian house in Beverley - on a  road that leads up to The Westwood and the racecourse.

Perhaps they have conversations in the middle of the night - comparing notes about the challenges of living without  bodies... Talking Heads.

Lund

Running down the centre of The East Riding of Yorkshire, there's a river called The River Hull. To the west of it, chalky downs known at The Yorkshire Wolds undulate gently like languorous ocean waves. To the east of the river  and composed of boulder clay deposited by the last great ice age, The Plain of Holderness stretches out to The North Sea.

Growing up east of the river meant that I was much more familiar with that landscape - Holderness. To the west there were villages that were only names and seemed unembodied - Lockington, North Dalton, Beswick, Lund and Hutton Cranswick. They were but a bicycle outing distance from my home but the river divided us.

Village green in Lund

Yesterday, I visited the charming village of Lund for the first time and walked with Tony to Kilnwick - another heard of settlement never seen. The farmland in that district was was well-drained and fertile but young barleyfields of this current era are invariably bereft of insects, birds, wild mammals or weeds. It's like farming in a factory. Old hedges ripped up and fertiliser spread by machines.  The holy grail is always abundance but where are the insects meant to live? Where our feathered friends and the hedgehogs?

In that arable desert, you sometimes see lone woods like islands in a sea of green. As luck would have it, we stumbled upon Lund Moor Wood at just the right time for native bluebells. They hung on the plantation floor like a blue-violet mist cherished rarely by passing ramblers in the month of May before their beauty evaporates like the sweet songs of youth.

It was a marvellous show though I freely admit that, partly because of the light conditions,  my images  could not begin to do them justice.

Kilnwick Beck