Peregrines

High on the tower of St George's Church, Sheffield a pair of peregrine falcons are feeding their young. Only two of the four eggs laid a few weeks ago have hatched. Time is running out for the other two even though the parent birds keep sitting on them hoping for the best. Last year all four eggs hatched and the greedy chicks all grew into fledglings.

The church is owned by The University of Sheffield. No religious congregations any more - just university students for the building is now used as a lecture theatre. Up at the falcons' nest box there are now two webcams and I cordially invite you to check what is happening by clicking here. This is reality TV that's actually worth watching if you can count patience amongst your virtues.

Priory

Dandelions where monks'  hymns once reverberated

A priory is a small monastery or nunnery. Often it was an outpost of a castle, bigger abbey or large country estate. It would have had several purposes - never solely a place where pious monks paid homage to God.

For almost four hundred years, Monk Bretton Priory operated in the heart of South Yorkshire. It was built by the noble and fabulously rich Norman family that developed Pontefract Castle - twelve miles north east of Monk Bretton. The family wanted their monks to pray for their mortal souls and they also wanted them to control tenant farmers and collect rents.

In the twelfth century the nearby River Dearne would have been a silvery stream containing fresh fish and pure water from the Pennine hills. Building the priory would have involved enormous effort. Thousands of stones would have had to be quarried from faraway hills and transported on river rafts or by horse and cart on rutted roads.to the chosen  green and peaceful location.

The gatehouse at Monk Bretton Priory

The priory had a large gatehouse to control entrances and exits. There was an administration building where financial matters were conducted. There was of course a large chapel for worship and  prayer but also a dormitory  for the monks, stables, gardens,  a refectory for meals and a large kitchen which had ingenious channels for both fresh water and drainage. In short it was an enclosed self-functioning complex. It even had its own graveyard.

In the middle of the sixteenth century, long standing tensions between church and state saw King Henry the Eighth calling for The Dissolution of the Monasteries. Along with other priories around the country, Monk Bretton was closed down, its monks departed and the building gradually fell into disrepair. Thousands of stones were filched for local building projects so what you see today is mostly ruins - a pale but evocative shadow of what once was.

The monks would never have imagined that one day the surrounding area would become very industrialised or that the town of Barnsley would stretch out its tentacles to embrace local villages like Monk Bretton and Lund. But that is what happened and now the old priory sits in the suburbs of the town on the edge of an impoverished council estate called Lundwood where once monks would have wandered collecting nuts and berries and listening to the birds in the trees that stretched heavenwards.

The priory's restored administration building

Monk's grave

Drainage channel heading to The River Dearne

Kitchen with water channel

Memorial

 

How soon past events may be forgotten. In yesterday's April sunshine I went for another jolly stroll - this time close to Barnsley - beloved second home of Frau Meike - the award-winning architect of Baden-Württemberg blog "From My Mental Library". 

I parked at Monk Bretton Priory which I shall blog about later on but here I am thinking about something that happened in mid-December 1866. Something awful. And I only learnt about it when I ventured into the grounds of Ardsley's Christ Church as I plodded back to my car.

Barnsley was once famous throughout the land for its coal mines. Indeed, when I first hitchhiked through the area in 1969 I was struck by the town's own version of The Alps - huge piles of coal waste or what we know in England as slag heaps. Today it is so different, so much cleaner and the coal mines have all gone.

In the mid-nineteenth century, English coal mines were frequently run by unscrupulous profit-hungry capitalists who seem to have viewed  the men and boys who worked the mines as disposable commodities. Safety was not very high on the agenda and there were many deaths through rock falls, flooding, suffocation and fire.

One of the pits at Ardsley to the south east of Barnsley was called The Oaks Colliery. There had been deaths there before - notably in 1846 when seventy three men and boys had been killed in a methane explosion. But on the night of December 12th 1866 an even greater tragedy struck for 334 men and boys died in another gas explosion and only six of the men who were underground at the time survived. The next day yet more men died - would-be rescuers - bringing the total of fatalities up to 361.

This is an extract from the report in "The Illustrated London News", March 1867:-

"The news soon spread far and wide that the Oaks Pit was on fire, and all the workpeople remaining in it. The friends and relations of those who were employed in the colliery were seen running frantically towards the melancholy spot, anxious to learn the extent of the loss of life. From the village of Ardsley, Gawber, Worsbro' hill, Barnsley, Monk Bretton and other places, numbers were presently collected together on the spot. The intensest excitement prevailed, the pit hill was everywhere crowded with the wives, the children, and the friends of the sufferers below, whose cries and wailings were alone to be heard."

I can hardly imagine the impact that this disaster would have had on local communities and families so cruelly robbed of their main breadwinners. Most of the bodies were never brought out of the mine. They still lie entombed far beneath the earth's surface but thirty five were interred in the grounds of Christ Church. And I only learnt about all of this because I turned round to read the inscription on a monument that is so small and so relatively insignificant that you might think it a kind of insult to all those lost souls.

For almost fifty years, The Oaks Colliery Disaster was the worst mining tragedy in British history until the toll of the dead were surpassed at Senghenydd Colliery in South Wales in 1913 when 436 miners were killed in a similar explosion. This was the price of coal and though it was long ago, I still bow my head in respectful memory of the dead. So many forgotten heroes. And the total of the dead on the monument is wrong.Not 354 but 361 - but hey who cares about seven dead miners?

Oskar

Oskar Groening worked at Auschwitz. You may have heard of that awful place. Jews were brought there on goods trains for extermination. Oskar  was just twenty one when he arrived at the death camp. He was assigned a clerical position and as a Nazi bureaucrat, he had the job of logging details of the currency that Jewish prisoners brought to Auschwitz.

He was not directly involved in the killing. As he once said,, he had a "desk job" and yet he currently finds himself, at the age of ninety three, facing justice in a court of law charged with being an accessory to the deaths of 300,000 people.

In fairly recent years Oskar Groening spoke out with shame about what he witnessed at Auschwitz. For example, he recalled a particularly terrible incident that had haunted him for sixty years:-

"...a baby crying. The child was lying on the ramp, wrapped in rags. A mother had left it behind, perhaps because she knew that women with infants were sent to the gas chambers immediately. I saw another SS soldier grab the baby by the legs. The crying had bothered him. He smashed the baby's head against the iron side of a truck until it was silent."

Remember, Oskar Groening was just twenty one when he was sent to Auschwitz. Little more than a boy. In my view, he himself was a victim of the Nazi regime. Like so many young Germans he was caught up in the tide of war. He did not start the war or plan the extermination of Jews. He was just a little cog in the processes of Nazi horror.

I think it's so wrong that this old man now finds himself in a court of law. It isn't justice, it's a legal witch hunt when a line should have been drawn under what happened at Auschwitz a long time ago. He was just a pawn and as in any game of chess, it's the back row you really need to get at and those evil men are already dead. What merit is there in pursuing Oskar? Forgive and forget.

Encounter

This is Paul in the hamlet of Whitle just north of New Mills. His clothes and arms are dirty because he has just come home from work. He drives and maintains heavy goods vehicles and is as strong as an ox. He's forty two and lives with his wife and three children in an old stone farmhouse that overlooks the Sett Valley on the western edge of The Peak District.

Whenever Paul gets home it is not long before he is out in his paddock tending his chickens. Like Jan in Sloughhouse, CA, he knows a lot about raising chickens and is passionate about them though unlike Jan he's not into showing them. He jut loves the feathers and the eggs and the fact that he has raised them and that they are free to run around in the sunshine. He shook his billy can of seed and a small flock came running with their handsome little cockerel behind.

Some chickens came running

Paul's house

Paul is a workhorse - a bit like Boxer in "Animal Farm". He just gets on with things . Take that big wall behind him. He built that with his own hands. Well there had been an old tumbledown wall there beforehand but he repaired it and raised it to its present height and as he was scrabbling around in the loose stone he found this huge piece of carved millstone grit. It had lain in the earth for donkey's years.  Neither he nor I were sure what it is but can you see the date "1587" carved on the side? The stone goes right under Paul's wall and is about seven feet long.

And here's the way that walkers get through the wall on the public footpath that passes right through Paul's paddock. Quite a climb up:-

 And here's the view from Paul's lane over The Sett Valley:-

When I am out walking, it is rare to spend more than a couple of minutes talking to strangers but I was in conversation with Paul for over half an hour and at one point thought that I would never get away to continue the circular route I had planned from New Mills Central railway station.

In that half hour I learnt enough about him to write a book. He spoke in a broad north Derbyshire accent and had a positive, cheerful "can do" view of life. It is unlikely that he gathered many if any qualifications at school but that didn't matter because he had his hands and his muscles and his spirit to make an honest  living for himself and his family.

I learnt about his sister - a former air hostess and his father who would sometimes point to the nearby stone quarry when Paul and his siblings were causing annoyance and say "Why don't you lot bugger off and play in yon sandpit?" The memory of this amused Paul greatly and his eyes narrowed to slits as a big, genuine smile lit up his face. You get a sense of that in the staged photo at the top of this post. And can you see how he is hiding his hands because they are black with engine grime?

Like me, Paul is very proud to be English and proud of our little country. We shared a common feeling of distaste for those who knock England or run it down. "It's beautiful!" said Paul his arm sweeping across his priceless view of The Sett Valley and "I know it's only a small country but we've done a lot for this world. We should be proud!"

If I hadn't made a move, I would still be talking with Paul now. As it was the half hour delay meant that I got back to New Mills Central Station at 7.15pm - just in time for the 7.16 train back to Dore and Totley Station where I had parked my car - for free! Yippee!

Poem

Lampedusa 
(Song of The Economic Migrant)

Between lives
And in the middle of this sea
Which  rises and falls
To the thrumming of my heart.

Faraway our village sits
In my valley
Where father raised goats
Till the laughing gunmen came
In their jeep.
Nana squeezes my hand,
Looks into my eyes,
Whispers her blessing
Then I leave.

Between places -
Hope in all these fearful faces -
Our memories dance
To the humming of the "Johnson" outboard.

Beyond that blue horizon
Our new lives wait
We will be safe there
I  will work and work and work
Maybe one day
See The Arsenal play
Ride in black taxi
Eat KFC from cardboard box.

If opportunity knocks
In the EU -
Inshallah!
Not far to go Nana...
We will soon be there...
I will send money
As I promised...
I can see the island now.

Peep

Peep...Peeping!

Long term visitors to this blog may remember that there are two sheep in our garden. The mummy sheep is called Beau and her frisky little lamb is called Peep. Peep is very clingy - always by his mother's side so today I decided to assist his social and emotional development by taking him out for a walk in the North Derbyshire countryside.

He was bleating plaintively as we drove over to Edale and it was disappointing to discover that he had deposited some lamb droppings on the front passenger seat during our journey. I put on my walking boots and we headed towards Jacob's Ladder which is a path that weaves up to Edale Cross.

We met a man called Tony from New Mills. He was with Ollie - his black labrador. At first Tony thought that Peep was also a dog - some kind of Arctic poodle - but I  advised him otherwise. We encountered an Australian couple near Edale Cross. He was called Bruce and she was called Sheila - no word of a lie! I volunteered to take their photo and suggested the resulting picture would look good on their Sydney mantelpiece. Bruce said "G'day mate!" which I did not understand though I think the expression was relatively friendly.

Soon Tony and Ollie headed off for Hayfield but Peep and I turned left to South Head Farm. Then there was a long trudge up to South Head before we followed  a long moorland wall to Brown Knoll. We stopped there for some refreshment. I had remembered to bring Peep a bag filled with fresh grass but I ate an apple and downed a bottle of water in three thirsty glugs.

Triangulation pillar on Brown Knoll

Then back to Edale Cross and down Jacob's Ladder to Yongate Bridge over The River Noe. Peep was doing really well and still frolicing without complaint but I had to carry him the last hundred yards to my car. He was almost asleep by the time we got there. It had been quite an adventure for the wee lamb.

Yongate Bridge

It Could Be You!

Old sheepfold on the way to Brown Knoll

Stone trough in a wall at Lee House Farm