It’s been nice to come down to London for a couple of days, the weather’s been good and I have met friends and had decent exercise. But there’s been something eerie about it, unnatural and wrong. Difficult to do much else today than post another picture of somewhere that should be very busy on this day and time under normal circumstances, but instead, echoed like an empty cathedral.
I went on a walk today along the Rochdale Canal from Littleborough to Walsden. Along that route one passes across the main watershed of northern England, which is marked by this sculpture, and poetry that you may enjoy (although the third and fourth lines are illegible on this reproduction — my apologies). If I were to have passed water at this spot, random chance would have led to it either bouncing to the left, and thus flowing into the Irish Sea at via the rivers Roch, Irwell and Mersey. Or, to the right — to flow into the North Sea, via the Calder, Aire and Humber. A very real line — as the poem says, a “liquid equinox” — but not a visible one, not without this memorial. Nice touch.
Bagged my second County Top in a week, a trip that took me through the urban delights of Wigan, which are more extensive than you might imagine. On the outskirts of town resides this ruin, still proudly marked as ‘Park House Farm’ on the map but now mouldering into decay. Urban explorers — catch it now before it is razed/incorporated into a new housing estate/featured on Grand Designs as a restoration project engaged in by those with too much money. It is presently a spooky, melancholy spot.
The monument on top of Stoodley Pike was first built to celebrate victory over Napoleon, but this version dates from 1856. Much of the graffiti on it may have been there for about this amount of time: who can tell whether the “MAN CITY” scrawled on one side is from the late 1960s Franny Lee era or has been added since the Sheikhs took it over and they became decent again? Are “R. Crowther” and “E. Mitchell” (visible here) still alive and proud?
Amongst the points of interest within walking distance of my house (honest, officer), there is this place, Top Withens, which sits way up on the moors overlooking Haworth, former home of the Brontë sisters. The plaque you can see on the wall here reads:
This farmhouse has been associated with ‘Wuthering Heights’, the Earnshaw home in Emily Brontë’s novel. The buildings, even when complete, bore no resemblance to the house she describes, but the setting may have been in her mind when she wrote of the moorland setting of the Heights. (This plaque has been placed here in response to many inquiries.)
In other words then, here we have a building that vaguely resembles a place in a novel. And that’s all.
But because popular opinion has it that Top Withens is Wuthering Heights, the structure, though abandoned for more than a hundred years, has been preserved as a ruin. Left alone it would surely have collapsed by now but the walls are carefully cut and mortared together, as gone or complete, it would not be worth what it is to the Haworth tourist trade as it is in this half-life state.
This is a truly monumental building, the first ever built that exceeded in height the Great Pyramid of Giza: and the only reason it lost its title as the world’s tallest in 1548 was because the spire was destroyed in a storm, and never rebuilt. Even today it can be seen for miles around, sitting as it does at the top of one of the few hills in Lincolnshire. It is proof that people 700 years ago can still show us a few things or two when it comes to engineering and architecture.
Windsor Road, with its distinctive steepness and stepped houses, has featured on here before — twice in fact — but not quite as pleasingly as today, thanks to another thin layer of snow in the morning. Third time can be the charm, then.
In my project to bag the county tops of Britain it has already become obvious that many of them are not prominent, airy summits lifted far above the surrounding countryside. Haddington Hill, at 875 ft (267m) above sea level, is not only the highest point of Buckinghamshire, but of the whole Chiltern Hills range which stretches through three other counties as well. But you wouldn’t know it, were this monument not located at some otherwise indefinable point, skulking under trees and definitely trying to not draw attention to itself. Still, that’s another one bagged. Eight down — 83 to go…
Nicolae Ceausescu, who ruled Romania from 1965 until he spectacularly lost control in late December 1989, was one of the most unilateral dictators of any that have ever seized power, running the country like his own personal fiefdom. Towards the end of his reign he commissioned this monstrosity, the Palace of the Parliament, as a monument to his own ambition. Apparently it is the largest parliamentary building anywhere in the world, and also the world’s heaviest building at some four billion kilos (thank you Wikipedia). It was something to look at on my final morning as I prepared to leave Bucharest; the mare’s-tails in the sky suggesting that the very mild weather I have enjoyed there is coming to an end…
Welcome to Romania — a new country for me, and the 40th to appear on this blog (allowing for my splitting up the component parts of the UK: a move which may yet prove prophetic, of course). I did not leave the conference venue all day, so more intimate shots of the city of Bucharest will have to wait, but this building was in view from there, as it is from most of the city. This is the People’s Salvation Cathedral, proof that not all the big houses of worship in the world are medieval; this was being planned 150 years ago, but was not actually started until 2010 and as is apparent on this shot, is not finished yet. It is the largest Eastern Orthodox church in the world.
Being 42 