The name of this blog

I have been asked by people who read my sports blog how these blogs came by their name. It is a Finnish name - Finland is somewhere I have got some excellent pictures, and intend to do so again in the future.

As readers of my sports blog will know, the biggest use of my camera is to take match day photos for Prescot Cables FC. A few years ago, once I had reached a standard I felt was suitable for display, I needed a logon to post a link on the Cables forum. I had just returned from holiday in Finland, so the name suggested itself - "kaapeli", Finnish for "cable", and as I started to show more photos, I continued to use the name. Visitors may be familiar with the word, as you will see it on signs if you go near a lake or the sea - not difficult in Finland.

These yellow signs are to indicate where a cable comes ashore, so you do not run your boat into it, at risk to yourself, and at risk of cutting off the electricity supply. In some areas the signs say "Kabel" in Swedish (the second language of Finland, spoken by about 5% of the population nationally, and by a higher proportion around the south and west coasts), and I have even seen one in English in Helsinki harbour.

This example is on an island in Näsijärvi, a lake to the north of the city of Tampere.

In the winter, the island is popular with walkers, being suitable for an out and back walk across the frozen lake. As well as being a mile or so from the shore, its attraction may also lie in being one of the few islands in an otherwise open lake, which can appear somewhat bleak in some weather. This can feel more so by the best views being obtained from the Näsinpuisto park near this memorial to the SS Kuru shipping disaster of 1929, when a steamer, that had been modified without sufficient thought to its stability, capsized on the lake with the loss of 138 lives.

Tampere's southern lake, Pyhäjärvi, seems much more peaceful, with calmer water, and the wooded islands one almost expects to find in a Finnish lake. A good way to enjoy the lake is by taking a boat to the island of Viikinsaari, a popular leisure destination, but peaceful away from the landing stage.

Pyhäjärvi from Viikinsaari

The lakes have a 59' difference in water level, with water flowing from Näsijärvi to Pyhäjärvi through the Tammerkoski rapids, which provided the power that made the city one of the most important industrial centres in the Nordic countries (in Swedish, the name Tammerfors is used for both the rapids and the city). The rapids still provide power, being channelled though three power stations owned by the municipal and regional electricity companies.

Tammerkoski rapids and Satakunnansilta bridge

I stayed in the city at the Hotel Tammer, just off this picture to the right. The hotel is run by a chain now, but retains some of the elegance from its opening in the 1920s. Not that I had a view of the rapids, I suspect there is a premium for that, so I had one of the rooms on the other side overlooking the fire station. Not that I was complaining, it is probably the grandest fire station I have seen.

Tampere Fire Station

Because of the city's industrial heritage it has been called the Manchester of Finland, and there are many similarities, with the former Finlayson mills and Tampella factories being converted to leisure and residential use like the mills and warehouses of Manchester, and the main activity of the city moving from industry to commerce. The Tammerkoski is undoubtedly more spectacular than the Ship Canal, even when there has been heavy rain where the River Irwell rises in the hills above Bury, sending down a torrent of twigs and branches to be trapped by the old docks at Salford.

Oh, and Tampere is a lot handier for the lakes!

Depicting John the Baptist

We have just come to the end of the Octave of the Nativity of St John the Baptist. The feast is on June 24th, and an octave is 8 days, including the feast, to extend the celebration.

Readers in most of England may need some introduction to John the Baptist, as his feast has been little celebrated since the Reformation. A remnant survives in commerce, as it is a quarter day - a day, along with St Michael & All Angels (September), Christmas and the Annunciation (March) on which many quarterly payments of rent etc. fall due.

Readers in Finland will need no introduction - Juhannus, called Midsummer when speaking in English, is one of the principal holidays of the year, celebrated with bonfires and traditional events, and marks the time when many city residents head to the countryside for a few weeks in the open air.

As the church in which I worship is dedicated to St John the Baptist, we have a number of depictions of the saint.

This statue was designed by Sir Ninian Comper, and was installed as a memorial to those men from the parish who died in the Second World War. It is said to have been modelled on Nijinsky, which unfortunately leads someone of my age to think of a horse.

A prominent statue like this will often strike a balance between depicting  what we know of the saint (a prickly character, denouncing his hearers as a brood of vipers) and producing an attractive work of art - the congregation will after all have to look at it for many years to come. This one may have erred on the side of art, we know from the Biblical accounts that John lived in the wilderness, and ate locusts and wild honey, so our statue is a little well groomed, and his garment, of camel hair, well washed and brushed.

We also have a statue above the north porch, outside the building, which is a more traditional depiction, presumably designed by George Frederick Bodley, as it is a fixture of his building.

The flowing beard, hidden in this picture by the Lamb, suggests a venerable old age, which John did not reach. We know he was about 6 months older than Jesus, and was beheaded before Jesus' Crucifixion, which suggests an age no more than about 30. Again, the hair is in suspiciously good order, and we only catch a glimpse of the camel hair garment under an outer robe.

Of course, it is easier to depict John's likely appearance in paint.

When the south porch was enclosed as part of a corridor to the hall a few years ago, a fresco was commissioned from a Romanian Orthodox artist, Laurentiu Nechita. It depicts Christ in Majesty, flanked by the Virgin Mary and John the Baptist, so we can see John as he is depicted in the Orthodox tradition. The hair and beard are more dishevelled, although the camel hair garment is, strangely, blue. Instead of the Lamb in the statues, John bears the Biblical text, "Behold the Lamb of God" the words that he uttered when Jesus came to him for baptism.

These very different works endeavour to depict John as he is described in his adult ministry. He also appears in Scripture at the beginning of his life, when his father Zechariah declares (by writing, as he has been deprived of the power of speech as a sign that the events revealed to him in a vision will take place), that the child is not to be named after his father, as would have been the custom, but to be called John, meaning "grace".

I am not sure of the wisdom of depicting the infant John in a statue, but someone had a go.

We know little of the provenance of this statue, but it looks like a classic example of mid Victorian sentimental bad taste, described by a former Vicar as a "hideous little gnome". It once occupied the pride of place now taken by the Comper statue, so I think we have a better lot than our forebears in that regard.

All trees round here

"You walk across a field... with COWS in?"

As someone born and raised in the countryside, from a farm labouring family, my mother was fond of recounting this reaction from one of her town based colleagues when she found that the path, unfenced at the time, from Dormansland village to Dormans Station crossed a field containing cows. This was in about 1978, the word "bovine" was a synonym for placid and unperturbable, and the only risk of crossing the field was stepping in a cow pat.

I am not so sure about cows these days, they seem to have beome more aggressive, and crossing a field is a bit like going in to a dodgy pub where everyone stops talking and starts looking at you, chewing menacingly.

So, let's take a look at the field we are talking about.

One could be forgiven for thinking that is not a field, but a wood - and so it is. The cows stopped grazing in the mid eighties, growth has been unchecked for nearly 20 years, so the land turned first to scrub, and eventually to trees. It is a familiar story across the area, livestock farming is not as economical as it was, and in many cases, where the field is not good enough land to grow crops, they have been abandoned to whatever will grow.

A couple of miles away, Hill Place Viaduct in East Grinstead was built to take the Lewes & East Grinstead Railway across the River Medway. The river here is only a couple of feet wide, but the soft clay with hard sandstone on either side means it has carved out a steep sided valley needing a ten arch viaduct to cross. When I first saw it, it strode across the valley from the East Grinstead side, very impressive for a seven year old. There is a view over to Hill Place Farm, which, I did not know at the time, my great great grandfather had farmed a hundred years previously. Indeed, his farming may well have been disrupted by the building of the viaduct.

When I next saw it, some thirty years later, I had a surprise. It is harder to see though now, with some of the trees nearly reaching the top of the arches.

The line the viaduct was built to carry was closed in 1958, and after some use as a carriage siding, it has been unused since the mid eighties. However, it is soon to be brought back in use by the Bluebell Railway, as part of their Northern Extension to East Grinstead.

One area where the growth of trees in the absence of grazing animals is really apparent is on the North Downs, which I shall look at in a future post.

Don't you just hate it ...

... when you go to take a picture of the Liverpool historic waterfront, and find someone has parked a boat in the way?

Queen Mary 2 moored in Liverpool

Queen Mary 2 visited Liverpool in September 2011. The original Queen Mary was registered in Liverpool, but never visited, as the 39' draught was too deep, whereas the Queen Mary 2, registered at the time in Southampton (subsequently registered in Bermuda to allow for weddings to take place on board), despite being over half as large again, has a draught of only 33'.

The Red Ensign - no longer flying on the stern of the Queen Mary 2

The time window for coming in to the estuary is quite tight, but when the tide is right, it allows a liner or cruise ship enough time for passengers to spend most of the day in the city.

Coming in

The best views of the ships using the cruise terminal in front of the City's historic waterfront can be obtained from Egremont Promenade, between Seacombe Ferry Terminal and New Brighton.

Queen Mary 2 and Liverpool Waterfront

From the Woodside Ferry Terminal in Birkenhead, or even better from the tower of Birkenhead Priory, the ship sits beside the Historic Waterfront and the newer buildings to the north.

Large passenger ships should become more frequent visitors, as the City Council has agreed to repay government grants used constructing the cruise terminal, to allow cruises to start and end in Liverpool. The money needs to be repaid, as, under European Union rules, it counts as illegal state aid. The rationale is that allowing cruises to start and end in Liverpool, giving people in the North a convenient location to start their holidays instead of going to Southampton, and allowing people to stay in Lancashire and Cheshire before starting their cruises only benefits Liverpool, and is therefore not allowed. On the other hand, only allowing ships to stop for long enough for a day in Liverpool City Centre benefits the whole region, and is allowed. No, I do not understand either.

Still, there will soon be the romance of people striding across the gangplank, high above the water, on to the promenade deck, on their way to exotic destinations. Well, not quite, the way on board puts function very much ahead of form these days.

Mother church

If I get into a regular pattern with this blog, there will be quite a few pictures of churches, I usually pop in if one is open when I am out and about. There is usually something of interest, even if in some cases it is what some clergy can do to an historic building. So, to start the ball rolling, here are some pictures of the church where I worship, St John the Baptist, Tuebrook, Liverpool.

Traditionally, the term "mother church" refers to the church in which you were baptised, and as I started attending as an adult, I was baptised here.

The amount of decoration in the church is similar to that in mediæval times. Not that it is mediæval: spending most of my time in church in Victorian buildings, when I visit a church that has been standing since the middle ages, I am struck by how plain it is. In the ancient church, the decoration was been painted over at the Reformation, and there is little or no visual evidence, apart from where restoration has uncovered fragments of a wall painting. This church is instead Gothic Revival - the conception of the architect, George Frederick Bodley, of what a 14th century English Gothic church looked like.

We cannot boast any of the scenes of the Last Judgment that adorned the walls in the middle ages, but we have the rather fine stencil work above: as I had been a bit wild with the incense on Easter Sunday, it nicely set off the light coming through the clerestory windows.

We will come back here again to look in more detail at other parts of the church, but for now, this is a taste of what I am used to in a church, to shed a bit of light on my comments on others.

A walk in the woods

Last March, I set off to Caldy RUFC to watch a game. On the way, I had a fundamental misunderstanding of the geography of the area. I thought the hill behind West Kirby was a ridge, with Thurstaston, where the club play, on top. It is in fact a round hill, with Thurstaston on the other side.

Without a map on hand to correct me, that short cut through Caldy Woods was not a short cut at all, but took me in completely the wrong direction. By the time I realised this, correcting my route would have taken me to the end of the first half, so there seemed little point continuing.

To avoid a wasted trip, I started to take pictures of the woods, and, feeling a bit lazy, I just left the 70-300mm lens on the camera, and took all my pictures with that.

 The rest of the collection from March can be seen here.

I thought it would be interesting to go to the same location every couple of months to see how the woods grow and decay over the year. Part 2 came at the end of April, just before Easter...

... part 3 in June ...

... and part 4 at the beginning of September - to my surprise, this was the one with the most difficult lighting so far, as the full canopy of leaves made the woods darker than earlier in the year.

There will be a part 5, I took the pictures in November, but I am a bit behind with my updating, and the timing of part 6 depends on whether we have any significant snow in the next few weeks.

All roads lead to ...

For my first proper posting, I thought we should go back to Dormansland, the village where I grew up, and to the oldest inhabited part of the parish, an Iron Age fort long since deserted at Dry Hill.

The clue to why people 2500 years ago chose to live here lies in the name (of more recent origin). Being on a sandstone ridge, the land is well drained, which the clay soils in the valleys either side were certainly not, so the settlers were able to cut back the vegetation to construct their fort, graze their animals, grow their crops and make use of the iron deposits along the ridge towards the modern Tunbridge Wells. The valleys were not the fields we see today, the 10 miles or so across the Eden Valley to the North Downs, and the 5 miles or so across the Medway Valley to the Ashdown Forest were heavily wooded.

When I walk along a path in a location like this, I sometimes wonder whether I am taking the same path as feet would have taken 2500 years ago. I suspect not, as I do not think land ownership did not become established as early as this. Once ownership became more organised in Saxon times, the course of roads and paths that ran between fields owned by different people would have become largely fixed, as both sets of owners would have been keen to prevent encroachment from the road on to their land, and once fields had different owners, it is likely they would rarely fall into the hands of a single owner who could change the course of the track. Country roads, such as Hollow Lane, less than a mile away from here, near the farm on which my great grandfather worked for 60 years, often come to an unexpected right angle because of this.

The picture above is taken approaching Dry Hill from the south - probably the direction in which there is least evidence of an iron age trackway.

This picture on the other hand is taken in the direction we know there to have been a trackway, to Titsey or Westerham on the North Downs in the background, crossing the River Eden at Haxted. This trip can be undertaken today using the Vanguard Way, on which both of these pictures were taken. The trip would have been less pleasant for our iron age forebears - dense forest, with the attendant risk from animals such as wild boar, sticky clay soil at the foot of Dry Hill and of the North Downs, and the River Eden (whcih frequently floods over the surrounding meadows even today).