New Year's Day at Shrieking Pit

For the second time this year, in the depth of winter rather than the height of summer, we passed a dark place of legend on our way from Southrepps to the North Norfolk Coast, going on this time from Overstrand to Cromer to catch what turned out to be the most enjoyable fireworks display I've encountered, not least because of its circumstantial spirit. Of course we'd connected the two points in reverse, via a much bigger loop, on our 2015 Norfolk Churches Walk.

Monday was a brief interlude of sun between a general drama of what my godson used to call (aged five) 'horrifying wind and rain'. The eve had been spent travelling, not too painfully, by tube, coach and train to Norwich to visit our companion Cal's friend Gail in the cathedral close. We headed for Evensong, which turned out to be evening prayers, as I'd expected - 15 minutes of liturgy which at least gave time to find where my favourite roof boss from numerous cards I've sent was actually located - in the Choir. Noah's ark, of course. Gazed upwards at this while a potentially jubilant psalm and the Mag, Nunc and Creed were all droned rather joylessly.

Not my photo, but this one, of the Green Man I always salute in the cloisters, is - albeit taken in the summer.

For once I left my camera behind, so I was dependent on Cally for a few images. None to post of our jolly time eating and chatting at the party held by Kate and Fairless in the Old Rectory up the hill, but a few of our NYD walk. The plan for which evolved nicely between the four of us: why not head for the pub in Southrepps proper, 10 minutes up the hill - where they squeezed us in for fish and chips between folk celebrating the New Year more lavishly - and then press on, ending up in Cromer so that we could take the train back to Gunton?

Which is what we did. The green lanes and quiet roads between Southrepps and the sea, a secluded zone embracing a valley and a very lovely wood, are already ones I dream about. So Shrieking Pit shouldn't be seen as too much of a blight - in fact on both occasions I never found it threatening, though the overhanging oak on the path side and the trees casting black reflections opposite are atmospheric both in August

and January.

The legend is proclaimed on a nearby board, told in colourful language (you can imagine a Northrepps local historian having fun), though it seems in many respects quite specific.The year was 1782, the fatal romance the one between an 18-year-old village beauty (was she really called Esmeralda?) and a feckless farmer who was told to stay away and cheerfully obeyed. One night by full moon our doomed heroine wandered along Sandy Lane, thought she saw the reflection of her lover in the dark waters and threw herself in, uttering three piercing shrieks which woke the village before she drowned. At midnight every 24 February you may hear them again...

We hit Overstrand in time for tea (needless to say our favourite shack is shut - crab and lobsters are not in season), then struck out along the cliffs (yes, Norfolk cliffs) towards Cromer. The grey pall that had spread in late afternoon looked about to lift with the sunset in the distance at the lighthouse,

and as you can see from the film of the 5pm fireworks, taken from a drone and quickly up on the Eastern Daily News website, it did: late blue skies are apparent here. Probably best with the sound turned off; one of the nice things about it was the absence of pumping loudspeakered music which had made a 5 November effort in a London Square such an endurance test. Here people were remarkably quiet; we were the only ones in our zone going 'ooh' and 'aah'.

The display could hardly have been better choregraphed, but just as memorable was the buzz in town - most shops open, mulled wine and a barrel organ outside St Peter and St Paul (so high is the tower that Cal's shot couldn't quite squeeze it all in).

Inside, the church was alive with folk buying refreshments and consuming them in the pews while big screens showed images of last year's fireworks. Here's one future for our ailing ecclesiastical buildings - they've got to be more welcoming, more open to social use. Fortunately there was nothing as lavish as a livescreening; any of the 10,000 folk who flocked into town could get a good view of the pyrotechnics shooting up from the pier. And the packed train journey back (for us only 10 minutes to Gunton) was jolly good-humoured too. Just what a community event ought to be.

Our 2 January was good, too - a walk along the beach from Mundesley some of the way to Happisburgh, where we started last September's churches walk, the light this time out at sea and giving way to prospective rain clouds just as we headed back, as this photo by Cally reveals.

A wet afternoon was spent cosily back at the cottage before we took the train to Norwich, and on to London. Needless to say we didn't have the courage for a New Year dip in the North Sea. Maybe at the start of 2019...

Christmas in Cranford Lacock

We did very well without the fake snow and the weird filming at what was clearly the wrong time of year in the two slightly disappointing episodes following up the best of telly's classic series. Lacock in Wiltshire is the perfect fastness of our friends the Van der Beeks whose National Trust-owned home played host - most famously, in my life - to the diplo-mate's stupendous 50th birthday party. More people will know Lacock's ideal village as a suitable location for the Midlands setting of Elizabeth Gaskell's cosy women-rule-the-roost Cranford tales when they came to be adapted and interwoven by the Beeb (our hosts' residence, Cantax House, has also featured in the Harry Potter films, though don't ask me where as I've only ever half-watched one of them).

What we did have to negotiate on our Christmas Day walk was the fallout from the previous few days' floods. Fortunately there's been no building on the floodplain of the Avon and I understand the only badly affected house was an old mill. The water meadows did what they're supposed to do, looking quite a pretty sight both from Bowden Hill (up top) and as we approached Raybridge.

Down at the bridge pedestrians had the edge over cars, since the road was impassable. Not so the raised route for feet (and bicyles) only.

In the summer J and I went straight up the road, but Andrew led us on his preferred route along the banks of the local canal via a field that looks more northern France post-1914 than Wiltshire.

The Wilts and Berks Canal is a fascinating case of a disused waterway being brought back to life by active locals in recent decades.

It opened in 1810 to bring coal from south of Bath to the area, but with swift exhaustion of that resource fell into disuse and was abandoned in 1914, the final death-blow having been dealt by the collapse of an aqueduct 13 years earlier. Some of it still remains filled in, but our stretch was vigorously restored and includes the handsome Double Bridge (re)launched by Camilla, the canal trust's patron, in 2009.

Of course an ivy-covered ruin is more picturesque than this, but hopefully it will regain a weathered appearance within a few years. We were grateful for it, anyway, because a walker going in the opposite direction told us that the flooding meant we wouldn't be able to cross further up where Andrew had intended. We headed up a field with views of the rather ugly house in which Michael Tippett lived with Meirion Bowen for so many years. Half the field was in shade, and the night's frosts meant more pleasurable walking than the saturated ground we'd so far covered.

We crossed Nocketts Hill to Bowden Park, with views of Wyatt's 1796 house to our left and the floodplain below straight ahead. The high beeches on the top of the hill looked especially splendid in their skeletal outline.

Down to Bewley Court, and a wood full of birdsong (the mild winter so far means they're all out scrummaging), and then to the more famous of the two bridges near the Abbey, also closed to traffic. No walking across the meadows here for obvious reasons.

 

Sunset, and home to (eventually) a splendid goose

with sprouts and cavolo nero inter alia

to accompany.

Deborah's decorations were as original as you might expect from a true artist (scroll down this blog entry for shots of her exquisite bathroom muralling).

The hall collection of animal skulls was suitably feathered

or clementined, in which company our marzipan pig from the splendid new Swedish cafe Bagariet in Covent Garden seemed naturally at home.

The garden is still looking splendid in the dead of winter, especially as the mists began to burn away and steam rose from the bourne at 8.30 on Boxing Day morning.

The yew lady stands proud by the green castle.

Soon there was activity in the village which I hadn't bargained for - what else but the Boxing Day meet for the hunt.

My first experience of such a thing, and purely as pageantry it's handsome enough with the black and red ('pink'*) jackets, the horses' banded manes and tails and the occasional top-hatted, veiled, side-saddle dame. But investigate further and you unearth the social divide it represents.

They'll tell you that all sorts join the hunt, which of course under the ban means following a fake fox (or that's the idea). But the gulf became apparent when the Master of the Hunt exhorted us to give generously to the helpers' fund 'because we can't afford to pay them properly'. 'Rubbish', my now-lost-in-the-crowd companion tells me she shouted. And apparently there was a bit of aggression when one of the riders deliberately backed his horse into the group of erstwhile protesters.

Well, I don't like the idea of the fox torn to pieces, but I have to say there are far more important things to protest about. And the trouble with the more obsessive and violent objectors is that they care more about animals than human beings. On the other hand, the Countryside Alliance is made up mostly of self-interested conservatives. Never mind, it was fun to see, once at least.

Leaning against the wall of the great barn, it was warm in the sun. And the light was even more brilliant than on Christmas day, so J and I whiled away a pleasant hour around the (closed) Abbey.

We've visited several times, not least when my godson was six and gratifyingly identified a mortar and pestle as Baba-Yaga's flying machine in the Russian stories we'd been reading (still among his favourites). This time restricted to the walkways around the south and east facades, rounding the corner by the Renaissance tower of unscrupulous Sir William Sharington who bought the 13th century nunnery in 1540, a year after its dissolution.

The rather splendid oriel windows date from the time of the early 19th century Talbots, into whose family Sharington's niece had married (W H Fox Talbot famously pioneered the art of photography here). We sat on the bench beneath the biggest and basked in the sun.

After lunch, we were roused to join the family on a last walk close to dusk in a valley near Box.

Lichen on a beech stump contrasted with the fallen leaves of that fascinating-in-all-seasons tree.

An ascent brought us to a field of alpacas

and then on past a very fine group of farm buildings

to the park of a slightly sinister mock-Lacock Abbey (I didn't note the name), home to a charitable Lebanese foundation, with plenty of fine trees in its ground.

New Year we spent in the bosom of friends Jill, Susie and Michael back in North Norfolk. The weather was not, to put it mildly, amenable to any but the shortest walks this time, but apart from visits to more churches, including the extraordinary Binham Abbey which I need to cover here anon, we had one big compensation. As we were driving from Binham towards Hindringham on New Year's Eve, the pall lifted in the west for an unexpected sunset

and then to our left - a rainbow lit by the glow. Not just a strip, but a whole arch - and then a second: a full double rainbow.

I curse the fact that my camera battery needed recharging, but Jill and J rushed to get their iPads out of the boot, so these three treasurable pics courtesy of our valiant driver and Norfolk churches walks doyenne record the moment. Let it stand  as a symbol at least of a really wonderful 2013, whatever this year has in store.

*see comments below for the reason why.

On the coast, at the church, by the lake

I'm paraphrasing Piper/Britten's Quint and Miss Jessel there, managing to squeeze in the first proper mention - which is to say an aspect of the last three-day portion - of our magical Scanditour alongside the second instalment of the 'Britten in Norfolk' strand. I've now left the ghosts behind in the last entry on the subject, which means on to our second evening, at South Creake to see the end results of the Yorke Trust's course work on A Midsummer Night's Dream. That's the church behind the hollyhocks in the central picture; sea holly aka eryngia in situ on the dunes above Holm beach up top; and sunset on the Särna lake, Sweden, after our only day of rain in the third picture.

This Dream was a classy show, no doubt about that, overlooked by the resident angels (several pictured above) and full of perceptive detail from director Jennifer Hamilton, whose calm and insightful character I warmed to so much in our round-table discussion after my Wells talk on the two operas earlier that Saturday. The showman vicar of Saint Mary South Creake had been  happy to let the workforce under set and lighting designer Ian Sommerville loose inside the building for a week, and how they transformed it.

Central was a round pond on which the barque eventually supporting Tytania and Bottom 'floated', with an old green sofa above it and holly over the pulpit, from which Puck and sundry fairies often peeped. I guess the shot-silk effect was due to the costume, make up and hair designer, no less than the best Boris Godunov I've ever seen, South African bass Gidon Saks (a friend of Hamilton). Production photos supplied by the Yorke Trust.

Conductor Darren Hargan seemed to be in overdrive from the start - why not let those eerie woodnotes glissando at more leisure? - but had a superb orchestra with which to conjure the right luminous nocturnes. My first note of inquiry to Rodney Slatford when we started our communication was whether he had a first-rate trumpeter at his disposal to do Puck's acrobatics. I well remembered how Cambridge students in Rosslyn Chapel a couple of years ago were nearly scuppered by a disastrous one. Fear not, replied he, and sure enough they'd had to buy in the best, RNCM graduate Mark Harrison, destined for a great career. The strings were deliciously sensuous; the woodwind gurgled and melted in 'Bottom's dream'.

Singers were more variable, but the Tytania we saw - out of several double-castings - would be welcome on any stage anywhere: Daire Helpin also took part in J's Europe Day concert but made more of an impact on me here. Her Oberon, Michael Taylor, seemed good enough to me though others were more critical. The lovers benefitted especially from Hamilton's lively staging, though the Lysander simply bellowed; the two Belgian girls, Helene Bracke and Annalies van Hijfte, did exceptionally well. Bottom, as so often, overegged the pudding but we laughed a lot at the antics of David Lynn's Flute-as-Thisbe. He'd also sung well in the first afternoon concert over at the chapel - my first live hearing of Britten's Six Songs from the Chinese with guitarist Dario van Gammaran.

One of the boys drafted in for the fairies had an exceptionally brilliant voice, fit competitor for Choirboy of the Year, I'd have thought. I didn't quite get the angle of Dan Robinson's laid-back, dreadlocked Puck. One day we really shall see a breaking-voiced boy acrobat in the role.

Otherwise, full marks all round. Involvement wise, I felt less close to the Glyndebourne Billy Budd at the Proms last night, but that may have had a lot to do with my distant coign of vantage in the Albert Hall. And the Creake pleasure wasn't quite over with the Dream since we returned the following morning to South Creake Chapel to hear world-class cellist Jamie Walton, a keen supporter of the Yorke Trust, in the Britten Cello Sonata with outstanding pianist Adam Johnson. The slow movement's blackness raised the hairs on the back of my neck: what a work. As they had two pianos for the rehearsals, they used them for Britten's unusual rep in that combination. Only in this centenary year, following on from the Tong/Hasegawa duo at Cheltenham, could I possibly have heard the Introduction and Rondo alla Burlesca twice in little over a month.

So we took our leave of matters musical - but not of the coast. I was still angling for the dip I'd failed to have on the previous day when the tide had retreated too far. So off we went to Holm beach, parking the car at the nearby bird sanctuary and setting off across the same saltmarsh we'd last negotiated in the sunset last September.

The eryngia was just flowering its purple-blue

and taller bracts - of aloe? I'm not sure - stood out against the cloud-studded sky.

And so across the sands near Brancaster

to swim in the warm shallows of the North Sea. This is as far as I'm going for documentation that I did it

though there is better ocular proof of daily swims in the lake at Särna, 20 kilometres from the border between Norway and Sweden.

This area once belonged, in fact, to Norway; it was gained without a struggle for Queen Christina by chaplain Daniel Buscovius in 1644. Hardly surprising that no-one contested the claim: at that time there were 20 farms on 4500 square kilometres with a population of around 100. I found all this out at the lovely wooden church a hundred metres from our log cabin which was superseded by a bigger one in 1881. More on that in a Dalarna churches survey; in the meantime, following Susannah's blog-entry which I linked to last time, here's our, erm, cosy cabin, No. 8.

And the Finches' campovan outside which we consumed our daily breakfasts.

First night was, as I've written above, one of wild skies with the rains only just abating (and still falling a little on the surface of the lake) - hence the most spectacular of sunsets -

while the second followed a radiant day in Fulufjället National Park, due a chronicle eventually. Fellow campers silhouetted walking their dog

and, to the north-east, a moon rising above other farm buildings.

On the second morning I rose to impenetrable mist which in 20 minutes was burning off

so that by 8.30 it was warm enough outside to swim. And yes, pace Susannah's blog, J gladly joined me and Susannah rushed in for a 10 second immersion, followed by half a minute - long enough for Jamie, firmly shore-bound, to photograph her 'swimming'. 13 degrees? No problem, which I can't say for 8, the temperature we experienced one alarming morning further south-east in Lake Siljan. But more of that, too, anon.

3/9 The full Stavanger International Chamber Music Festival chronicle is now up on The Arts Desk. I'll have more to say here about Norwegian ecclesiastica.