Tastes of Beijing

From train sink to hotel sink to The Forbidden City

From sink to sink

The top left picture shows the shared sink on the Trans-Siberian Express and, by way of contrast, the top left is the elegant sink they are currently enjoying in China’s capital city. Tiananmen Square and The Forbidden City are key sights to visit in Beijing and Sally is seen above entering the World Heritage Site of the Imperial Palace complex. Maggie is shown below in the same place, alongside the appealing outdoor corridor and private ablution area of the quaint and welcoming Double Happiness Courtyard Hotel. The Sudoku book (look closely) travelled across Asia to be there; it doesn’t come as standard issue in the hotel.

Return to China

Sally has been to China before (with Emily, Harriet and me too) on an extended visit during a hot July and August back in 2009. That time we travelled widely and saw a total eclipse of the sun; this time Sally will be based in Beijing at the end of a journey with her pal, Maggie, from Saint Petersburg, via Moscow and the Trans-Siberian Express through Mongolia to China. As far as I know it’s the first time for Maggie in China, though she has recently travelled to Japan with her daughter, Amy. As I said in the first of these dispatches (by proxy) from the East, the world is at once a small place and an immense, unfathomable place.

The Double Happiness Courtyard Hotel

The images above are from the magical oasis where they stayed in China. After travelling 4,992 miles to reach their destination, rest, relaxation and restful lighting were all appreciated.

Ri Tan Park to Shipley

One less obvious place (not on the main tourist routes) visited by the dynamic duo was Ri Tan Park with extensive gardens, a small lake and dramatic “Star Gates.” The picture above has interesting vertical imagery with nature and man-made structures, ancient and modern, mingling on the eye…. All that remains is to trust British Airways to bring the intrepid travellers back to their families and friends in Yorkshire and the UK.... and the world....

Mission Impossible? Mais non....Mission Accomplished!

Return to Stonehenge

Avebury
Developed and populated around 2600 BCE, Avebury is the site of a stunning concentration of Neolithic and Bronze Age remnants including West Kennet long barrow, Silbury Hill, ditches, avenues and the enigmatic circles within circles of standing stones. I went a couple of years ago on a King Arthur road trip with Emily and this time we returned with Sally.

Close Up
The astonishing feature of Avebury is that you can get super-close to the stones and walk along and amongst their grandeur. They are a perfect way, if you visit the Alexander Keiller museum on site, to introduce you to the weird landscapes in this part of the country before going on to the monumental “other” part of the World Heritage Site, site of many a battle between environmentalists, pagan worshippers and English Heritage…. Stonehenge.

The Alignment
Stonehenge’s axis runs north-east to south-west and at midsummer the sun rises in the north-east and at midwinter the sun sets in the south-west. Even on a May evening (when we were there) on a clear night the sun setting is a powerful event. It’s easy to be awestruck about how the original builders and engineers could align both solstices, six months and 180 degrees apart.

Our ancestors were not so primitive
Avebury’s stones were lifted into their positions at a similar time that the Egyptians were raising up the Great Pyramid at Giza. Given the other Great Wonders of the Ancient World, I have to conclude that just because we have no written records, it does not mean our ancestors were incapable of scientifically elaborate achievements. What would we now know about the past if the Librar(ies) at Alexandria had not burned down several times – nor indeed if other libraries throughout the world had been better preserved?

Stonehenge’s history, as far as we currently know
Long barrows in the Stonehenge landscape appeared as early 3500 BCE and by 500 years later the first wide circle (with smaller stones) had been constructed. Avebury (and the Great Pyramid at Giza) came about 500 years after that. We can place the erection of the larger stone circle with its uprights and lintels to about 2500 BCE, two generations after Avebury.

Durrington Walls
A nearby settlement either housed the builders or thrived on the trade generated by the presence of Stonehenge and a group of huts have been recreated next to the Visitor Centre.

What is Stonehenge?
Over the years Stonehenge has been proclaimed a celestial clock, a temple, a place of sacrifice, an art installation, an impressive site for civic ceremonies – the current view is that we simply do not know how it was used in its heyday. We’re not even sure it was ever completed.

Not for Druids (originally at least)
One certainty is that it could never have originally been a Druids’ Temple, as Druid practices began in the Iron Age, long after Stonehenge had appeared. Druids may have appropriated the stones in later years, but so have poets, novelists, songwriters, artists and plain old romantics….

Imaginative History

RHS Harlow Carr Gardens - with its great bookshop 

Trip out

Unpacking boxes, bags and months of living in the South finally gave way to a trip to North Yorkshire, via Harlow Carr Gardens bookshop near Harrogate. Where else more appropriate for a visit than Fountains Abbey?

Buried in a secluded valley not far from Ripon, the word “magnificent” is not too strong to describe the experience of visiting Fountains Abbey.  Pretty quickly it is obvious why the place is a World Heritage Site – from the romantic abbey ruins, to the landscaped lakes and gardens of Studley Royal, the “High Ride” walk with intriguing follies, the deer park, St Mary’s Church, Fountains Hall, the herb garden, the display rooms….

Views from the "High Ride" walk at Fountains Abbey and Studley Royal

Time travel
If only time travel were possible…. To glimpse the place when the first 13 rebel Benedictine monks arrived in the valley in 1132, and then to see a time lapse movie of the growth of the buildings over several centuries into the richest Cistercian monastery in England, and then to despair as the site turned into the largest abbey ruins in the UK…. If only I believed that King Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell had pure religion in mind when they began their dissolution scam.… (£!£!£!£!)

Vices and virtues
Fountains Abbey speaks of time, decay, conviction, faith, vanity, glory and power. The stones, without doubt, hide stories of anger, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy and gluttony. Of course I am sure there were many monks who demonstrated virtues of chastity, temperance, charity, diligence, patience, kindness and humility. One of my favourite pastimes is to let my imagination roam on the sites run by the National Trust or English Heritage. Ken Follett’s Pillars of the Earth is partly responsible for cementing my imaginative take on the blood, sweat and turmoil that went into the construction of church buildings in the medieval period.

Whose history is it anyway?
Seamus Heaney famously thought that history “is about as instructive as an abattoir” and Henry Ford wrote that "history is more or less bunk” but I suspect they were referring to the official version of history, the one written by the military winners. History to me has always been about the untold stories, the domestic details, the women and children, the teachers and builders, the doctors and bakers. Shakespeare’s history plays are as real, to me, as Holinshed or Plutarch in evoking the passions of the past; sure, they are biased, but so are the text books. The billions of words of conjecture written about the Tudors cannot all be correct. Give me Sharon Penman’s The Sunne in Splendour over David Baldwin’s biography of Richard III (though I have to say Baldwin’s is the best I know….) Both approaches are equally popular but I have yet to be convinced that a literary view of history is any less valid than a “historical” approach to history.

Either our history shall with full mouthSpeak freely of our acts, or else our grave,Like Turkish mute, shall have a tongueless mouth,Not worshipp'd with a waxen epitaph.

That was then, this is now
Wandering round Fountains Abbey can be an experience which involves the politics of the rise and fall of monasteries and the factual history of the architectural decisions, or it can be about imagining Brother Dominic and what brought him there, how he fared in the different seasons, what jobs he enjoyed doing the most, what were the greatest hardships, when did he experience his finest moments of faith and what caused his strongest moments of doubt? What kind of an abbot was Henry Murdac? Wandering round on a crisp September day in 2014, Fountains Abbey is an ideal place for contemplation of who we’ve been, who we are and who we’re going to be.