A Cuxton carving, some Covent Garden pottery and a Steep monument…
I plan to visit my sister in the Kentish village of Cuxton on Saturday next, and here’s a photograph dating from my last visit to Cuxton, on Boxing Day, 2011, of a carved bench on Bush Hill…
A carved bench, Bush Hill, Cuxton, Kent
And on the theme of handicrafts, here’s a stall I came across at Covent Garden Market in central London, in 2007 I believe it was…
A pottery stall, Covent Garden Market…
Our after-work rambling group has its first outing this coming Thursday, around Swanmore in Hampshire, so here are a couple of images from a previous outing, in the vicinity of Steep, near Petersfield, also in Hampshire. Steep is associated with the poet Edward Thomas, who died at Arras in the First World War. The two images here are followed by Thomas’s poem ‘Adlestrop’, which happens to be one of my favourites, so here it is…
A misty Steep landscape, early spring 2011
Hillside monument to Edward Thomas, at Steep, Hampshire
Adlestrop
Yes, I remember Adlestrop —
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.
The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop — only the name
And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.
And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.
Edward Thomas (1878-1917)
A Weekend Diary 