Finally: Fountains Abbey!

No matter how many times I have come here already (and how many more times I'll hopefully be here in coming years), the majestic ruins of Fountains Abbey do not lose any of their fascination for me. This is truly a place like no other. Maybe my pictures manage to convey something of its unique atmosphere.

One of the first things I saw this time and had not - as far as I remember -  noticed before was this fig tree growing aginst the wall of the largest structure. A fig tree, in the North of England? Well, have a closer look - the figs are already growing. I guess the old stone wall must give off enough warmth to keep the tree going.

This must be one of the most photographed views around the abbey; I know I have taken pictures of this huge window frame before, but it never looks the same with the ever-changing sky behind. A person standing below this window barely reaches as high as the decorative arches underneath.

Once you reach the outskirts of the ruins, you can get a better impression of their vastness. What a sight, and what a busy place it must have been when it was still an active abbey and monastery! 

And to imagine that it all started in the year 1132, when 13 monks were fed up with the life at their former monastery, where there was too much emphasis on luxury and comfort and too little on faith and spirituality.
When they arrived, there was nothing in this valley, just plenty of trees and the river. With their own hands, they dug up the ground to plant some crops and built a small hut to live in. Those first years must have been incredibly hard; only their determination, deep faith and a good portion of stubbornness must have made survival possible.
Eventually, the abbey grew and prospered and became one of the largest and wealthiest in all of Europe. Only when Henry VIII decreed its closure over 400 years later, the abbey was left deserted and - as mentioned in my previous post - widely used as a convenient source for cheap building materials.

Don't know about you, but I am glad that people did not tear down all the walls and did not carry away every stone!

Walking away from the ruins towards Studley Royal, I found the view looking back so beautiful that I took a picture every two minutes or so.

One last glimpse at the abbey, before we turned round the bend. That part of the grounds is called Studley Royal and of very different character than the abbey, but still very peaceful and quiet. You'll see that in my next post.

Fountains Hall and Fountains Mill

Two posts back, I ended my description of the walk my sister and I took from Ripon to Fountains Abbey with a first glimpse at the ruins of the abbey, and mentioned that one of my next posts would feature Fountains Hall.

Here it is:

The hall was built in the 17th century, using stone from the abbey ruins. Today, some of the rooms are open to visitors; this post from 2012 shows what it looks like inside.
You can even rent holiday flats in here - wouldn't it be great to be staying in such a place?

I can't remember the small garden opposite the hall having been open last time I was here. It was a new place for us to explore:

View from the entrance of the hall towards the walled garden.

What lies behind the wall:

Ready to move further on towards the ruins, we got distracted again by looking at some of the other buildings making up the estate. Some of these are inhabited by people who work on and for the estate, while others can be rented as holiday homes.

With all the times I have come here, there was still a place I had not been to: Fountains Mill. The sign said "open", and the large old door looked promising, so we went in and had a good look at what is one of the oldest building on the entire Fountains Abbey grounds. The mill was used from the very beginning of the monastery to grind corn, and served this purpose (although obviously not for the monastery any more) until 1927.
Part of the water-generated power was also used for a timber saw, and the rooms were home to refugees and a mason's workshop.
Nowadays, you can walk around the exhibtion and try your hands at some of the old machinery yourself.

In front of the mill is a tea shop, where we had a little break. We also discovered the Porter's Lodge, which has been housing an exhibition about the abbey since 2008. Somehow, I managed to completely miss this during my visits here since then. The exhibition is very well done. Central to it is a large model of the abbey and its grounds of how it may have looked in its heyday, before the dissolution of the monastery in the 1530s.

After that, we were finally walking across the grass to where the actual ruins begin - but that, as you may have already guessed, will be the subject of my next post.

Read in 2014 - 21: Rope Enough

These days, I usually parallel-read two books: one "physical" book, the kind that is made of paper and can rest on your bedside table or adorn your shelf while you are not reading it, and one on my kindle. The kindle-reading is mostly limited to the train trips to and from work, but I made an exception last night: The ebook I had been reading for a while was 90 % finished, and I really HAD to know the end, so I read the last few chapters in bed, not waiting for my next trip to work.

The book was "Rope Enough" by Oliver Tidy, a self-published author from the UK who now lives in Istanbul. You can find out more about the author and his books here on his wordpress-page.

"Rope Enough" is the first of a series of four books, "The Romney and Marsh Files". The books are set in Dover and describe the cases DI Romney and his sergeant Marsh have to deal with. Romney is, I believe, in his mid-to-late forties; a single man with at least two serious relationships (marriages?) under his belt but convinced he won't find a suitable candidate for a third try, not at his age and not with his requirements.
Marsh is a young woman who has been transferred to Dover only two months ago and has not yet had much time to get to know the place and its people very well.
The two are very different in their approach to their work, but make a successful team - probably because of their differences.

A young woman working at a garage is brutally raped at her work place. She happens to be the girlfriend of one of the most notorious criminals in town, a man Romney would very much like to see behind bars. When more crimes linked to the first one happen, he sees his chance to finally prove the man's involvement in them and other illegal activities. But something does not add up, and it takes a while before the DI and his sergeant realize that there is more to this case than meets the eye.

The way they go about solving it is very well described; I am no expert in police procedure, but it all sounds very much like I'd imagine a real police unit going about their daily work, along with the tedious paper work, reporting to their superiors and so on.

People are portrayed in a believable way, and although I have never been to Dover, I am sure that those who know the place will recognise it well in the book.

This is no cosy mystery. It is contemporary crime fiction, and although Oliver Tidy never goes into too much gorey detail, some scenes are realistic enough to make you want to get on safer ground in the next chapter. Having said this, I very much enjoyed "Rope Enough" (which, contrary to what the title and cover image imply, has nothing to do with anyone's death by hanging).

For a self-published book, it was well edited; I found few typos and only one editing error: A witness changes his name from Nick Holmes to Ricky Holmes a few pages further on.
It was free on the kindle shop when I came across it, and I will certainly go and find the other three books in the series, no matter whether they are for free or not.

Walk to Fountains Abbey

If you put "Fountains Abbey" in the search box at the top left corner of my blog, you will find several posts with many pictures of this wonderful place near Ripon in Yorkshire, England. The 1st of June saw me and my sister back on what we now consider our traditional walk there - we can't visit Ripon without it!

I took so many pictures on that day that I decided to divide them between several posts. The first part shows the walk from Ripon (look here to see where we started) through Studley Roger (the village next to the site of Studley Royal and Fountains Abbey), the deer park, St. Mary's church, and the first glimpses of the ruins.

As you can see, it was a cloudy day, but sunny and warm enough for us to enjoy the walk very much.

Approaching Studley Roger, and a picture for John/Scriptor Senex (although I know he is taking a break from blogland these days):

The gates to Studley Royal, the deer park and Fountains Abbey:

About half way up the hill, looking back you can see Ripon Cathedral. The pictures show what it looks like with and without zoom. We saw very few deer this time, but look at all that lush green!

Two thirds of the way to...

St. Mary's. The indoors pictures were taken without flash.

By now it was lunch time and we sat at the obelisk outside the church to eat the sarnies we'd brought.

After a short rest, we went further along to the visitor centre. There, you pay to get to the actual abbey; up until now, everywhere we walked is free access. So, even a family who maybe can not afford to pay the admission fee of 10,50 per adult (don't know how much for children), will be able to have a great day out.

From the visitor centre, we walked down the hill towards the ruins. The first glimpse we got was this:

I don't think I've taken pictures from this perspective before. It looked as if you could just jump across the small gap from the slope onto the bell tower!

One last picture for today, before you'll see Fountains Hall in my next post.

Read in 2014 - 20: Von Afrika nach Kanada

"Von Afrika nach Kanada" means - as I am sure you have guessed - "From Africa to Canada". It is the 2nd part of Hieronymus Hirschle's autobiography; the first part covered the years 1921 - 1941, and you can find my review for it here.

This book covers a much shorter period of time, the years 1941 - 1946, from the moment soldier Hirschle was captured until his release and return to his home village. A lot happens to "Mus", as he prefers to be called by his friends (short for Hieronymus, which would be Jerome in English). Not only does he involuntarily travel from Africa to Canada and from there to England, Scotland, back to England and finally to Germany, but he also undergoes deep changes. He is still a young man of 26 by the end of the book, and so some of this change would have probably happened anyway in the natural course of growing up, but most of what affects him so deeply would have never happened to him without the war.

I must admit I "quick-read" some of the chapters dealing with the war in Africa. In order to understand the book and follow Mus through his life, I did not need to know in all detail what type of gun each tank had, how many units were fighting over which stretch of desert and so on. But all those chapters also told a lot about what life was really like out there for the average soldier, trying to survive in an environment that was icy cold at night and unforgivably hot by day, fighting, sleeping, eating out there, missing their loved ones and not getting much reliable information most of the time. It probably was the same for all soldiers, no matter whether they were German, English or Italian, and Mus very soon feels that instead of fighting, they should be helping each other.

Let me quote directly from the book. After Mus has been engaged in his first real battle (as part of a crew manning a tank) and sees the first dead "Tommies" (as British soldiers were called), he breaks down, cries bitterly and prays for all the dead, regardless of their nationality. He writes:

Verfluchter Narr, schimpfte ich mich dann selbst [...], bringst eine Menge Leute um und dann betest du für sie. Warum bringst du sie dann erst um? Weil sie sonst dich umbringen? Oder fürs Vaterland? Für die Heimat? Die bestünde auch weiter ohne Krieg. Aber die der Tommies auch. Oder für die Freiheit? [...] Wer garantiert uns, dass wir nach einem Sieg frei sind? Also ist doch der ganze Scheißkrieg umsonst. Mein Gott, wer das alles verantworten muss.

In short, he calls himself a damned fool for first killing people and then praying for them, and asks himself what's the point of the whole "f*****g war" and who will have to answer for all that. There are many more such scenes and thoughts, and as in the first book, a lot of what Mus writes is very moving and thought-provoking.

His years in Canada are not at all bad. He is assigned to a PoW-camp where the prisoners work in the woods, something he quickly learns to enjoy a lot. There is relative freedom for the prisoners; he can often ride one of the working horses through the beautiful forests, they are fed well and live in relative comfort, even earning a little money through the red cross and with some extra work for other companies.
Friendships are struck up between prisoners and the Canadians who work at the camp, and because the forest and the satisfying work reminds him a lot of home, Mus is not as unhappy as one would think. Still, the men are not free, and what news they get from home are not good. They all approach the situation differently; some stick firmly to their Nazi beliefs, others begin to doubt, and others again have long turned their backs on the whole ideology and fight it wherever they can. 

For many, the total absence of female company is the biggest problem, and it is here where I disagree most with the author: to him, homosexual relationships as he witnesses them in the camp are completely wrong, like a disease that spreads, something disgusting. He still loves his friends as friends, and does not end a close friendship when one of them tries to shift their relationship to a sexual level, but he abhors the mere thought and is horrified by it all.

Altogether, I can not help but admire the frank telling of what happened to "Mus" in those years, and what he thought and how it changed him. Again, for me the most touching scenes are the ones involving animals. When the prisoners are finally told to get ready for the long way home, Mus has to say good-bye to his beloved horse. It reminds me very much of the scene in the first book when he leaves home and sees his dog for the last time.

The voyage home is not as straightforward as had been promised to the PoWs; they are held in England, later Scotland and then England again for months before they are finally really put on a ship to Germany. England in the post-war era was still suffering from food and other shortages, and many times the prisoners share their meagre rations with the English men at the factories where they were made to work. As before, Mus sees his fellow human first and foremost in everyone, and tries to find something good in any situation. He is not as optimistic as he was before the war, though, and when the book ends with him coming home, it is not with the great relief and enthusiasm one would maybe expect.

I have already started on the third and last book; it really is a pity that these books have not been translated into English, because I would so much like for you to read them, too.