Not quite Dodoni

This is an interesting amphitheatre. I doubt whether any Greek or Roman tragedies were performed there, but it was certainly used for public hangings.

Thomas Hardy Night

Lat night I went to a Thomas Hardy event, a programme of readings, music and performances by The New Hardy Players, a fundraising event to support the Hardy Manuscripts Fund.

The highlight of the evening was Norrie Woodhall, who celebrated her 104th birthday in 2009. She knew Hardy. She gave a memorable rendition of her own poem "One Hundred and Four" and of Hardy's "The Voice":

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me,
But as at first, when our day was fair.

Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,
Standing as when I drew near to the town
Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,
Even to the original air-blue gown!

Or is it only the breeze in its listlessness
Travelling across the wet mead to me here,
You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,
Heard no more again far or near?

Thus I; faltering forward,
Leaves around me falling,
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,
And the woman calling.


Norrie said you have to have had experienced the kinds of losses she has experienced in her long life in order to understand a poem like that. She is a truly extraordinary woman.

The evening had many lighter moments, like the performance of William Barnes' "A Bit O Sly Coortin'", by Devina Symes and Brian Slater,and Hardy's "Ah, Are you digging on my Grave" (Ann Gaudin and John Bowles) and the brilliant performance by the auctioneer, Mr Garry Batt.

Ah, Are You Digging On My Grave?

"Ah, are you digging on my grave,
My loved one? -- planting rue?"
-- "No: yesterday he went to wed
One of the brightest wealth has bred.
'It cannot hurt her now,' he said,
'That I should not be true.'"

"Then who is digging on my grave,
My nearest dearest kin?"
-- "Ah, no: they sit and think, 'What use!
What good will planting flowers produce?
No tendance of her mound can loose
Her spirit from Death's gin.'"

"But someone digs upon my grave?
My enemy? -- prodding sly?"
-- "Nay: when she heard you had passed the Gate
That shuts on all flesh soon or late,
She thought you no more worth her hate,
And cares not where you lie.

"Then, who is digging on my grave?
Say -- since I have not guessed!"
-- "O it is I, my mistress dear,
Your little dog , who still lives near,
And much I hope my movements here
Have not disturbed your rest?"

"Ah yes! You dig upon my grave...
Why flashed it not to me
That one true heart was left behind!
What feeling do we ever find
To equal among human kind
A dog's fidelity!"

"Mistress, I dug upon your grave
To bury a bone, in case
I should be hungry near this spot
When passing on my daily trot.
I am sorry, but I quite forgot
It was your resting place."

Whitcombe Church and William Barnes

The church may be redundant, but it seems that the Revd. William Barnes is still tending his flock. He preached his first and last sermons at this church.

Barnes may not have wanted to use words derived from Latin or Greek in his Dorset dialect poetry, but he did write this poem, "Grecian Maids", in 'national English'.

"Oh! lovely were the Grecian maids of old..."

The (conserved) wall-painting of St Nicholas is c. 1400. The Purbeck marble font is 13th century. The barn beside the churchyard has been beautifully restored thanks to the author Minette Walters, who lives in the nearby farmhouse/manor house. Interactive Map, Minette Walters' website

Whitcombe, from British History Online

Could it be Corfu?

Lulworth Cove (Dorset) and a fourth century mosaic pavement found at Hinton St. Mary (Dorset), probably the first image of Christ found in Britain. Now in the British Museum.

Corfe Castle and Corfu

I'm trying to work out whether there's an etymological link between Corfe (as in Corfe Castle, Dorset) and Corfu.

Although the roots are apparently quite different,"Corf(e)" being Anglo-Saxon for "gap", "pass" or "cutting", eg between two hills- from Old English ceorfan, 'to cut' -or 'carve'(?), and "Corfu" being linked to Greek "korefi"/"coryfai", "summit" or "crest"), the locations of Corfe Castle and Corfu's Old Frourio (with its twin peaks, on either side of a gap), suggest a link, perhaps to some common but much older Indo-European word?

Ideas, please.

And who was Miss Wood, who published two poems about Corfe Castle in 1820?

"Thou ancient pile! a long and last adieu,
No more thy ivy'd tow'r shall meet my view...
Yet mem'ry oft shall trace thy scenes sublime,
Thy turrets moulder'd by the hand of time..."

(Adieu to Corfe Castle)

"Hail, venerable pile! all hail to thee!
Oft o'er thy grass-grown courts my feet shall stray..."

(Written on first seeing the ruins of Corfe Castle).

I wonder what people would say if one stood at the entrance to the Old Frourio and addressed it "Hail, venerable pile!" For the time being I have bid it "adieu".

Bridport Harbour (West Bay) and Sleepy John Estes

I've been re-reading "The Marches of Wessex" by F. J. Harvey Dutton (1922).

I'd forgotten that it opens with a description of Bridport Harbour:

"The England of my dreams is of a magical nature. It appears to me as a green chalk hill, high and strong, running towards the sunset....That England is built up partly from my intimate love of one place, Bridport Harbour in Dorset, where the world for me seems to end, and partly from many walks I have taken on the Dorset hills on my way to that haven of rest...

Yet that night as I stood on the little black wooden pier at West Bay (Bridport Harbour's alias), and watched the still beauty of the moonlit sea, the conviction came back to me that there is, after all, something of true peace in an English county- some solid precipitate left after the shaking of centuries."

Sometimes one can still experience such a feeling.

Paul Nash, Shell Guide to Dorset (1936):

“Bridport: Gate to the West. A delightful town set back from a wide street of fine red-brick houses. Formerly it had a busy life and considerable importance. The making of nets and rope still goes on, and there is a slight coasting trade. The sea lies 2m distant at West Bay, which is being developed from a quiet watering-place into something different. On every side the country is magnificent. The coast rears up a shaggy orange cliff which slopes backwards in tumultuous downs, ribbed with dark hedge lines. Across the coast road, inland, downs continue ample movement, revealing many barrows and other earthworks in their course. Here and there sudden pyramids are thrown up – actually conical in form and sometimes topped by clumps of trees.”

Everyone needs a change (even from the equally magical island of Corfu).

In the immortal words of Sleepy John Estes (whom I interviewed briefly around 1964):

"Everybody ought to make a change sometime".

It's a profound song, also recorded by Taj Mahal and Eric Clapton. Check it out on YouTube. Sleepy John's version goes more or less like this:

"Now-
Change in the ocean,
Change in the deep blue sea,
Take me back baby
For there's some change in me:
Everybody, they ought to change sometime,
Because sooner or later,
We have to go down to that lonesome ground."

Sleepy John Estes died in June 1977, in a sharecropper's shack which was put on display in a parking lot in Brownsville, where I later visited it. It reminded me of another of his songs, which I'd discussed with him back in 1964 ("Rats in my Kitchen"; see ISIS 28 November 1964):

"You know those rats are mean in my kitchen, I've ordered me a mountain cat, (x 2)
You know the way they've destroyed my groceries, I declare it's tight like that".

We could use a few mountain cats back in Mandouki.

Sleepy John, a great blues poet, signed his photograph (in the American Folk Blues Festival programme) with a simple cross.

On recently released Sleepy John material.