Overhead Power Lines, Natural Beauty, Landscape and Visual Impact: Winterbourne Abbas, Dorset

From The Telegraph - Power lines to be taken down at cost of £11 million per pylon -
"National Grid unveils £500 million plans that will result in less than 10 miles of overhead power lines being removed from beauty spots"

The Dorset AONB - National Grid

"There was a general consensus at the stakeholder event that the section of line from Winterbourne Abbas south-east to the edge of the South Dorset Escarpment at Bronkham Hill provides the best option for undergrounding works. However, stakeholders pointed out that it would be challenging to find locations for sealing end compounds in the AONB’s open landscape. Burying the cables underground was the preferred option with members of the public that attended the event. It was felt that screening or camouflaging pylons would not be beneficial to the area. Attendees highlighted the impact that undergrounding would have on the landscape and that there was a need for restoring the land if such an option were to be taken forward."

Local History, Age, Memory and Popular Tradition: Richard Jefferies Explores Oral History in His Village

From a manuscript of 1877, first published in 1948.

Richard Jefferies (1848- 1887) writes:
"I set out in my own village to learn from the unlettered our local history..."

He approaches Mr. Browne, a local farmer, but Mr. Bowne's memory proves to be confused on certain topics.

"Old Betsy would tell you more, perhaps," said Mr. Browne. "They say she's a hundred years old."

They visit the old lady in her cottage.

"She could not tell me the year in which she was born: she calculated her age by the thatch. The house had been new thatched four times since she could remember. She  was a great girl when it was done for the first time, because father fell from the ladder and broke his arm - that she recollected well. Father thatched it twice. Her own husband thatched it the third time, and the fourth was three years ago. I could see it if I liked - 'it were amazing thick.' Mr. Browne and I measured it roughly; we found it between eight and nine feet in thickness. The farmer said a good coat of straw would last twenty years: four coats represented eighty years; add three years since the last thatching, and say the old lady was seven when her father broke his arm, and that would make her ninety."

Jefferies Land: A video on Vimeo

Australia: Malcolm Turnbull to be new Australian Prime Minister

From BBC News - "Australia is to have a new prime minister after Tony Abbott was ousted as leader of the Liberal Party by cabinet minister Malcolm Turnbull".

Sydney Morning Herald - Malcolm Turnbull wins Liberal leadership challenge 54 votes to 44 votes

From The Guardian

BBC: Tony Abbott - A tough day

From THE HON MALCOLM TURNBULL MP

"Remember this: The only way, the only way, we can ensure that we remain a high wage, generous social welfare net, first-world society is if we have outstanding economic leadership, if we have strong business confidence. That is what we, in the Liberal Party, are bound to deliver and it is what I am committed to deliver".

"For the seriously imaginative"

Introducing the panel, Sydney, 1999:

With Dr. Alison Chiu, David Malouf AO and Malcolm Turnbull


Update, The Guardian - Malcolm Turnbull suggests changes to education and climate policies possible

From Oxford Today

Gene Vincent in Australia, 1957; Johnny Meeks

GENE VINCENT AND THE BLUE CAPS

Be-Bop-A-Lula  - AUSTRALIA 1957

Classic rock! (YouTube)

Johnny Meeks on lead guitar.

Johnny Meeks, Rockabilly Hall of Fame

Greece: Walking in Mani; Patrick Leigh Fermor

From patrickleighfermor.org - "Walks amid the watchtowers of the Mani" - William Dalrymple in The Financial Times.

Queen Camel, Somerset: "News did not travel fast in those days" (Walter Raymond); Camel Folk; Somerset and Her Folk Movement; Folk Song in Somerset; Down-Along Talks, Dan'l Grainger

From "Gentleman Upcott's Daughter", 1892.

More here

"The song has departed from the hearth and the sweep of the scythe from the meadow...the school slowly undermined the dialect...More potent than book-learning in the hastening of this recent evolution in English country life has been, I think, the introduction of rapid locomotion...The railways diminished many limitations. In coaching days, for all but the very rich, life even in towns was terribly circumscribed. The stay-at-home habits of the humble villager now seem almost incredible...Quite early in their history some railways began to advertise short summer excursions. 'A day by the sea'...Flushed with excitement, and all the maidens wi' a tutty o' boy's love and roses a-piece, they all rod in un from Yeovil Town to Weymouth Bay and back".

From "Somerset and Her Folk Movement", Walter Raymond, July 1921.

And then the young people discovered a world beyond the parish. They went to London, left the village for the town, the county for the city...

Compare Walter Raymond with Charles Marson:

From introduction (C.L.M.) to Folk Songs from Somerset, First Series, 1904, by Cecil J. Sharp and Charles L. Marson (The Rev. Charles Marson, Vicar of Hambridge):

"Folk-song, unknown in the drawing-room, hunted out of the school, chased by the chapel deacons, derided by the middle classes, and despised by those who have been uneducated into the three R's, takes refuge in the fastnesses of tap-rooms and the wilder parts. It is a treasure to be sought and found in nooks and corners, underneath much mental and some moral lumber. It comes out shyly, late at night, and is heard when the gentry have gone home to bed, when the barrack-room has exhausted its Music-hall menu. It is to be found when men have well drunk. The parson hears of it, but rarely hears it. Domesticated and holy Penelope does not sing it at her loom...You must ask our Arcadian Aspasias if you want to get news of it".

The Rev. Herbert Pontin, "Old Dorset Songs" (1906):

"Of course, we cannot shut our eyes to the fact that the old traditional songs are fast dying out. Boys educated at a National School think it almost beneath their dignity to sing the ungrammatical, unrhythmical and unpoetical songs in which their fathers and forefathers delighted".


From 'The Passage of Camel' in "Cluster-o'Vive, Stories and Studies of Old World Wessex"
by John Read (1923):

"There is an old-time atmosphere about the Camels: they are among the nooks, yet to be found in Somerset, which the influences of modern civilisation have but slightly touched. In such places the hand of Time has lingered lovingly, and, caressing, lagged behind".

The waggon, on the way to the Mildmay Arms:

"The waggon passed into the semi-darkness of the overhanging canopy of hazel bushes which lined the steep banks of the batch. Crack! A loud retort of the long-handled whip echoed through the hollow way, followed by a burst of the melodious old waggoning song:

"When vust I went a-waggoning,
A-waggoning did go,
I villed my parents' hearts with grief,
Wi' sorrow, care and woe..."

Crack!

"and many are the hardships,
Since then I have gone thro-o-o......"

Photograph from "More Down-Along Talks"

From "Down Whoame", "Barney Hodger", 1924

Visiting London, from Down-Along Talks by "Dan'l Grainger" (David J. Gass)