The last stop on the journey… arriving once again before sunrise, waiting for the gates to open…. St. Andrews was the largest Catholic church in all of Scotland… and now all that stands are the twin towers at the eastern end, and half the wall of the western entrance. And a lot of rocks…
This One Is Kind of A Big Deal
Everybody fire up yer radios! Wednesday night – well, actually, Thursday morning – I will be a guest on the Coast to Coast AM radio show with host George Noory. Coast to Coast “…airs on...
Read MoreThe Future Is Prologue:
Cosmic Summit 2024
Some of you know that for the past couple of months I have been ‘laser focused’ (I actually hate that expression, but it does seem to express the ADHD way I go at some things) on the...
Read MoreAvailable Now on Audible!
As Philo-The-Third told me, his father – Philo T. Farnsworth The Second – had ‘two major cases in his life. The first was electronic video. You wouldn’t be looking at this if he...
Read MoreLinks For My ACA Friends
So that I could just put it all in one place… Little Green Boat – the poem I mentioned I wrote that describes how everybody in the neighborhood knew what was going on except us kids...
Read MoreEulogy For Harvey Schatzkin
Arthur, Harvey and Paul ca. 1953. The kid on the right is the only one still living. Not shown: mother Ellen, sister Dorothy aka Dotsie _________________________________ September 30, 1958 Ellen has...
Read MoreComing Soon: TBWIT – The Audiobook!
More than fifty years after I first heard of Philo T. Farnsworth (in the summer if 1973)… More than twenty years after The Boy Who Invented Television was first published… And a year...
Read MoreHow’s This for Dark Thoughts?
Once again, on the subject of why we can’t have the keys to the Cosmic Ferrari… I am preparing a presentation for a conference in North Carolina in June. Consider this the...
Read MoreThe final leg of the trip, traveling this Sunday afternoon from Harrogate in Yorkshire to St. Andrews in the Kingdom of Fife, Scotland. This rainbow followed me most of the way… a most unusual rainbow, I might add, because it formed in an otherwise perfectly clear sky. There wasn’t any rain to speak of… just… this rainbow…
Hot and cold water from the same faucet… something of a rarity in this part of the supposedly civilized world…
One of the more expansive and well preserved ruins in Yorkshire, built by the Cistercians from the 12th to 14th centuries and, like the others, dissolved by Henry III in the mid 1500s.
I visited Fountains when I was here last year, but arrived late in the day and only managed to patrol the perimeter, so to speak. I never got inside.
This time I spent almost 10 hours on the property. I arrived shortly after the grounds opened, had a private tour (nobody else showed up) for about two hours, and then stayed well into the evening.
I didn’t know when I decided to spend the day at Fountains that Saturdays in the autumn they light the place up, offer picnics and barbecue, and then a choir performs in the vaulted chambers beneath beneath the refectory.
Jervaux Abbey in Yorkshire is off the beaten path… it’s on a privately owned estate, so it doesn’t show up in any of the English Heritage guides. I learned about it from chatting with the attendant in the visitor center at Kirkstall Abbey.
When I see paintings of these ruins from the “Romantic” period – late 18th, early 19th centuries – they are often depicted as lushly overgrown with foliage hanging from the walls and columns. But today, they are mostly well maintained, the foliage trimmed and cut back almost to the point of non-existence.
So Jervaux Abbey was something of a throwback to an earlier time… the owners apparently spend a whole lot of money trimming the foliage. So more than any other ruin I visited during this trip, Jervaux recalls the paintings of JMW Turner, who, I learned, sat on this very hill in 1816 (almost 200 years ago) and sketched this ruin for a Yorkshire visitor guide.
Not familiar with JMW Turner? You will be soon… there is a major feature film about him coming to the US later this fall… In the meantime, Google him…
Because nothing says “cozy English cafe” like three Chinese icons hanging on the wall above a warning about wet floors…