Lost in a landscape: Barton Turf

Barton Turf – White light and angels. It rained, my god how it rained. A bank holiday hex hanging over Easter. And typically the patterns of various occupations in one household left me on my own staring at a refracted sodden world as the cars trundling along Aylsham...

Lost in a Landscape: Scottow

Memory has a strange tonal range. There are sparks of colour in between the washes of grey and flat spots of black or white. I have a very distinct memory of first learning to ride a bike. Oddly for some reason that escapes me, it wasn’t at the hands of a parent...

Lost in a Landscape: Stratton Strawless

Stratton Strawless There is this thing were you travel through a landscape, passing things, that have become lost, part of the blur of the countryside, the unnoticed facets of a landscape which sit just back, away from our arterial routes cut as they are by human...

Lost in a Landscape: Wayland Wood

There is a darkness in woodland, hiding in the shade of the green canopy, something that retracts in the sunlight in the corner of your vision, beyond the growing and shrinking of the shadows, the greening, then yellowing, then bareness, with each revolution of the...

Lost in a Landscape: Trunch

There’s a lot in a name, Trunch has one that doesn't fit in in Norfolk, or in fact in England. Locally it sits uneasily with the profusion of ~hams and ~tons, and ~bys and ~thorps. East Anglia’s toponymy is that of the invaded, repeatedly settled. People who move into...

Lost in a Landscape: Rich pickings – Swafield

Swafield and Bradfield ‘Fruit picking’ and ‘Pick your own’, are something commonly seen on hand painted signs still wedged in hedges and gateways across rural East Anglia and the Fens, it was and is part of a year long routine in Norfolk, especially with summer...

Lost in a landscape: Little Witchingham

There's a sea of barley, the horizon a shadowed thin night cloud line of trees. In the late afternoon heat this far from the coast there's no wind, no air sucked in by the heated land to move the thorned tops. Everything is calm. The summer hasn't advanced enough to...

Lost in a Landscape – Lyng Easthaugh

Lyng Easthaugh The lands to the west of Norwich have only a passing familiarity for me. I grew up in north-east Norfolk where I recognise the landscape facets and how they fit together pretty well, the marl pits and churches and the little winding roads that dip in...

Lost in a landscape: Edingthorpe – Rising toward the surface

The cloud has almost boiled back, the sun chasing a lowering and disintegrating weak ridge of low pressure, there's a space for early summer between it and the next low dragging in from the south west. Temperatures are rising into those of a late summer day, yet it's...

LOST IN A LANDSCAPE

Hidden corners, holloways, tracks, and desertion in the deep landscape.

Lost in a landscape: Barton Turf

Lost in a landscape: Barton Turf

Barton Turf – White light and angels. It rained, my god how it rained. A bank holiday hex hanging over Easter. And typically the patterns of various occupations in one household left me on my own staring at a refracted sodden world as the cars trundling along Aylsham...

read more
Lost in a Landscape: Scottow

Lost in a Landscape: Scottow

Memory has a strange tonal range. There are sparks of colour in between the washes of grey and flat spots of black or white. I have a very distinct memory of first learning to ride a bike. Oddly for some reason that escapes me, it wasn’t at the hands of a parent...

read more
Lost in a Landscape: Stratton Strawless

Lost in a Landscape: Stratton Strawless

Stratton Strawless There is this thing were you travel through a landscape, passing things, that have become lost, part of the blur of the countryside, the unnoticed facets of a landscape which sit just back, away from our arterial routes cut as they are by human...

read more
Lost in a Landscape: Wayland Wood

Lost in a Landscape: Wayland Wood

There is a darkness in woodland, hiding in the shade of the green canopy, something that retracts in the sunlight in the corner of your vision, beyond the growing and shrinking of the shadows, the greening, then yellowing, then bareness, with each revolution of the...

read more
Lost in a Landscape: Trunch

Lost in a Landscape: Trunch

There’s a lot in a name, Trunch has one that doesn't fit in in Norfolk, or in fact in England. Locally it sits uneasily with the profusion of ~hams and ~tons, and ~bys and ~thorps. East Anglia’s toponymy is that of the invaded, repeatedly settled. People who move into...

read more
Lost in a Landscape: Rich pickings – Swafield

Lost in a Landscape: Rich pickings – Swafield

Swafield and Bradfield ‘Fruit picking’ and ‘Pick your own’, are something commonly seen on hand painted signs still wedged in hedges and gateways across rural East Anglia and the Fens, it was and is part of a year long routine in Norfolk, especially with summer...

read more
Lost in a landscape: Little Witchingham

Lost in a landscape: Little Witchingham

There's a sea of barley, the horizon a shadowed thin night cloud line of trees. In the late afternoon heat this far from the coast there's no wind, no air sucked in by the heated land to move the thorned tops. Everything is calm. The summer hasn't advanced enough to...

read more
Lost in a Landscape – Lyng Easthaugh

Lost in a Landscape – Lyng Easthaugh

Lyng Easthaugh The lands to the west of Norwich have only a passing familiarity for me. I grew up in north-east Norfolk where I recognise the landscape facets and how they fit together pretty well, the marl pits and churches and the little winding roads that dip in...

read more
Last breath: Rosary Cemetery

Last breath: Rosary Cemetery

Rosary Cemetery My inclination was to put this into the hidden history category, but then I remembered how often I end up sauntering around with people I've never met, but whose names I can see, in the light and shadows of trees and bushes and stone and thought it all...

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Lost in a Landscape – Blickling Arborglyphs

Lost in a Landscape – Blickling Arborglyphs

Dogs lead sometimes, our is beige, stinks, is opinionated and prefers woods to beaches, muck and leaf mould to sand and pebbles. There's more to sniff and mark an roll in in woods and fox shit beats dead gull hands down in the scent masking stakes for some...

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Coasting – Bacton

Coasting – Bacton

Bacton; a place name to conjure with if you know North East Norfolk's emptier fringe. A confusing piece of coast where as you move north of Happisburgh; the cliff drops and as it swings further round and there is a vale where Walcott sits. A series of tiny villages...

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VANISHING POINTS

The Landscapes of the Western Front

Vanishing Point: Dartmoor – father and son

Vanishing Point: Dartmoor – father and son

There's a focus, out there. You'll see it in most cemeteries on the old front. The famous dead, the men, and boys who achieve some infamy by dint of their bravery, age or circumstances. Sometimes it's a footballer who scored big in 1912 before signing away four years,...

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Vanishing Point: Bernafay Wood

Vanishing Point: Bernafay Wood

Bernafay Wood After Carnoy the cloud started to drop, a shield of it obliterated the sun. Within twenty minutes the light had almost completely failed, the air filled with prickles of moisture. It took a good hour to lift as the edge of a small front slid in from the...

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Vanishing point: Courcelette

Vanishing point: Courcelette

I've been fortunate at times out on the front, walking the levelled trenches, across the flattened shell holes and in the regrown woods. You meet people, some you know via the curious enmeshed world of social media, shared interests in a shared space eventually made...

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Vanishing Point: Carnoy to Montauban

Vanishing Point: Carnoy to Montauban

I'm not far from here. Sitting in a hotel room on a laptop, near a roundabout and Le McDonalds, watching a dubbed film which was bad enough in English in the first place. So I thought I'd start doing something apart from lazy hotel drinking. Carnoy is just to the...

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Lost boys: Sid Northrop

Lost boys: Sid Northrop

I recently rediscovered this. It was something I'd put on Flickr. It is the tale of another family member and his last few days and hours in the Great War. We visited the panel he is remembered on at Tyne Cot a couple of years ago. He was my grandmother Jesse Parr's...

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Urbanism

Walking the old streets

Lost in music

Lost in music

A few years ago I did an album a day thing on social media, not entirely sure why on reflection, I guess it passed the time and time does passes. Music behaves as a bit of a catalogue or bookmark of favourite, or not so favourite, passages – it's part of our timeline,...

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Jess Macdonald

Jess Macdonald

For anyone who knew her - especially from the old Twitter mob, Jess Macdonald (@Jessikart) left us late in the evening of Tuesday the 2nd of January. She passed with her mum Meryl and her sister Abi by her side. She was one of my best friends, a funny, feisty, riot...

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Hidden history

What you don’t always sense

Finding Crome

Finding Crome

Nick Stone is a contemporary photographer, writer and visual artist, he is the creative mind behind ‘Crome’s Norwich: 1821-2021‘, a photographic exhibition on display at the Museum of Norwich exploring the artist John Crome’s relationship with his native city. It...

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Walking the past: St Georges Street – Part Two

Walking the past: St Georges Street – Part Two

Once you get past the nexus of Vikings, Lollards, and antifa missionaries. You are faced with a recent piece of change – a set of traffic lights which supplanted a pedestrian subway much beloved by lots of local photographers, graffiti artists, pooling rainwater,...

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The Walled City

The flint and water circle

The Walled City 4: St Augustines Gate

The Walled City 4: St Augustines Gate

This used to be the back wall of Magpie Print. I remember it being an inside; the inside of a building full of printing gear with 'Mudpie Bob' as we called him at the helm steering it. The trade seas were rough, from letterpress through to photolitho. I used to help...

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The Walled City 3: Pockthorpe gate and Norwich city wall

The Walled City 3: Pockthorpe gate and Norwich city wall

Barrack Street is pretty dull inmost respects these days, a humdrum piece of grey carriageway winding through crossings and traffic islands as it links the Magdalen Street flyover to the nexus; Mousehold, Plumstead, Kett's Heights or along Riverside. It is the epitome...

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