There are a few places that I make a pilgrimage to regularly, where I have a kinship and need to pay homage.  These places are all clustered around three key areas in the South West of England, the Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, Purbeck Isle in Dorset and Glastonbury in Somerset.  However as I was writing the article to include all the places in those areas it turned out to be far too long, so I decided to make this a three part article.  Today’s article is part one of three and starts with the area closest to home – the Salisbury Plain.

Salisbury Plain

Avebury Stone Avenue - Copyright R.Weal 2010

In, on and around the Salisbury Plain there are a lot of wonderful ancient monuments and sites of historic significance and beautiful landscapes, gardens and breathtaking views.  I love these places and always have done since I was a young child.  Brought up in a family where an appreciation for the richness of history and culture was consistently reinforced and encouraged meant that I was exposed to historic places like Avebury, Silbury Hill, Stonehenge and Kennet Long Barrow on a regular basis.  An appreciation for the beauty and awe inspiring power of nature was bred by numerous visits to places like Stourhead, run by the National Trust and Heaven’s Gate and Shearwater Lake, which are both on the Longleat Estate.

Something about the feats that the builders of the monuments at Avebury, Silbury Hill, Stonehenge and Kennet Long Barrow achieved lent an air of stupefied solemnity to me even as a young child.  I never pass them without a feeling of reverence and pride that I have lived most of my life amongst them and that others travel hundreds of miles for just a glimpse of them and yet right now I drive past them all every day on my way to and from work.

Sunset Stone at Avebury - Copyright R.Weal 2010

Of them all Avebury is the closest to my heart, a place to go and contemplate, the nearest place I have to a church, where I can commune with nature and the power of the Earth itself.  A place where you might find me on the night of a full moon making offerings to concepts bigger than myself.  During the day it is a place I love to have my camera at hand, to capture the desolate beauty of the surrounding countryside, offset against the magnificence of the Avenue and Rings of Stones.  A truly magical and mysterious place that everyone should visit at least once in their life.

When it comes to sheer appreciation of beautiful views I cannot choose between Heaven’s Gate, Shearwater Lake and Stourhead.  All three have very different aspects that I enjoy.

Heaven's Gate Ring - Copyright R.Weal 2007

With Heaven’s Gate most people visit to see the magnificent view down onto the Longleat Estate, but most quickly come to realise that there is so much more to this area, which becomes a riot of colour with the rhododendrons in the spring, the effervescent green of the summer and the autumnal perfection with the turning of the leaves come early October and even in winter the views are quite stunning!  Added to this is the the addition of the Stone Ring and horse shoe of standing stones which were erected as part of the Millennium celebrations.  It’s a beautiful spot for contemplation, photography and an appreciation of the beauty of the British countryside.

As a child we would visit Heaven’s Gate every year for the spring Rhododendrons and the autumnal procession.  I remember thinking it must be some sort of magical place where fairies and angels lived to be called Heaven’s Gate.  In my youth I never quite understood that it was the beauty of the place and it’s views that had lent it such an auspicious name.

Shearwater is a beautiful man made fresh water lake that sits on the outskirts of the Longleat Estate. It’s popular for fishing, sailing, walking, cycling and of course photography.  Shearwater is situated nicely between Longleat and Warminster in a picturesque area of Wiltshire on the cusp of the Deverills at Crockerton.

Last Peek (Shearwater Lake) - Copyright R.Weal 2010

The lake is surrounded by many beautiful specimens of deciduous and evergreen trees and shrubs/bushes such as Rhododendrons.  There’s lots of wildlife on and in the lake, from the fresh water fish – carp, bream, roach, perch, tench and rudd to the many water fowl – Canada geese, ducks and sea gulls.  In the woods the sharp eyed will see numerous grey squirrels and if you’re lucky you might even spot a deer or two peeking out from the dense foliage of ferns.

As a child I used to love running free through the small forest that skirts the lake, walking with my family as my Dad explained things about nature that I found absolutely fascinating and he would make me walking sticks, tickle my back with assorted pieces of foliage and engender a great love and affinity for the woodland around me.  When I visit there these days I am often with camera in hand, but the child within me still has the urge to run wild through the forests and I am transported back to simpler times.

Palladian Bridge and Pantheon view through the trees at Stourhead - Copyright R.Weal 2006

Stourhead was always a full day out.  A beautiful house and managed gardens (I didn’t really appreciate the house as a child).  My sisters and I used to love running through this beautiful garden estate which has various exotic and local varieties of trees some of which date back to the mid 1700s and were planted right at the garden’s inception by Henry Hoare II.  It was Henry who had the gardens designed and created between 1741 and 1780 in a classical 18th Century design, with a central lake as a focal point.  The inspiration for the gardens came from painters such as Claude Lorrain, Poussin and most notably Gaspar Dughet, who painted Utopian style views of Italian landscapes.

The gardens must have been a great labour of love for him and it shows through the attention to detail and the feeling you get of effortlessly walking from one world to the next, so masterfully planned and deliciously executed. Trees and shrubs were brought in from all over the world and successive generations of Hoares added to and enhanced the gardens until it was passed on to the National Trust in 1946 who have continued to care for the house and develop the gardens.

Palladian Bridge in twilight (Stourhead) - Copyright R.Weal 2006

On the surface it would seem that Stourhead bears much in common with Shearwater Lake, a lake at the heart, surrounded by woodland, but Stourhead is a much more controlled and deliberate environment than Shearwater.  This both adds to and detracts from it – the sense of raw, untameable beauty I experienced in the Shearwater Lake forest is missing, but the beautifully crafted temples, bridges and grotto that are dotted throughout the gardens enhance the sense of otherworldliness and a magical timelessness.  The exotic trees and shrubs bring to life vistas many would never have seen without the efforts of the Hoare family.

As a child Stourhead was a place of exploration and adventure, a place to let lose knowing that your parents were just a little way back along the path.  A place to picnic and eat ice-cream in the Spread Eagle Inn just outside the gardens.  I always seem to “glow” when I visit Stourhead, as an adult there are just too many images to capture and like Shearwater Lake and Heaven’s gate spring brings a riot of colour through the Rhododendrons and Autumn is a spectacle of red and gold.

I feel peaceful and right when I’m at Stourhead and that’s a feeling that everyone should be able to experience and cherish.

Well that’s it for this instalment, I hope you enjoyed my memories of the places I love on the Salisbury plain and perhaps I’ve whetted your appetite for a visit.  Don’t forget to watch out for part two of my places of pilgrimage – The Purbeck Isle, where I’ll explore some of my most treasured holiday memories.

Sleep tight pilgrims, see you on the next wagon train.

Wealie
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The Isle of Purbeck
Glastonbury

Don’t get me wrong, the great moments are obviously important, they shape our views and opinions, send us down one path and close off another forever, but we only ever exist in a finite space and time and those great moments are over almost before they’ve begun.   I live right here, right now, in this space, in this very moment – I’ll likely remember it for the rest of tonight, I may remember it tomorrow, maybe even in a week, but the clarity of it will surely fade with time, because the importance of this moment was fairly low in the scheme of my life. But like all the memories I have of keeping this blog, it will join the amalgam of feelings I am building, of the contentment and catharsis, the joy and fulfilment that I associate with this space where I freely share something of my art, my views and feelings.

Maybe an example will help clarify my meaning!  I can’t remember every experience of writing or painting, but I remember painting Convergence after my Nan died, how that individual piece helped me to make sense of my feelings.  Then there’s the poem “Witness to the Storm” that was such a powerful and liberating experience of writing my very spirit and essence onto the page in a visceral and enlightening experience.   Those two memories stand out loud and proud, they were pivotal pieces of art that happened and became defining moments in my life, but even as important as they are, they fail to match the overriding sense of purpose, rightness, contentment, catharsis and achievement that my experiences as a whole of creating art over the years of my life has given me.  That body of work to date started as early as 7, when I used to make up stories for my little sisters and comes right up to now, to this blog post I’m writing at this very moment.  Together the collective span of artistic experiences have and will continue to shape my life immeasurably, the collective emotions of those memories are far more important that one single stand out experience.

So that’s what the poem “Between the Rapture and the Ruin” is all about, those seemingly insignificant moments that make up the majority of our lives, that when brought together have the weight and gravitas to create those emotional caveats around our repeated experiences and to elevate the mundane and familiar memories to a status beyond import. The rapture tonight is my words, weaving around me, spilling forth like a font of spiced wine, captivating me as they haven’t for a while and the ruin is a picture, a place I have visited so many times in my life, a beautiful ruined castle that speaks to me on a deep and personal level – Corfe Castle in Purbeck, Dorset, on the South West coast of England.

I took this picture in 2009 on my birthday, it was a beautiful, hot, sunny day, with some truly atmospheric cloud formations that worked very well with the high contrast, black and white treatment.  It seemed a fitting picture to put with this poem.

Take a moment why don’t you to contemplate the great divide between the rapture and the ruin in your life and hopefully you’ll find something magical too, maybe even an ephemeral wisp to hold on to.

Wealie x

Corfe Castle - Copyright R.Weal 2009

BETWEEN THE RAPTURE & THE RUIN

Life is not the moments that define it
Not the rapturous joy
Nor the ruinous pain
Life is the moments in between
Each sunrise
Every sunset
Everything you have ever been and all you are not yet
The cumulative clamour of your every heartbeat
Every reckless breath
Each considered thought
All your comforting words and thoughtless taunts

Life is not the moments that define it
It is the passing through of the seasons
The time that so easily slips unnoticed through the fingers
The complete volume of all your tears both sorrow and joy
Your every seasoned plan or Machiavellian ploy
Each tremulous smile
Every small slight
The sum of all your warm kisses and bitter delights
Every delicate touch
Each blundered fumble
It’s every moment through which you’ve soared or tumbled

Life is not the moments that define it
It’s the passage in between
Grant me not great joy
But spare me great pain
The sincerest wish I ponder
That there is a man with whom I might wander
Who will share with me contentment
Between the rapture and the ruin
Be a part of me like a second skin
On whom I might always lean
Who’ll live with me in the ephemeral wisps of the moments in between

Ruth Weal
14 April 2008 8.22 pm

Copyright R.Weal 2008 ©

Written in an ephemeral wisp, of a moment in between

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