Saturday, November 03, 2007

Badlands and Egrets

If anyone noticed my blog absence yesterday, it was for the best of causes - I was out walking. In this case, around the fine old Kentish town of Faversham (with an amazing parish church, St Mary of Charity, that has to be seen to be believed). As so often with such time-soaked, visually rich and glorious English towns - especially towards the eastern seaboard - there's a dark and seamy netherworld just beneath the rosy surface. Faversham is closely surrounded by council (or ex-) estates that seem all the more squalid and gipsyish for being on the edge of open country. The quaint old streets of Faversham are thick with charity shops, pound shops and suchlike, and walking out of town along Faversham creek takes you through an extraordinary Dickensian marginal world - half of the water, half of the land, with bizarre houseboat-style habitations amid the rotting hulks and beached barges. As the signs of human population dwindle, a bleak, flat estuarine landscape opens up, in which it would be no surprise to see Magwich himself emerging from the mud or being rowed silently down the creek. However, at intervals one of these lands gracefully and redeems the muddy blankness... I blame global warning.

10 comments:

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  2. Great piece of writing, Nige. However, I haven't seem this amazing parish church, St Mary of Charity, and don't believe in its existence.

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  3. Here's the proof, Andrew (and proof also that it is in the hands of the modern, go-ahaed, outreaching C of E).

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  5. Where would Europe be without medieval space-age cathedrals?

    Allow me cathedral instead of church for the sake of the integral beauty and grandeur of my sentence & the significance with which it is charged.

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  6. Interesting about the egret. Never having seen one outside a zoo I saw 2 on the same day last week in South Cerney, a village just up the A419 from Swindon (which I like to think of as the Detroit of the Cotswolds). One of the local twitchers saw 2 on the same day I did and I think someone else has logged 5 at one go.

    I reckon you're right. It's that there global warming.


    Pete B

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  7. I LOVE your descriptive prose, Nige! You should be doing a novel about this place. In fact, this snippet reminds me of an atmospheric English novel I quite liked a few years ago, and it's by a painter's daughter: "The Sea House" by Esther(?) Freud.

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  8. You're right about the warming. Little egrets were quite the rarity 20 years ago. Now they're commonplace, especially along the south coast. Thorney Island is the stronghold; I have seen up to 50 there together at roost. They're also moving inland, and for the first time the other day (to my knowledge) a couple turned up at Alresford Pond.

    They are beautiful creatures. This picture was taken by my lady-friend at Chidham (W. Sussex) on Boxing Day 2004.

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  9. Thanks Susan! And Richard - a superb photo that, and these birds are indeed good to see...

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