Category: Travels in the South West

These blogs are mainly travels and visits in the South West, but they may take place elsewhere. They are usually about a special kind of place, but that will be different for different people. If we are lucky it will be where we live, if not we may spend time getting to where the poetry of place happens for us, it could be beaches, cafes, moor.

And we need to have to have the means to get to where a poetry of place happens to us. There’s buses, trains, bicycles, on foot…

Bude Connect: Latest

Bude is a train desert, it is farther from a mainline station than practically any other place in England. So, you have to be pretty determined to get there.

Now as of the last couple of years there is now an organisation, grass roots, to connect Bude with the world. It is ‘Connect Bude’ made of local people who know a thing or two about railways and engineering.

We had a meeting in October in the Falcon Hotel next to the Canal in Bude which looks practically straight out to sea across the Atlantic Ocean where the surf rolls in day in and day out and is a favourite surfing beach with a major surfing culture. And this day was no exception, the sun was shining it was mild and people were swimming in the sea in late October. It was inspiring. And it was beautiful.

Budleigh Salterton Literary Festival 2024

BUDLEIGH SALTERTON LITERARY FESTIVAL Sept 21 24 Blog by Lynne Pearl The sun was brilliant and the gardens beside the Temple Mount Methodist church in Budleigh were resplendent, the sun was so strong.  We might have been in Greece, the sea was nearby.  But we were in a small seaside town in the far South…

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Agatha Christie Literary Festival, Torquay

I was invited to the Agatha Christie Literary Festival in Torquay, South West, by a friend who had tickets for a range of talks. We were going to ‘Lost Lingo’ a talk by author, Kate Kingold from Chicago. I had arrived on the little branch line train from Exeter. It’s like stepping into a novel arriving in Torquay when you leave the period station which is all curly Victorian metalwork and beautiful ornamental pillars, you can immediately see the sea. This day it was the deepest of blue and above a pellucid blue sky with one or two puffy white clouds. The sea was restless in the wind, but the sun was very bright for an autumn day.

Dartmoor Mountains

I found my way back, I just retraced my steps and found familiar bushes and dried up stream, and the stone wall. There was the gate I had opened. It was still there. I was not lost. There was sun everywhere and the bigness of the sky and the space of the moor, which always inspires poetry. As in ‘ROAD TRIP RIVER VOICES.’

The Amazing Art of Cath Whitehead

Cath does the same with her depictions of the countryside of Devon, with the light falling on the red soil churned in furrows by the plough and the sea as it sits moodily in a steep sided estuary. Trees become painted as giant friends, with almost a personality they are so firm and present to the viewer. The intrusion of the human world in the form of architecture becomes monumental and reduced to the bare minimum.

Cleeve Abbey, Somerset

We parked the car where it was dry and approached the area on foot. The first building we came to was a gatehouse and there was a notice there from the ‘Almoner’ to say that this was where food was given to the poor. The monks helped the local people when they were in trouble, needed food. Then beyond the gatehouse there is nothing until one reaches a building that looks like a later farm house. A drainage ditch or water supply leads from the gatehouse to the main buildings or the ruins of them that are left.

Spring Hawthorne

HAWTHORNE IN BLOOM
I was walking along the River in Somerset and there ,so early in the year ,was this Hawthorne, a whole tree ablaze against an azure sky. It seemed unreal after months of grey. But it was real. Cicely Mary Barker said in her poem illustrated by her painting of the Hawthorne fairy that the Hawthorne is the first. It is brave and forges ahead.

Poetry From A Railway Car

Robert Louis Stevenson in 1885 wrote, in ‘A Child’s Garden of Verses.’ :

From a Railway Carriage
‘Faster than fairies, faster than witches,
Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches…

Bude, Cornwall in Winter

The wind is everywhere and the sky is over and above and the turf under your feet on the headland is springy. From here, there is a flag pole, and monument that tells you how far it is to the nearest land, and where. It is North America with thousands of miles of sea between. There is the fullness and the emptiness.

Its’ beauty just goes on and on and the world and any cares no longer exist and there is just this beauty and then not even that, just infinity and peace.