A PROLIFIC PEAR TREE IN AN OLD ORCHARD

I found this wonderful crop of pears on a very large tree in an orchard which apparently has not been cultivated for over fifty years. The plums in my previous post were from the same site, which has also produced great amounts of other varieties, including greengages, various types of apple and a great abundance of damsons.

Sand Lizards Courting - Great picture from the Ukraine by young phographer Alexey Timoshenko

"Botany Bay", South Worcestershire, 1 May 2011

Kempsey Common and environs, near Worcester

From the Worcester Standard newspaper 1 April 2011 Archbishop dedicates eco-friendly church

The Archbishop of Canterbury paid a visit to the County to dedicate a new eco-friendly church at Mucknell Abbey. Dr Rowan Williams dedicated the church, which has been built from locally-sourced sustainable materials, on Friday (25 March) at the Abbey near Stoulton....

Abbot Stuart said: " We have a lovely new building. Now we are setting about developing the 40 acres of land in a way which will model that loving care for the world. Already we have planted an orchard and several thousand trees as part of the restoration of Feckenham Forest*, and we have begun work on our own large kitchen garden".

*Also known as the Forest of Worcester - please see my subsequent post @ http://woodwose.wordpress.com/

Crookbarrow Road, Brockhill Village, Worcestershire (2010)

The numinous landscape of South Worcestershire, shown here in the Malvern Hills, has long been the inspiration for music, of which Elgar's is the outstanding example, and poetry, including the less well-known Poly-Olbion - please see my other post for today @ http://woodwose.wordpress.com/

However, the wider landscape context created by the Malverns, the Severn Valley and Bredon Hill, an outlier of the Cotswolds, has perhaps not received the cultural attention it merits. I have, therefore, resumed a longstanding personal project focused on Crookbarrow Hill, at the edge of Worcester, as the starting point for an exploration of this cultural landscape.

Incidentally, the slow progress of this project is largely due to my involvement in various spatial planning sagas - see
www.crookbarrow.com/
http://crookbarrow.wordpress.com/
http://smartlimits2growth.wordpress.com/
In case the slow pace continues I've decided to publish the introduction :

MESSAGES FROM THE MOUND

A Cultural Study of Crookbarrow Hill

Introduction
For some years now I have intended to write a history of Crookbarrow Hill, but the time has never been right. Today, 30 October 2010, I resumed “The Green Man Project” blog with a post (see below) on “The Story of Silbury Hill”, a book recently published by English Heritage which suggests that Europe’s largest man-made mound may have been developed over many centuries as part of an even more extensive landscape project in what is now the Avebury World Heritage site in Wiltshire. My own intuition is that the man-moulded mound known variously as Crookbarrow Hill, Brockhill and the Whittington Tump, next to Junction 7 of the M5 Motorway in Worcestershire is also part of a much larger ancient landscape discourse, I shall call it: a “big conversation” extending back into prehistory circumscribed to the west by the Malvern Hills, to the east by Bredon Hill, and with the Severn River providing the north-south axis.

Having at last set the scene for “A Cultural Study of Crookbarrow Hill”, I shall explain why I have chosen this intellectual form of inquiry rather than a more straightforward historical account, or the cultural history which I also considered. The reasons for this in part reflect my academic education in both English literary and urban and regional planning studies, and the fact that I am neither a historian nor an archaeologist. I also have a strong interest in depth psychology, particularly Jungian, in contemporary green spirituality, in the historical relationship between the Christian religion and Britain’s pagan legacy, and in what are widely known as “earth mysteries”, including ley lines. More mundanely, I am concerned with how modern society, and more specifically government agencies, value and protect the historic environment in different parts of the British Isles, especially in England and Wales. “A Cultural Study”, therefore, seems to lend itself best to the diversity of my interests and, indeed, to the intellectual plurality of perspectives inspired by the visual panorama from Crookbarrow Hill itself.

The study is intended to cover the following issues and themes:

• Description of Crookbarrow Hill at the present time
• The numinous landscapes of South Worcestershire
• Seasonal festivals, religious events and local folklore
• Wider interpretations of the role of hill barrows etc
• Depth psychology and Earth Mysteries movement
• Future management of Crookbarrow and environs*

* These are presently used for horse pasture: see my recent post @ http://horsework.wordpress.com/ In short, there is no management of Crookbarrow Hill and environs by the relevant agencies, in sad contrast to the attention given to ancient sites elsewhere. Perhaps the main reason for this is that Crookbarrow Hill falls within an area identified for urban development at the present time.

THE STORY OF SILBURY HILL is a new publication by English Heritage which explores the development of the largest prehistoric mound in Europe. Latest research suggests that construction of Silbury Hill may have taken place over many centuries as part of the unfoldment of an "unconscious collective" master plan for the wider landscape of Avebury. As such, "The Avebury Project" might be interpreted as the co-operative work of prehistoric society's "Collective Unconscious"*, and a message in a mound for modern man.

* A term coined by Carl Jung

The Urban Rural Fringe

The followings abstract refers to "Prospects for the Rural-Urban Fringe in Australia : Observations from a Brief History of the Landscapes around Sydney and Adelaide" by
Raymond Bunker and Peter Houston, published by Blackwells in 2003 :

Despite being a major site of recent population growth and, arguably, a key arena for sustainability concerns, the rural-urban fringe has received relatively little attention in the literature concerning Australian cities and urban policy. To address this shortcoming the authors review post-World War II efforts to plan the rural-urban fringes of Sydney and Adelaide and find a number of issues for contemporary policy-makers. First, the fringe is becoming increasingly complex due to multi-faceted demographic change, a broadening economic base and demands for better environmental management, all within the context of an evolving understanding of sustainability. Second, water resource management, partly under the auspices of integrated natural resource management, is assuming a much higher priority than in early fringe planning endeavours, which emphasised urban containment, agricultural land protection and landscape conservation. Third, and partly as a consequence of this shift of priorities, there is also evidence of changes to the nature and focus of policy tools used in the fringe, with land management concerns now cutting across traditional land use planning. Finally, and fundamentally, these observations raise questions about how future governance of the fringe should be organised. Together these four themes pose an enthralling series of challenges for policy-makers for which much more research and discussion are needed.

Stonehenge : Settlement Found

The discovery of an ancient settlement near Stonehenge is a timely reminder of the importance of archaeological conservation :

Neolithic site found near Stonehenge
31/01/2007 06:11
By Patricia Reaney
LONDON (Reuters) - Evidence of a large settlement full of houses dating back to 2,600 BC has been discovered near the ancient stone monument of Stonehenge, scientists said on Tuesday.
They suspect inhabitants of the houses, forming the largest Neolithic village ever found in Britain, built the stone circle at Stonehenge -- generally thought to have been a temple, burial ground or an astronomy site -- between 3,000 and 1,600 BC.

Crookbarrow Farm “Regeneration” and Battenhall to Norton “Green Corridor” Proposals

This paper summarises 2 possible “rural-urban fringe” projects, to the south east of the city of Worcester, and adjoining areas of Wychavon district. These projects are :

• “Regeneration” of Crookbarrow Farm, Whittington
  
• Creation of a Battenhall to Norton “Green Corridor”*
  * The “Corridor” is focussed on the area between the A44 (to the north) and the railway line (to the south). The M5 roughly bisects this.
  

1. “Regeneration” of Crookbarrow Farm
Crookbarrow Farm is home to the “Whittington Tump” or “Crookbarrow”. According to Jabez Allies “Antiquities and Folklore of Worcestershire” (2nd edition 1852): “Cruckbarrow Hill is rather larger than Silbury Hill in Wiltshire. Silbury Hill is said to be perfectly artificial, but Cruckbarrow only partially so”. Noakes Guide to Worcestershire (1868) also notes that Crookbarrow Hill is “one of the largest tumuli (supposed) in England". Before World War II, and prior to the construction of the M5 motorway (Junction 7 is a few hundred metres from the Crookbarrow), the Tump (or mound) was an important focus for the local community. A history of Whittington by Michael Craze, published in 1977 to celebrate the Queen’s Silver Jubilee (which involved a night time gathering with torches at Crookbarrow Farm) mentions that “the older recalled similar crowds on Good Friday…when the Worcester custom was to walk out and picnic on the top” as well as “…the Whit Monday Fair on Whittington Tump”. However, in recent years both Tump and Farm have suffered the “degeneration” typical of rural-fringe areas, with the added problem of noise/pollution and severance caused by road construction/traffic.

2. Battenhall to Norton “Green Corridor”
Current proposals to build a bus park and ride facility in Battenhall, and a rail park-way in Norton (ie at either end of the “Green Corridor”), and associated plans to increase the capacity of the local road network, would compound existing pressures on Crookbarrow Hill and Farm, and adjoining areas which also have important archaeological and historic environment value. Indeed, the “sub-text” of transport proposals would seem to suggest plans to expand the City of Worcester into these areas, as happened with Warndon Villages (also a place of high landscape value, although much of this is now subsumed under residential and – rather poorly designed - commercial developments). It is proposed here that the relevant authorities re-consider their transport proposals (the objectives and status eg funding of these is anyway unclear), and consider instead sustainable “regeneration” (as broadly defined, for instance, by English Heritage) of the Battenhall to Norton Green Corridor. This would involve investment in measures to improve conservation of the historic landscape, including its ongoing management, and to enhance public access, in ways compatible with such conservation aims.

version 1 1.9.2006