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

CLIMATE CHANGE, TRANSPORT AND MODERN LIFE

Last Sunday afternoon, I took a cycle and walk around Kempsey Common, several miles south Worcester, with my camera: please see pictures in my photo-post of yesterday. Notwithstanding its "deep rural" appearance, this area is actually bisected by the M5 motorway, which is a mere stone's throw from the beautiful thatched cottage shown in the second photograph.

My first visit to Kempsey Common was in 2002, when I met an elderly man pushing his bicycle, on which he had travelled from Worcester for recreation. He also enjoyed allotment gardening. However, whilst there is some indication that during the past nine years the latter activity has grown in popularity and that demand for allotments exceeds supply, I do not detect much increase in cycling to nearby beauty spots amongst Worcester folk. Indeed I saw very few people at all on Sunday afternoon, although there seemed to be a lot of traffic on the motorway.

Also noteworthy was the heat of the day and the dryness of the ground, almost as if Winter had passed rapidly into Summer. Nevertheless, observable climate change and the underlying need to conserve energy for the environment and domestic economy do not appear to be reducing people's desire for motorised travel mobility.

One reason for this, I would suggest, is the modern psyche's need for distraction of the kind provided by the car journey together with England's main weekend leisure activity: shopping. Self-directed unstructured activity in natural surroundings is, increasingly, not just beyond the capacity of the young to enjoy, but also many of their elders, which is a great shame.

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/

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.

"Small is Still Beautiful"

This book, by Joseph Pearce, appeared in 2001, one of a number of visionary works published around the turn of the millennium, which somehow seem to have been lost in the culture of size matters which has grown evermore in recent years. "Small is Still Beautiful" has a foreward by Barbara Wood, the daughter of E F Schumacher, who wrote the better known and certainly more influential "Small is Beautiful" in the 1970s. Yet Joseph Pearce's book is very well written, and endorced by key figures from the green, co-operative and social enterprise movements. In short, it is definitely worth a read, and it will certainly make you think.

For this reason (ie incitement to serious thinking), "Small is Still Beautiful" would not be welcomed in New Labour circles. As a the previous editor of the New Statesman, Peter Wilby, noted after his tenure there came to an end :

"New Labour welcomed ideas only within very tight boundaries, most of them technocratic rather than inspirational. New Labour is a tightly-corseted suburban party, and almost everyone connected with it - in academia as well as in Westminster - keeps the curtain tightly drawn lest the neighbours catch them running wild with ideas..." (Guardian 12.9.05)

However, this observation, I would suggest, applies not only to New Labour but also to wider society, including much of the environmental movement, with regard to green issues today.

Last year, whilst attending a planning inquiry a serious green man, whom I have known for many years, expressed the view to me that it was easier before the concept of "sustainable development" came into being. Whilst I find this concept useful, on the one hand, as something which encourages joined up thinking about environmental issues, and their relationship with economic and social considerations, I also found myself agreeing with my aquaintance.

I will use this analogy from the area regeneration context. On the radio last week, it was reported that representatives from UNESCO (?the United Nations Educational Science and Cultural Organisation) were to visit Liverpool to ascertain whether development proposals for the waterfront area were compatible with this part of the city's status as a World Heritage Site.
A man from the local preservation society spoke very eloquently on this theme - in fact the society had "called in" UNESCO - and also said, with some passion, that whilst he greatly welcomed "regeneration", funding associated with this seemed to have brought with it "a load of carpet baggers". The same, I feel, is true of funding associated with "sustainable development".

My feeling is that the "sustainable development" community (if there is such as thing), which began with strong links to the environmental and green movements now also plays host to "a load of carpetbaggers", which is not to say that, as with area regeneration, some excellent work is not being done.

Many environmentalists and greens have been suspicious - rightly so in my opinion - of large funding streams, whether from public or private sources, which may divert their "resources" from core areas of work. This is not to say that large projects and funding streams do not have their place.

However, in my view "Small is Still Beautiful" whether - and perhaps especially - in an over developed country such as our own, or in developing/less developed countries still very much applies. With regard to the latter, the award of the Nobel Peace Prize for 2006, divided into two equal parts, to Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank for their efforts to create economic and social development from below would surely have won the approval of E H Schumacher, and be hailed as good news by Joseph Pearce. Mohammad Yunus, an economist from Bangladesh, and the Grameen Bank which he founded, are world leaders in the provision of micro-credit.