Some Dorset Landscapes

From Colmer's Hill near Bridport

Here is a little gallery of some of the photographs I took while we were away in Dorset over Easter. Some were taken with my iPhone, and some with the Fuji X-T1. I think you'd be hard put to say which was which at this scale and resolution, and even as modestly-sized prints the differences are noticeable only to the most highly critical eye. Obviously, the main advantage, practically-speaking, of the Fuji is the ability to change aperture and focal length, in this case by using the excellent Fujinon 18-55mm f/2.8-4 "kit zoom", the best all-round lens I've ever had the pleasure of using.

On Hardown Hill, near Morcombelake

Lyme Bay during Storm Noa

(on the horizon you can see what the Cobb is for)

On Stonebarrow Hill, looking west towards Lyme Bay

On Stonebarrow Hill, looking East

On Pilsden Pen looking south

(highest hill in Dorset)

On Pilsden Pen looking east

(rampart and ditch of the hillfort in the foreground)

Seatown Beach

Lyme Regis during Storm Noa

Engraved window at Montacute House

This pane of glass in a window at Montacute is inscribed with some Latin verse, engraved in 1770 (and presumably also composed) by the then owner of the house, Edward Phelips, using a diamond-tipped stylus. It begins with the lines:

Felix cui mentis Vis & Divinior Ardor

Intima Naturae pandere sacra dedit

Qui potuit Causas Scrutari & foedera rerum

Qui Newtone tuis gressibus ire Comes

and has been translated as:

Happy is the man who has a sharp mind and a spiritual passion

To reveal the innermost secrets of Nature

Who can grasp the causes and relationships of things,

Who can walk in the footsteps of Newton.

Yet happy too is the man who cares for his fields,

And who knows the many riches of his garden;

Who has learned how to graft trees

So that each may thrive in its soil,

Who knows which grow best in the rich mud

And ooze of the bog, and which flourish on the stony ridges,

Which shun the biting cold of the north wind

And which come into leaf up among the snows of Scythia.

Do not scorn or despise this humble toil;

For it is the concern of the Great Creator himself.

Do not seek Him only amid the stars in the sky;

For it is in the small things of life that you may find God.

(Translation by Peter Hill)

This upmarket tagging of windows seems to have been a bit of an 18th century fad, but I must admit I would not have expected to see Newton invoked by a member of the landed gentry in this way. The reference to Scythia – not exactly a near neighbour to Dorset – leads me to suspect that this may be an adaptation of some classical pastoral poem, but I know very little about Latin poetry or its conventions, which are rather different from those of English poetry, and don't mean to start finding out now. A quick google draws a blank (nothing in the Georgics, for example).

It's an interesting reflection, though, that the ability to compose verse in Latin would have been an expected and unremarkable outcome of the education of the more intelligent male members of a relatively undistinguished landed family. Like most grammar-school pupils in the 1960s I studied Latin at school for five years, and passed my O-Level exam with the top grade, but for me simply to parse this little poem aided by a "crib" [1] is a tough enough challenge; actually to compose anything similar is way beyond my capacity. Even the simplest Latin inscription or motto can be baffling, as they tend to be truncated allusions to "famous" passages in classical literature or in scripture, and exploit the brevity of Latin's grammatical and poetical conventions which defy easy comprehension. It is always embarrassing to be put on the spot, when looking at the memorials in some church or stately home: "So, you know Latin, don't you? What does all that hocus-pocus mean?"

And yet Latin was once the lingua franca of the educated classes (although Greek seems always to have carried more prestige among actual classicists). It is easy to forget that Newton's major scientific works were written in Latin, not English, for example, or that English poets like John Milton once produced a parallel Latin-language body of work that is now inaccessible and unknown to most of us and yet was often well-regarded in its day. Ben Jonson's snootiness about Shakespeare's "small Latin, and less Greek" in his eulogy in the First Folio of 1623 is notorious (and possibly misunderstood), but the move towards the use of vernacular languages that could be understood by all literate folk was already unstoppably under way, exemplified in Britain by the various translations into English of the Bible, culminating in the "King James Version" of 1611. Today, the prestige of the ancient languages and their double function as a barrier and a bridge into the higher realms of education and knowledge has faded: I think most of us are far more impressed and mystified by fluency in mathematics, that peculiar and difficult language that, unlike poetry, actually seems to make things happen [2].

Churchyard at Symondsbury

(yes, the yellow plaque does read "Danger of Death"...)

1. A slightly suspect crib, too... Isn't "Newtone" the vocative case ("O Newton!"), for example, and  "tuis" = "yours"? I could easily be wrong, though. As that great translator from the classics Alexander Pope wrote: "A little learning is a dang'rous thing; / Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring" (An Essay on Criticism). Wait, Pierian Spring? WTF? Wikipedia to the rescue!

2. W.H. Auden, Part II of "In Memory of W.B. Yeats":

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:

The parish of rich women, physical decay,

Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.

Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives

In the valley of its making where executives

Would never want to tamper, flows on south

From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,

Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,

A way of happening, a mouth.