High Points, Low Points
May. 7th, 2004 10:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pjthompsonForgive me: I'm still processing this trip and it's probably going to keep spilling over here.
Someone asked what the high point of my trip was. There were so many things that made such an impact, but I suppose if pressed I’d say the most impressive was Tintagel. The place is breathtaking, even if you don't buy into the Arthurian associations—and I'm not sure I do, although recent excavations there have produced tantalizing clues that seem to support some Arthurian-era associations.
Tintagel village is a little place, heavily influenced these days by the New Age shops, although they haven't gone completely mad with it, thank God, and it still retains some of its village feel. To get to the "castle" (13th century ruins), you have to first go down a long, steep path into a kind of seaside gorge. You can go even further down to the actual rugged beach itself with its spectacular sea-carved caves lining the cliffs, but that's a pretty strenuous climb down then back up and you'd better be prepared to get there early in the day and eat your Wheaties if you want to do both the cliffs and the castle. We wanted to see the Castle and then decide about the rest, so we turned away from the sea path and headed towards the "island" on which the castle sits. Once we'd climbed up, then down from the castle we were too tired to climb down (then back up) from the beach. Hell, we were too tired to make that steep climb back out of the gorge. We decided to say, "Screw pride" and pay the enterprising man with the Land Rover to drive us back up again.
Actually, the island is a big hunk of rock once linked to the headland by a narrow land bridge. The top of the land bridge has eroded away but the National Trust folks have erected a metal bridge for folks to cross over it. It's a steady uphill climb to get to the bridge and the day we were there was moody, gray skies, threatening rain, the wind blowing strong and cold, the sea pounding against the black rocks of the cliffs below and sending up giant spumes. Crikey! The genuine Daphne du Maurier atmospheric Cornwall experience. Perfect!
Once you've wheezed over the bridge (also an upward climb) you still have to scramble up the cliff face to get to the top of the island and the castle. I'm talking very steep steps, chipped out of the rock and then lined with slate—nearly vertical in some places. Okay, okay, okay, so there's a very sturdy, multi-layered handrail, but you do feel rather out there on the cliffs. We had to stop for many "photo ops" along the way—our running joke whenever we were seriously out of breath, begun when I actually faked photo ops earlier in the trip so no one would see how winded I was getting going up the steep hill at Chysauster. I actually raised the camera to my face for fake pictures, but later confessed what I'd done to much hilarity. (Fortunately, we scrambled up so many hills, et al., on this trip that by Tintagel I was in pretty good wind--but it was a challenge for all of us.) Was it worth the climb? You betcha.
On the island there are really layers of ruins, from 5th century Dark Age foundations, to 9th century monastic ruins, overlaid with the ruins of the 13th century castle. Apparently Richard, Earl of Cornwall, built a castle there as a show piece because even by his day the Arthurian associations at Tintagel were well known. Whenever he had important visitors, he'd send out a legion of workers a week in advance to the castle at Tintagel to bring in all the luxurious furnishings and what-not and then take people out there to show off. As soon as the visitors left, he'd remove all the good stuff and leave a small cadre of guards behind to look after the place most of the year. It was just too windswept and dramatic for a full-time presence.
And that, more than the ruins, is what makes Tintagel a magic place. Breathtaking—not just from the climb, but from the views along the coastline--black and gold slate rock topped by bright green turf, pounding surf, angry white-capped sea, gulls screaming and gyring. It's just one of those places that makes you vibrate with the raw power of nature. It made me feel insignificant while at the same time making me feel part of the continuum of nature and of the ancestors who struggled to survive in such places. It really did strip away a lot of the modern pretensions because I realized, looking at that untamed coast, that no matter what man builds up, nature has the last word. We can build our show castles, but in some places, it's a constant fight just to stay even.
Oh yeah, we have a tendency as a species to try to conquer nature, but we rarely succeed at that long-term. We can destroy a place, change it utterly to suit our short-term needs, but ultimately . . . the rust never sleeps. What was there may not come back again the way it was once we've laid our heavy hand on it, but something else will come along that we have to fight against. A place like Tintagel reminds me, if I need it, that humankind is not divorced from nature. We sometimes have the illusion that we are, but nature always has the last word. We can't survive in a world we've destroyed anymore than any other endangered species.
And speaking of places destroyed . . .
Low Point: Bath. When I visited it fifteen years ago, I really liked the place. It was a graceful, beautiful, historic city with loads of interesting things, a lovely river, well-maintained. When I visited it this time, I was distressed by the heavy invasion of American-Internationalist stores everywhere: The Gap, Starbuck's, Orvis, etc. Store after store cramming those once-graceful streets, making it like any ol' mall anywhere. I mean, I can understand the residents wanting to be part of the modern world, not wanting to live in a museum, but I think they've lost something precious along the way. I spent two days in Bath on the last trip. This trip I couldn't wait to get out of town and realized I would probably never go back again.
Fortunately, most of the things I was interested in for this trip are not heavy tourist destinations. Oh yeah, Stonehenge and Avebury. But they've managed those places really well, not let the rapacious internationalist conglomerates take over. The National Trust has kept commercialism very much to the minimum, very discreet, and I was happy to see that these sites (which I also visited fifteen years ago) had not changed much. Avebury is still the coolest because you can go right up to the stones and lay hands on them and it was a thrill, even though we were marching around them in a pouring rain. And Stonehenge…well, what you've heard is true. They seem smaller when you first get there, it's crawling with tourists. But again, they've managed it well and although you can't walk amongst the actual stones, you can get quite close to them and walk all around them. You can manage a genuine Stonehenge experience (if you keep an open mind and lowered expectations) and it can still be a mighty impressive place.
My biggest disappointment regarding Stonehenge is due to the weird, near-dissociative experience I was having in all the places I revisited from the previous trip. It was like I was seeing it through two different windows in time, having trouble sometimes jibing old with new. The first time I saw Stonehenge it was autumn, past the tourist season, and I remember driving through the undulating landscape approaching it, cresting a low hill—and there it was right by the roadside, stark and dramatic against a blue-gray sky. You still do come over a crest and see it, but they've planted a coppice of trees in the middle distance, so the dramatic effect of Stonehenge against the sky has been smudged and diminished.
Everything changes, nothing remains the same. You can't step in the same river twice. Or the same Stonehenge.
Oh, and on a writing note: I received a reply from Anna Genoese at Tor on my novel in only two weeks. =:0 The letter was waiting for me when I got home. She passed on it, but she wrote me a very encouraging personal note. She loved the title, loved the setting, thought I'd done an interesting take on vampires, but the characters didn't captivate. However, she did say she'd love (her word) to see my next work. So I'm consigning this rejection to the plus column—and really, I'm not at all upset about the rejection. No, I'm not putting a brave face on things, I'm not in denial. I truly didn't think this novel was up to snuff, but I promised myself that I'd give it one last shot (I've sent it out numerous times) and if AG passed I'd move on to other things. Like my next work, my just-completed novel, the one I may well send to her when I've got it polished up.
Someone asked what the high point of my trip was. There were so many things that made such an impact, but I suppose if pressed I’d say the most impressive was Tintagel. The place is breathtaking, even if you don't buy into the Arthurian associations—and I'm not sure I do, although recent excavations there have produced tantalizing clues that seem to support some Arthurian-era associations.
Tintagel village is a little place, heavily influenced these days by the New Age shops, although they haven't gone completely mad with it, thank God, and it still retains some of its village feel. To get to the "castle" (13th century ruins), you have to first go down a long, steep path into a kind of seaside gorge. You can go even further down to the actual rugged beach itself with its spectacular sea-carved caves lining the cliffs, but that's a pretty strenuous climb down then back up and you'd better be prepared to get there early in the day and eat your Wheaties if you want to do both the cliffs and the castle. We wanted to see the Castle and then decide about the rest, so we turned away from the sea path and headed towards the "island" on which the castle sits. Once we'd climbed up, then down from the castle we were too tired to climb down (then back up) from the beach. Hell, we were too tired to make that steep climb back out of the gorge. We decided to say, "Screw pride" and pay the enterprising man with the Land Rover to drive us back up again.
Actually, the island is a big hunk of rock once linked to the headland by a narrow land bridge. The top of the land bridge has eroded away but the National Trust folks have erected a metal bridge for folks to cross over it. It's a steady uphill climb to get to the bridge and the day we were there was moody, gray skies, threatening rain, the wind blowing strong and cold, the sea pounding against the black rocks of the cliffs below and sending up giant spumes. Crikey! The genuine Daphne du Maurier atmospheric Cornwall experience. Perfect!
Once you've wheezed over the bridge (also an upward climb) you still have to scramble up the cliff face to get to the top of the island and the castle. I'm talking very steep steps, chipped out of the rock and then lined with slate—nearly vertical in some places. Okay, okay, okay, so there's a very sturdy, multi-layered handrail, but you do feel rather out there on the cliffs. We had to stop for many "photo ops" along the way—our running joke whenever we were seriously out of breath, begun when I actually faked photo ops earlier in the trip so no one would see how winded I was getting going up the steep hill at Chysauster. I actually raised the camera to my face for fake pictures, but later confessed what I'd done to much hilarity. (Fortunately, we scrambled up so many hills, et al., on this trip that by Tintagel I was in pretty good wind--but it was a challenge for all of us.) Was it worth the climb? You betcha.
On the island there are really layers of ruins, from 5th century Dark Age foundations, to 9th century monastic ruins, overlaid with the ruins of the 13th century castle. Apparently Richard, Earl of Cornwall, built a castle there as a show piece because even by his day the Arthurian associations at Tintagel were well known. Whenever he had important visitors, he'd send out a legion of workers a week in advance to the castle at Tintagel to bring in all the luxurious furnishings and what-not and then take people out there to show off. As soon as the visitors left, he'd remove all the good stuff and leave a small cadre of guards behind to look after the place most of the year. It was just too windswept and dramatic for a full-time presence.
And that, more than the ruins, is what makes Tintagel a magic place. Breathtaking—not just from the climb, but from the views along the coastline--black and gold slate rock topped by bright green turf, pounding surf, angry white-capped sea, gulls screaming and gyring. It's just one of those places that makes you vibrate with the raw power of nature. It made me feel insignificant while at the same time making me feel part of the continuum of nature and of the ancestors who struggled to survive in such places. It really did strip away a lot of the modern pretensions because I realized, looking at that untamed coast, that no matter what man builds up, nature has the last word. We can build our show castles, but in some places, it's a constant fight just to stay even.
Oh yeah, we have a tendency as a species to try to conquer nature, but we rarely succeed at that long-term. We can destroy a place, change it utterly to suit our short-term needs, but ultimately . . . the rust never sleeps. What was there may not come back again the way it was once we've laid our heavy hand on it, but something else will come along that we have to fight against. A place like Tintagel reminds me, if I need it, that humankind is not divorced from nature. We sometimes have the illusion that we are, but nature always has the last word. We can't survive in a world we've destroyed anymore than any other endangered species.
And speaking of places destroyed . . .
Low Point: Bath. When I visited it fifteen years ago, I really liked the place. It was a graceful, beautiful, historic city with loads of interesting things, a lovely river, well-maintained. When I visited it this time, I was distressed by the heavy invasion of American-Internationalist stores everywhere: The Gap, Starbuck's, Orvis, etc. Store after store cramming those once-graceful streets, making it like any ol' mall anywhere. I mean, I can understand the residents wanting to be part of the modern world, not wanting to live in a museum, but I think they've lost something precious along the way. I spent two days in Bath on the last trip. This trip I couldn't wait to get out of town and realized I would probably never go back again.
Fortunately, most of the things I was interested in for this trip are not heavy tourist destinations. Oh yeah, Stonehenge and Avebury. But they've managed those places really well, not let the rapacious internationalist conglomerates take over. The National Trust has kept commercialism very much to the minimum, very discreet, and I was happy to see that these sites (which I also visited fifteen years ago) had not changed much. Avebury is still the coolest because you can go right up to the stones and lay hands on them and it was a thrill, even though we were marching around them in a pouring rain. And Stonehenge…well, what you've heard is true. They seem smaller when you first get there, it's crawling with tourists. But again, they've managed it well and although you can't walk amongst the actual stones, you can get quite close to them and walk all around them. You can manage a genuine Stonehenge experience (if you keep an open mind and lowered expectations) and it can still be a mighty impressive place.
My biggest disappointment regarding Stonehenge is due to the weird, near-dissociative experience I was having in all the places I revisited from the previous trip. It was like I was seeing it through two different windows in time, having trouble sometimes jibing old with new. The first time I saw Stonehenge it was autumn, past the tourist season, and I remember driving through the undulating landscape approaching it, cresting a low hill—and there it was right by the roadside, stark and dramatic against a blue-gray sky. You still do come over a crest and see it, but they've planted a coppice of trees in the middle distance, so the dramatic effect of Stonehenge against the sky has been smudged and diminished.
Everything changes, nothing remains the same. You can't step in the same river twice. Or the same Stonehenge.
Oh, and on a writing note: I received a reply from Anna Genoese at Tor on my novel in only two weeks. =:0 The letter was waiting for me when I got home. She passed on it, but she wrote me a very encouraging personal note. She loved the title, loved the setting, thought I'd done an interesting take on vampires, but the characters didn't captivate. However, she did say she'd love (her word) to see my next work. So I'm consigning this rejection to the plus column—and really, I'm not at all upset about the rejection. No, I'm not putting a brave face on things, I'm not in denial. I truly didn't think this novel was up to snuff, but I promised myself that I'd give it one last shot (I've sent it out numerous times) and if AG passed I'd move on to other things. Like my next work, my just-completed novel, the one I may well send to her when I've got it polished up.
no subject
Date: 2004-05-07 11:45 am (UTC)And I can sympathize with your feeling on Bath. When I went to Killarney and Bantry, Ireland in 1997, I thought the were the greatest places. Bantry was small and secluded, while Killarney was your typical medium tourist trap. But when I went back in 2002, both had almost doubled in size and in a not very good way. :-( But like you said -- can't ask people to live in a museum.
no subject
Date: 2004-05-07 11:59 am (UTC)Yep. In the writing game, we takes our groovies where we gets 'em. :-)
>>But when I went back in 2002, both had almost doubled in size and in a not very good way.
Someone said to me just before this trip: "Keep your memories of places you like. Don't go back. Chances are it won't be the same and you'll be disappointed." They were referring to a place I'd loved in Italy that has since changed. On this trip, the revisits were all strange, but thankfully only a couple were "ruined."