Simon Knott
@SimoninSuffolk
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'dust in the air suspended, marks the place where a story ended'
East Anglia
Joined January 2019
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Last Seen Profiles
'Eden Rock' by the Cornish poet Charles Causley is one of his most moving, I think.
'They are waiting for me somewhere beyond Eden Rock:
My father, twenty-five, in the same suit
Of Genuine Irish Tweed, his terrier Jack
Still two years old and trembling at his feet.
My mother,…
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The Arundel tomb in Chichester Cathedral, as seen by the poet Philip Larkin while on holiday with Monica Jones in the summer of 1955. Larkin was born
#OTD
9 August 1922.
'Side by side, their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,
Their proper habits vaguely shown
As…
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Siegfried Sassoon, born Matfield, Kent
#OTD
8 September 1886, wrote some of the most ascerbic poems about his experiences of WWI, and afterwards.
'I saw the Prince of Darkness, with his staff,
Standing bare-headed by the Cenotaph:
Unostentatious and respectful, there
He stood,…
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'My Dear Lucy, I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start…
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The poet Wilfred Owen was killed in action
#OTD
4 November 1918, at the Sambre–Oise Canal. It was just a week before the Armistice. I often think of this early poem as winter approaches each year:
'The browns, the olives, and the yellows died,
And were swept up to heaven; where…
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'The Skylark', by John Clare, on his 230th birthday:
'The rolls and harrows lie at rest beside
The battered road; and spreading far and wide
Above the russet clods, the corn is seen
Sprouting its spiry points of tender green,
Where squats the hare, to terrors wide awake,
Like…
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'When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?'
John Ball, Colchester-born rebel priest and one of the leaders of the Peasants Revolt, was hung, drawn and quartered
#OTD
1381 at St Albans in the presence of the King. He's become a symbol of resistance to injustice…
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The author A S Byatt was born
#OTD
1936. Her 'Possession' remains for me one of the most remarkable books by an English writer in the last 30-odd years. At once a detective story, a gothic romance, a mythic fantasy and an academic comedy, with time shifts and twists and turns in…
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The poet John Masefield was born
#OTD
1878. Poet Laureate from 1930 to 1967, he's fallen out of fashion, but 'Sea Fever' still strikes a memorable note:
'I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,…
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The early 16C screen at Worstead, Norfolk depicts a crucified bearded woman, here on the right beside St William of Norwich. This is St Uncumber, also known as St Wilgefortis, and today was traditionally her feast. Supposedly, she was a devout virgin who escaped marriage to a…
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Kirkstall Abbey. Until the 18th Century, the road from Leeds to Bradford ran through the ruin of the Abbey church.
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But of course Blythburgh is best known for its painted roof angels. Peter Porter's poem 'An Angel In Blythburgh Church' captures the mood of the place well, although it does contain one error. It wasn't 'Cromwell's soldiers' who peppered the angels with shot, but an 18th Century…
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'To describe a church as an orgasm is bound to offend someone', wrote Ian Nairn of All Saints Margaret Street, a short walk from the hell of Oxford Street, London, 'yet this building can only be understood in terms of compelling, overwhelming passion. Here is the force of…
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Shingham, Norfolk.
The medieval churches of England are, above all else, a communion, a touchstone down the long generations of the people who were born, lived and died in their parishes. Some of them were rich and important, and they are remembered by monuments and brasses, by…
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Today is Michaelmas, the feast of St Michael and All Angels. It's one of the four Quarter Days, when traditionally rents fell due and workers could be hired. St Michael often appears on War memorials, as here with his flaming sword at St Michael Cornhill, London, by Richard…
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Sir John Betjeman was born
#OTD
28 August 1906. Best known as a poet, he was also a prolific broadcaster, columnist and campaigner. His poem 'Norfolk' is an elegy to lost innocence:
'How did the Devil come? When first attack?
These Norfolk lanes recall lost innocence,
The years…
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Philip Larkin could always find the universal in the particular, in 'First Sight', for example:
'Lambs that learn to walk in snow
When their bleating clouds the air
Meet a vast unwelcome, know
Nothing but a sunless glare.
Newly stumbling to and fro
All they find, outside the…
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Today is Plough Monday, by tradition the start of the farming year, a day of significance in every rural community. This 1849 headstone for 21 year old Samuel Croft at Blyford, Suffolk has a relief of horses unharnessed from the plough, a symbol of his labours being over.…
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On this, the eve of the feast of All Hallows, when by tradition the souls of the restless dead wander the land, a gentle reminder from the Anglo-Saxon burial ground at Sutton Hoo, Suffolk.
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Today's the feast of St Lucy. She holds fire on the early 16C screen at Horsham St Faith, Norfolk. Under the Julian calendar before 1752, St Lucy's day coincided with the winter solstice. Fire was appropriate for the longest night, and a reminder of the lighter days to come.…
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The writer Evelyn Waugh died
#OTD
10 April 1966, at the age of 62. By most accounts he wasn't a terribly nice person, but he wrote like an angel. 'Decline and Fall' is, I think, the funniest book I've ever read, and 'Scoop' is not far behind. 'Put Out More Flags' is perhaps the…
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This is a find for me, I didn't know it existed, the artist Pauline Boty's self-portrait in the NPG. It's the only stained glass in the whole collection, surprisingly. Boty was strikingly, memorably beautiful, and was the model for the Julie Christie character in the film…
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A detail of the poet William Cowper's memorial window at Dereham, Norfolk, visited yesterday. His dog Beau and his hares Tiney and Puss, glass by Heaton, Butler & Bayne, 1900.
' Old Tiney, surliest of his kind,
Who, nursed with tender care,
And to domesticate bounds…
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The writer Patrick Leigh Fermor was born
#OTD
11 February 1915. In December 1933, at the age of 18, He set out to walk across Europe from London to Constantinople, a journey which took him four years. He recounted his story, which captures the continent in the deceptive peace…
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Today's the feast of St Michael and All Angels. On the 1530s screen at Wellingham in Norfolk, he weighs souls against their sins. On the left, the Blessed Virgin lays her rosary on the scales to tip the balance in favour of the souls. The demons in the other pan are powerless to…
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More photos I took in Moscow in the 1980s. Soldiers pose for a photo in Red Square, Moscow, Christmas Day 1988. Back to 1985, we're outside the Bolshoi with the temperature -26°, & in front of a poster for иди и смотри, 'Come and See', one of the best films ever.
@sovietvisuals
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East Guldeford, Sussex. On the edge of Romney Marsh, more remote from its diocesan cathedral than just about any other English church, some 80 miles from Chichester. The cathedrals at Canterbury, Rochester, Guildford, Southwark, St Pauls and even Boulogne are all closer. 1/3
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Today's the feast of St Monica, the 4th Century North African mother of the wayward St Augustine. Here she is, deep in conversation with St George on the reredos at East Barsham, Norfolk. Often presented as a model of patience and piety, she is the patron saint of difficult…
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'And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.'
The early 16c nave roof at St Wendreda, March, Cambridgeshire.
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The writer and war poet Siegfried Sassoon was born
#OTD
1886.
'If I were fierce, and bald, and short of breath
I'd live with scarlet Majors at the Base,
And speed glum heroes up the line to death.
You'd see me with my puffy petulant face,
Guzzling and gulping in the best hotel,…
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Today's the feast of St John, Apostle and Evangelist. Here he is with his poisoned chalice on the late medieval rood screen at Cawston, Norfolk. He's the patron saint of authors, publishers and booksellers.
Cawston:
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The front door of the late medieval Merchant's House, Plymouth. Sloightly on the huh, as they say in Suffolk.
#AdoorableThursday
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Today's the feast of St Cedd, 7th Century Anglo-Saxon missionary and patron saint of the great county of Essex. His mission was at Bradwell-on-Sea out on the end of the Dengie Peninsula, where the chapel of St Peter on the Wall is a goal for modern pilgrimages. 1/3
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The poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson died
#OTD
6 October 1896. His valedictory poem 'Crossing the Bar':
'Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea,
But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and…
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Today's the feast of St Mary Magdalene. In the 13th Century Golden Legend she is set adrift in the Mediterranean in a rudderless boat with her sister Martha and brother Lazarus. Their boat washes up in Marseilles from where she converts Provence to Christianity. A 17th Century…
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'Mother, Summer, I' by Philip Larkin
'My mother, who hates thunder storms,
Holds up each summer day and shakes
It out suspiciously, lest swarms
Of grape-dark clouds are lurking there;
But when the August weather breaks
And rains begin, and brittle frost
Sharpens the…
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After St Edmund's martyrdom he was decapitated, but his head was found three days later guarded by a wolf. Two 15c bench ends at Walpole St Peter, Norfolk and Stonham Aspal, Suffolk. Today is the feast of St Edmund, patron saint of East Anglia.
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St Matthew on the rood screen at Cawston, Norfolk, the dedicatory inscription dated 1488. I think he's the earliest example in East Anglia of a figure shown wearing spectacles. Today's the feast of St Matthew.
More about Cawston:
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The poet and author Thomas Hardy was born
#OTD
1840 at Stinsford, Dorset.
'Only a man harrowing clods
In a slow silent walk
With an old horse that stumbles and nods
Half asleep as they stalk.
Only thin smoke without flame
From the heaps of couch-grass;
Yet this will go onward…
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Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, Lord Chancellor of England under Henry VIII, died
#OTD
1530. He sits on the corner of St Peter's Street and Silent Street, Ipswich, the town where he was born and where has, among other things, a street, a theatre and a pub named after him. His cat peeps…
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I visited 365 churches in 2022. Most were revisits, and most were in Norfolk. However, there were 23 new ones, 18 in Lincolnshire, 3 in Norfolk, 1 in Cambridgeshire, 1 in Suffolk. One of the most memorable was at Martin, Lincolnshire, a lovely little church in a farmyard. 1/3
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Anyone who arrived by train in Cambridge even 20 years ago simply wouldn't recognise it if they stepped out of the station today...
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Tonight is the Eve of St Agnes. The opening of John Keats's poem:
'St. Agnes' Eve—Ah, bitter chill it was!
The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;
The hare limp'd trembling through the frozen grass,
And silent was the flock in woolly fold:
Numb were the Beadsman's fingers,…
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Tonight is Twelfth Night. 'The Dead', the final story in James Joyce's 'Dubliners', published in 1916, takes place tonight. To my mind, 'The Dead' is the finest short story every written, reaching its unforgettable conclusion in the early hours of the feast of the Epiphany.
In…
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Plough horses on a headstone at Blyford, Suffolk.
The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins was born
#OTD
1844, and in this poem he remembers the death of one of his parishioners:
'Felix Randal the farrier, O is he dead then? my duty all ended,
Who have watched his mould of man, big-boned…
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The memorial to the artist Eric Ravilious, ''lost in the Atlantic' in 1942, here in Copford churchyard. Not brilliantly clear, I'm afraid.
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The martyrdom of St Edmund in a 15th Century wall painting at Stoke Dry, Rutland. He's tied to a tree by invading Vikings and shot through with arrows, after which he'll be beheaded. Today's the feast of St Edmund, patron saint of East Anglia.
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Thanks to the Aslef overtime ban, my connecting train is cancelled. But every cloud has a silver lining, it's an ill wind etc etc. So I have time for a brief wander around Ely Cathedral, for why wouldn't you?
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So, something strange. This is the Resurrection, painted on the ceiling boards of the attic of Provost Skene's House, Aberdeen. It's part of a rosary sequence painted in 1626, and is probaby the most important surviving cycle of Early Modern religious paintings in Scotland. 1/3
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The writer Henri-Alban Fournier, better known as Alain-Fournier, was born
#OTD
3 October 1886. His only novel, 'Le Grand Meaulnes' is a magical book about a romantic friendship between two boys on the verge of adulthood, set in a mysterious, remote wooded countryside. It's a book…
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WH Auden's poem 'Musée des Beaux Arts' was written during World War II, and places human suffering in its mundane, everyday context.
'About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is…
26
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St Dunstan in the East, not quite the City of London's most easterly church. Entirely gutted by German bombs in May 1941, the surviving tower and outer walls now contain a pleasant garden. Today is the feast of St Dunstan. 1/3
St Dunstan in the East:
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As darkness starts to fall across England on the feast of St Lucy, here's John Donne.
'’Tis the year's midnight, and it is the day's,
Lucy's, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks;
The sun is spent, and now his flasks
Send forth light squibs, no constant rays;
The world's whole…
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Today's the feast of St Alphage, a 10th Century Archbishop of Canterbury martyred by the Danes. A church in the City of London was dedicated to him, and its ruin is neatly tucked under one of the new Barbican walkways on London Wall. Until about ten years ago it was fenced in…
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On John Betjeman's birthday, an excerpt from "Summoned By Bells", his long blank verse autobiography. He remembers as a boy wandering the City of London, choosing a church to attend Evensong.
'I used to stand by intersecting lanes
Among the silent offices, and wait,
Choosing…
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The writer Thomas Hardy died
#OTD
11 January 1928. There are about half a dozen books I try to reread every couple of years, and Hardy's early novel 'Under The Greenwood Tree', 1872, is one of them. It's a lovely book, a tale to reread in winter, a vivid story of rural characters…
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The 15C stalls at Blythburgh, Suffolk have 18 saints carved on their front. For several centuries they were used for a school in the south aisle, but in the 1890s they were moved back to the chancel. St Philip with his loaves of bread. 1/3
Blythburgh:
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'Katharine Queen of England'
'A Ballad for Katherine of Aragon' is an early poem by Charles Causley. She's buried in Peterborough Cathedral, Cambridgeshire.
'As I walked down by the river
Down by the frozen fen
I saw the grey cathedral
With the eyes of a child of ten.
O the…
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Darmsden, Suffolk, a curious place. No public roads approach this small village. The little 1880 church by Herbert Green sits not far from Darmsden Hall. Redundant and sold off in the 1970s, it was bought from the diocese by the local community. 1/2
More:
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Another excerpt from 'Little Gidding' by TS Eliot, who was born
#OTD
1888.
'If you came this way,
Taking the route you would be likely to take
From the place you would be likely to come from,
If you came this way in may time, you would find the hedges
White again, in May, with…
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And so, after a wander around Southwold rambling on, we head a couple of miles up the Blyth to East Anglia's best church.
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Today's the great feast of the Assumption, shown here in 15th Century glass at East Harling, Norfolk. Along with Christmas and Easter, it framed the late medieval year, and coming at the height of the harvest would be a time for particular celebration in rural communities. 1/3
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The Mary Rose. I find it strangely affecting, that not only could it re-emerge from the past after more than four centuries, but also the hundreds of ordinary objects that were found with it, the possessions of the 500-odd crew. And, of course, the sheer human endeavour required…
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The architect and designer Augustus Welby Pugin died
#OTD
14 September 1852 at the age of 40. His influence on 19th Century architecture was extraordinary, despite his short life. His writings and prolific design work almost single-handedly kickstarted the Gothic revival in this…
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'I found my poems in the fields, and wrote them down'
The statue of John Clare, born
#OTD
1793, in the garden of John Clare Cottage, Helpston, Cambridgeshire.
'Well, honest John, how fare you now at home?
The spring is come, and birds are building nests;
The old cock-robin to…
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Having photographed every rood screen in East Anglia (and nearly a hundred of them have surviving medieval figures) I have to say that Barton Turf, Norfolk is my favourite. Interestingly, as well as the nine panels depicting the Orders of Angels, the screen has three female…
Today's the feast of St Apollonia, 3rd Century martyr. A popular saint in medieval East Anglia, she is the patron saint of toothache sufferers, and appears regularly in church art holding a tooth in pincers, as at Barton Turf, Norfolk. 1/3
Barton Turf:
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The poet WIlliam Cowper was born
#OTD
26 November 1731. His dog Beau and his hares Tiney and Puss appear in his memorial window at Dereham, Norfolk.
'Old Tiney, surliest of his kind,
Who, nursed with tender care,
And to domesticate bounds confined,
Was still a wild jack-hare.…
13
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The German writer WG Sebald's grave at Framingham Earl, Norfolk. Visitors place stones on it in the Jewish tradition, although in fact Sebald was not Jewish. Indeed, his father was a Wermacht officer. Sebald, born in 1944, recalled being shown images of the Holocaust at school.…
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High Windows.
32 Pearson Park, Hull. The poet Philip Larkin lived in the top floor flat for 18 years. Most of the poems in 'The Whitsun Weddings' and 'High Windows' were written here.
'Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond…
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I'm out in deepest, darkest Norfolk with Cam Self, and our first stop is this tiny 19th Century Catholic church, lost in the woods at Lynford.
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The first name on the war memorial at Dry Drayton, Cambridgeshire, is Harry Anable, the youngest brother of my great-grandmother Alice. He was born in the village in 1897, the son of a bricklayer. Harry signed up as a Private in the 11th Suffolks, the Cambridge Battalion, made…
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I is for Iken, Suffolk.
Iken is one of those fabulous spots that some people think of as their favourite Suffolk place. Others come across it by accident, as if it were a happy secret. And there must be many people, I suppose, who do not even know that it exists. The little…
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Today is the feast of St Etheldreda, abbess and queen, patron of the Isle of Ely. Her shrine in Ely Cathedral was destroyed at the Reformation, but has been marked in more recent years.
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It's All Saints Day, the feast of All Hallows. The screen at Cawston church, Norfolk was erected in about 1490, and has memorable portraits of saints on its panels. Here's St Matthew, wearing a pair of spectacles. 1/3
Cawston:
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The crowned Blessed Virgin and Child on the screen of c1500 at Great Snoring, Norfolk. Her face has been erased by the Anglican reformers of half a century later. Her son the Christchild was almost entirely obliterated. Only the rose she holds in her hand survives intact.
More:…
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The poet WH Auden died in his sleep in a Vienna hotel 50 years ago today, on 29 September 1973, at the age of 66. He was buried in the village cemetery at Kirchstetten, where he lived. Writing about himself as a child, he recorded that he had been: 'the son of book-loving…
WH Auden's poem 'Musée des Beaux Arts' was written during World War II, and places human suffering in its mundane, everyday context.
'About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is…
26
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Christ is taken down from the cross. His mother's hand cradles his head in a fragment of 15th Century glass, part of a considerable collection at Yaxley, Suffolk.
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The 14c mystic Julian of Norwich is remembered on this day. She was an anchorite at St Julian, Norwich, and here she is in glass by King & Son at St Thomas, Norwich with her little cat.
'All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.'
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'In Memory of John Giles, lost at sea, 1872'. Painted Victorian glass at Witchford, Cambridgeshire, depicting the John Temperley going down in a storm. Giles was the son of an agricultural labourer, born in nearby Grunty Fen in 1838. He was on board the John Temperley when it was…
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From the floor... to the ceiling. Pugin's painted panels above the chancel at West Tofts, Norfolk.
Floor tiles by Augustus Welby Pugin at West Tofts, Norfolk. The part-rebuilding and restoration here in the 1850s was Pugin's biggest project in East Anglia, much of it completed after his death. The church is now in the Army's Stanta battlefield training area.
#TilesOnTuesday
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Tottington, Norfolk, abandoned in 1942. Munro Cautley, in his book 'Norfolk Churches' of 1948, recorded that it was 'a fine church with 14c tower and nave, a fine 15c square headed screen, beautiful benches with grotesques and pierced backs, a Jacobean pulpit and tower screen and…
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The poet Louis MacNeice was born in Belfast
#OTD
1907. The son of a Church of Ireland minister, his mother died when he was six. His poem 'Autobiography' is imbued with a deep sense of melancholy:
'In my childhood trees were green
And there was plenty to be seen.
Come back…
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In Lutyen's crypt chapel at Liverpool Catholic Cathedral, looking west.
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'Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
And…
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The sheer ecstacy of Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem 'The Windhover' gets me every time:
'I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he…
'As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors…
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Before Autumn rushes headlong into winter, here's Shakespeare's Sonnet LXXIII:
'That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou…
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Siegfried Sassoon's poem 'Everyone Sang' was written at the end of the First World War:
'Everyone suddenly burst out singing;
And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom,
Winging wildly across the white
Orchards and dark-green fields; on - on - and…
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Today is the feast of St Edmund, patron saint of East Anglia and once of all England. Here he is by Suffolk artist Elisabeth Frink at the church in her home village of Great Thurlow, and then on a larger scale outside of St Edmundsbury Cathedral, Bury St Edmunds.
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Nurse Edith Cavell was shot at dawn in Brussels
#OTD
12 October 1915, a few weeks short of her fiftieth birthday. Her memorial window by Ernest Heasman, at Swardeston, Norfolk where she had grown up and where her father was the rector. 1/3
Swardeston:
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Today is the feast of the Ascension. Mary and the disciples watch Christ's feet as he ascends to heaven, leaving his footprints on the ground. 15th Century glass at East Harling, Norfolk.
East Harling:
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Today is Shrove Tuesday, the last day before the start of Lent, also known as Mardi Gras or Pancake Day. One of the great things about being a grown-up is that no one is going to make me eat pancakes ever again.
Shrove Tuesday takes its name from the old word 'shriving'. To be…
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'Nothing, like something, happens anywhere'
- Philip Larkin
'Coming up England by a different line
For once, early in the cold new year,
We stopped, and, watching men with number plates
Sprint down the platform to familiar gates,
'Why, Coventry!' I exclaimed. "I was born here.'…
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The poet TS Eliot was born
#OTD
26 September 1888. He was a London firewatcher in WWII, and this excerpt from 'Little Gidding' recalls walking home in the morning light through a newly blitzed landscape:
'Ash on an old man's sleeve
Is all the ash the burnt roses leave.
Dust in…
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The chancel with its reredos at Tottington, Norfolk. The church was abandoned in 1942, an event remembered in the poem 'Tottington: Reredos' by Andrea Holland:
'Of stone, in St Andrew’s church; a Baronet’s row of thanks
in the lifting of the weight of typhoid from a young son,…
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Christina Rossetti's 1871 poem 'In The Bleak Midwinter' was set to music by Gustav Holst in 1906 for the English Hymnal, and is commonly sung as a carol.
'In the bleak midwinter,
Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on…
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St Botolph Aldersgate in the City of London, seen from Postman's Park. Ian Nairn wrote that it was 'the comfortable, humane, live-and-let-live thing that a city church ought to be; one furry stock-brick body (1788 by Nathaniel Wright), one up to date stucco east end (1831), and a…
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Resurrection. Today is Easter Sunday. Christ rises from the dead on the screen at Binham, Norfolk. After the Reformation the screen was whitewashed and painted with biblical texts, but the medieval figures have begun to show through.
'Now the green blade riseth, from the buried…
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The poet Stevie Smith was born
#OTD
20 September 1902 in Hull. Here's her poem 'The River Deben' in which Suffolk's River Deben becomes the portal to the world beyond!
'All the waters of the River Deben
Go over my head to the last wave even
Such a death were sweet to seven times…
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