The Hammock Papers: churches

Showing posts with label churches. Show all posts

06 December 2025

Old-Fashioned.

Ben Maton guides us through the English countryside, moldy old piles, and ancient Christmas music ...

Advent I ...

Advent II ...

More "good old-fashioned escapism" ...

17 November 2025

Favorite.

I never weary of great churches. It is my favorite kind of mountain scenery.

Robert Louis Stevenson

26 May 2023

Excellent.

An excellent album.

From bandcamp.com ...

Following rare access to the bell tower at Hull Minster in September 2021, this immersive electronic work is made entirely of recordings of the bells that have rung out over the city of Hull for centuries, and of the clock mechanism that has marked that time. With live spatialisation across 24 speakers set up around the magnificent Hull Minster, this music delves deep into the resonances of the place and plays with the rich acoustics of the building.

Nightports is based on a simple rule of restriction: only sounds captured for a particular project can be used. Nothing else – no samples or synths or drum machines – though the sounds captured can be stretched, cut, morphed and twisted, ordered and reordered. All of the sounds of this performance come from Hull Minster. It is music in and of this special place.

20 May 2023

Doorways.

From Luke Sherlock's top ten English church doorways ...

29 January 2023

Churches.

It was through looking at churches that I came to believe in the reason churches were built.

John Betjeman

A Passion For Churches ...

It's always worth a try to get the key, however remote the church. In fact, the remoter, the better.

16 October 2022

Read.

Google Arts and Culture on "How to Read a Church."

12 December 2021

Mountain.

I never weary of great churches. It is my favorite kind of mountain scenery.

Robert Louis Stevenson

24 October 2021

Filled.

DEFEATED? A SONNET to EMPTY CHURCHES

Come on. You lot have survived worse things:

Black Death, Plague and two World wars,

The Reformation (Cromwell clipped the wings

Of angels in the roof); and there are scars

On ancient faces, marble noses cropped

And poppy heads beheaded like the King;

And modern vandals too. But you've not stopped

Your ageless plain ability to sing

Of something quite indifferent to the now;

Built with a trusting love and potent faith

You stand there still in testament to how

Beauty is not a wafted fleeting wraith,

A ghost which chance can whimsically destroy;

You can be filled, if not by faith, with joy.

Anon, June 2020

Thank you, Churches Conservation Trust

13 April 2020

I ought to warn you that my verse is of no interest to people who can think.

Sir John Betjeman

Summoned by Bells ...

A Passion for Churches ...

Let's Imagine: A Branch Line Railway ...

Britain's Cathedrals and Their Music ...

23 September 2018

Tell.

Hawksmoor, Composite Section, Plan, and Elevation of 16-bay Dome, St. Paul's, 1693

If these stones could tell the story

of our joys and tears

they would sing ‘To God be glory!’

till the Lord appears:

walls and pillars, bell and tower,

tell your power through the years.

Reverend Christopher Idle

BARRY HINES

"That's why it makes me mad when I take her out and I'll hear somebody say, 'Look, there's Billy Casper there wi' his pet hawk. I could shout at 'em; it's not a pet, Sir, hawks are not pets. Or when folks stop me and say, 'Is it tame?' Is it heck tame, it's trained that's all. It's fierce, and it's wild, an' it's not bothered about anybody, not even about me, right. And that's why it's great.Look, there's Billy Casper there wi' his pet hawk.' I could shout at 'em. It's not a pet, Sir. Hawks are not pets. Or when folks stop me and say, 'Is it tame?' Is it heck tame, it's trained, that's all. It's fierce, and it's wild, an' it's not bothered about anybody, not even about me right. And that's why it's great." (A Kestrel for a Knave)

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

WALT WHITMAN

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering. I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. The last scud of day holds back for me, It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow’d wilds, It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk. I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun, I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags. I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles. You will hardly know who I am or what I mean, But I shall be good health to you nevertheless, And filter and fibre your blood. Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, Missing me one place search another, I stop somewhere waiting for you.

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL