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| Crocuses in Mum and Dad's Garden |
Well Spring appears to have well and truly sprung here in Kent, but what a week..... my teenage maiden hardly got a look in as I was busy with work, zipping around Kent, I think she must have lent me some energy to get through some rather long days, without raising too many sardonic eyebrows or throwing huge temper tantrums! However by the end of the week she seemed to throw in the towel with a tired hissy fit as I began to go down with a nasty case of man flu. My adult head was telling me stay in bed and take it easy but the noisy headstrong hooligan inside me was hell bent on sending me out and about to explore and walk the land, albeit with my lovely Mum and Dad and their dog Scrumpy Jack, who by their own admission thoroughly enjoyed their third childhood as they called it when they became grandparents!
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Jew's Mallow Or
Corchorus Olitorius |
Off we headed to nearby Herne Bay laughingly mocking our 'wild' explorer's spirit and sense of adventure, it's a long standing family joke that we 3 have all inherited the family stay at home genes... between us we rack up an incredibly tiny combined distance of 17 miles from our places of birth to current homes - Dad tipping the scales with a stonking 12 miles of his own in that mix - phew! It almost definitely wasn't our ancestors that explored the new world we joked, we'd have been the ones keeping the home fires burning and tilling the land or more likely pottering in the garden with flowers as you can see from the photos of their beautiful garden!
It was a mystery to us what made people push themselves to such extreme and unknown environments, just well, just because......not enough of an option for us. Not very Goddessy I mused, yet as my Mum pointed out we both found the courage and strength to venture forth on our own
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| Hellebore |
spiritual journeys and paid no heed to people who thought that we were mistaken, foolish, doomed to fall off the edge of the world or be eaten by sea monsters... Courage of convictions we encouraged and consoled ourselves, was measurable in more ways than just miles, fathoms or leagues!
Right on cue, as we arrived at Herne Bay one of the first things we saw apart from the sea was a model of the air craft of Amy Johnson, the pioneering English Aviatrix who was the first woman to fly solo from Australia to Britain before crash landing and dying in the Thames estuary in 1941 just off the coast of Herne Bay. I did take some photos of it and one of the information board about it as I felt it was symbolic especially after we what we had been talking about in the car. It seemed particularly poignant in honouring the brave women who had made their stand for equality, but later I somehow managed to empty a bottle of water into my hand bag and all over the camera....new camera required, thank goodness for camera phones.....
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| Beach Combers Haul |
After a stroll along the beach at Herne Bay and the 4 of us searching for hag stones - the dog burrowing like mad with me, we had to make do some shells, a fossil, quartz, pebbles and sea glass for my altar - not a bad haul! Whilst beach combing carefree with the dog at my heels, I saw the towers of the old church at Reculver on the headland a few miles along the coast and pointed them out... Luckily my parents were feeling indulgent and decided we'd go up there for our picnic and a wander round.
Now obviously when I say picnic, I mean a cheese and pickle roll in the back of their car whilst fending off the dog, we didn't sit outside with a hamper and blanket - it was too cold, we'll wait until after Easter for that, we're English not crazy.
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| Old and New |
Bracing is a descriptive term that springs to mind, windswept is a romantic one, the truth was it was that cold up on the headland that frost bite was a distinct possibility, so it was a very brief exploration of the ruins and a much longer one of the warmer visitors centre. What we discovered as we thawed out, was that the ruins were of a chapel known as St Mary the Virgin, built on the site of a 1st/2nd Century Roman fort as part of a mission to convert the Pagan locals of the British Isles to Christianity in about the 7th Century - as you can imagine this intrigued and amused me a great deal.
Part of the Roman fort walls remain and some stones and tiles have been recycled as part of the more 'modern' 12th century towers known locally as the Sisters. As you can imagine there are tales of ghosts, a weeping woman, a child crying as well as Roman centurions. It's a wild, windswept place with the wind leaving little shelter anywhere and it is very
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| Atmospheric Ruins |
atmospheric. I can imagine the wind howling round and it being scary after dark without too much trouble! I left with the feeling that there was an older history there that had disappeared into the annals of time, just as the land had fallen into the sea, including the Fort boundaries and part of the land and the graveyard there. There must have been good reasons to build on the windy headland, it has been suggested it was to keep out marauding Frankish and Saxon pirates - more brave or desperate people looking for new land or treasure, I wonder which beliefs and deities they brought with them.... I bet my lot were last off the boats, muttering darkly about being warmer back home and looking hopefully for signs of a Grain Goddess amongst the wind battered grasses. It may have taken them a while and an epic journey on a very long path not straying too far to start with, with many pit stops just to sit and look back on where they had come from before cautiously planning the next stage, but they got there in the end.....
Have A Blessed Week and Keep Exploring -Whatever Your Path x x
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