Rowley Gallery Blog
It was a bright crisp morning in April, the next Sunday after Easter. Aeroplanes were drawing maps all the way from London down to Sussex. It was a constant distraction, I needed to make frequent stops to check the sky. No wonder I avoid sat-nav. Continue reading “Ditchling Beacon”
Over the Pyrenees a week before Easter, en route to Barcelona, the spectacular view a heartbreaking reminder of the suicidal plane crash five days earlier. A flight from Barcelona to Düsseldorf had fallen from the sky onto similar mountains near Barcelonnette in the French Alps. It was impossible not to think of it, to imagine its kamikaze descent, to remember its helpless victims. Continue reading “Flying To Barcelona”
Henry Moore’s Large Spindle Piece, a cast bronze sculpture from 1974, now installed in the newly reappointed King’s Cross Square. For the past forty years the station was hidden behind an “awful tin shed” temporary canopy. It’s eventual removal, and the long overdue revelation of Lewis Cubitt’s elegant facade, is celebrated by the arrival of this captive “flying shuttle”. Continue reading “From Moore To Serra”
Our first walk, when we got back from Italy last year, was to another landmark oak. It was in Epping Forest but not in a part of the forest we’d visited before. We started near Queen Elizabeth’s Hunting Lodge on the far side of Chingford and headed east. Continue reading “Pulpit Oak”
After climbing out of Menaggio on tight switchbacks up to Croce, high on the ridge, the road scoots along the floor of the Val Menaggio, passing Bene Lario and 3km later reaching the small, reedy Lago di Piano, protected as a nature reserve and breeding place for water birds. Drop into the little information office beside the lake, or ask the Menaggio tourist office for the route description of a pleasant, almost flat two-hour walk here that takes in woodlands and a fortified cluster of medieval houses on a peninsula in the lake, known as Castel San Pietro. Continue reading “Rogolone”
Three weeks ago, on the second day of 2015, we took a turn around Glastonbury Tor to welcome the new year. We met up at 100 Monkeys for lunch then set off over the fields to climb the hill. Continue reading “A New Year Revolution”
Villa Monastero was on the furthest shore of Lake Como, a long circuitous drive by car from Argegno where we were staying, but just ten minutes by ferry if we drove up to Menaggio. We left the car there and crossed the lake as foot passengers on the autotraghetto to Varenna. Continue reading “To Monastero”
A walk around the narrow streets of the città murata, Como’s walled old quarter, a dense network of narrow, pedestrianised lanes at the centre of the city. An aimless wander through the maze of streets and some random photographs for souvenirs, mementos, frames of reference. Continue reading “In Como”
A couple of weeks before our walk around Burnham Beeches, I walked to Wittenham Clumps with Andrew Walton. We’d done the same walk five years earlier and afterwards Andrew had painted this little watercolour as a memento, here brightening up my sad old workshop wall. That was in the days before this blog; now I was keen to retrace our steps and record them for Frames of Reference. Continue reading “Wittenham Clumps”
A couple of weeks earlier we walked in Burnham Beeches, where, according to England in Particular – the largest assembly in the world (of pollarded and coppiced beeches) still stands… acquired by the Corporation of the City of London in 1880 to protect it from development. Continue reading “Burnham Beeches”