Saturday 12 January 2013

Less than the sum of it's parts


At Box Hill - near Bath - there is a big hole in the ground from which they extracted 'Box Ground', the stone used to build all the really important buildings in Bath, including the Royal Crescent, which - up until fairly recently - was the largest domestic dwelling in Europe.

It is quite a large hole, but when you stare down into it, it doesn't seem large enough to have provided the building blocks for all those massive, honey-coloured structures for which the city is famous.

Bath stone is 1.25 cwt per cubic foot. This may explain why my neck is out of kilter and my recent bout of back pain. In my youth, I thought very little about carrying up to two cubic feet of it up a scaffold, and now I may be paying the price.

So it is very pleasing when a building appears to be light and airy - a filigree which defies the tonnage it is constructed from.

Have you ever seen the towers of the cathedral of Freiburg, in the Black Forest of Germany? A building made of lace.

I sat beneath it once, watching a family of hawks chase families of pigeons - both of whom were resident in the stonework about 150 feet above. The Falcons were in the upper story, and their lunch lived in the lower middle section. Neighbours from Heaven.

7 comments:

  1. Good luck with that ...
    That is a lovely image - a building made of lace.

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    1. I think I've sorted it now, so I deleted that comment above.

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  2. There's a Box Hill just north of Dorking in Surrey; but probably more used for dogging than digging.

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    1. There is a lovely hill just outside Cheltenham, on the other side of the road from an active Cistercian monastery which I took a walk in recently - until I realised that it was a pick-up place for rather seedy gay men, who were all standing around in the woods on their own, waiting...

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  3. Down here in the colonies, there are very few buildings older than 200 years. When I visit the northern hemisphere and see stone carved to lace, or even a decent spire, I get all overcome like.

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