Cardigan/Aberteifi - Castle and Historic Church

As I mentioned in my previous post, I was in Wales a few weeks ago, visiting my Dad. While I was there, I visited three castles and a few old churches. I'm not sure quite how 'Gothic' in the spooky sense of the word this is, but it is Gothic in the architectural sense. It's hard to feel spooky on a day with such bright sunshine - glorious for many, but too warm for me!

This post does include a spider photograph, so if you're averse to spiders, then don't scroll past the ornate door. I have put it as the last photograph so you can still appreciate the others without having to look at spiders. 

Restored curtain wall, Cardigan Castle. Photo by me.

Cardigan/Aberteifi is on the River Teifi, and we went there to visit the indoor market, and have a look around. I had had been there before, and knew it had a castle, and it was restored in 2014 (which I had read about). The first time I had been to Cardigan was before that, and while I think local council owned it at the time, it was in disrepair after having been neglected by its previous owner and inhabitant for many decades. Unfortunately, while the entrance fee was modest, I didn't have enough money on me, so I didn't get to go inside the grounds. From what I gather, most of the buildings on site are later, but it has nice gardens, and I was hoping to at least look at the gardens, but it was not to be. I did take a couple of photographs of the exterior, however.

Secondary wall, embankment, and then primary wall with tower...
And a much later additional house/cottage, affiliated with the castle. Photo by me.

Another gem was a rather lovely medieval church that has been extended several times over the centuries. The church is The Priory Church of Our Lady of Cardigan (I don't know what that is in Welsh, although I did read it and I've since forgotten it). It is in a very beautiful graveyard, and next to a hospital but also next to a busy road. I did take some exterior photographs, but they didn't turn out very well. I apologise for no good overview photographs. My partner Raven also took some nice photographs, so with his permission, I have included those too. 

Photograph by myself. Gravestones in rows through yew trees.

The graveyard is mostly older graves, although I did not go around and get a particularly good average for the estimate age - looked like mostly 1700s and 1800s gravestones.They are almost all made of the same sort of grey stone as the church and the castle, and most are a slab given a roughly arched shape with text - not like some of the Protestant chapel yards, full of urns and obelisks, or a chapel on a hill we visited, which had a much wider variety of stones. (Unfortunately I accidentally deleted many of the photos of that particular chapel! )

Photo by Raven. 

This is the far corner of the graveyard. All along the back wall are grave-stones laid vertical, with the climbing plants sort of taking over in places. I don't know if they are memorials from plots that were re-used, or if this is just where fallen-over stones got placed, or if there were just a lot of people buried along the wall. 

I also think this photo goes to show what a bright and sunny day it was - very hot, a few wispy white clouds, and scorching brightness. Personally, I found it too hot; I overheat easily and get sun-burnt just as easily, so I prefer cloudier, cooler days. Some people love the sun, but I have to hide under hats, long-sleeved floaty clothes and lots of sun-screen.  
 

Dead Tree. Photo by Raven 

I'm not sure what kind of tree this was when it was alive. There were plenty of yew trees, but yews are poisonous to other plants, so I doubt that there would be other plants growing from it if it were a yew. The tree stump felt almost sculptural, and its timbers bleached grey-white seemed fitting with the stone and almost skeletal itself. 

Grave with ornate carving. Photo by Raven.

This gravestone near the entrance was interesting - it had some sort of crest surrounded by a laurel wreath or other foliage, but it has suffered the ravages of time - the central design, presumably a monogram, is pretty much illegible, and any motto or similar on the banner beneath the leaves has long since de-laminated. I think perhaps the topmost leafs have lost some mass, too. It's interesting to see a headstone carved in the shape of a Dutch gable, too. 

Architectural salvage. Photograph by Raven.

I'm not sure which part of the building this detail came from - I couldn't even figure it out by looking at it - it's some part of some Gothic details, but it's also a broken jigsaw piece of architectural history.  Raven took this photograph of it - I guess it looks sort of abandoned in this corner of the porch, but really it's a sign that someone's put it there so it doesn't get discarded. I don't know where on the building it used to belong - perhaps part of something that has since been altered, so it can't go back - but whatever it was, it is put there where it is not forgotten.  It's almost on display. 

Monk. Photograph by me

This monk's head terminates the arch over the porch. It looks like one of the more recent additions to the church. From what I gather of the church's history, I think at some point it was connected to a monastery as well as a priory (I'm really no expert on this), which I guess is why they used monks as a decorative motif. There's one at both ends of the archway, looking solemnly upon all those who enter the church. I don't know if they are representative of specific people or not.

Ornate ironmongery.  Photograph by me. 

Both Raven and I admired the ornate doors - I don't know how old they are, perhaps Victorian, perhaps earlier, but they have the most fabulous swirling ironwork on them.  I have a thing for doors and windows - maybe it's liminality of them. I also really appreciate when something that doesn't need to be ornate gets an artistic treatment. Plenty of church doors have much simpler hinges, some have fancier, but it's nice to see something like this. Someone put enough time, money and effort in for this to be not just an ordinary door - probably several people; someone to make the timbers into a door, someone (or some people) to do the metalwork, someone who designed it, someone who paid for it... Someone who checked that it would fit in the aperture of the door frame! It's not as common these days, to have such things made, and I think we're losing out. 

There are several stained glass windows in the church - framed by stone tracery that looks very, very old indeed - but maybe not as old as the apertures in the walls, as they look like they once had larger arches and arched tracery rather than arches in rectangles. I don't know exactly how many phases of construction and alteration there have been (I counted at least 5) but it's got so much history built into the walls. It was really quite fascinating. 

Spider, photograph by me.

I really like spiders. Raven, not so much. I saw this spindly one on its thread in the porch window. 

Old High Church Revisited - Photographic Friday

This building is probably very familiar to all of my readers - it's the Old High Church in Inverness. It's somewhere I really enjoy going, especially the accompanying graveyard, and it is a building I have already extensively photographed, especially the unusual tower. The oldest parts of the tower date from the 14thC, but most of it was rebuilt in the 18thC. There's apparently been a church there since the 500s as it is one of St. Columba's original churches, and there was a pre-Christian religious site before that, possibly dating back millennia as many ancient sacred sites in the area do. 

I've finally taken a picture of the Old High Church from across the river! This seems like it would be the obvious thing to do, but for some reason I have never gotten around to doing so. It was such a cloudy day, and this was a lot less dramatic a picture than I would have liked. However, I do think this picture shows how the church is built on a mound - which I have heard called 'St. Michael's mound' - so many sacred hills, hillocks and mounds are associated with St. Michael, but I don't know why. I know some have specific legends, but many don't. If anyone wants to educate me on this, please do!

I have recently got LightZone, which I am still learning to use. The first picture in this series was edited with G.I.M.P (Gnu Image Manipulation Program - minds out of the gutter!) and the second I think was with ::PicMonkey:: - a free online photo editing website, where you can do basic edits via your browser, which is what I use for the majority of my selfies. There's a premium version if you want to pay for it, too, which is has more capabilities.  This final picture of the Old High Church is the first picture I have ever tweaked in LightZone. I was very quickly able to bring out the details, and I am getting used to the primary method - the 'zones' which are, in black and white images, areas of a greys within parameters, eg. white, very very light greys, very light greys, light greys, moderately light greys, moderate greys, etc. It's had to explain in words! Anyway, I think it is something where the interface and approach to editing would work quite well with how I process images. 

There is a low headstone in the foreground with a notch in the top - that notch was carved as a rifle-rest after the Battle of Culloden for the executioner's rifle. Just out of shot, beyond the left edge of this photograph is a wall, against which Jacobite prisoners were shot. There's still dents in the wall from it. I mentioned this in my Graveyard Walk post, and it's something that really stuck me. It's such a cheery graveyard now - or at least as cheery as a graveyard can be - with a nice view over the river and charming trees and plenty of wildlife, especially birds and rabbits, it's darker history is easily forgotten. It is quite moving to me to think of what awful things happened there. 

That's all for this instalment of Photographic Friday. I've got quite a few more blog entries in the works; getting time to work on all of them around college is a bit trickier, but I hope you have all found what I've been writing about recently to be interesting. If you like architectural photography, don't forget to check out my Tumblr ::Architecturally Gothic::. Domesticated Goth also has a Tumblr ::here:: where I post more selfies, links to what I post here, snippets of my life, and also reblog stuff from other bloggers that I find interesting - everything from illuminated manuscripts to Gothic models. 

Photographic Friday: Gothic Revival Church By The Sea

I have to do a precedent study for college, as I am designing a seaside home in a semi-rural location, so I have been visiting a bunch of little fishing villages on the Black Isle coast as that is the area our home is for. That is quite a long way to go just to look at stone cottages with bottle-neck gables, rectangular windows and dormers ('coastal vernacular residential architecture idiosyncratic to the locality')  as lovely as they may be, so I gathered up some friends and made a road-trip of it. Raven, Catastrophe and K went with me. 

Catastrophe and K photographed by Raven; he's an awesome photographer!

The weather was a bit chilly, and partially cloudy, but a lot milder than I would expect for February in Scotland; there's still snow on the taller hills, but it's strangely mild this year in terms of temperature -  in terms of storms, it's been quite bad. Catastrophe and K went to stand right up near the sea wall and got utterly soaked by the crashing waves. Raven photographed them, and I went off to look at cottages. But I didn't JUST look at cottages... 

Above the cottages I noticed a graveyard and church... 

How can I resist Gothic Revival architecture?

I haven't been able to find out much about Rosemarkie Parish Church except that it was opened in 1821, and is in a similar style to most of the stone-built Gothic Revival parish churches in the Highlands; it's very 'Church of Scotland' - fancier than most Free Church churches and less fancy than Catholic ones. I know that many of the parish churches are very similar, but I find them all uniquely charming in their own way, and while to some it may seem "they're all the same", to me each one is different with its own quirks, and I appreciate all of them. 

I like dramatic skies and pointy arches

As far as churches go it is not the biggest, nor the fanciest, nor the most unusual, but the thing I really like about it is not just the building itself - it is its location. It is just up the hill from the beach; it overlooks a row of cottages and then there is the coastal road and the pebbled beach. The view is pretty impressive. It is an exposed place and the salt on the wind reminds you that you're not far from the sea at all. 

That's not a field beyond the hedge, it's the sea

I love these wee churches with their pretty graveyards. I've been around hundreds, and they never fail to enchant me. I've written about why graveyards appeal to me before, and while I am no longer Christian, ecclesiastical architecture still appeals to me - people have made such beautiful things in devotion to their God (and sometimes, I guess, for secular ulterior motives too) and many of the better-designed churches convey a sense of peace and optimism, or in the case of grand cathedrals, seem to be man's best attempt to build something on Earth approximating how it is in Heaven.  I think some of them got pretty close. 

I also like mausoleums...

It has its own graveyard. I would think there are quite a few who would like to be buried looking out at sea for the rest of eternity, especially in a community that was for a long time a fishing village. I really liked this Gothic iron fence - the gate seems broken, not closing properly; I didn't leave it open like that out of laziness or anything; I didn't even open it, and I didn't want to fiddle with it in case I broke it more. 

Beyond that row of graves and the hedge behind them is a steep hill and then it is, as you can see behind the fence at the rear, the sea. Rosemarkie faces onto a firth, rather than the open sea, so somewhere on the horizon will be Morayshire - the land between Ardersier and Culloden. 

This is just one point on my road-trip, and there will be more architectural photography over the next few days, including the ruins of Fortrose Cathedral. It  surprises me how many truly grand and quite vast ecclesiastical buildings lie in ruins across the Highlands - Beauly Priory and Elgin Cathedral being notable examples. 

A Goth In Dingwall

I am continuing with project photographing Goths and similar alternative types in the Highlands. It is really important to me to show the world that even a mostly rural and often quite remote area like the Highlands (quite sparse in terms of population, with Inverness, our only major city, being smaller than some towns) has Goths, and that we are every bit as fabulous, unique, and varied as Goths in other places. I actually think that are lower numbers means that we do not tend to group ourselves into cliques by genre, and that many of us are quite varied as individuals as well as each being representative of varied styles; I know I can be anything from Gothic Lolita through Romantic Goth to Trad Goth when it comes to fashion and that I am hybrid of all of those things when it comes to my approach to Goth itself, and to being alternative, and there's so many different aspects to many of the Goth individuals I know locally - I am certainly no exception. 

Samm, a portrait. I love the narrow depth of field in this one!
Photograph by HouseCat

This installment of the project is bringing you Samm, from Dingwall. Dingwall is a town of Viking origin that's a short way North of Inverness. I was quite happy to get there on a £6.10 day ticket that could also take me as far south as Daviot  -which I considered, but I ran out of time. Daviot has a lovely church in a beautiful location that I have been wanting to photograph ever since I saw it on my way up the A9 to get here! Samm is an enthusiastic cosplayer, as well as Goth inclined alternative lassie, and a big fan of camping. I have had an awesome time camping with her, and hopefully we're going camping together again soon. 

Full length Samm, by a railing and vines. 

Samm's style for this photoshoot is very Nu-Goth, with a Killstar top and and H&M skull scarf, a neat black skater skirt and chunky black boots. This is just one variation on Goth and Alternative fashion that Samm wears, and I may well photograph her again in the future in a different set, wearing a different style. She took her jacket off for the photos, and as you can probably see, it started off a grey and dull day, so the scarf is actually mine, lent to her as I didn't want her getting cold! 

Looking into the graveyard, the sky making

The location is the churchyard of St. Clement's church in the centre of Dingwall. It is bordered on 3 sides by carparks (including a particularly large one for the local supermarket) and offers an idyl of quiet and respite from the traffic and busyness around it. I am not the sort of person to ask models to drape themselves across gravestones, nor to walk across graves like they are ordinary grass, nor to be loud or obnoxious in a cemetery, so I was very careful in taking these photographs to respect the surrounding graves, and to only use fence railings as "prop"s, not the graves themselves and to at least try to keep the wording on graves obscured, as I feel those things are personal to the families of the deceased. 

Samm and the "teeny tiny urn-thing". Photograph by Housecat

Samm is a particularly chirpy and bubbly person, and I tried to convey that in the photos. She was trying to do her "serious Gothic modeling" expression, but it always cracked into at least a smirk. It doesn't help that I called the finial on the railings a "teeny tiny urn-thing".  Perky Goths are real (and I am one! especially once caffeinated... ). 

Playing with the angles of stone walls. Photograph by HouseCat

In terms of photography, I am relatively with how these came out. My favourite is the first one shown, with the narrow depth of field. I both like how that specific effect turned out, and also the composition for that photograph. All the photographs are in black and white, which is not something I have done for portrait photography before - I took inspiration for how I normally treat my architectural photographs. In some of them, where she is mostly monochrome and the background is quite leafy, I do feel like she would have been more distinct from the background in colour, but over all I like how this set turned out. 

Autumn Road-Trip 1: Ardclach Old Parish Church

Back in early Autumn, Raven, Suzy_Bugs, Hemlock (another Goth and photographer) and I went on a road-trip around the area between Nairn and Elgin, looking for interesting parts of the local historical landscape to photograph - old buildings, old bridges, graveyards, churches and interesting places from an architectural and historical point of view. A disused chapel and graveyard in the middle of nowhere seemed like the perfect start. 

Photograph by HouseCat. A surprisingly sunny day for Autumn in Scotland.

Instead of a rectangular, hall-like floor-plan, like many chapels of the period, or the traditional cruciform shape, it is T-shaped, with the side wing probably being an extension to an original hall-style church. It's in quite a lovely secluded location and is enclosed, along with its churchyard, with low stone wall - or rather, low from the churchyard perspective, as it is built on a terraced plateau and is significantly higher than the flood-plain below. There was apparently a church on the site before this current building, which according to the Buildings At Risk Register, was dedicated to St. Luag. 

 have tried to take the graves at angles where they're not readable,
but I think it is too shallow, sadly. No disrespect ended to the deceased or relatives.

It hasn't been used in decades. It is boarded up with the 'windows' painted onto boards over the real windows (if they're still there). The building is not open to the public, so I have no idea what the interior is like. The graveyard has some fairly recent graves for a cemetery at a disused church. I found out that the building was put on the Buildings At Risk register. The entry has a few interesting details about the building - as to its age, it was built in stages from 1626 onwards, with a lot of work done in the 19thC, and it has been unused since 1958.

A very bright day in Scotland. Photograph by HouseCat. 

The weather was particularly mild for autumn. There were light showers, but otherwise it was quite sunny. We went for a short walk in the surrounding countryside.  The river is very close by, and quite fast flowing over rock - it reminds me of the river Teifi in Wales. My next blog entry will be photographs of the river. We also took photographs of creepy-crawlies (mostly spiders, but none of my photographs of spiders came out right), plants and the countryside, which while very pretty, I do not feel fit in with the theme of this blog, so I am not posting them here. I will only be posting about the river because I like the textures and blackness of the water in the photographs I took, and feel like they are better suited to aesthetic of this blog. 

A photograph more akin to my usual style. Photograph by HouseCat.

In one far corner of the graveyard, there was a small tree, and beneath the tree were candles, a horse-shoe, some ribbons and other items that seemed to either indicate a rather unorthodox memorial, or some kind of folk-magic.  I left it alone, and did not photograph it as I did not wish to be disrespectful to the intentions of whomever person put them there.

This was just the first part of the Road Trip, and there were many more places I visited that day - all of which will be featured on my blog. 

In full colour! The sky was grey with clouds but bight. 

The area was pretty green and lush, and the rain showers really made everything seem so bright. Something about the pine woodland reminds me of parts of Canada. It really is a lovely location. For a place so secluded and long-disused, and with a graveyard, it didn't seem creepy outside. Hemlock told me a rather creepy story about inside, however, that doesn't exactly include a ghost, more something that I will simply term an "entity". Maybe at some point I will get him to write it up and share it here. 

Looking down the broad side of the church. Photograph by HouseCat

That is all for this instalment, but I will post the rest up shortly. I do hope you enjoy my architectural photographs of disused and ruined buildings. I especially like chronicling the various local graveyards, are they can so easily fall into disrepair, and I hope that maybe if that happens, my photographs may at leat be a record of what once was. 

Inverness Churches, Dark Skies and Winter Weather

These were taken before the Christmas holidays, when I was on my lunch-break from work, having taken the bus into town. I have a later lunch than most, so it was mid afternoon when I went for my break, and the weather was rolling in to get dark early - earlier than the roughly 3:30 time the sunsets seem to start in the depth of winter here. Inverness is surrounded by hills and mountains that significantly raise the horizon, meaning that the sun has far less distance to go to set, plus, for American readers, we're a wee bit further North than Sitka in Alaska (for comparison's sake) and to European readers, we're similar to Yaroslavl in Russia and a bit south of Gothenburg in Sweden! Anyway, the general result of the cloud and latitude and season was to create some rather atmospheric lighting and I took the opportunity to take these photographs in the city. 

Photograph by me. 

This is the Free Church of Scotland on Bank Street, as seen across the graveyard of the neighbouring Old High Church. I think this is the first photograph I have taken of it from this angle. The clouds rolling in are pretty dramatic in this photograph, and I think it best captures the weather. 

Photograph by me

I took a few photographs of the church tower from very similar angles that day. I read in the papers recently (I think it was the Inverness Courier...)  that the congregation can no longer afford the insurance, and that it may have to close. I think that would be a vey sad fate for what is a very beautiful and very old building. I hope that their fundraising goes well. 

Here is the same building again, this time in colour, and from an almost identical angle. I think in colour the low sun is more visible, and the warm reds of the masonry. It's a lovely, lovely old church and has been a city landmark for centuries - I really do hope it manages to get funding both to remain open and keep the building in good repair. I am not Christian, but I do appreciate good architecture, and I do appreciate the role the various churches have in the community locally (I know that they run a lot of local charitable ventures, and are linked to the food-bank, etc.), so things like the possible closure of this church make me sad. 

Music That Inspires: Choral Music

This is such a broad topic! I've found it very hard to narrow it down to one aspect for this blog, as music is something that permeates my life. Back when my I still had headphones for my iPod, it was something that was pretty much a constant in my life. I studied it up to A Level and play several instruments, and I sing. When I am particularly strapped for cash, I perform as a street musician (a busker) in Inverness with my recorders  and I am very glad to have a talent (turned into something useful by all the hard work and music lessons and the 6hr-a-day practice schedule when I was a teen) that can earn my keep if necessary. 

I also have milder synaesthesia, and for me sounds tend to be accompanied by colours and 'textures' (I 'see' a lot of it as solidified light almost like glass) to the point where when I am composing, I tend to pick things that look good when I shut my eyes, because they invariably sound good too, and even wrote up an entire chart of chords by colours and what they invoke imaginatively to help me in my compositions. 

I didn't want to write about my tastes in stuff like Goth, Darkwave and French Coldwave because I'm pretty sure I've covered various aspects of that on my blog already. Beyond Goth, my tastes in music are quite broad. I thought I would focus on an aspect of my musical life that has inspired me as a Goth while being quite removed from Goth itself. 

I like early ecclesiastical sacred choral works from a variety of traditions, not limited to but including many things from Gregorian chant to Renaissance polyphony, to modern works such as those of John Taverner and Karl Jenkins. 

When I was younger and somewhere between my Christian roots and my Pagan faith, I was rather active in various church choirs and I have been singing from a very young age. I sang in both church choirs and school choirs, but as many of the schools I went to (I moved a lot) were Christian, I still sang mostly sacred music. I have not attended Church for worship service in years, and do not intend to as I am thoroughly Pagan now, but I still attend the occasional concert of sacred music.  Choir holds almost all positive memories for me. I got to a relatively high standard and ended up singing some challenging music in some really beautiful places. 

While the religious content was not always in alignment with my personal faith (and as I grew older, I grew further away from Christianity) there was something about it that connected with me on a very profound and spiritual way. I think there is definitely something spiritually powerful about religious singing, as an act of worship and an act of faith in itself rather than as simply a celebration thereof. There is a lot in the Bible about music, from David's lyre, to the songs of Solomon, to the angels who sing eternal praises in Heaven, and while this is heading off on a tangent that probably deserves its own post, I certainly think that Christianity and other religions that use sacred song (I have some CDs of Buddhist singing, from a period when I was interested in becoming Buddhist), and they have something very precious and definitely inspiring. A few years ago I tried writing some Pagan songs in a similar choral style, but suffered from a lack of people to sing them (I experimented with multi-tracking myself, but it come out very strange!) and so that project was put into indefinite stasis. 

The heavens my imagination transports me to might not be the one I envisioned when I believed in an afterlife in Paradise, but the music still has the power to supremely move me. It also always reminds me of the glorious Gothic architecture of the Chapels, Churches and Cathedrals I have attended for various things from Royal School of Church Music summer-schools at Magdalene College Chapel in Oxford (a building that is truly glorious) to St. Mary's Church on the bridge in Henley-on-Thames with it's Morris-esque murals and beautiful stained glass, to Peterborough Cathedral (which is Gothic on a truly vast scale!) and thus whenever I hear certain pieces I think of certain places and events.

It should be relatively apparent that historic architecture, especially that in the Gothic style, is something that I am really passionate about. With early Gothic literature, the term came about because of the use of settings, and how a lot of those settings were the sorts of buildings I love. To me, I cannot easily separate my experience of those buildings from the music performed in them, the music I performed in them as part of a choir. 

I have a specific fondness for requiems (how stereotypically Gothic of me!) especially the later ones. Later requiems were written more as concert pieces than to be sung at requiem masses, but they are still based around religious texts and sentiments, and as such I'd like to mention a few here. Fauré's requiem with its serene , and is also one of my favourites, then Verdi's with its furious Dies Irae, and Mozart's as well (and the wonderfully Gothic story written about it for the film Amadeus! It's not true, and Sallieri was not driven by obsessive jealousy to murder Mozart by working him to death, but it's a very good story!). I also like Vittoria's 'Missa Pro Defunctis" and "Officium Defunctorum" - his "mass for the dead" and "offices for the dead", the latter of which I heard sung by The Sixteen back in 2006 in Reading. It was  one of those moments when, despite struggling with depression at the time, I managed to unlock the glass box it felt my head was in, and be lost in the music rather than my own thoughts. 

Choral music of various Christian traditions has inspired both my own musical life as a choral singer (I even ran a choir at the school I work at until my chronic illness made in untenable) and also as an artist and poet and photographer as glorious music mixes with beautiful colour and light in a synaesthesic mix in my head, and always evokes a sense of wonder, sacredness and a belief that there is a Divine and glorious presence in the universe, even if to me the heavens are the literal heavens of space full of stars, nebulae and very real glorious light, and to me, a pantheist, the Divine is inherently manifest through reality. When I shut my eyes and sit on the bare earth and feel the boundaries between what is me and what is everything else dissolve and meditate, there's a similar sense of awesome, brilliant, glorious something that I touched when I was singing psalms, evensongs, hymns, masses and oratorios. 

My Musical Pick
There is some overlap with my tastes in more Goth music; some of my favourite pieces by Dead Can Dance are the ones where multi-tracking has been used to create a choral effect, but the songs they sing have words of Lisa Gerrard's glossolalia rather the Latin texts various masses and offices. I think that same sense of light and glory that is forever intangible that I got when listening to choral concerts in Oxford collegiate chapels and grand Gothic cathedrals is what inspired Host of The Seraphim with its vocals that seem to soar ever upwards in plaintive chant over a very minimal (electric?) organ and distant strings. It reminds me of how psalms are traditionally sung with the chords changing according to the text, rather than the text made to fit the melody (think Alleghri's 'Miserere mei, Deus'). To me, Host of the Seraphim is like watching angels come and go, filing past out of view and into nothing but beautiful light. 

Barevan Church and Graveyard

In which I take even more photographs of windows...

After visiting Rait Castle, we headed to Wester Barevan, south of Achindown and Nairn, to visit the ruins of Barevan church, which has been ruined for a very long time, long enough for graves to have been lain in the floor of the old church. Barevan church and graveyard, in the summer sun, is one of the most peaceful and picturesque graveyards I have ever been to. It is almost like a garden, rather than a graveyard, and has plenty of pretty trees and nice views. 

A grave is lain where the altar once was... Eerie.

However, all it takes is a change of weather to give it an entirely different atmosphere. When the clouds roll in and obscure the sun, and when the wind rattles the leaves, it suddenly feels much more exposed. It is not quite as bleak as the wilder, open places of Scotland, as there are trees and it is circled by woodland and hills, but suddenly the weather seems very much there, and the stone walls seem greyer, and the lack of a roof suddenly becomes a concern. 

I heard you like windows, so here are two windows
seen through a window, viewed in a browser window,
perhaps on a computer running Windows...

The style of architecture, from the rough stone walls down to the Y-tracery on some of the double windows being carved from single pieces of sandstone, reminds me of Rait Castle, and I wonder if they were built at similar times or even perhaps by the same people, or whether that is just how things were done in that place in those times. As you may have noticed, I still have my obsession with photographing windows. 

Narrow depth of field, focusing on stone texture

I really enjoyed photographing the ruined church. I had some fun trying out new ideas with the photography, such as the photograph above. Normally at this point, I would be elaborating on the history of the architecture, but I really don't  know very much about the history of this graveyard - to me it is this is a totally unknown and unexpected graveyard in the middle of the countryside; I have no idea of why it is there, or what sort of congregation it would have had - there's not much settlement about it nowadays, but maybe more people lived there in the past. 

That one rock makes it seem more desolate than it is, by being less desolate.

I still think the strangest thing about that place is how quickly it changes with the weather, how rapidly it goes from almost serene to foreboding, how rapidly the clouds and wind can change how it feels. I will finish with two colour photos, taken within an hour of each other, which I think illustrate this point. 

This photo was taken a couple of steps away from the one above.

The clouds are dark and flat, what little blue is in the sky is quickly retreating and the walls are caught in shadow. Less than hour earlier I took quite a different photograph, looking in through the door of the church at a head-stone, and it seems so bright - like another time and another place, somewhere sunnier and with bright walls and green vines. 

Tomorrow I will showcase a guest post from Raven of ::Chance Photography:: with photographs from both Rait Castle and Barevan graveyard. Architecture week runs until Saturday, so stick around for more photographs!

Snow, Executions, Graveyards and Cats

Well isn't that a strange list of things!

Firstly, it snowed. I know it is mid-March, and theoretically Spring began on March 1st (for those places that use other dates than the equinoxes and solstices as seasonal starts) but it is once again terribly cold and snowy. We have had patches of warmer, brighter weather, but it seems to have plunged once again into winter. 

Snow and trees. Photograph by me.

This is a photo I took in local woodland. It was around 09:20 (I wasn't working at that point, my shift was later) in the morning, and the sun was quite low in the sky soon. Snow had blanketed everything in powdery whiteness, and the branches glittered brightly in the sun. The sky was blue, with more snow-clouds blowing in. I spent some time walking around the woods with the camera, and took a few other pictures, but this one was the best.

I caught a bus shortly after this and went into the city. I was surprised that it was so snowy in the city itself, as it is usually slightly warmer than the surrounding countryside, and often if it is snowing out on the hills, it is only raining in the city. Instead, I found great swirling flurries of snow. I wandered into the graveyard on Church St. to take photos, as I know it to always be very pretty, and the church beside it is a lovely Gothic Revival example (the church in it being much older).

Old High Church Graveyard

The sky, as you can see, had begun to cloud over once again, as more snow was falling and even more snow heading our way. I try not to photograph individual graves too legibly, but some were included as I tried to get a photograph of the overall scene. I will remember to photograph from the opposite angle in future, where I only get the backs of the stones. They are not (by any means) recent graves, and I hope I cause no offence to the families of those interred there. I tried very hard to photograph a rather fluffed-up crow that was scooting between the stones, and at one point perched on top of an urn-shaped grave stone, but he was too flighty (probably a result of the cold). 

Graveyard in the snow.

While I was there, I noticed that the visitor's board - the educational one with a brief history of the church and grounds - was buried under snow, so I cleared it off. Having cleared it off, I glanced over it, thinking I had read it all before, but then realised I hadn't, and that the parts missed included a rather gruesome episode in the Church's history. After the Battle of Culloden, Jacobite prisoners were kept there temporarily, and executed in the graveyard. There were, and are, two stones in the graveyard, one with a groove in the top that was used as a musket rest, and one 9 yards directly in front of it, facing the river, where the prisoner to be executed was placed. I think quite a few died there. Apparently the executioner missed once, and there is dent in the wall of the house opposite. Reading about it sent chills down my spine, and it seemed quite eerie that the churchyard that is now peaceful and pretty and full of wildlife and nice statuary was once witness to such bloodshed. While graveyards are often associated with death, it is rare for people to have actually died in them. 

I had to go home at this point, as I had to get ready for my shift at work, but the weather started improving again. A lot of the snow melted in the afternoon. 

There's a cat perched on me. 

On a lighter note, on the way home to change for work, this friendly cat from a neighbour's house came over to see me. She likes clambering on me, and as you can see in the photograph, especially likes sitting on my shoulders. She's a very, very cute little kitty. And yes, I am terrible at taking selfies. I often get to play with her on my way too and from the bus, and once she refused to get off my shoulders, and I wondered if she was hoping to sneak onto the bus with me... Eventually she climbed onto a fence next me and was content to be petted while sitting up there. 

Arches, Tracery and Details

❝Architecture on a Saturday?

What is this heresy? 

Photographs are for Fridays!❞

<evil villain> 

You all thought you'd escaped Photographic Friday's usual bunch of architecture pictures, didn't you? You thought that I'd be content with Raven's lovely pictures of me (lovely because he's a good photographer, not because I'm a lovely model) and that there would be no spires, steeples, turrets, arches, or other architectural photographs of any kind, and that you were safe from my photographic obsession with buildings. 

Wrong!

Bwahahahahaha!

 </evil villain>

Out in the sunshine with a camera and a corset.
Photograph by Suzy_Bugs

Now, over the last week or so, I have not actually been out to photograph buildings, but spending a lot of time indoors. This is for two practical reasons. The first is that I physically am not up to walking around a lot. Last Thursday (yep, actually last Thursday) it was really rather hot out, and I fainted in the heat, landed awkwardly, bruised my hip, sprained my ankle and bruised my knee badly. Normally I would say this is minor damage and carry on as per usual, but I work on my feet and cannot afford to take days sick. I made the mistake of trying to carry on as per normal, with Roller Derby on Monday night and walking my daily 14 to 15 mile commute on the Tuesday, but by Tuesday evening my ankle was so sore that I was using my cane and not shuffling far from the sofa! As such, I thought it best to avoid too much unnecessary walking, so my photographic activities have been curtailed. The second reason is that I have been focusing my efforts on illustrations for a book. This is paid work, valuable to me, so it must take priority. 

I didn't have to digitally straighten this one!

That said, I did dig out a few pictures from a previous trip. These are all (I think all) of St. Mary's Catholic church on Huntly Street, in Inverness, on the opposite side of the river from the churches I usually photograph. It is an unusual church building, and a very beautiful and ornate one. From the website, I gather it has beautiful stained glass windows, including some wonderful modern pieces commemorating local historical figures and ties with the Polish community in Inverness, but I do not want to be disrespectful by photographing inside the church, especially as I am not Catholic (even if I once was, maybe because I once was.). 

Dramatic skies ahoy!

Trying to get a half decent angle that takes in a large portion of the building was a real challenge - one I think may best be answered from the other side of the river! The picture above is from an angle suggested by Raven, as he was being a very helpful photography coach for me.  The sky was mostly a dull sort of cloudy that day (hence why the direct photograph has such a dull sky above it) but it had a moment of drama, and I took the opportunity. This is my favourite photograph from this little expedition, and in my uneducated opinion, the best. 

Open tracery

The front of the building is designed to maximise grandeur, with the church recessed from street level and connected to the equally ornate ecclesiastical buildings either side with angled walls that create a bit of false perspective and also draw the visitor in towards the church door. It does not appear, in terms of size, to compete with the Protestant churches of various denominations on the opposite side (Free Church, Church of Scotland, etc.)  although I do not know how far back it goes, and it does not posses a tall and imposing steeple. It does, however, manage to cram as much ornament as physically possible into a relatively compact space. It is a Victorian Gothic Revival building in a city full of Victorian Gothic Revival buildings, and I do wonder if the architects involved got a bit competitive. 

Fleur de Lis design. 

Even the floor tiles are fancy! This tile is made with two different clays, rather than being painted, a terracotta red for the design on a creamy-coloured background. Tiles have been produced in this manner and in similar designs for hundreds of years - the Victorians didn't just emulate their Medieval inspiration, the reproduced its craftsmanship. Now, where can I get some of these for my hall-way... 

The cement render behind the gate is in pretty ruin.

I want some of my pictures to have a sense of narrative, a sense that they are part of a story. I like taking pictures that have doorways, paths, arches, passageways - things that give a sense of how the building is something that can be walked through, not just detail on a flat plane, and also I want there to be a bit of mystery. I'd like people to wonder, as I do, what lies behind the gates, around the columns and down the passageways. Whenever I played games like Tomb Raider or Assassin's Creed or Prince of Persia, it was always exploring the nooks, clambering on buildings and generally being curious that intrigued me, more so sometimes than finishing the level! I have this sort of attitude towards real life, except with the limitation that there are places I am not allowed to go and apparently clambering on the buildings is frowned upon (not that this stopped me at boarding school...). 

I have a feeling this is part of another church.

Sometimes it's just the shapes, the patterns, the textures, things less directly 'building' that catch my eye. Hopefully, as my legs (especially that ankle!) recover, I shall be out and about taking more pictures. Maybe there will even be variety as I find something other than buildings and monuments to photograph. Either that or I will eventually produce a comprehensive guide to twiddly buildings in the Highlands. I am hoping to get some castle photos taken; Cawdor Castle, Inverness Castle, Brodie Castle, etc. etc. Lots of castles around here, including the fabulous Eilean Donan Castle (my correspondents will recognise that one from the multitude of postcards I send), so it that sort of project could keep me occupied for a while.