Winchester

luka

Well-known member
There's a world of difference between seeing and being within an historic landscape and seeing it's artifacts and monuments in situ than walking round a museum. You get the whole gestalt or whatever. It's also a town where yhe countryside, the south downs in this case, feels right there, as a presence. As I say I can't remember the lazt time I felt so inside the web of birdsong, one of the very best listening experiences you can have. That field of three dimensional space and sound sources everywhere and the webs weaved between voices trilling and chirping
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
There's a world of difference between seeing and being within an historic landscape and seeing it's artifacts and monuments in situ than walking round a museum. You get the whole gestalt or whatever. It's also a town where yhe countryside, the south downs in this case, feels right there, as a presence. As I say I can't remember the lazt time I felt so inside the web of birdsong, one of the very best listening experiences you can have. That field of three dimensional space and sound sources everywhere and the webs weaved between voices trilling and chirping
It's true, it does feel like it's in the country. More so than other, maybe even smaller, places. That's why I mentioned that it was on a hill, I really had this sort of sensation of a town built around a hill and climbing out of all this countryside that surrounded it.
 

luka

Well-known member
And hills are very beautiful too aren't they? These great folds in the land itself, the giant energies behind those crumplings, that geological time pulse, and the thin layer of biomass cladding them, the green mesh. Vegetable Empire built on the rock. Those two distinct time pulses. I love hills. And you're right, sort of. It's more in the cleft between hills so you can climb out of it and look down over it.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Is it? I'm probably thinking of somewhere else....
But yes, there is a beauty and (not just a twee one, one with power) in the English countryside. Probably everywhere but it's that one I'm noticing a lot now that I've moved away.
 

luka

Well-known member
Is there anywhere that gives the same buzz? Possibly I'd have to stay somewhere overnight. Wells?
 

luka

Well-known member
Is it? I'm probably thinking of somewhere else....
But yes, there is a beauty and (not just a twee one, one with power) in the English countryside. Probably everywhere but it's that one I'm noticing a lot now that I've moved away.

It's subtle I suppose isn't it. But once you register it you can't shake it off. It's there as a presence.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Similar presence? Good question? I dunno, first guess would be somewhere like York or some other old cathedral city. Lincoln maybe (I never been there). Don't think Oxford would fit the bill somehow...
 

luka

Well-known member
Let's all go to Wells!
Dissensus day out!
Hire a mini-bus. Woebot will be the driver.
Fight over what tapes to play on the waY up!
Can't wait!
 

luka

Well-known member
We're all going to Wells! Barty the sulky teenager in the back of the bus. Eventually we bribe him with a load of 10ps and tell him to go and play the streetfighter cabinet in the minicab office
 

luka

Well-known member
The reason I went to Winchester is that ever since finishing Prediction Tablet I've had a deterioration in my quality of contact. I feel as though there were a grubby film between me and the cosmos (not as in porno movie! The other film! Translucent layer!) And I haven't had access to my (possibly not my, alarming thought) full range of powers and acuity of perception. I hate it when this happens so I wss trying to find a way to break down the current assemblage so it can reassemble at a higher level.

I went to Canterbury on Sunday but it didn't give me what I was looking for.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I must have mentioned walking the Ridgeway. Hitting that hill fort near there was one of the real highlights
Uffington Castle? Also the little hill half-way up White Horse Hill is called Dragon Hill, according to legend the bare bits of grass on top are where drops of the dragon's blood fell during its battle with St George. Although George was a Turkish/Georgian knight who almost certainly never came to England so I dunno how that works.
And of course Wayland Smithy nearby has its own thing going on. At school remember kids telling stories about going there and seeing weird people in dark robes performing sinister rites. I was just about young and gullible enough to half-believe them...

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Though all this is a different, perhaps overlapping, culture from the one you started talking about.
 

luka

Well-known member
I think it's very much of a piece.
Uffington is right. I couldn't remember the name. There would have been pagans in robes at Wayland Smithy when you were a boy and now but it's just harmless cosplay isn't it. Modern wicca etc.
 

luka

Well-known member
When the Saxons obtained the rule over the land, Cerdic, the first king of the west, was crowned at Winchester, and having slain the monks, converted the church of St. Amphibalus into a temple of Dagon, in the year 516
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
There would have been pagans in robes at Wayland Smithy when you were a boy and now but it's just harmless cosplay isn't it. Modern wicca etc.
There may well have been but I struggle to believe that the twelve year old Matty Bramwell had somehow got there from Wantage in the middle of the night and was spying on them from behind a tree and that casts doubt on his exciting account of beautiful naked women and human sacrifice.
 
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