Category: Geology

Rain and Ruins and Reigning (by )

Found Poems of the Concrete - The Priory

The city landscape is multifaceted and layered, within this city, the one I chose as home - there is industrial wealth rotting from the victorian glory and areas of decay a few decades in the making - fixed with memories and longings and a hope that transcends it all making it ripe for a rebirth - Tudor houses stand in grandeur around 1920's colour and glaze - we choose which story to tell - there are new glass and glitz buildings calling to the business minds and all of it is beautiful overlapped and intwined.

There are the very rocks beneath - housing stories far older than this city - than this kingdom - than this land itself - within the rocks - stories telling of different landscapes. And then there is the religious blanket that settles on this region and gave it life and industry in the middle England of old. There is the Priory and the tales that it's remains have to tell.

St Oswald's.

The ruins of St Oswalds Priory

Golden stone arches whispering of times long forgotten and a majesty of realms, calling for exploration but first there is the semi silhouette of something more modern and yet still older than many countries can claim - a building that stands sentinel as if guarding the religiocity of the region - though weather it practices the same as the foundations as they would suggest it was something else. An evolution of Faith? A changing and growing with the times and peoples and rotation of the Earth around the Sun. It is none the less a church and is full of the patience of ages with a name of mother and of guardianship St Mary's.

St Mary's Gloucester (I think)

The sky is a leadened dead weight that sucks the colour and definition from this built and ancient landscape, ice waters threaten but there is no storm in the roll and twist of those clouds - though there is a strange glare of light that hurts the eyes if focus is attempted. The clouds seem to phase out through the stone windows as if this world and that observed world are not quiet in alinement reminding you of tricks for meditation of doors to December and cats eating themselves and strange impossibilities that contort the mind until they do indeed become possible and you think of travel between such worlds and laugh at the riduclious idea and move on.

Looking through the window St Oswalds Priory

Or rather back, stepping further and further away from the stones and the window so that more of the decaying structure is visible as for a moment it was as if the halls had become whole once more and the collapse of centuries had fallen away. The wind whispers songs that bounce of the stones and get lost in the cracks and weathering. Little ideas are hiding in the chinks - maybe one day they will be found and listened too but not this day because you are too caught up in the stone work itself, and how it forms around the windows, and how the windows are indeed more of an absence of a thing than the thing itself.

Remnants of rooms Gloucester History

And they mark that this was once a room, once a living breathing space, where people where and thought and become nothing but bones and memories and shadows and shades that may still lurk in the cracks and dips of this ruin. Little fragments of the before can be found when you look hard enough - and up close to these old old stones that sing of the multifarious lives that they have lived, hallowed halls of Warrior Queens and monks sending the hopes of a people to the sky god and always the gentle hum of the city around you to remind you of the place in time that these relics now inhabit. Not everything is stone, more perishable things hide in plan sight.

Wood in stone St Oswalds Priory Gloucester

Time seemingly flows around this place, condensing and stretching at odd intervals and you stand in the middle observing yet another window and imagining the glory of the ground it would have stared out upon and the tapestries and drapes and trappings of various ages seem to drift across your sight, a reminder of harsh climates and cold stone walls - churning memories of the places you have lived before of brick and stone and wood and block and how each of these domiciles felt. Of those that leached heat and those that retained it. Even the canvas you slept under in the garden as a child, a surplus of the second world war so heavy and thick, or thin metal that shifts and quakes in the driving rain so loud it becomes the mind. People have been living their lives for a long time in many ways and at many levels of comfort, but these halls would unlikely have allowed you to become old. The thought is a shudder of sensation as if ice has been packed into your bones and is still expanding pushing out the marrow and splitting the core of you.

Structures in Stone St Oswalds Priory

And though you can feel the tragedies of the human condition piling up through the fabric of histories you feel the tug and the pull to investigate further - to fall down the rabbit whole of archaic intrigue and to explore these words that are at once the same as our own and so completely alien that they burn the minds eye if left unfiltered. Blood or no blood, and the mer slight possibility of holy relics - of a person fragmented and normally falsified - can do little to damp your curiosity and besides someone told you it was built wrong to house such things - there is an elegance here that draws you ever onward into it.

Clouds Through Stone Gloucester History

A storm churns reminding you of legends older than the building though not older than the cut blocks that make it up and certainly not older than the stone that was quarried from dead seas that hide in Cotswold Hills. But still the cycle of stories push at you, as if trying to summon thick mists like dragons breath to hide the roads and red bricked buildings that surround.

Ruins and Rain (by )

As part of Mothers Day Alaric took me for a walk around the ruins of St Oswald's Priory here in Gloucester - I realised that I had not explored it properly and he decided that that needed to change - in general I like exploring old buildings and plan to do it a bit more this year including more Cuddly Histories as well as the science. This was only part of our walk which also included the industrial run down bits but I've separated them out for now. These photos are not meant to be academic though I really do want to study them more as being a geologist I kind of want to know the full story of each and every stone!

If you want to know more about the history then go here (actually the lovely website I was going to link to seems to have disappeared so I will try and do a write up on the blog at some point), also this year is really important for the Priory and there are going to be all sorts of things happening in and around it this summer due to one of the founders Aethelflaed!

Serious check this woman out - warrior queen and all sorts!

Now to the photos - I am putting them up here as I know several people want to use them for art projects (me included), you are welcome to use them to draw from - if you use the actual photos this is fine for non profit works (though please still credit me) but could you please talk to me for anything else. 🙂

You can see larger version of the photos by just clicking on them - there will also be a prose-poem type thing at some point but for now this is the photo dump for us artists to be getting on with 🙂

St Mary's Gloucester (I think) The ruins of St Oswalds Priory Looking through the window St Oswalds Priory Remnants of rooms Gloucester History Wood in stone St Oswalds Priory Gloucester Structures in Stone St Oswalds Priory Clouds Through Stone Gloucester History Buildings within buildings St Oswalds Priory Gloucester Nature reclaiming ruins Gloucester Shapes in the stone St Oswalds Priory Striations in the stone St Oswalds Priory History and Geology Gloucester Roots of like on the decay of ages St Oswalds Gloucester Hidden features St Oswalds Priory Some arches are older than others St Oswalds Patterns and shapes St Oswalds Priory Accidental crenulation St Oswalds Priory Blocks and shapes St Oswolds An arch that was St Oswalds Priory Two ages envisioned St Oswalds Layers of History Gloucester Looking along the ruins St Oswalds Gloucester Regal Ruins St Oswalds Priory Which window is which St Oswalds Priory The angle of ruin St Oswalds Priory Tower through the window St Oswalds Priory Tree through ancient window St Oswalds Priory Alaric examining the stones St Oswalds Priory Gloucester A Little Nook St Oswalds Priory Shapes and Hidden Ages Amongst the Stones St Oswalds Priory Structures within and without St Oswalds Priory Colour and shape History Gloucester A view down the stones Gloucester St Oswalds Priory Shape and Space St Oswalds Priory Stone and structure St Oswalds Priory Ruins through the arch St Oswalds Priory The dark and the light Gloucester Through the arch more arches can be seen St Oswalds Ruins Gloucester St Oswalds Priory Brick and Stone Gloucester History Life's struggle Gloucester St Oswalds Priory St Oswalds through the Gate Graves shape curve and angle St Oswalds Priory Branch and Ruin St Oswalds Priory The Wall and the Branch St Oswalds Fragments of self eaten by time St Oswalds Priory Stone and shape and weathering St Oswalds Priory Shapes cut from stone St Oswalds Pillars and supports St Oswalds Priory Gloucester Rocks and rocks and different rocks St Oswalds Priory

p.s. it kept raining hence the title!

Form more images to draw from you can look through the archive on this blog or check out some of the stuff on my photo and images blog, or look at my Flickr.

SmashFest Photos (by )

Back in the autumn we took part in SmashFest Earth and Sky Tour when it came to Gloucester Library. It was an amazing day with lots and lots of people - so many that I we began to run out of our Space Craft supplies so that was more than I typically get through at a whole weekend of music festival!

As Cuddly Science we had a fantastic time and my new asteroid impact simulator went down very well as did the paper mâché volcanoes!

Here is the SmashFest Flickr account with some cute pics of Mary etc... hidden in and amongst it all and maybe the rest of us as well 🙂 Mary had her rainbow coat.

Working Things Out (by )

Cuddly Science is about the kids engaging and discovering things for themselves - sometimes this leads to "off topic" discovers such as how the magnetism of the earth works when the workshop was about looking at the rocks with the hand lens attached to the compass! These are the best moments though when the child is fully engaged and working things out for themselves and asking questions!

Working out how the world works with Cuddly Science

Plus this is a super cute picture of Mary 🙂 But in all seriousness one of the things I came up against time and again is restricted learning - to keep children focused on the "task in hand" for box ticking rather than it being about the learning process. This is one of the reasons I am sticking to informal education rather than formal - my brain doesn't work like that and though will agree that children including those with ADHD need help to learn to focus often I feel it is detrimental.

I love these moments when the child falls down the rabbit whole of enquiry and you can see their brains actually working things out for themselves - it is AMAZING!

Ada Lovelace Day 2017 – Dr Rebecca Wilson (by )

Today is Ada Lovelace Day - an annul celebration of women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM), named after the Victorian mathematician and visionary Ada Lovelace.

Each year we try to do a little write up on women who have inspired us in the sciences. There are many entries for previous years - in fact later today I am going to make a special category for them all 🙂

This year I have chosen my friend Dr Rebecca Wilson.

Broken lift

Rebecca started off in Geology studying at Imperial College's Royal School of Mines, where she not only excelled in her own studies but helped me with some of the more advanced GeoChemistry elements, lending books and explaining things in multiple ways.

She was part of the posse that went with me to the Natural History Museum London to get work experience and helped me get into the meteoritics department. A PhD at the Planetary and Space Science Institute looking for organic material in micrometeorites.

She went on to post doc and research and science outreach at Leicester University and the associated Space Centre. During this time she developed some pretty awesome out reach kits. Those that can be available to the public/teachers are downloadable here.

Rebecca also won an science journalism internship which took her to Ireland, she has in fact been all over the globe studying, researching and presenting.

She has side stepped into medical data visualisation realm where she is pushing the frontiers of science ever forwards as well as highlighting the issues of accessibility on her various travels.

Rebecca has rubbed shoulders with the top people in both space and planetary science as well as within the deep data computering spheres not to mention the odd science communicator such as Brian Cox! Becca he is highly versatility and extremely dedicated and she is also a hell of a lot of fun to be around 🙂

She was even chosen by Jean for a school project on role models and heros!

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