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okay hi so we woke up here in a van yesterday morning. this is heysham overlooking morecambe bay. it's the 8th century chapel of st patrick with its rock cut tombs. This complex kinda tumbles the later churchyard next door where a saxon arch was re-erected. this place is phenomenal & absolutely threw me about. it's both alien & familiar

after this we drove to sunderland point. this is a village only accessible by one tidal road which cuts it off twice a day. it's a marshy prison. here there is a work by artist chris drury, a camera obscura housed in this dry stone chamber. it's a phenomenal vibe. you go inside and it's pitch black. slowly slowly the image of the bay behind appears in a circle. every now and then a bird will dart across and it feels filmic. the structure is beautifully built. It feels like a burial

not far from here there's 'sambos grave', an 18th century funerary monument to an enslaved person who died here. the story is so deeply fucking tragic but there are thousands upon thousands like it which are of course never told. britain lives in an evil, festering silence about what it did.

luke

we careered north and came to cartmel priory, founded in 1188 by the biggest bastard of all time, william marshal. it was saved from dissolution because the village argued this outrageously outsized monster building was their parish church. it's full of gorgeous intrigue

when you come to the choir though, your goddman nuts get slapped. the medieval stalls were refurbished in the 17th c with the most amazing oak carving ive probably ever seen. described as "gothic in effect" but it's more than that. so hard to photograph but the effect is heart stopping

THEN we went into the cumbrian mountains proper. we came to swinside, not far from langdale, a famous centre of polished axe production in the stone age thru the neolithic. this is SUNKENKIRK. this stone circle will never , ever leave my memory. I'm really not joking when I say you can *feel* the energy here. I did my usual perambulation of the outer, then went straight to lie in the middle. the approach is WILD. you go up this track & only at the last second does the circle emerge from a dip

'kirk' is northern dialect for 'church' and the 'sunken' bit makes sense when you see this thing emerge from behind a brow. phenomenal place

then to ravenglass where there is pretty much a whole ass standing roman bathhouse. I had a panic dream this morning that I couldn't recognise roman stonework anymore & had got it wrong my whole life

THEN on to gosforth!!! there is a 4.5m tall cross here in the churchyard carved with norse and christian symbols. this thing absolutely cleaned my clock. its unreal. Inside the church there's various wild viking age stonework, including a panel showing Thor fishing & these 'hogback' tombs which are uniquely themselves

last post from my cumbria trip!! the most amazing thing I'd seen are these rock carvings at copt howe. just incredible. I'd spend the day before on mushrooms so coming to these got my mind racing. these are *very* close to the polished axe factories at langdale.

@knownrobes I can almost SEE the energy. Amazing.

@knownrobes Thanks for this beautiful thread.

@GwenfarsGarden Thanks for boosting this into my timeline!

@stelepami @knownrobes Luke often goes to amazing places and shares the pics and history. This just reminded me I hadn't followed him from this account, so that's sorted :)

@stelepami @GwenfarsGarden thanks for reading!! there's plenty more from the weekend, but I shall post the rest later or tomorrow.

@knownrobes v curious to know why you think William Marshall is so bad?!

For me, the biggest bastard of all time* is Edward I.

*Well, prior to the 20th century...

@GwenfarsGarden oh aye the truly terrible longshanks takes it. I mean tbf marshall wasnt even bad at all! it's just impossible to seperate his name from the castles of wales