Text: SPENCE'S PLAN FOR EVER
15.02.2026 21:24
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Text: SPENCE'S PLAN FOR EVER
I was prompted to write this blog post by a post on the Surrey Medieval site this morning. In the course of composing I noticed I'd first shared this image with accompanying commentary on the old 'Bird site' on 7/2/2019 - exactly seven years ago today thegrammarofmatter.wordpress.com/2026/02/07/s...
Franz Wilhelm Seiwert and John Heartfield
modernismmodernity.org/articles/hak...
Delighted to find Seven Wells Farm on the OS 150 map (it features on the Saintbury Ley, in the Ley Hunter's Companion), the edge of which is on an alignment which includes Temple Grafton (Shakespeare's 'hungry Grafton'?). Looking forward to seeing Hamnet this week, which has its own haunted 'vibe'
The entry for 'Littywood' can be found here, in David Horovitz (2003) A Survey and Analysis of the Place-names of Staffordshire (PhD Thesis, University of Nottingham), pp.419-420
lichfieldlore.co.uk/wp-content/u...
An old map showing a place called Littywood, encircled by a moat, situated south of Furlong Lane
When I first saw this image of Littywood moated manor (Lvtiude in 1086), I thought, "Henge!" David Horovitz, in his survey of Staffordshire place-names (2003) thinks it may have developed from a prehistoric earthwork. Focus for an array of church and manor alignments, its name is 'puzzling'
First ring-necked parakeets I've ever heard at Southampton Common today. Didn't see any, though. Already seen in the last year at Riverside Park/Woodmill and Mayfield Park
Thanks for the Devereux tip! On OS sheet 150 (Worcester/Malverns) was pleased Pebworth church, Hillborough Manor & churches at Haselor, Oldberrow & Ullenhall align @ 10 miles. The line south after Pebworth goes off map. Shame the places Shakespeare names are on either side of OS 150/151. Awkward!
Honestly, it was a real revelation seeing that Shakespeare rhyme. Probably got a few Warks leys sketched out on the odd sheet of A4 in a pile somewhere (I'm sure of it, but no time to rummage). A habit of randomly picking up OS maps in charity shops of places I've never been and reaching for a ruler
Not heard of this rhyme before but an obvious source for a passage in Finnegans Wake by James Joyce - 'as strait a way
as your ant's folly me line while ye post is goang from Piping Pubwirth to Haunted Hillborough' (p. 340). I'd only taken it as an oblique reference to Watkins' 'old straight track'.
Portrait of Bill the Bard
Rhyme "describing" local vilages believed to be written by Shakespeare after he’d lost in a drinking contest at Bidford:
Piping Pebworth, dancing Marston,
Haunted Hillborough, and hungry Grafton,
With Dodging Exhall, Papist Wixford,
Beggar’s Broom and drunken Bidford.
#FolkloreSunday
Guerilla Birdsong (Feat. Ronnie Ronalde)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=xikS...
Applying historical materialism, ‘the conceptual expression of the objective social structure of capitalist society’, to non-capitalist societies naturalises capitalist social relations, mistaking purely historical categories (the economy) for ‘eternally valid ones’ www.academia.edu/39882309/Awa...
Merry Christmas and happy new Gemeinwesen
www.endnotes.org.uk/dossiers/jac...
‘As Adorno saw it, Surrealist art had been compromised by postwar conditions: made of “world-rubble”, the montages of Surrealism created only “nature morte”; “After the European catastrophe the Surrealist shocks lost their force.”’
Hal Foster on Surrealism v. fascism: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Cast iron circular finial of a road sign, bearing the legend, HAMPSHIRE WHEELY DOWN
A Bronze Age barrow at Wheely Down, which has been under the plough for many years, is just about perceptible as a bump on the skyline, in line with a trig pillar just over the horizon.
Liminal topographies: the guide post at Wheely Down which may have inspired the eponymous Richard Thompson song and the nearby Bronze Age barrow, implicated with UFO landing sites and an epic cross-country trip of Fairport Convention. In Northern Earth, Issue 182 northernearth.co.uk/product/nort...
T. W. Adorno likened his encounter with Ernst Bloch's first major work, The Spirit of Utopia (Geist der Utopie), to his memory of reading a grimoire as a child. Reading this piece offers other implications to Adorno's concept of mediation: for every mediation a medium!
brill.com/view/journal...
Emblem of 'Eternitas' (Eternity) from Henry Peacham's Minerva Britanna (1612). A long-haired, female figure (who is suspended in mid-air over a harbour) holds up two orbs, encircled by her long tail, emblazoned with stars
To be the midpoint of triple Nature, to move all things,
You attach the soul and diffuse it through adapted members;
and Soul, cut in two, has globed its motion in two orbs,
goes forth to return to itself, turns about the depth
of mind, and curves the heavens to a like pattern - Boethius
It's certainly a very strange tangle of tales with an unexpected possible antecedent and literary echoes. Curious, indeed...
Photo of a yellow sun setting towards a calm sea and bathing the foreground green field with two standing stones in a golden light. Between the two standing stones there is a fallen or recumbent stone. The sky above the sun is blue and a distant hill burns an autumnal russet colour. The standing stone that takes up nearly half of the picture is covered in patches of white lichen and has a sinuous line that marks the edge between a stone face that is flat and a face that isn’t.
…and another photo of this stone with the rest of the stone row (towards sunset this evening) #StandingStoneSunday
An angular but smooth tall standing stone, grey- but covered in patches of calico-and mustard-coloured lichens, stands amidst a clump of Juncus rushes in a pile of grey cobbles. The green grass beyond sweeps away to more yellowing rushes and then drops away to the calm blue of Cardigan Bay. Beyond, the distant purple mountains of the Lleyn Peninsula form a thin strip below a yellowing sky preparing for sunset.
Tallest stone of the Waen Oer stone row looking out over Cardigan Bay to the distant mountains of the Lleyn Peninsula. An odd-shaped stone with odd cigar-shaped natural markings for #StandingStoneSunday
