Rural urban

I suppose inevitably writings like this become a journal or have journal elements. A week of warm sunny weather broke tonight with a crashing thunderstorm that blew up out of nowhere; the sunlight failed and there were strong winds and then torrential rain, and thunder and lightning. And then of course it is gone, the air fresher, the garden saturated, the rainwater dripping off the trees. Now it is mistier, the trees disappearing into a fine rain/haze.

To Kington this morning to collect some advertising leaflets for h.Art week in September. I sat in the car and looked at a small Georgian cottage and thought about the connections between landscape and association. The cottage was on the main road through the small town, with a very small front garden and an ornate porch, cast iron with a tent-like roof. Sash windows, old brick, slightly shabby and overgrown. I'd hazard a guess that it was built between about 1780 and 1820. Such places remind me of the Romantics, especially Keats; there seems something domestic and settled about these buildings, the setting for firelight and conversation and creativity, like Leigh Hunt's house on Hampstead Heath. I can imagine wild travellers being dropped off by the stage coach or a carter, open top coat bulging with poems and journals, the knock-knock-knock at the door, the golden light spilling out into the dusk. My romanticism! Today they are the epitome of the English country cottage, and yet when Keats was alive they would have been brand new and would not have had these associations. Is it the association of creativity and domesticity that I like? The visible landscape of another time? It occurred to me that the lives of famous people are a way into their time for us, their stories become a way of understanding their history. So Wordsworth's time on the Hindwell becaomes a method of examining the history of that valley. It's vague, this and I'm getting off the point. But the rediscovery of historic landscape through the lives of famous people I find interesting.