Yet more good news for Celtic Romanticist Travel Scholars

At some point I'll return to using Plashing Vole as a dart board for my arrows of opinion (perhaps having grown a beard for a few weeks I was the anti-Samson), but for now, here's another opportunity for all you budding scholars of Romantic travel writing:

The AHRC-funded ‘Curious Travellers’  project is pleased to advertise a fully-funded PhD, to start 1st October 2015, exploring any aspect of C18th and Romantic-period tours to Wales and Scotland.  The post will be based in the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies (CAWCS) in Aberystwyth, and will run for three years.  We invite applicants to offer ideas from a broad spectrum of possible research topics within the main subject of 'The Welsh and Scottish Tour 1760-1820'. Suggestions might include (but are not restricted to): 

Perceptions of Wales and the Welsh/ Scotland and the Scots in written tours, published and unpublished; the experience of female travellers; antiquarian recoveries of early Britain; the writings of Thomas Pennant;  correspondence and knowledge networks; encounters with Welsh/Gaelic literature or song; natural history writing in the tours; enlightenment science and domestic travel; topographical art and artists. A candidate interested in the visual art aspects of the project would have the possibility of working closely with the topographical art collections in the national libraries and museums of Wales and Scotland.  

The successful candidate will work alongside a team of researchers currently engaged in the AHRC-funded project “Curious Travellers: Thomas Pennant and the Welsh and Scottish Tour (1760-1820)”, jointly run by CAWCS and the University of Glasgow, and led by Dr Mary-Ann Constantine and Professor Nigel Leask.  The deadline for applications is 30 April 2015: for further information about the project and details of the award please contact mary-ann.constantine@cymru.ac.uk

Fun hobbies for making friends

Hurrah, wifi at my Child Protection and Welfare Lead Officer Training Day. (And NSPCC: a 'short taxi ride' tends not to cost £12. Clearly your clients are regular visitors to the expenses teat).

I picked up a new hobby this morning. Choose a busy, early morning train. Say a 7.00 a.m. one from Birmingham to Leicester. Then systematically phone everybody in your contacts lists, in order, to 'see what they're doing'. Presumably the answer is 'eating breakfast' or 'shaving' or 'waking up'. Make sure that no sentence has any connection with the preceding or subsequent sentences. Speak progressively more loudly to drown out the rustling of newspapers and rustle of eyebrows being raised.

Gradually, a second leisure activity occurred to me. Sit opposite the telephonic maven. Take out a notebook. Write down random sentences while looking up at the conversationalist every thirty seconds or so. Take bets on whether this will make him/her self-conscious about discussing his/her entire life at full volume to 50 people. (Answer: no).

To boldly go…

The inaugural lecture of the CTTR is by Prof Jan Borm, an über-academic: German, Chair of English Literature at a French university, giving us a tour d'horizon of Arctic studies in German, English, French, Russian, Danish, East Siberian, Czech and Inuit cultures, taking in Foucault, Rousseau and everything in between, delivered with panache.

OK, I have an academic crush. And after the warm white wine, I'm going to break into my quarantined office to (as Faustus puts it) 'burn my books'.

Author to look up: Jean Malaurie. One of his four volumes of autobiography about his 32 Arctic journeys, Hummocks, is available in English and sounds fascinating.

Gathering moss

Spring starts in the small places: this is moss on a wall

I love the juxtaposition of soft natural colours and somebody's racy bedsheets

This was taken through the window of a dour, bare and locked church. Creepily, the organist was playing gloomy music as we prowled round the outside.

Ironbridge and Coalbrookdale again

The bridge used to be flat, but it's gradually folding up

This seems an unlikely juxtaposition

Christmas Cottage - for my New Zealand reader

What an appropriate name for a road

Beautiful decay

Post-industrial hellhole

Yes, twee racists still exist

To the Iron Bridge

I've had the pleasure of an afternoon spent with my esteemed colleague Dr C., and a coachload of budding travel writers, all primed with Romantic poems and accounts of Ironbridge Gorge and its associated village, Coalbrookdale.

We visited Rotunda View, Mr. Reynolds' Romantic lookout point on a high hill, though his structure is long since gone, then wended our way through the most beautiful post-industrial landscape you'll ever see: the soft tips of the alder trees give the impression of billows of smoke.

While up there, Dr C. read an extract of a travel letter describing the exact spot, by Richard Warner in 1807. Perhaps there's hope for Detroit yet.

My pictures are here

Anna Seward had this to say (in typical Romantic style) in 'Colebrook Dale' (1810)

Scene of superfluous grace, and wasted bloom,

O, violated Colebrook! in an hour

To beauty unpropitious and to song,

The Genius of they shades, by Plutus brib'd,

Amid thy grassy lanes, they woodwild glens,

Thy knolls and bubbling wells, thy rock, and streams.

Slumbers!--- while tribes fuliginous invade 

The soft, romantic consecrated scenes. 

Warner:

…our wonder was still more excited by Coalbrook Dale itself, a scene in which the beauties of nature and processes of art are blended together in curious combination. The valley which is here hemmed in by high rocky banks, finely wooded, would be exceedingly picturesque, were it not for the huge founderies, which, volcano-like, send up volumes of smoke into the air, discolouring nature, and robbing the trees of their beauty, and the vast heaps of red-hot iron ore and coak, that give the bottom, "ever burning with solid fire", more the appearance of Milton's hell than of his paradise.

Hello again!

How are you all? I had a wonderful few days, and loved travelling through four countries (Britain, France, Belgium and Germany) by train on a single day. Old friendships were re-established, beer was drunk, books were discussed and Vole felt rather inelegant surrounded by willowy, stylish Germans.

And now, thanks to a madcap plan by James, we're going to Oslo from Thursday to Saturday! How cosmopolitan am I?

More tomorrow - haven't been home yet, just straight to the office.