#edlingham

The interior of St. John the Baptist, Edlingham, Northumberland.

 A window in St. John the Baptist, Edlingham, Northumberland.

We arrived at this beautiful little church with its squat Norman tower about mid afternoon on a beautiful week day. There were no other cars nearby and the church sits in the midst of fields.

As we stood in the graveyard admiring the grounds and the outside of the church we became aware that we were not alone. On the far side of the graveyard, on the other side of the church, there was a man laying the grass with a flat cap on his head, and a full brown tweed suit complete with plus-twos. He was propped up on his arm and with his other hand he was petting a cat.

He never once looked up or over at us when we arrived or left, and it was as if he was some ghostly apparition of a gent from another era enjoying the poetry that is a quiet and empty country church yard.

Edlingham, Northumberland UK. Series – TVRRIS. (The tower appeared on the cover of my 1992 book Experiencing the Past – [Link] ) Archaeographic notes: There emerged in eighteenth-century Europe a distinctively modern aesthetic of ruin, part of an antiquarian and romantic sensibility. This series aims to question, reconfigure, reanimate the picturesque castle ruin in the terms of an archetype…

There can be few more picteresque spots for a picnic than Edlingham Castle in Northumberland. In fact, a picture of the view of the castle from Corby Crag, above Alnwick was used as a promotional backdrop to Lord Of The Rings . Sitting quietly in a narrow green valley that lies between the moors about five miles south west of Alnwick, Edlingham Castle is surely one of Northumberland’s hidden…