We’ve just come back from a remarkable dramatic occasion: the Winter Solstice Play performed by the Rendham Mummers. Rendham is a village just a few miles inland from Snape. At each solstice, winter and summer twice a year, the Mummers perform a new ‘play’ on one evening only.

Tonight’s was called ‘Death Stole the Sun’. It began at 7.30 pm so was performed in the dark which led to quite dramatic effects:

This photograph shows the ‘stage’, a grassy knoll about 15m across between a splendid tree, greenly under-lit, and three arcs of straw bales on which sat an enthusiastic, participatory audience of the ‘hiss-boo-and look behind you’ variety. To the left was a square red tent housing the 5-person band in which a drum, a recorder and a guitar were prominent. The violin seemed to be largely decorative. They may have played some Telemann and the like but I only recognised the James Bond tunes.

Between tree and tent was a curtain, used to dramatic effect when it fell away to reveal three ‘Essex girls’ called Tracy, Maisy and Daisy (I think). Right of the tree was a narrow ridge tent used for unmentionable goings on of an explicitly sexual nature. Centre front of the picture is the Master of Ceremonies with the script – one suspects the only copy – whose main job turned out to be not so much telling the audience what was about to happen as prompting the cast what to say and when. Behind him are various members of that cast including, to his right, the three ‘Essex girls.’

Those girls may not have featured in a genuine medieval mystery play but here the rest of the dramatis personae were drawn from that tradition. We had a splendidly acted pair of the Grim Reaper and Death; the latter turned out to be the missing son after he himself had been deaded by a cannon ball shot with an excellent flash and bang from a toy cannon:

The scaffolding tower behind Death’s left shoulder was necessary to provide the platform from which the Archangel Gabriel descended. This she did to great effect but far too early in the play, most of which she spent suspended rather awkwardly and inarticulate over the front of the band tent. This unfortunately put her slightly higher than the Earth Mother who, to signal clearly just how top she was meant to be, lounged nearby in an easy chair on top of a kitchen table.

Another prominent character was an oak tree alias the Green Man with flaming branches coming out of his head above a cloak of leaves falling to the ground:

Unfortunately, he was relieved of his manhood which in turn necessitated the ‘Essex Girls’ giving up their large bottle of Viagra  to help achieve a miracle fertilisation which in the end proved unnecessary since Death was the missing son anyway. The plot did get somewhat tortuous and fragmented towards the end, but that didn’t matter since everybody was just waiting for it to finish so that they could process behind the cast with flaming torches down the hill to the pub:

Before finishing my critique of the ‘new’ Sutton Hoo, I would like to insert a few notes about a selection from the many other events I have been to and things I have seen during an autumn dominated in terms of time by looking after some of the Rare Breed sheep from the National Trust’s flock whose summer home is on Orford Ness. The Ness has been flooded for several weeks now and for a time we took some of the refugees rescued from it. All are now off the Ness and parts of the flock are distributed over several places in Suffolk and Essex, including Snape Warren where we perform our twice-daily duties.

Above right, part of our reduced flock of 20 (3 Manx, 6 White-faced Woodlands, 11 Hebrideans, in the background), led by, above left, Jesus and her two lambs; and, below, Woodlands being selected by Andrew the NT shepherd for removal to pastures new.

It is a delight and a privilege to be working with these lovely creatures, but they do take up a lot of time, particularly relative to the limited daylight hours at this time of year. Still, keying this on the eve of the Winter Solstice, what a invigorating thought it is that from tomorrow the days will be getting longer.

Talking of Winter Solstice, I repeated my mistake of recent years of putting a couple of paintings into The Cut’s open exhibition at Halesworth, now open and exhibiting until Saturday, 11 January. My main painting is called ‘Black Winter Solstice’, an overtly gloomy work expressing my own gloomy  state of mind in the autumn of 2019:

Above top: ‘Black Winter Solstice’ hanging to the left of the window in The Cut, December, 2019; below, the same in better lighting.

My other painting is an older one not previously shown at The Cut: ‘Slashed Red’, an abstract collage which was great fun to make and which is full of painterly innuendo:

Partly because it is unlikely that either will sell, it should perhaps be recorded that recently two of my other paintings have found a new owner:

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They make a contrast: on the left, a small. impressionistic but figurative version of the view from the bridge of the quayside at Snape Maltings at low tide; and, on the right, a geometric abstract created in Michael Horn’s studio three or four years ago.

And looking at that quayside reminds me that I’ve had several more looks at the ‘ship art’ etched into the fabric of St Bartholomew’s church, Orford. I noticed on my favourite column between the nave and the north aisle a rather prominent fish:

I suspect that image may well have been unconsciously in my mind when I found myself doodling on a photograph in the travel section of a newspaper:

 

Anyway, about 180 degrees round the column from the Orford fish, I almost convinced myself that, among a palimpsest of scratches, I’d found not just a new ship but two ships, one etched on top of the other:

If you accept the two vertical lines as the two main masts of two different ships, two prows of two different ships, one on top of the other, emerge from the linear complexity below. I’ll see if I can take a better photograph on my next visit. Meanwhile, to remind us of what an unambiguous ship looks like, here is a new photograph of an image which has already appeared in these pages:

And lo and behold, even this well-known image now, under good cross-light, appears to consist of a round-bottomed boat cutting across a flat-bottomed one. Orford never fails to give: I went from the church down to the quay and was just in time to catch the lower parts of a double rainbow shimmering and then fading over Orford Ness:

The third vertical on the right is the, rather surprisingly still standing, lighthouse on the far side of the Ness.

The indoor exhibition is still contained within the same large modern shed as before, but the latter has now been renamed as ‘the High Hall’. Of course it is right to stress the importance of the Hall in Anglo-Saxon life but any illusion that this building might seem like a 7th century timber hall inside is destroyed by the placing of a large circular exhibition gallery in its centre. So a visitor goes around the outside of this structure and then its interior, hardly what one does when visiting a long rectangular building such as an Anglo-Saxon hall. The point is not perhaps all that important, but invoking a ‘High Hall’ seems rather pointless when it is immediately negated.

That said, I thought the exhibition was excellent – innovative, full of interest and with objects of such magnificence that one forgot that almost all are reproductions (the original material is in the British Museum).

The Hall is themed on three principal topics – the people in the royal court, the royal connections overseas and the technical skills needed in war and peace.

The ‘people’ section is about individuals, dominated by women, so very much in the fashion of our own times. The introductory video is of two women, an old retainer and a new slave-girl, chatting as they prepare for the funeral of a king. It vividly brings out the dilemma at individual level of tradition v. the new, and specifically of pagan beliefs and this incoming new religion called Christianity.

The first of numerous photographs of well-made models continues these ideas with panels on the ‘Wise Woman’ and the ‘Slave Girl’, both emphasising the importance of women in Anglo-Saxon society and also introducing the idea of social hierarchy within that society.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Personally, I was particularly glad to see the prominence given to  the second theme, the Anglo-Saxons’ far-reaching connections to worlds far beyond East Angle-land:

A set of excellent distribution maps illustrates this largely unappreciated dimension of our supposedly ‘primitive’ forebears. As exemplars, the first shows the generality of connections with the Eastern Roman Empire centred on Byzantium, the second how far away one of the specialist materials on the site, bitumen, had to be sourced.

 

 

Acknowledgement is given to the skill of the various crafts-people actually making the many extraordinary objects created in England from materials brought from afar. One such craftsman is illustrated:

 

Among the many objects, one decorated brooch is picked out for analytical treatment:

 

 

That’s quite enough for one post. I’ll add a Sutton Hoo exhibited III post shortly.

 

As some previous posts have indicated, I have been visiting Sutton Hoo throughout the summer out of interest to note how the £4 million+ -worth of revamping of the site for visitors has developed. I have not been involved in the scheme in any way other than to observe. All is now complete and open, except for the new observation tower overlooking the site of the burial mounds.

A much-hyped part of the scheme has been to open-up the whole site by encouraging visitors to participate in a ‘new and exciting’ ‘landscape experience.’ Essentially this means going on one or more prescribed walks, some along newly-made paths, and looking at a few new information structures dotted around the landscape. One of them is illustrated below: an information panel and a concrete ‘map.’

 

  

 

The panel reflects a theme throughout the new presentation – exhorting visitors to use their imagination. All well and good but quite a lot is known about the Anglo-Saxon landscape and its seems a pity not to tell people about that as a foundation on which to use their imagination. The concrete slab beside the panel has some marks in it and both bumps and a coloured area on it. The former include but six mounds representing, without explanation, the (minimum) 17 which actually exist or existed. The last, somewhat enlarged by rainwater when I took the photograph, is meant to show the River Deben, whence the ‘royal ship’ was towed uphill (in imagination); for the graphic is meant to be a map of the area, acting as both a guide – it shows modern paths – and a background on which to embroider the viewer’s imagination. I asked several people on different occasions what they made of this visual – some didn’t even realise it was a map – and they found it difficult to use. Not surprising really, since without a scale or a North point it is indeed difficult to use.

Unfortunately, this is the case with all the maps and graphics on site: the cartography is poor throughout. And though the walks themselves are attractive, there seems to be a mismatch between the laudable intention to lead people healthily and educatively by roundabout ways to the burial mounds and what most people actually do; which is of course to follow their desire lines along the most direct route to the mounds. Perhaps they will follow the sinuous route to the barrows when the observation tower is open and best-approached from below.

I know that a site is constantly evolving in terms of its presentation and use; but management should be able to mitigate some of the more obvious flaws. Here, a walker around the whole site will encounter at least five different styles of information media/panels. Some of them are relics from much earlier presentations of Sutton Hoo, indeed from last century. As a result, what the visitor sees today bears a hint of stinginess and shoddiness, not exactly the impression you want from a £4 million refurbishment; and of course overall there is a lack of coherence in the presentation because different interpreters have wanted to make different points at different times in the past. Maybe all the interpretive clutter around the mounds will be cleared away once the observation tower is open; but that begs the question of how and where you inform all the visitors who will still walk directly to the mounds, whether or not they then climb the tower.

Meanwhile we have experienced a wet autumn; and such has been the wear and tear along the desire line to and at Mound 1 that visitors have had to be roped off on to other lines and taken off Mound 1 altogether. There were 700 visitors on the day in late September when I asked about visitor numbers. Doubtless many people have been attracted by sustained publicity about the newness of Sutton Hoo’s presentation throughout the year.

I’m going to stop there but a part II will follow idc. Two further photographs serve as tasters.