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It's been a long time since we went for a bike ride what with one thing and another. So this week we went off in search of Langley Chapel, less than four miles away. I had done my Google map research and was convinced it would be fairly easy to find, despite being in the middle of a Shropshire field. We cycled up to the small but pretty village of Acton Burnell.
Once through the village however, it all became very uphill-y and with our cycling legs being a bit rusty, there was a lot of pushing. Alright, pretty much all pushing.
As we climbed higher, the views were spectacular. This is looking across to our main town of Shrewsbury. Somewhere in there towards the right, I think.
I found a lovely roly-poly field formation for painting inspiration. There aren't that many dry stone walls in Shropshire and this picture reminds me of the dear Cotswold countryside, which is lined with them.
Joe found me a tiny cottage in a field, sadly ruined with no roof, but very sweet seen through the hedgerow.
Anyway, we got higher and higher, in search of Langley Chapel - or even a handy signpost - until we got to a point where I knew that it became EVEN MORE hilly. And unfit as we were, we decided to turn back. Happily, it was downhill all the way to Acton Burnell.
Now, we had seen a footpath sign in the village and wondered if we had managed to miss the chapel. So Joe went ahead and explored, and waved me to follow. He had found something. We followed the field footpath and discovered a promising looking portico.
However it did look familiar and as we neared, we realised it was the beautiful Catholic graveyard for the old 'big house' which we had investigated last year. Slightly daunted but determined to have one last shot, we tried another part of the footpath. Which was very pretty but showed no sign of a chapel.
We found a few wild damsons though and jolly nice they were too, after all that exercise.So well exercised but feeling a bit defeated, we hastened home, with rain clouds looming overhead. Back home, we looked at a map and were chagrined to find that had we ventured a little further (towards the EVEN MORE HILLY bit), we would have found Langley chapel. It was about five minutes away from our turn-back point. So that's a trip for another day. Nonetheless, it was lovely to get out and explore. We may not have found Langley chapel. But we did get some exercise.
Out with Marjorie the other week, pootling to the Post Office which is two miles away. On the way back, I spotted a notice pinned to a gate post and, as one does, stopped to investigate.
However, it wasn't a planning application for a new housing estate (although that is in the pipeline for this area). It was a Thomas Hardy poem. Rather random, but lovely.
The Walk
You did not walk with me
Of late to the hill-top tree
By the gated ways,
As in earlier days;
You were weak and lame,
So you never came,
And I went alone, and I did not mind,
Not thinking of you as left behind.
I walked up there to-day
Just in the former way;
Surveyed around
The familiar ground
By myself again:
What difference, then?
Only that underlying sense
Of the look of a room on returning thence.
Pondering this and wondering 'who, what why and when?', I cycled on. And came then stopped.
Another country poem, pinned to another gatepost, with the brooding Wrekin just showing in the background.
A sonnet, by John Clare.
A Spring Morning
THE Spring comes in with all her hues and smells,
In freshness breathing over hills and dells;
O’er woods where May her gorgeous drapery flings,
And meads washed fragrant by their laughing springs.
Fresh are new opened flowers, untouched and free
From the bold rifling of the amorous bee.
The happy time ofsinging birds is come,
And Love’s lone pilgrimage now finds a home;
Among the mossy oaks now coos the dove,
And the hoarse crow finds softer notes for love.
The foxes play around their dens, and bark
In joy’s excess, ’mid woodland shadows dark.
The flowers join lips below; the leaves above;
And every sound that meets the ear is Love.
It's taken me a long time to get my lovely push bike (Marjorie) out and about. The day Andy surprised me with her was one of the happiest days of my life, to know that he loved me so much - as I loved him.
Since he died, even though she is my only form of transport - and the nearest shop being two miles away - I haven't been able to face riding her, a unbearable reminder of what precious thing I have lost.
But this spring I felt able to get her out of the shed and dust her off. Brian-next-door pumped her tyres up for me and we have been having little adventures, finally exploring the gorgeous landscape around us.
We're never far from a view of the Shropshire Hills.
We even found an egg honesty box a few miles away. It's hard sometimes, to allow myself to enjoy all of this, knowing that Andy never got the chance to see that we made the right choice after all. How he would have loved it.
Shropshire is proving to be more uppy and downy than the Cotswolds, but Marjorie and I are learning to tackle the hills.
It's nice to see my little cottage with its cream chimney stack, nestling in the landscape as we return home.
By: Alice,
on 2/11/2013
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Remembered today for her much publicized feud with Linus Pauling over the shape of proteins, known as “the cyclol controversy,” Dorothy Wrinch made essential contributions to the fields of Darwinism, probability and statistics, quantum mechanics, x-ray diffraction, and computer science. The first women to receive a doctor of science degree from Oxford University, her understanding of the science of crystals and the ever-changing notion of symmetry has been fundamental to science.
We sat down with Marjorie Senechal, author of I Died for Beauty: Dorothy Wrinch and the Cultures of Science, to explore the life of this brilliant and controversial figure.
Who was Dorothy Wrinch?
Dorothy Wrinch was a British mathematician and a student of Bertrand Russell. An exuberant, exasperating personality, she knew no boundaries, academic or otherwise. She sowed fertile seeds in many fields of science — philosophy, mathematics, seismology, probability, genetics, protein chemistry, crystallography.
What is she remembered for?
Unfortunately, she’s mainly remembered for her battle with the chemist Linus Pauling. Dorothy proposed the first-ever model for protein architecture, provoking a world-class controversy in scientific circles. Linus led her opponents; few noticed that his arguments were as wrong as her model was.
Why did he attack her research and career with such ferocity?
In those days before scientific imaging, scientists imagined. Outsized personalities, fierce ambitions, and cultural misunderstandings also played a role. And gender bias: Dorothy didn’t know her place. She didn’t suffer critics gratefully, or fools gladly. On a deeper level, the fight was philosophical. Imagination and experiment, beauty and truth are entangled inseparably, then and now.
Linus won two Nobel prizes. What became of Dorothy?
Dorothy, a single mother, came to the United States with her daughter at the beginning of World War II, and eventually settled in Massachusetts; she taught at Smith College for many years and wrote scientific books and papers. But her career never recovered. I wrote this book to find out why.
Marjorie Senechal is the Louise Wolff Kahn Professor Emerita in Mathematics and History of Science and Technology, Smith College, and Co-Editor of The Mathematical Intelligencer. She is the author of I Died for Beauty: Dorothy Wrinch and the Cultures of Science.
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