A medieval house

The heron pulls slowly off the corner of this still moat, flying over the chestnut and sycamore trees in a nearbly copse. I watch as she flaps slowly past the tall Elizabethan windows of the hall, its Cotswold stone glowing in the shallow late-October sunshine. The flowers in the garden are mostly past, leaving it looking as old and weathered as the house itself.

This place is new to me, old to itself. In itself it holds the memories of the early medieval hall, but they are hard to find because on it has come the layers of changes, many of them Elizabethan (the windows, some panelling, some attempts to make the house lighter and warmer), some Jacobean (a room carved out for King James to stay in), some Georgian (a flamboyant plaster ceiling for the hall), some contemporary (a striking modern bed; new curtains incorporating, strangely, the hair of the family dog).

I have never been here, but it seems familiar as well as new. I have studied it in a big volume on Greater Medieval Houses of England, volume 3. I have pored over the house's website. And I have read an evocative book by a young man who grew up there, about his growing up and about his difficult older brother, a severe epileptic. This is William Fiennes' The Music Room. Read it if you have an interest in old homes, in the way the brain works, and in how writers pull on their memories and make them interesting to people who don't actually know them.

The house is called Broughton Castle, in Oxfordshire, England. Go there. I want to go back. My picture of it is just a teaser, mostly because my camera battery ran out while I was there.

(Coincidentally, Joseph Fiennes, William's cousin, danced here as "Will Shakespeare" in Shakespeare in Love.)

Dovedale

The layering of history in England is neither more nor less than the layering of history anywhere in the world, I know. But in England, I'm more acutely aware of it.

By layering, I mean the way one can sense the years and centuries underlying the surface of life: the way the road very occasionally gives up its manic curves and straightens out for a few miles, and you realize that it's following one of the roads cut efficiently and uncaringly across the landscape by the ancient Romans.

Or, going even deeper, the way the crags here in the Peak district show those long-past sedimentations, heaved up in the incline from southwest to northeast in geological time; that happens all over the US, too, but here an extra layering brings them to consciousness, for they are the evidence by which Lyell and the other 19th-century geologists propelled the world from biblical theo-history to geological evolution theory.

(I hope soon to read Tracy Chevalier's new book about the English fossil hunter Mary Anning -- not yet released in the US, I think).

I walked in Dovedale yesterday. It's a famous place in England, a Yosemite on a tiny scale, only 3 miles long. I came  because I love walking with my cousin Elizabeth and her husband John, and because I wanted to see a place where the geology tells so much about the layering, and where poets and artists that I'm trying to know more about have come in the past.

Here was Wordsworth, a kid walking (yes, walking) home from his freshman year at college, stopping by to see the valley. He wrote a little "blog" entry about it, too, storing up his impressions for some future use.

Here was Joseph Wright, the painter of Derby, who loved light so much. He must have walked this valley late at night, and he painted this beautiful picture that now hangs in Oberlin's museum and that I take my students to see.

Here was Miss La Roche, in the 18th century, who picnicked by the river Dove, and then climbed on a horse with the elderly Dean (cathedral Dean, not academic) to climb out of the valley. Near the top, the path became too steep, the horse slipped, the Dean fell to his death, and the young lady survived to write to her mother about the event.

And here was I, at one moment in time, a fold in the strata of history, gratefully balancing on the stepping stones planted two hundred years ago across a river that still flows today.