Pictures From A Walk

I went out for coffee around 11 am today just before a walk on the north side of Canterbury, just along the Ring Road - the circular road surrounding what used to be the walled city. In some places the wall is still intact, in other places it's long gone; but the road is just around the outside of where the wall was or is.

It's worth noting here that I wasn't the only person on High Street with this "coffee" idea, which ended up reinforcing a nasty stereotype about England and queues. Most coffee shops were full up, with my personal favorite (Caffe Nero) having a line that extended outside. Needless to say I went somewhere else, but I wanted to point out that I had coffee this morning as it will put some of the shaky photography into perspective, and give me an excuse for some poorly focused shots taken with a vastly overpowered zoom lens.

Moving on. After coffee, I went for a walk, as stated, along the Great Stour river that runs through the north side of Canterbury. It's roughly as wide across as the Yahara river in Madison, but in most places just a tick narrower.

The buildings come right to the edge of the river, and in some places it looks as though the foundation of the buildings themselves is creating the riverbank. To me, this makes the architecture that much more impressive from a durability standpoint, as most of these buildings have been there for at the very least a hundred years, and the river flows very fast in some places.


Like there.

The river is controlled by a baffling system of arcane lochs that divert the river away from things that could be washed away, and directing it at a greatly accelerated rate towards something much more fragile - the fast side of the river doesn't even have brick laid at the shore. It makes one wonder how long the river can run before it starts creeping onto the path that one follows along it. The answer is precisely 225 yards.

From the loch at the top of Abbot's Mill garden (really a yard surrounded by a walkway), this overflow is literally less than 250 yards downstream. Finally, a little swampy patch that reminds me of home enough to take my picture by. Call it proof of life if you want. Next time I'll pick something more historic.

The marshiness just made me feel comfortable. And there weren't any yobs around to wonder what the hell I was doing; who wants to hang around a big puddle, anyway.

Sometimes the concentration of churches here gets almost out of hand. Then again, you've only got so many square miles to mash the protestants, Anglicans and Catholics into in such a fashion that they can always see the cathedral from their own church, just to remind them how small it is.

This is actually an abbey, but you get the idea. The cathedral can be seen from almost everywhere, that's how big it is - all the major streets, and some of the minor ones too. There's nothing accidental about that.

I can see it quite clearly from my street too; I took this picture last night.

The one sure thing about this place is that it's an eyeful. There's so much to look at that if you don't exercise some discretion, you'll be snapping pictures constantly and drive the point home that you're not from around here. I haven't taken any pictures on High Street yet for basically that reason; if I'm going to suddenly make myself very conspicuous, I had better get a good shot out of it. That, and I like both cameras that I use very much and would like them to stay mine in the near future, which frankly means not displaying them on a busy day on High Street. So those will be forthcoming, but I'll have to wait for a relative lull, which Saturday isn't.

The sun never gets very high in the sky here; noon looks about like a summer day at 5pm, which gives everything a kind of dusky feel to it. And with buildings crowding around most places, it never really looks like morning. Hard to explain, but true. In some of the pictures, this is obvious.

But for now, I have a little more rambling to do.