water and stone lie behind everything in Buxton
Geese, coffee and lumps of rock....
As part of the Word on the Street project for Buxton Our Street, we’re collecting contributions from local residents, visitors and passing pigeons (that will make sense in a later post!). For more information, visit this post, or just contact the coordinator, Gordon, a line to creepingtoad@btinternet.com
Here are a few words to walk you along our streets
Rock solid on Spring Gardens
David Carlisle
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| gritstone, as yet untamed |
Little noticed, running along the central spine of Spring Gardens are the rows of gritstone, the one-time product of the Council’s Street Improvement Scheme, or so the brass plaque says.
They weave gently, these modern standing stones, echoing the rise and fall of the High Peak’s hills and valleys, themselves carved by ice and water.
Walk along with your shopping head fixed into place and you’ll never see them. Stop and listen to the wind and you’ll hear it whisper through these musical gritstone teeth. Once you do that, you’ll appreciate their curving lines, their sheer mass inspiring respect for heavy work done by nature in shaping the landscape and the lives of all living within it.
Gritstone sentinels of Spring Gardens, Architects have crafted with you, Builders have captured you and Shoppers have been oblivious to you. Yet, you point the way.
Blocky and leaning in honourable respect, they softly nod at the past and smile encouragingly towards a better future for Spring Gardens, our future.
And if David’s words have wandered us along Spring Gardens
counting rocks, maybe we pause…
Flat White Encounter
Maggie Pollard
My friend beamed with excitement
that I should meet his online lover.
Up from the South.
I made allowances for that.
I joined them in Café Nero.
My friend stood up to greet me.
I thought the boyfriend would.
He didn’t.
Instead, he stirred his coffee,
an empty gaze reflecting back himself.
Bound to be nervous, I thought.
He wasn’t.
‘I thought it was a Spa,’ he snapped.
We chorused ‘Yes it is! It is!’
‘It’s not like Bath,’ he said.
It’s Buxton.
His disappointment filtered down
‘And why is this called Spring Gardens?
There isn’t one that I can see.’
He had a point.
My friend fussed with his serviette.
I stirred my untouched love heart with intent.
My friend had so hoped I’d be impressed.
I wasn’t.
 |
| in earlier days, this might have been a moment in the Hardwick Hotel |
And after that perhaps we need to step out of town for an afternoon wander?
Geese over Monksdale
Jonathan Davey
We are welcome on the tableland.
Greasy limestone slabs
Helping us over the lumpy walls
leading down to the dale hidden in that featureless crust.
Slipping over the sodden steep field,
in the far distant background we hear
sounds reminding us of the shouts and cries
of a far-off childhood playground
Silence for a few seconds,
then the two- tone sounds blow in again on the east wind.
Some kind of clamorous conversation,
“Can you hear something? What is it?”
Louder and closer, the laughing sound.
We look above the rounded silhouette of hill,
the sun intimating its presence
behind the layers of mist upon mist.
Look, there they are,
raggedly undulating line of working wanderers,
drawn across from the North Sea marshland
to the food of Morecambe Bay and Ribble
Not harsh, not sweet, but exultant celebration.
To these ears joining in the movement,
a wild conversation for us.
On that Tuesday in Derbyshire.
No matter to you Pink Foot whether you are seen or not
but it matters to me.
You don’t know me
but in my own way, I know you.
There will be more!
We have an event coming up on Sunday 19th February at the Pump Room in Buxton (details will be posted very soon! Posted on facebook just now, details, will appear in blog shortly) where anyone’s everyone, old friends new friends passing strangers might all drop in and put pen to paper - or just read quietly, read aloud, laugh or weep as the words call to them!
