Dokkum, Friesland

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When we were in the Netherlands recently we visited Dokkum which is a fortified town in the north-east municipality of Noardeast-Fryslan in the province of Friesland. It’s a very scenic town.

Dokkum Canal + Brewery , Netherlands

Of course there are canals all over the Netherlands, but Dokkum is at the end of the road so to speak. During really cold winters when the canals freeze over enough they have ice skating races on the canals in eleven towns in Friesland, and this is the last one.

Dokkum Canal, Friesland, Netherlands

Dokkum Bridges ,Canal, Netherlands

 

Canal Boats, Dokkum, Friesland, Netherlands

Small canals lead into a bigger one. In some places people have their boat moored in front of their house, much better than a car!

Dokkum, Small Canal, Friesland

I think this a laburnum tree by the side of the canal in the photo below although it’s difficult to say as the flowers weren’t properly open yet.

Dokkum Canal , Laburnum Tree

This is a lovely town, well worth visiting if you are in the vicinity, but we were there on a Monday and not all of the shops were open, this is quite common in Friesland.

 

 

Dissolution by C.J. Sansom – 20 Books of Summer 2024

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Dissolution by C.J. Sansom was first published in 2003 and it’s the first book that I’ve read by the author, in fact it was only when I read his Guardian obituary when he died in April that I realised that I had almost certainly missed out on some really good reads. I think I did borrow one of his Shardlake books from the library before, but realised that it was part of a series, but never did get around to getting the first one, until now. I really enjoyed it.

The setting is England in 1537. It’s the year after Anne Boleyn’s execution and Henry VIII is beginning to dismantle the large network of monasteries that have managed to accumulate huge riches over the years. Henry is determined to strip them of their wealth and Thomas Cromwell has sent a young man to St Donatus Monastery to investigate their finances, but he is found dead there, he has been beheaded in the kitchen, and Cromwell sends Matthew Shardlake and his young apprentice to investigate the murder.

When they start to question the monks they soon realise that they are very far from being holy men, or even good men, the place is awash with sin, but which of them is a murderer?

This is an atmospheric read with a long snowstorm adding to the sense of menace as the monastery turns into a prison for Shardlake and his apprentice, trapped with  a murderer on the loose.

This was another of my 20 Books of Summer.

 

Six in Six – 2024 Edition

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Jo at The Book Jotter is hosting Six in Six again and I’ve decided to take part,  it’s an enjoyable look back at what I’ve been reading over the first six months of the year. Joanne always suggests lots of possibilities of categories and I’m taking advantage of most of her suggestion.

Six authors new to me:

Rachel Ferguson  – A Footman for the Peacock

The Life and Death of Harriett Frean by May Sinclair

Charles Spencer – Killers of the King

Lin Anderson  – The Wild Coast

Flora Fraser – Pretty Young Rebel

Forest Silver by E.M. Ward

 

Six books that took me by the hand and led me into the past:

The Revolt of the Eaglets by Jean Plaidy

Sword at Sunset by Rosemary Sutcliff

The Winter List by S.G. MacLean

Across the Barricades by Joan Lingard

The Secrets of Blythswood Square by Sara Sheridan

A Footman for the Peacock by Rachel Ferguson

 

Six books from the non fiction shelf:

Notes from Walnut Tree Farm by Roger Deakin

Holloway by Robert Macfarlane

Pretty Young Rebel by Flora Fraser

The Salt Path by Raynor Winn

Landmarks by Robert Macfarlane

Women and Power by Mary Beard

 

 

Six books by Scottish authors:

The Redemption of Alexander Seaton by Shona MacLean

Green Willow’s Secret by Eileen Dunlop

The Fall of Kelvin Walker by Alasdair Gray

The Tenement by Iain Crichton Smith

Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart

Squeaky Clean by Callum McSorley

 

Six vintage crime books:

Uncle Paul by Celia Fremlin

Suddenly at His Residence by Christianna Brand

Green for Dander by Christianna Brand

Someone from the Past by Margot Bennet

Somebody at the Door by Raymond Postgate

Post After Post Mortem by E.C.R. Lorac

 

Six book titles containing female names:

Consider the Lily by Elizabeth Buchan

Harriet Said by Beryl Bainbridge

Madame Claire by Susan Ertz

Eustacia at the Chalet School by Elinor M. Brent-Dyer

Dimsie Grows Up by Dorita Fairlie Bruce

The Life and Death of Harriet Frean

Thank you Jo for hosting this, it’s always useful to have a look back.  I’ve been reading a lot of historical fiction over the past six months, more than usual I think. For the rest of 2024 I plan to mix things up a bit more, but reading plans often ‘gang agley’  – as we all know!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Footman for the Peacock by Rachel Ferguson

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A Footman for the Peacock by Rachel Ferguson was originally published in 1940, but was reprinted by Dean Street Press in 2016. It’s A Furrowed Middlebrow Book.

Sir Edmund Roundelay and his extended family, including his three elderly unmarried sisters, live in a stately pile called Delaye. It’s the beginning of World War 2 and everyone is expected to ‘do their bit’ which for the Roundelays means housing a large number of children and their teachers in the unused rooms of the house.  Lady Evelyn Roundelay is having a tough enough time coping with the running of the house as it is, the rules will have to be got around. For the first time the Roundelays are having to deal with people who have been given unexpected status due to their war work, it’s a bit of a knock to their sense of entitlement, but not for long.

In the past the Roundelays had been harsh employers, literally running their young footmen to death so that they could run ahead of their carriage to clear the way for it as they drove through villages, but there are still members of staff who are descendants of past servants working in the household, there hasn’t been much in the way of social movement.

This was an enjoyable read, the blurb on the back says that it was “controversial when first published in the early days of World War II, due to its treatment of a loathsome upper-crust family dodging wartime responsibility. It can now be enjoyed as a scathing satire of class abuses, a comic masterpiece falling somewhere between Barbara Pym and Monty Python.”

It was one of my 20 Books of Summer reads.

The Other Queen by Philippa Gregory – 20 Books of Summer 2024

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The Other Queen by Philippa Gregory is one of my 20 Books of Summer. It was first published in 2008. I had sworn that I wasn’t going to read any more books about Mary, Queen of Scots for quite a long time – if ever – or any more books by Philippa Gregory for that matter as I think she has some unusual theories on historical facts, but heigh-ho. It was the fact that this one features Bess of Hardwick which drew me in, she was surely one of the most fascinating women of the Tudor period.

The date is 1568 and Bess is on her fourth husband, the Earl of Shrewsbury, she has worked her way up from nothing to the aristocracy, with her three previous husbands leaving everything to her, she’s a very wealthy woman, but obviously wanted status too.

Unfortunately Queen Elizabeth I is looking for a place to lodge Mary, Queen of Scots and she decides to use Bess and her husband as suitable jailors. Queen Mary has an enormous retinue which she refuses to whittle down and for her everything must be of the best. Queen Elizabeth is determined not to pay any money over to the Shrewsburys and the whole of the cost of keeping Mary and her many hangers-on and followers in the lap of luxury causes tension within the marriage. Bess sees her fortune diminish by the week and it looks like she’ll even lose her beloved Chatsworth to pay the debts, she has had to put the building of Chatsworth on hold over the years of Mary’s captivity but even worse than that, William Cecil, Elizabeth’s spymaster is trying to link Shrewsbury, and possibly even Bess, with Catholic plots to rescue Mary from captivity. They might end up being executed.

Bess realises that like many men her husband has been the target of one of Mary’s charm offensives, and the fool has completely fallen for Mary.

I enjoyed this one although I was somewhat puzzled when on page 9 Mary describes Elizabeth as ‘that red-haired bastard’.  It’s unlikely that she would ever have done that considering that Mary had red hair too. However, according to Philippa Gregory she had lovely long black hair! That is just plain wrong and I can see no reason why Gregory would do that, particularly as their are numerous paintings of Mary and her red hair, and of course all the contemporary descriptions of Mary and her red or golden red hair.

This is the sort of thing which had put me off from reading more by this author, it seems she just likes to be different for the sake of it.

If you are interested you can click the link to my Hardwick Hall blogposts, it’s quite a few years since we visited, I hope we can go back there sometime in the future though as I loved it. Argh, that post was written in 2012.

Also if you are interested in Bess of Hardwick you might want to read the book by Mary S. Lovell

There are some more photos on that blogpost.

Windmill House and Garden, Sebaldeburen, Netherlands

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In my recent post about the windmill at Sebaldeburen I mentioned that the job of windmill keeper comes with a house, a typically Dutch house but no two houses seem to be the same. The man who looks after the windmill took no credit for the garden though as he said that was his wife’s department!

Sebaldeburen Windmill House 2

The garden was all very lush, they had had as much rain as we had in the previous month or so, I think in another week it would have been much more colourful.

Sebaldeburen Windmill House garden

You can see that there are some veggies coming up in the photo below, amazingly they haven’t been chomped by slugs, which is what happened to my brother’s salad crops. They have been terrible this year due to all the rain. As you can see there’s even a large fruit cage in this garden, although if I had been lucky enough to have one of those I would have filled it full with berry bushes of all sorts, it looks a bit empty to me, but I suppose they are growing just what they can cope with, I still have some raspberry jam left over from last year despite giving a lot of it away.

Sebaldeburen Windmill House garden

If you look closely at the photos above and below you can see that someone (presumably the windmill keeper) has made a sort of mock up of a paddle steamer riverboat, using two big wheels as the paddles. If you zoom in on either end of the photos to see the detail you will see that there are a couple of stylish bird boxes attached to the ends. It’s quite a feature.

Sebaldeburen Windmill House garden 3

The windmill keeper spoke very good English and said that he had worked all over the world, incuding in England, Australia and New Zealand, but we didn’t ask him what he worked at, maybe it was windmills. The photo below shows a wooden model cutaway of the internal workings of a windmill.

Sebaldeburen Windmill cutaway 2

It amazes me how someone came up with the idea as they’re so complicated looking.

The Runaway Summer by Nina Bawden – 20 Books of Summer

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The Runaway Summer by Nina Bawden was first published in 1969 and it’s one of my 20 Books of Summer. The book is/was aimed at older children.

Mary’s parents are getting divorced and during the school holidays she has been sent to live with her Aunt Alice and grandfather who live on the coast, while everything is sorted out. Mary is premanently angry about the whole situation, she has no friends in the area and she knows that she’s behaving very badly towards Aunt Alice and Grandfather, but annoyingly they are very understanding, which only makes Mary feel worse!

In a fit of rage Mary runs out of the house and heads for the sea front where she gets into more trouble as she’s so angry she decides to steal some sweets, but her shoplifting has been seen by young twin sisters who have run away from their older brother Simon. He’s the eldest of a large chaotic family and their father is a policeman!

On one of her trips to the beach Mary watches a small boat coming towards it, when it reaches the shingle two dark men jump out and help a young boy out too. It all seems strange, none of them are dressed for a trip in a boat and they have suitcases, when they get on the beach the boatman sails off again. The young boy has a damaged arm and as the men make their way along the beach, he’s left behind and Mary can see that he’s crying.

But in no time the men are picked up by the police, and Mary decides that she must help the young boy and hide him from the authorities, but she’ll need help from Simon.

As you would expect fromm Nina Bawden this is a really well-written book, but I found myself checking the details about when it was first published and I must say that I find it fairly depressing that she was writing about illegal immigrants in small boats – and it’s still a huge problem and very much in the news 55 years later.

It turns out that Krishna had been flying from Kenya to London to stay with his uncle, but there was a deadline to do it legally and due to plane delays he had missed it, and so began all his troubles.

My  20 Books of Summer list is here. This is the sixth book that I’ve read on the list.

 

 

 

The Secrets of Blythswood Square by Sara Sheridan – 20 Books of Summer 2024

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The Secrets of Blythswood Square by the Scottish author Sara Sheridan is one of my 20 Books of Summer reads, and it was a really good one.

The book begins at Calton Hill in Edinburgh in 1846. Rock House stands right at the base of the hill and it’s owned by David Octavius Hill, the pioneer in photography. A lot of the photography work is done by two young women, cousins Jessie and Ellory, with Ellory being very much the underdog. It’s a tough life. When a philanthropist makes it possible for Ellory  to set up on her own she immediately takes herself off to Glasgow where she plans to open up her own photography business. She has far more business sense than the stuffy Hill, and has more talent and flair for artistic composition. She’s determined to make a go of it.

Meanwhile in Glasgow Charlotte has just lost her father, a wealthy businessman, and is now alone in the world with only her father’s servants for company.  When she meets Ellory the two are drawn to each other, despite the difference in status. It turns out that Charlotte isn’t as well off as she had expected, there’s a mystery to what has happened to a large investment that her father had made, and according to his will she’ll have to share half of what money there is with whoever lives in Helensburgh House, wherever that may be. But it seems that there’s very little actual money available, Charlotte thinks she’ll have to sell her family home and get rid of the servants.

This book involves the infighting of the Church of Scotland factions which had split up into the Free Church – The Great Disruption – and the protests that went on when the one time slave Frederick Douglass was giving lectures in Scotland and elsewhere, and trying to shame the churches to hand back the money which they had been given by slave owners over the years, something that they never did.

Sara Sheridan weaves actual historic people into her fiction books, such as the escaped slave Frederick Douglass, and her historical notes at the back of her books are not to be missed. I enjoyed this one just as much as the only other book by her that I’ve read, The Fair Botanists.

I must admit that when I read the title of this book I had assumed that the story would involve the notorious Victorian Madeleine Smith who lived there and was accused of poisoning her ‘gentleman friend’ so it was a nice surprise to discover that the storyline was completely different.

Sebaldeburen Windmill, Netherlands

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To me windmills were just things that were worked by the wind turning their sails, but it turns out that there are all sorts of different windmills. The windmill that we visited in Sebaldeburen lies between a ditch and a canal, with the ditch at a lower level than the canal, so an Archimedes screw is worked by the mill, to take the water from the lower level up to the higher, you can see the screw turning around.

Archimedes Screw

Being in charge of a windmill is a very skilled job, and also quite hard work because if the wind changes direction the sails have to be twisted around to catch it again. That entails turning a hefty looking handcrank. You can see the handcrank in the photo below, plus the windmill operator and some family.

Sebaldeburen Windmill , Friesland

The surrounding fields are of course flat, but still scenic. Just very different from what we’re used to in Scotland.

Sebaldeburen Canal, Netherlands

Sebaldeburen area, FrieslandDitch + surrounds

Yes that is thatch that you can see on the internal walls, but the massive lump of wood in the centre is the windmill shaft which is constantly turning and the whole thing is very noisy, which somehow I don’t associate with thatch.

Sebaldeburen Windmill shaft

There are so many things in motion, grinding away, hold onto your hair!

Sebaldeburen Windmill wheels

There are lots of steps up, in the Netherlands they are more akin to what we think of as ladders, even in private homes the stairs are VERY steep, it’s often best to go down backwards.

Sebaldeburen Windmill steps

Some disused windmills have been turned into holiday accommodation, presumably for the very fit!

Sebaldeburen windmill, inside windmill

From the ground floor in the windmill you can see all the water flowing underneath it, through a very thick piece of glass, I walked around it!

Water flow beneath Sebaldeburen windmill

I well remember when I was in primary school we were given a lesson in lighthouses, and the life appealed to me, of course my teacher told me that girls couldn’t be lighthouse keepers, I could only be a lighthouse keeper’s wife, that’s what school was like in the 1960s! Being a windmill keeper appeals to me too, especially as the job seems to come with a very nice secluded house and garden. But I’ll blog about that some other time.

 

 

 

Post After Post-Mortem by E.C.R. Lorac – 20 Books of Summer

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Post After Post-Mortem by E.C.R. Lorac is subtitled An Oxfordshire Mystery. It was first published in 1936 but this edition was published by British Library in 2022. It has an introduction by Martin Edwards.

Mrs Surray and her professor husband have lived in their home for 25 years and she particularly loves the place and its garden. Their five adult children are all arriving for the weekend to celebrate their mother’s birthday, they’re a talented bunch, all successful writers of some sort, they’re all academically high-fliers and writers of various sorts. It should be a perfect weekend of celebration, but shockingly one of the ‘children’  doesn’t survive the night.

It looks like an open and shut case and at the inquest the coroner is happy to come to the obvious conclusion, however, with hindsight the evidence doesn’t really add up, and so begins a search for clues, with CID Robert Macdonald given the job of investigating.

I enjoyed this one – up to a point. I really didn’t like any of the members of the Surray family, they were all too up themselves/self regarding for my liking, Macdonald the detective was the only really likeable character, but the mystery itself was decent.