Legacy 13- Cornwall/Aarhus

Cornwall to Jutland

Apr 25, '12 10:17 AM for everyone

Sorry about the break; I’ll try very hard not to get back into my old habits, honest!

I’ve been away, partly for pleasure and partly business.  The pleasure element fell over Easter, when I ended up cat and chicken sitting for a friend in Cornwall.  This was all very bucolic and I found out far more about the care and maintenance of hens that I had ever imagined- like the sheer amount of water that even three hens will get through, and their slightly awkward 25 hour cycle when it comes to laying eggs.   I don’t suppose I’ll look at a barnyard fowl in the same way again.

I did manage to do some walking and tourism too.   I was staying just off the eastern edge of Bodmin Moor so did some walking there.   It’s a deeply strange place.  The Moor drifted in and out of regular human habitation over the millennia as climate changes, agricultural practices and other activities (primarily mining) came and went.  Back in the late 19^th century it was a kind of Klondyke, riddled with mines extracting copper, tin and even arsenic.  Tiny villages became boom towns almost overnight, with populations mushrooming into the thousands, sprouting chapels and drinking establishments in almost equal numbers.   Engine houses for the pumps necessary to keep the mines dry enough to be workable shot up across the Moor, railways marched across the landscape.   Then the bottom fell out of the industry and, after a last flourish around the First World War, it was gone by the early 1920’s.  The railway tracks were lifted and removed almost down to the last bolt and rivet, the villages shrank back to their original insignificance (give or take a few Wesleyan chapels and surprisingly large hotels).   The engine houses lost their machinery and their roofs but were left where they stood.   The result now is a landscape where Neolithic stone circles, Celtic high crosses from the sub-Roman era and derelict industrial buildings co-exist in the same limited space and look as if they could all come from the same period, unimaginably remote or very recent.  It’s not hard to see why legends of unknown big cats hiding out somewhere on Bodmin Moor could develop; one could imagine almost anything about the place.

The other place which caught the imagination was Launceston.  This used to be the county town (one of several that Cornwall has had over the years) and for a short period in the mid 13^th century hosted a royal court as the home of Richard Earl of Cornwall, brother of King Henry III of England and pretender to the title of Holy Roman Emperor- he had been elected “King of the Romans” (the title for an Emperor who hadn’t been formally crowned by the Pope- it didn’t involve any actual control over the city of Rome) by a faction of the German princes in the long confused era which followed the death of the Emperor Frederick II in 1250.   Richard’s power even in Germany was pretty limited and confined to parts of the Rhineland ruled by his supporters but it made him in name at least one of the greatest men in Christendom.    Launceston castle wasn’t really up to the job of providing a base for this sort of figure.   In its own way it’s very impressive- a textbook example of a “motte and bailey” castle.   The original wooden building on top of the motte (a semi-artificial mound) was replaced by a great round stone mass known as a shell keep in the 12^th century; this contained living quarters but was far too limited and purely defensive for the display aspects inherent on royal status so Richard had to build new ranges of accommodation across the bailey (the lower enclosure of the castle).   Ironically very little of his lavish additions now survives while the great ominous defensive tower still looms, solid and slightly sinister, over the town.

The other notable building in Launceston is the parish church.   This is a bit mind blowing.   The bulk of the building derives from a late rebuilding campaign Begin in the 1510’s but not completed until 1542 and is one of the most exuberantly decorated late Gothic buildings I’ve come across in England.  Every square inch of the external walls is covered with intricate carving, mostly abstract decorative patterns in which stylised Tudor roses figure prominently but including St George striking down the dragon and other saintly figures (presumably the sheer difficulty of eliminating them, coupled with Cornwall’s notorious religious conservatism in the 16^th and 17^th centuries, explains why they survived the Reformation- which was in full swing as the final touches were being added).   It’s a rather amazing sight in a small Cornish town; these’s something rather Iberian and even proto-baroque about it.  Perhaps it’s an indication of what English church architecture might have looked like if Henry VIII hadn’t had the marital problems which led him to proclaim himself Pope in England.

My other travel was on business and took me north to Denmark.    Specifically it took me to Aarhus on the east side of Jutland.   This is the first time I’ve got beyond Copenhagen and it was interesting for that alone.   Sadly the conference was both tedious and time consuming and I’m a bit too conformist to simply bunk off sessions I’m supposed to be attending to go sightseeing.  My view of Aarhus and its environs is a bit impressionistic- lots of red brick and red tiles, a remarkable number of flags being flown on public and private buildings, rather hillier than I’d expected, a city with a rather ghastly 1970’s shopping centre (very British….) but a surprising number of fine old timber framed buildings and the odd bit of the idiosyncratic brick built Gothic of the Baltic region.   The city hall is a notable piece of Danish modernist architecture from the late 1930’s with a striking tower clad in Greenland marble included at the demand of the local population.   And there’s a statue in honour of the local pigs, which appealed to my fondness for quirky memorials.

One of the conference dinners was in the local art gallery and we were promised a guided tour before the meal.  This was a bit of a disappointment.  The gallery is quite substantial and we were rushed round a few highlights (which weren’t the ones I’d necessarily have chosen as such) at breakneck speed so that we could get up on to roof for the views over the city.   Predictably the holdings are a bit patchy and centred on Danish art (which, according to the museum’s own publicity material, doesn’t really exist before 1800).   There are lots of rather idealised landscapes from the 19^th century, some from the South Italian hunting grounds of generations of northern artists but others much more local in origin.  It’s interesting how the artists managed to make the tame and rather unexciting landscape of Jutland look suitably grand- and managed to idealise Danish peasant life as well.  

The gallery was staging a big exhibition on the reception of Modernism in Denmark in the years around the First World War.   This was one part I could easily have devoted quite a bit of time to, not least because it had a number of rather good Braques, Legers and Delaunys on loan from elsewhere.    I wish I could say I’d come across some unexpected Danish gems, but I didn’t- at least not in the time available.  In fact the striking feature about the Danish element was how derivative and watered down the Danish appropriation of Cubism and other movements of the Parisian avant garde was (wilder things like Futurism obviously never got anywhere near Denmark).   Perhaps that isn’t surprising given that the atmosphere in Denmark seems to have been even more hostile to artistic experiment than it was, say, in Britain at the time.  Innovative paintings were attached on the walls and death threats were issued.   There was even an enormous row about the acquisition of the painting by Harald Giersing below- a portrait of his wife.   It’s just as well nobody suggested in the 1920’s that the gallery ought to acquire, say, a Severini……