Good morning!

Last weekend I went to Lindisfarne. If you’ve not been before, I recommend it as it abounds in both rugged beauty and friendly sparrows. I also enjoyed finding out the stories of the women of Lindisfarne and surrounds, presented here for you to enjoy as well.

Lindisfarne Castle was a Tudor fort until a rich publisher bought it as a fun side project to ‘do up’ and make into a summer home. Gertrude Jeykll designed the garden for it, with no apparent regard for convention:

In order to plant the crag on which the castle stands, Gertrude supposedly fired seeds at the rock face from a large fowling gun and lowered a small island boy, 7 year old Harry Walker, in a basket from the Upper Battery to access the difficult ledges.

https://gardeningjules.com/2014/08/27/gertrude-jeyklls-garden-at-lindisfarne-castle-holy-island-northumberland/comment-page-1/

The Castle also has an Anya Gallaccio installation currently – I’d not been aware of her work before but this installation of 10,000 roses on a gallery floor looks brilliant:

For a small window of time, the piece is a gorgeous display of velvety flowers that viewers will want to reach out and touch. But, the artist is more interested in what happens next. As the roses gradually wither and die, Gallaccio says, “I like the mixture of celebration with death or decay.” The dying flowers are a visual gesture of passion, but the artist doesn't want it to be a sentimental piece. She focuses more on the collaboration between herself and the objects, and enjoys the enigmatic process of natural decay.

https://mymodernmet.com/anya-gallaccio-red-on-green/

Finally, one of the local heroes of the Farne islands is Grace Darling, who rowed out in a storm to save the lives of people from a wrecked paddle steamer. The RNLI’s email address for her museum is AskGraceDarling@rnli.org. I very much want this to be a problem page you can write to in which Grace Darling always suggests the most butch solution possible in your situation.

William thought the sea was too rough for the lifeboat from Seahouses to set out […] He knew the rocks and he knew the tides. Grace pleaded with her father that they both take out the coble to rescue them. Thomasin feared they would both be lost but Grace was already down at the coble [NB this is a little boat, I didn’t know that before last weekend either].

http://www.gracedarling.co.uk/Rescue.html

Have fun,

Alex.