Green Man Curiosities

This photograph from Patrixbourne church is the best I've taken! The way that light through the stained glass colours the window splay is fascinating.

Almost always, the Madonna is depicted wearing blue. However, before this became her official colour, she was more often shown in green - this is a very ancient window at Stowting, Kent. There is a copy at Appledore, but this example is extremely rare.

The ruined church of Reculver - often known as the 'castle' - was replaced by the church at Hilbourough, a mile or so distant. The new church has this representation of the old Reculver church in one of the windows. Reculver itself is shown here, photographed from Hilborough's churchyard.

A wonderful mixture is this window at Lullingstone. The sundial has a realistic fly painted on it, the sea around the ship is beautifully depicted and there is half of a Green Man at the bottom.

This window, also in Lullingstone, is a mixture of sixteenth century glass with a couple of lovely green parrots.

Lullingstone again, Flemish glass. I find the way landscapes are painted into windows like this one very haunting - a fairytale world beyond the glass that can almost be entered into.

The Culpepper window at Hollingbourne is built from rescued fragments of glass - there are strange leafy angels and a horned head.

This message, on a floor slab in St Mary's church, Sandwich, has fascinated me since I was 16 or 17. I presume it indicates the entrance to a family vault.

On a bright day, if you squint, this group of pyramids by the River Stour at Chartham really does look like a miniature Teotihuacan. I think they are 'dragon's teeth', blocks of concrete which were to be placed on roadsagainst tanks in case of invasion during WWII. One still finds them in occasionaly in hedgerows.

The dragon eating its tail - the Ourobouros - is a very ancient symbol of eternity or infinity. (Remember the old Pink Panther cartoon where the vacuum cleaner eats itself? Terrified me; still does.) This example is from inside Barfreston church.

Strange heads from Barfreston, again, and Stelling.

These four heads are obviously very old, more of the period of Barfreston church than the church at Boughton-Under-Blean, where they were found.

Faversham churchyard has quite a collection of rather oddly carved gravestones.

These odd heads are, believe it or not, the seed capsules of various snapdragons - all from my old garden in Kent.

The very rare Lesser Snapdragon, antirinum orontium, and Round-Leaved Fluellen, kickxia spuria - also pretty rare.

Round-Leaved Fluellen, Scarlet Pimpernell and Yellow Pimpernell.

Ivy-Leaved Toadflax, cymbalaria muralis.

Sharp-Leaved Fluellen has even smaller flowers than the Round-Leaved Fluellen - the froglet here has just emerged from the water for the first time.

Frogs can be fully proportioned yet still quite small - this fellow is a year or two old.

A A MILNE
THE HOUSE AT POOH CORNER
AN ENCHANTED PLACE
They walked on, thinking of This and That, and by-and-by they came to an enchanted place on the very top of the Forest called Galleons Lap, which is sixty-something trees in a circle; and Christopher Robin knew that it was enchanted because nobody had ever been able to count whether it was sixty-three or sixty-four, not even when he tied a piece of string round each tree after he had counted it. Being enchanted, its floor was not like the floor of the Forest, gorse and bracken and heather, but close-set grass, quiet and smooth and green. It was the only place in the Forest where you could sit down carelessly, without getting up again almost at once and looking for somewhere else. Sitting there they could see the whole world spread out until it reached the sky, and whatever there was all the world over was with them in Galleons Lap.

Wildlife is quite found carved in Devon churches - here are a frog and a snail from the pulpit at Coombe Martin.

The fox and cubs in their earth is on the pulpit at Buckworthy, the bench end representing Night (owl,bat and moon and stars) is at Coombe Martin.