Stirling Examples

Stirling Castle

The Castle of Stirling was a wonderful place to wander in, around, and a'boot. You talk about a place full of history, well this is the real deal.

I was very much captivated by the many figures that decorated the exterior walls of the castle, from the royal to the demonic, and so I post a selection of them here for your consideration.

The Royals

The Demons and the Grotesque

Devil figure close-up

And the guy with the crossbow protecting the battlements

 Colin

Aging Sculpture

Everything gets older, hell even the stone that we carve our memorials is aging in it's own particular way; it's eroding, it's softening, the figures may be blurring, fading, sometimes to the point of losing the shape
of whatever it originally depicted.

What is it besides likely bovine?

When Sid and I visited York in England we went to the old mediaeval cathedral there, York Minster. I was hoping to wander around the outside of the building and take photographs of the figures on the roofs and walls. Unfortunately the grounds were largely gated off while extensive restoration was going on and the only figure that was close enough to me to photograph was this particular one, on the point of fading to obscurity.

Gargoyles and other hangers on.

I'd like to introduce another theme here that's been one of my photographic interests for years.

Blech

I've always been fascinated by the creatures that sit or cling to walls and roofs, the ones that strive under window casements, and those that are stuck away in isolated nooks and crannies. Often, particularly in this busy world of ours, these silent sentinels are ignored or forgotten. They are also, even though cast in stone, aging.

Here are a few examples from Westminister Abbey (old churches, gothic ones in particular, are often great locations for gargoyle hunting).

The only problem is that they mostly occupy the higher realms.

Figures out of nightmare, figures out of time, many appearing to be quite ticked off.

I spy with my little eye something that is...

And mixed in with the menagerie of creatures are often the faces of people.

Golden Carousel

While we're on the topic of carousels I thought I'd like to add one more to this blog (even though it doesn't quite fit in with a lot of the criteria that I normally use when I photograph them).

I caught a glimpse of this carousel as Sid and I were walking across the Thames River, probably over the Hungerford Bridge, in London. That's the England one, not Ontario.

The ride was located on the walkway along the river embankment near 'the Eye', that big ferris wheel thingy that is located there. I don't believe this is a permanent installation so don't expect to necessarily find it there if you visit.

Okay, so the horses are fiberglass, not wood,

and the horses have names, which is nice I guess,

and it's gaudy as hell (is it just me or do you think that nobody does gaudy quite like the English),

and the horses have no tails,

but outside of all this there is one very major difference, did you notice? This carousel rotates in the opposite direction to every carousel I've seen in Canada and the United States, clockwise instead of counterclockwise.

Those English.

Colin

Guelph Antique Carousel

Last year I was still chasing down old carousels, the wooden ones, that were within day trip striking distance of Toronto. I had already done some research and found out that I had missed one of what I thought of as a 'major' installation, although a minor one (that's supposed to be a joke) nearby.

I had also just financed a new used car and wanted to take it out on a road trip. My son Elliot came along for the ride.

It was a beautiful summer day for a drive. We hit the road and headed in the direction of Guelph, Ontario. I had some printed directions and knew a bit about the layout of the city and so with only a little bit of head scratching and paper consulting (no GPS here, GPS is for sissies) managed to locate the carousel and, at the same location, a small replica train that gives rides around the park.

So the carousel is one manufactured by the Allan Herschell Company (you can tell by the features of many of the animals) and was likely constructed around 1919, at least that's the year painted on the outside wall of the pavilion. There's a bit more information that can be gleaned on-line about where the city of Guelph got it and so on.

The funny thing, at least to me, is that I used to live here, in Guelph, way back when (talking the 70's here), around the time the carousel was purchased.

The carousel is in fairly good shape, considering it's age and the fact that it is still very much a working carousel. I'm sure there are those who would like to see a little bit more funding for the care and restoration of the horses except we seem to be living in the time of the bean counter, where art and culture are often pitted against the bottom lines of city budgets.

 Still it was nice to see. There was one thing that was a bit of a distraction for me and an indicator of possible funding and maintenance issues. Some of the horses once had actual horse hair tails but that day I visited all that was left were threadbare (more like 'hairbare' but I don't think it's a word) butt plugs.

To be honest I don't really know if it was caused by a lack of restoration funds, the lack of horse hair on the market, age, vandalism, or, as is likely, a combination of all the above factors.

 And thereby ends a tail.

The Void

I know I haven't visited here in a while or posted anything to it. I guess I just lost interest. Thanks to my friend Sid and a new blog venture we have initiated I decided to come back, do a little dusting, take the sheets off the furniture, sweep away the cobwebs and leave the address for the new site (kind of like a place to forward mail to).

We decided to put on line some of the photographs taken in various cemeteries we have wandered through during our travels (solo and duo) and and if you are interested you could check out...

http://cities-of-the-dead.blogspot.ca/

Again, thanks to Sid, you may even find an addition or two here.

Colin

Grai fields

Grai fields storefront, Kingston Road, Scarborough, ON

The Storefront on Kingston Road

I’m really sorry. I mean I have this little horsy tidbit, maybe not quite a full-blown actual carousel story with pictures and all but something in that particular neighbourhood at least. And it is something from the actual neighbourhood of my neighbourhood. Close by at least. And it happened months ago, likely at the end of summer. Sheesh. Like I said, sorry.

And I didn’t post it to the blog. I meant to, really.

Okay, my first excuse for not doing so is that I thought that I already had posted it. When I discovered that I had not, rather recently too, I thought that I had at the very least started to work out the storyline or blogline or whatever you call it in Word. I swear. I guess I should due more diligence.

Window full of horses

The second excuse is that this little episode or memory gap might have occurred during the infamous hard drive crash of 2012. That’s when I might have lost the file that I thought I had started work on. Maybe, I’m not sure, but I’m willing to use that as the excuse.

I’m paranoid enough with all my photographic files that I back them up regularly and burn them out to disc as well. And I do the occasional backup of my whole system too. I thought (what, again?) that I had recovered everything from the crash and, once the new hard drive and os had been installed, loaded everything back into the computer. But maybe I was wrong there. The story itself could have fallen through the gap between backups, into the lost data abyss.

Enough of excuses, I should just move on.

Okay, so this little story happened some time ago, we’ve established that. What I haven’t said is that it all happened because of my son Elliot’s craving for pizza.

Big horse, shortened head

I’m a divorced guy and I’ve been living in this same place for a number of years. I’m sure that somewhere on this blog I’ve done my Scarberia joke already. In case you don’t know Scarborough is one of the municipalities of Toronto. My son Elliot was living in Peterborough with his mom but has moved in with me while he attends Ryerson University in Toronto.

It’s great having him here.

So we were out one weekend doing chores, notably the grocery run, and had gone to this particular grocery store a little further away from the one closest to where we live so that I could pick-up some red pepper sauce (it’s really good) along with all the regular kind of foodstuffs that we like to cram into our gustatory orifices. Oh, and some khat food too.

Flowers in her hair

Having finished the shopping and now sitting back in the car Elliot chirps up and says that he’s hungry and what he’d really like is pizza. Okay, said I, and we headed out taking an alternate route back to our side of town along the poor man’s Don Valley Parkway, namely Kingston Road, that would lead to, you guessed it, pizza and home. On the way I happened to catch out of the corner of my little eye the flash of a storefront with what appeared to be a couple of carousel horses. Sacred feces. I couldn’t quite make out the name of the place, something field, but I knew just about where it was.

Looking out, looking in.

Okay, let me do the Reader's Digest version and abridge the story a little bit here. Got pizza, went home, stashed the perishables, grabbed camera, headed back out to the location of the store. I figured that if I didn’t make the effort right then and there then, according to that Murphy fella, the place would disappear quicker than meat thrown to a hungry lion, or maybe pizza to a hungry Elliot. Things like that tend to happen.

I got a bit of glare from the window but I think the photographs still look okay. I took a number of shots of which these are a selection. 

The gang in the storefront window

I never got to go into the store. It wasn’t open. There were two notices in the window. The first, the one you see to the left of the display, was an advertisement for what seemed a topically named daycare centre. The second notice, which you can hardly see because it had peeled away from the window (the vagaries of scotch tape) and was now resting on the rump of the big horse in the front, said that the horses were not for sale but might be available for rental from a movie prop house.

Oh, and another minor detail, there are no poles on the big horses.

And dat's dat.