Saturday 29 May 2010

Purple

We got to the top of the hills just before midnight; 'STOP' I heard.
Snow was on the ground and falling fast and heavy from the sky; and Claire, fresh from Cape Town had never seen snow before. Despite the hour, despite frozen middnight, despite my assurance that we would see far more snow when we got to the high mountains, we had to stop, and it was wonderful. Yet my memories of the Berwins are far more of the heather than the snow, miles upon miles of purple moorland, rising and falling as far as the eye can see. It was the first place that I had known such colour.

However when I first painted a purple stole, I was already serving my curacy in Minehead and it was to Dunkery that I was drawn. There is no patch of heather on Exmoor, not even around Dunkery, to rival the Berwins in their full splendour, but it's good enough. Since that first stole I have also come to know Bossington Beacon; to the extent that I can now navigate my way over it and around it and up and down it in almost any weather and when my running shoes have fallen to pieces and my feet are taking the strain. What Bossington Beacon has, beautifully and powerfully, is heather and gorse together, above the sea and sand [Selworthy Sands] and shingle [Porlock Bay]. It's neither big, nor high or remote, but it is special.

We wear purple stoles in Lent and Advent, the seasons that lead to Easter and Christmas. Purple in church is not the colour of emperors but of mourning and waiting and confession. Which is perhaps an uneasy fit with the glory and joy of the heather covered moorland. Yet, somehow, as with so many other fusions of art and sprituality, it works, or at least, it enables me to paint some purple stoles.

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