Endnotes — Thomas Maloney

Peacock Butterfly1.jpg — “Unlike Shangri La, the combe isn’t far away or guarded by high passes: it is tantalisingly nearby. Like all good retreats, it resists the passage of time. I imagined it populated by symbols of this resistance: gnarled trees, foxed and fragrant books, candlelight and carved stone. Inspiration is never lacking there.
“It isn’t, of course, a real place. Or is it?”
Thomas Maloney, In Search of a Sacred Combe

House Sketch001.jpg

The smooth slabs of the bridge were slippery, and it was not until I reached the other side that I looked up into the mist before me: I drew an arrow of sharp air into my lungs as the first of my revelations of place found its mark.

It was built in sixteen twenty, he told me, as a consolation for the non-inheriting younger son of a Richard Kempe, the nobleman who owned this corner of the county — thus explaining, apparently, the oversized grandeur of its windows and ceilings. Hartley’s grandfather, a lawyer, bought it from the by-then-ruined Kempes in the early years of the next century, and it had stayed in the Comberbache family ever since, passing down a tangled chain of sons, step-sons, daughters and cousins.

Temple Plan.jpg — ‘Hartley’s design is based on the principle of confinement,’ he continued, setting down the cup and placing his palms almost together, with a tiny gap between them. ‘A man’s eye is accommodative, like his heart — bathe it in light and the pupil contracts and becomes insensitive; but wrap it in gloom and it dilates — invites sensation and responds with rapturous intensity. By confining the sun’s light to the narrowest of paths and then splintering it into a dark space, he celebrates the glories of both phenomenon and witness.’