Portland Connections

Church Ope today, always fascinates me... I was studying a map of Portland at the museum today, a copy made of an original c. 1800. The place names are different, intriguing. With all my family coming from the north of England (or so I believed), I am still trying to find out about my grandmother's grandfather George Harris, who said (in the 1881 census) that he came from Portland, Dorset, born here in 1847. Such a coincidence.

The Phoenician

Saw the Phoenician statue today at Portland Museum. He has a presence of his own, contemplative but aware of the changing world around him. Benevolent too. With the high point of Phoenician culture around 1200BC, I wonder whether this statue could possibly be so old. There were trade links between Dorset and the Mediterranean in this era.

More Pirates

I have nearly finished writing the Portland Pirates now. The story is a little more complex as the relationships between the characters are intertwined, and Isabel my main character is heading towards that awkward age of 13. Church Ope features a lot in the story, as well as Chesil and Portland Bill. The atmosphere of Church Ope lends itself well to pirates, not to mention the intriguing graves at St Andrews. Vikings landed here in the 8th century. I've read that Portland itself was named for the Saxon pirate Porth. Pirates everywhere... if you look hard enough...

Portland Pirates!

Writing about pirates for Book 3... Looking at the history of piracy, it fascinates me to find just how much the pirate legend owes to fiction. Even some 18th century pirates took up the profession after reading a romanticised account of the pirate lifestyle! (Rather like Heat magazine today.)Blackbeard played to his own legend, lighting tapers in his beard. Writing about pirates is referencing a whole literary genre, from the mysterious Captain Charles Johnson who wrote about Pyrates in 1724 to Treasure Island onwards. Even the movie of Peter Pan has influenced how we perceive pirates, with the invention of 'walking the plank'. Not to mention Pirates of the Caribbean! It's a challenge to come up with something different enough to be worth reading! Though of course these will be Portland Pirates which sets them apart anyway...

Lovely to see these gentle creatures early this morning... a peaceful start to a busy Sunday. Portland Pirates is taking shape. Is there enough swashbuckling... ?

Church Ope Cove

I spent some time at Church Ope today, thinking about pirates! Many of the graves still standing there are worn and difficult to decipher, most of them dating from the early to mid 1700s. I was speculating at the origins of the word Ope with a friend, we believe that it's possibly a Scandinavian word originally, meaning opening or inlet, and there are several 'Ope' places on Portland. Looking across the bay from Church Ope, it's easy to see why the Vikings found this approach attractive when they visited Portland many centuries ago. I remember visiting the so called 'pirate graves' as a teenager and finding the words and images on them far more legible than now. The hourglasses on some of the stones fascinate me; an image that I don't associate with gravestones nowadays, yet clearly significant in the past, showing the inevitable passing of time, perhaps also the finite aspect of life. It's a powerful image and it shows how differently time and death were seen in the past. We also spent quite a while wondering who would have been buried in the raised stone graves marked with skull and crossbones. These stones still stand fast and look well constructed. The image of skull/crossbones that we now associate with piracy was once, like the hourglass, an image for death, so may not in fact show a pirate burial. And would a pirate warrant an expensive, respectable burial in the island graveyard? Perhaps not. These ancient graves are nonetheless intriguing and mysterious...

Launch of Enchantment of the Black Dog, December 2010

Thanks to everyone who came along to the launch, it was great to see so many people and it was good to talk to about Portland history. I met a member of the Durston family, related to the poet/stonemason Skylark, whose story about the black dog inspired and intrigued me.