"Junkies Go Home:" Waste Woods

Across the road from Norwich's 'secret garden,' the restored nineteenth century Plantation Gardens, lies a strange scrap of forgotten waste woodland I assume was once part of the same quarry. (The famous 1988 image of the double decker bus sinking into a collapsed hole in the road, courtesy of instabilities caused by medieval chalk mines beneath the surface, happened mere yards away). I don't know what this chunk of crumbling wall is, or how many years it has stood. I like this place as a weird grotty twin to the Plantation Gardens.

"Contained the Remains of Withburga:" Saint Withburga's Well, Dereham

"Wihtburh (or Withburga) (died 743) was an East Anglia saint, princess and abbess who was possibly a daughter of Anna of East Anglia. She founded a monastery at Dereham in Norfolk and a traditional story says that the Virgin Mary sent a pair of does to provide milk for her workers during the monastery's construction. Her body is supposed to have been uncorrupted when discovered half a century after her death: it was later stolen on the orders of the abbot of Ely and a spring then appeared at the site of the saint's empty tomb at Dereham." - Wikipedia entry for 'Wihtburh'

In the churchyard of St Nicholas' Church in Dereham, this supposedly holy well remains, quietly minding its own business. According to another Wiki entry, on the history of Dereham, attempts were made in the eighteenth century to turn the town into a new Bath or Buxton by building a bath house over the well. The building was apparently ugly and unpopular and was eventually demolished in the late 1880s.

I visited on an overcast day. A young woman was sitting on a bench by the well talking loudly on her mobile phone. I felt a bit shifty, poking around with a camera, but she paid no heed. "I f**king didn't! I f**king didn't! I'm f**king telling you, I f**king didn't!" she kept yelling down the receiver. I never found out what she was denying.





















This final image is of the lady herself, on a fifteenth century rood screen inside the church.

Window Photography:

More iPhone photography taken from moving vehicles. These were all taken during a train journey from Norwich to Doncaster a few weeks back, all somewhere between Thetford and Peterborough.

I posted a similar entry back in May, entitled 'Maybe Everything That Dies Someday Comes Back.' It was named after a line in a Springsteen song, from his album 'Nebraska,' because vehicle-window photography (there has to be an easier term...) often reminds me of the terrific, understated cover of that record. And some of these to me do seem weirdly evocative of lonely desert landscapes: ridiculous, considering the actual locations, but still.

I was messing around with a black and white photography app called Hueless, as well as the inevitable Instagram filters.