We walked down to the sea this morning along the side of the estuary – it was high tide with distant bright, scudding light illuminating the low hills and fields on the other side of the Straits:-

We went to buy two Sea Bass this morning, freshly caught last night in the Anglesey sea:-

A treat in store:-

In looking up information about Kerry Downes, I was intrigued to find a photograph he had taken of Anthony Blunt, who was Director of the Courtauld Institute when Downes was both an undergraduate and postgraduate (it was Blunt who inspired his interest in Borromini). I assume it was taken on one of the Courtauld’s Summer Schools and shows a) the languid side of Blunt’s nature and b) that Downes was a good photographer:-

http://www.artandarchitecture.org.uk/images/full/240.html

I was sad to hear from Edward Chaney, his pupil at Reading, of the death of Kerry Downes (Chaney co-edited his festschrift with John Bold). I followed in Downes’s footsteps in the archive at Castle Howard, where he had done detailed research for his great monograph on the work of Nicholas Hawksmoor, based on the Ph.D thesis he had done under Margaret Whinney at the Courtauld Institute in the mid-1950s. It was published by Desmond Zwemmer in 1959 and set new standards for scholarship in an English architectural monograph. Ten years later, he published a much shorter, but also admirable, distillation of his views of Hawksmoor for the Thames & Hudson World of Art series, a book which introduced many people, me included, to the glories of the English Baroque.

Later, he was to publish a monograph on and, also, a biography of Vanbrugh as well, but I always felt that he was more psychologically in sympathy with Hawksmoor as the underdog in the relationship between the two great architects – the hard-working, hyper conscientious and deeply scholarly, but cautious Hawksmoor, not Vanbrugh, the flash and socially more ambitious showman.

I scarcely knew Downes, who may have felt (rightly) that I was trespassing on his patch. I am sad that he has died too soon, I assume, to be included in the SAHGB oral history project (he was a Past President of the SAHGB) as he knew both Anthony Blunt and Rudolf Wittkower during his time as a student at the Courtauld. Maybe he has left a memoir. I hope so.

Oh dear, oh dear, the tree specialists have just come round. At Easter, we thought that our ash trees – the majority of the trees which give character to our garden – had got ash dieback. Indeed, they have. One takes them for granted, until one discovers that they’re diseased, with an unpredictable lifespan and the need to clear them over time.

I’m posting a picture of the best of them in memoriam:-

We had been tipped off at Crûg (thank you, Sue) that Halen Môn, the local sea salt company which supplies Anglesey Sea Salt throughout the world, had acquired a pop-up caravan serving lunch. It has. And it’s delicious: fresh crab, washed down by Wild Horse beer, a new craft beer from Llandudno. It has everything to recommend it (but, oh, it’s only thanks to EU funding and the Welsh voted against the EU):-

We walked down to the Straits from St. Nidan, the early sixteenth-century church, now locked, which was demolished – bizarrely – in 1844 to build a new and much more expensive church up near Brynsiencyn in spite of it having been a place of pilgrimage since its foundation in 616:-

There is a carved head alongside the North door:-

From the church, the old track down to the Straits is extremely beautiful:-

After three days of intermittent rain and the threat of storms which never quite materialised, it’s a pleasure to see the outline of Snowdon again on the horizon:-Later in the morning, we walked further up the Menai Straits, where its profile of double peaks was much more obviously visible:-

Out to the Point, always beautiful in an austere way, where one can look out to Puffin Island:-

The lighthouse keeper’s cottages are 1839:-

The lighthouse itself 1835-9, designed by James Walker for Trinity House to protect the ships going from Liverpool across the Atlantic from running aground on the rocks:-

The café has home-made bara brith and ice creams.