I am posting four of the last five sunrises in Angelesey:-

Saturday

Sunday:-

Monday:-

Today:-

This is what I’ve learned about Charles Tunnicliffe from reading his Shorelands Winter Diary (with apologies to those who already know all this).

He and his wife Winifred moved to Malltraeth in March 1947 and he kept a diary of his first year there.  The Shorelands Summer Diary was published in 1952 and was a succès d’estime, much admired for its close observation of bird life on the estuary and its detailed drawings.  But it was expensive to produce, so the winter months were unpublished until after his death.

They give a good sense of country life after the war.  For anyone inclined to romanticise it, there was a great amount of shooting, not in an organised way by the local grandees, but by local schoolchildren who would take a pop shot during the shooting season at the geese as they flew overhead.

Here is the estuary at Malltreath, as seen from close to Shorelands at very low tide today:-

And from the Cob, where Tunnicliffe often walked, as did we:-

So, I’ve now signed up to Merlin.

Thank you for the suggestion.

As it happens we have also just been to Oriel Môn to see the exhibition of the work of Charles Tunnicliffe who lived in a bungalow on the edge of the estuary at Malltreath:-

Now I must read his Shorelands Winter Diary which records the wealth of Anglesey bird life.

So what I thought was a hoopoe turns out to be a lapwing.

Shows I am an ignoramus when it comes to birds:-

Rather late in the Christmas season, I have caught up with Tim Abraham’s very nice and generous recommendation of my Vanbrugh book in a pre-Christmas post on Engelsberg Ideas (I also enjoyed Dirty Old River).

I am a third of the way through Robin Holloway’s unbelievably magisterial Music’s Odyssey: An Invitation to Western Classical Music, if you want some New Year’s reading:-

Books of the Year 2025 – Engelsberg ideas https://share.google/bG4gBHH2UsMsd2XsL

Another church recently taken on by the Friends of Friendless Churches is St. Twrog in open farmland atmospherically placed on a knoll surrounded by sheep.  We were told it would open at 2.30, but didn’t.

But beautiful nonetheless:-

I hadn’t registered that the Friends of Friendless Churches have recently taken custody of another redundant church in a remote northerly part of Anglesey.

We couldn’t get in, but admired it from outside, surrounded by trees and next door to what used to be the village school:-

The Architecture Foundation has kindly chosen John Vanbrugh: The Drama of Architecture as one of six books for its Book Week, showing short – well, in my case, not so short – films about what it describes as ‘the best architecture books of the year’.

I hope this will bring the book to the attention to architects as much as architectural historians – and, also, to listeners in the States where it is being published in March, more or less at the same time as the opening of the exhibition at Sir John Soane’s Museum.

Happy Christmas !