We visited a letterpress printer called Emma Young who makes a trade printing invitations and menu cards:
Tag Archives: America
West Tisbury Farmer’s Market
In continuing our tour of Martha’s Vineyard utopian, rural pastoralism, we paid a visit to West Tisbury Farmer’s Market. It was beetling hot:
Chappaquiddick
In recording our explorations of Martha’s Vineyard, I feel that I should also record that we visited Chappaquiddick yesterday, and stood on Dike Bridge where Edward Kennedy’s car went off into the sea in July 1969. At this remove, it was hard to see how he could possibly have taken a wrong turning down an unpaved road and left Mary Jo Kopechne in the sea to drown. But at least I remember the months of news coverage of the trial. This is the so-called Chappy Ferry:
Edgartown
Edgartown is almost too good to be true. A once prosperous whaling community with grand classical mansions built by merchants in Main Street and a big, barrel-vaulted Old Whaling Church, dated 1841.
Menemsha Bike Ferry
I took the first ferry from Menemsha across the bay to Indian country. $5 one way. Then I rode back the hilly route through Lobsterville.
Middle Road
The afternoon was hot and sultry as I walked the footpaths on the property of our friends, Hans Kraus and Mariana Cook. No wonder Mariana has had a project photographing primitive walls (see Mariana Cook, Stone Walls, Bologna, 2011) because the estate is surrounded by ancient walls made up of large boulders, dating from a time when the land was grazed by sheep and including a nineteenth-century sheep pen. It felt prehistoric because of the old oak trees, including some dead, and the wealth of untamed vegetation. I swam in the pond.
Martha’s Vineyard
We arrived at Oak Bluff and drove across the middle of the island, a mixture of scrubland and small holdings, occasional open fields and stone walls, small clapboard houses, all heavily wooded. Its history dates back to the original settlement of 1602 when seafarers came in search of sassafras, used as a cure for syphilis. We’re staying in the south-west corner of the island in what’s called up-island, based on its position in longitude, slightly less touristy, more discrete, in Chilmark with its memory of sheep farms and the Wiltshire downs, with the sea eating away at the coast. This is the sea:
And this is inland:
Dutcher Dock
In the afternoon, we went down to Dutcher Dock to buy fish from Larsen’s fish market. It still has some of the atmosphere of a fishing village with working boats alongside the more expensive cruisers:
Fiddlehead Farm
We called in at Fiddlehead Farm, a small market garden and farm shop established by Bob Skydell who worked with Leon Krier for Jim Stirling, then turned restauranteur, and now spends half the year in Nicaragua. All the abundance of New England produce is piled up in the shop:
Woods Hole
After the long flight to Boston, we arrived at Woods Hole for the ferry across to Martha’s Vineyard. I always forget the impact the US makes: how neat and orderly everything is; the size of the cars; how unwelcoming they are at immigration; the steamy heat:
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
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