Mow Cop Castle

What was the last thing you searched for online? Why were you looking for it?

So I could draw it

I had to do a drawing prompt for an art group that I’m in and I wanted to draw something old with ‘nooks and crannies’ which was the prompt.

I love the phrase, I think of old buildings, of old corridors and priest holes that people could hide in. Like Cavaliers hiding from Roundheads. Of hidden treasures, or pirates gold doubloons.

Mow Cop Castle is actually a folly, it was built on top of Mow Cop Hill that looks out over the Cheshire plain. It was never a ruined castle, but built to look like one, with the walls built to appear like they are tumbling down, and it’s silhouette is very striking as you look up to it. If you go up to it you can see the Jodrell Bank Observatory over at Holmes Chapel.

The drawing is not a good representation but it gives you an idea of how it looks.

Boarded up

An old ruin made of pinkish grey stone. The window has a white windowledge stained with green algae caused by the wet atmosphere in the area. The window is boarded with some sort of chipboard. The lower section is sodden with damp from successive rainstorms. It must be screwed into the window frame because it is sunken into the window surround, not flush with it. A bracket of metal, almost the shape of the number ‘2’ is on one side of the window, and a thin line of stonework shaped almost like an eyebrow sits in the stone course above the boarded window. This is on the first floor of the building so it would not be easily accessible from the ground. The light on the building is grey, reflecting what the sky would look like if it was visible in the photo.

I was trying to write this in a simple descriptive way. It’s harder than I thought to be accurate!

Recurring dream

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In my dream I’m in a city, buying a crumbling house, with many floors. It is so delapidated, chunks of rubble are falling from it.

The house is actually two houses one on top of the other. It is perched at the top of a vertical cliff, and bits of building keep falling off.

I don’t know why I’m having this dream. I’m not scared in it, the city seems recognisable as somewhere I know, the sun mainly shines, or the sun is setting. Sometimes I will be miles away and I have to walk back to the house, by convoluted paths.

All the buildings in the city are falling down, but they are like ruins, much more romantic than real buildings.

I want to work out why I’m dreaming this and I don’t understand is why it keeps recurring?