Roots - A Love of Wood

My father loves wood and he shared that love with me. As a little girl I showed an interest in doing what daddy was doing. For probably my fifth or sixth birthday I asked for a toolkit for a present, rather than give me some toys my dad took me to an ironmongers and together we selected a set of real wood tools – a small saw, hammer etc. I can remember just being able to look over the counter at the selection. He encouraged me to use them too, one day when I was having trouble sawing a piece of wood, rather than do it for me or tell me what to do, he said to me that I should think how he would hold it still and left me to get on with it. When he returned I proudly showed the sawn wood, the other end of which had been kept firm by nailing it to the lid of a nice wooden box of my father's. Rather than be angry with me for ruining the box he was delighted, the inventor in him beamed at his little girl coming up with a workable solution to a problem. He still tells this story with pride forty five years on.

I never fulfilled my wood-filled promise. Going to a girls' grammar school we learnt domestic science not woodwork. Now all those years later I am planning to rectify this omission. I have decided to learn woodworking. I want to learn how saw and fix, to use the grain, to smooth and release shape and pattern. In the Czech Republic with its vast forests wood is plentiful. Here in our Czech home there is space to work – why I could even use the barn as a workshop. The house has need of such work, if my skill proves good enough. There are doors to be made and shelves, and even furniture. But I am getting ahead of myself, first I must relearn the basics and more besides. It is part of a need I feel at this time of life to go back to basics, to use my senses of touch, sight and smell. I have told my father of my plans and he is delighted. He wants to give me his tools, some handed down from his father, which he had thought he would be unable to pass on as no one was interested and in such a case how can I let him down.

Roots - The Shed

When I was very small my parents moved to the house that has been their home ever since. It is in the small Cotswold town of Winchcombe,a terrace house in the street that leads past the church. It is a non-descript house, but one with a long history. All the houses in the street were built on burgage plots – long thin pieces of land with a relatively small road frontage built in the late Middle Ages to house the homes and workshops in a single plot of the artisans who serviced the community that had grown up around the large Saxon abbey. Our house had until recently been a bakery. When my father built the kitchen extension, he found medieval walls of some outbuilding.

At the end of the garden stands the “shed” - a two-storey Cotswold stone stable, where my father and later my sister had their workshops, thus the tradition of craft continued to the modern day. When we moved in, my father found owl pellets and dead snakes in jars at the bottom of the garden, the former owner had kept his owls in the shed. A large lean-to greenhouse ran the length of the shed, in front of it were vegetable beds, before they succumbed to my mother's ever encroaching flower beds. At one end of the shed instead of limestone there was an old brick wall with bricks that were crumbling away, these afforded me, when I was practicing to play backstop for the school rounders team, a surface which deflected a thrown ball in all sorts of directions. At the same end an external staircase led up to the second floor.

As is so often the case the shed was my father's domain, it was where my mother did not attempt to organise his untidyness. It was the place where he invented things – he like his father before him is an inventor and one such invention paid for the kitchen. It was also the place where he kept his wood.

My father had plans for the shed, throughout my childhood he was restoring it. It was a huge adventure – he was delighted to find cobbles in the floor, which he carefully uncovered. One day he returned from the pub with a large piece of Cotswold stone which he had been given. It looked like nothing at first until you turned it round to reveal Norman or Saxon carved stone – it was part of a pillar from the old abbey. The stone was carefully installed in the stable wall. He claimed some oak beams from the demolition bonfires at a nearby flourmill and singlehandedly installed them in the ceiling, whilst my mother watched through fingers standing at the kitchen window, unable to stop him but worried stiff that something might slip and he would be injured. By the time I was at university the shed was now so restored that I was able to have my 21^st birthday party there. But somehow that was as far as it got, somehow he never did finish it. The woodturning lathes which were waiting his retirement there have stayed unused.

Why am I saying this in a log about the Czech Republic, why now? Well this morning I caught myself delightedly unearthing granite cobblestones in the yard and I was reminded of Cotswold cobbles in the shed. Looking up I gazed at the barn. As I have said in an earlier post it was the barn that had first attracted me to buy the house and yet it remains unfinished, as something prevents my continuing in its restoration. I wonder whether this is my “shed”, whether I am acting out my father's experience and whether I will complete my dream as he did not.

Czech Weather

I am back in the Czech Republic having let some friends stay in our Czech home for what should have been a couple of weeks. Unfortunately after only three days they decided to leave because it was cold. Now the thing is that at this time of year the Czech Republic is nearly always several degrees warmer than in the UK, right now it is 30 degrees and I could do with it being somewhat colder. We Czechophiles often have problems with Brits who seem to think that the Czech Republic is somewhere up north near Russia, when instead we are actually south of the UK - only marginally - we are approximately on the same latitude as Paris.

I have learnt from bitter experience however not to overegg how the Czech Republic is normally warmer and drier than the UK. If I say this to people visiting us, then the great law of sod kicks in and there is inevitably rain when they arrive, even though the day before will have had glorious weather. Instead I say it is like the UK's weather, it can rain at times but the sunny days tend to be hotter. But clearly even that doesn't work - maybe those preconceptions are just too hard to shake off.

By the way the converse also works. I daren't say to my friends that Czech winters are usually colder and have snow, because as soon as they arrive or rather the night before there will be a sudden thaw.

The Water Spirit

The Vodnik is the Czech water spirit. Similar to the Germanic Nix the Vodnik lives in the water (usually ponds and rivers in Czech folklore) and is someone you do not want to upset. He has a malicious streak - prone to drowning people and keeping their souls in a ceramic pot. If you meet him you will see a man covered with slime and sometimes scales, wearing a coat of tatters and a hat, another give away can be his hands and feet which are sometimes webbed. He often carries a fish, the porcelain pot and a pipe - as he is known to enjoy a quick smoke and so Czech fishermen make him an offering before they fish.

Our family has a particular fondness for the Vodnik despite his unfriendly ways. Our son was given a large book of European fairystories, when he was young, and his favourite story in the book was about the Vodnik or Nix. The book was one of those lovely fairytale books from the former Czechoslovakia and published in the UK by Hamlyn. Its illustrations were by a Czech artist Jan Cerny (about whom I know nothing, not helped that his name translated is John Black and so very common) and are wonderfully Czech with a quirky humour and dark undertones. Our son has grown up into an artist and film maker and we are often struck by how his work seems to have something of that Czech illustrative style. The Vodnik in our son's book is a friendly one who helps the hero get his girl and somewhat out of character with most Czech Vodniks. Our son's imagination was taken by the Vodnik, whom he sees as a sad character looking longingly through the weed at the world beyond water.

The Czechs too have an affection for the Vodnik - you will find him in stories, in music (Dvorak wrote a symphonic poem on the subject and includes him in the opera Rusalka) or hanging up for sale in puppet shops. A few years back I found this Vodnik for sale in a confectioners in Trebon. He is made of marzipan - the Czechs make all sorts of marzipan animals and figures, which make ideal gifts. I couldn't resist him, bought him and gave him as a present for my son. My son's affection for the Vodnik did not extend to refraining from eating his gift, but not before I took this photo.

More on the Castle Gardens

Many visitors to Cesky Krumlov Castle never make it into the Gardens. If they do they very seldom get beyond the formal gardens nearest the Castle. In so doing they are missing out on one of my favourite haunts. The formal gardens are very fine with formal flower beds, terraces, sculptures and fountain, but beyond these are more informal areas.

It is here that you will find both the summerhouse and the revolving auditorium featured in my last post. As you will have gathered the summerhouse is a rare rococo gem and well worth viewing, although many walk past it without a glance. Below is a photo of the summer house from outside the gardens, which show the level of decoration.


Beyond that crouched in the trees is a little pavilion - its ceiling decorated with 18th century frescos. These frescos, shown below, like the masquerade hall in the castle, betray a sense of fun and amusement so in keeping with the time in which they were created. The gardens are for walking in and giving pleasure. The walks are treelined to proffer shade in the summer leading to a pond. You will not find many tourists here, but you will find the locals - walking with their children to feed the ducks and squirrels, sitting on the grass engrossed in a book or lying asleep among the wild flowers. It is place to visit in all seasons - in spring when the first flowers appear, in summer to escape the sun's glare or in autumn when the leaves are falling. Sadly in Winter it is closed to visitors.


And as you walk you can feel the shades of the castle's former residents walking and laughing too. This is a garden of pleasure and mystery. In these modern days we have lost the ability to read the puzzles of garden design that so amused our 18th century forebears, with their references to classical mythology, masonic and alchemical symbols. What we enjoy is a shadow, but a very fine shadow at that.

The rotating theatre

Regular readers of my blog will know my views of the need for UNESCO to protect the important historic buildings of Cesky Krumlov against the pressures of commercialism. I welcomed their call for an audit of historical buildings.

One of the conditions of World Heritage site listing was the removal of the rotating auditorium from its current site in the Castle Gardens next to the Bellarie Summerhouse, which was built in the rococo style in the mid 1700's. The summerhouse is a remarkable and beautiful building and the UNESCO argument is that it should be seen in its natural setting without the intrusion of a modern open-air theatre auditorium. As someone who has specialised in rococo gardens - I formally ran a heritage centre in Vauxhall, which was built on the site of Vauxhall Spring Gardens, the most famous of all rococo gardens - I am acutely aware of the rareness of such gems.

That said there are many fans for the auditorium in its current position. I would recommend that visitors to Cesky Krumlov make a point of experiencing the magic of a performance in the gardens, before we lose the auditorium from its current site. Throughout the summer there are operas and plays staged in the gardens and whilst the performers can be of varying quality the theatre works wonderfully in the setting. You sit on the raked seating under the stars (or rain if you are unlucky) and the performance takes place around you - in the gardens and on the terrace of the summer house. The 360-degree rotation of the auditorium allows this action to take place anywhere within sight of the audience and anywhere that suits the drama. We watched Dvorak's opera Rusalka and the scene moved from the court to the lake home of the water sprite heroine and back again easily with the turn of the auditorium.

If, as they must to meet UNESCO demands, the Cesky Krumlov authorities do move the auditorium, it is hard to see where it can go and have the same magic. I do think the auditorium is in the way of seeing the summerhouse properly in its setting, although sitting in the empty auditorium does give you a great view. I also think far more could be made of the summerhouse to enable visitors to appreciate it, for starters I would love to be able to look inside. But at the end of the day I do wonder whether some compromise might not be the best solution. When I was researching the Vauxhall pleasure gardens and their rococo structures, I became aware of the theatricality of the period - rococo is nothing if not artifice. The auditorium whilst not in keeping architecturally with its historic surroundings, undoubtedly is in terms of spirit.

The Landscape of South Bohemia

As I was driving our Czech visitors to Tesco's I asked them what they thought of the Cotswolds. The response surprised me - the landscape reminded them of South Bohemia. It hadn't occurred to me, that I had managed to buy a Czech property in an area similar to my British birthplace and home. But on reflection I can see why they might say that.

Certainly the area around their home town of Holubov is similarly hilly, although it is far more forested than the rather bare Cotswolds. Both areas are very beautiful. A first glance at the hills around our house (see above) could deceive one into thinking one is in a slightly wooded part of the Cotswolds - the area around Stroud perhaps. But look again at the photograph and you will see the foothills of the Sumava mountains rising behind the hills. These are the steep hills that ring Olsina lake, beyond that there are steeper summits. South Bohemia would indeed be like the Cotswolds, if the Cotswolds were next to the Lake District.