Autumn Holiday

After our holiday in the Isle of Wight here are some of the places the wife and I visited:

Mottisfont Abbey, Romsey:

This is not in fact an abbey but a stately home built on the site of an abbey. The abbey dates from the 13th century, but after the dissolution the abbey estate was given by Henry VIII to one of his cronies, Lord Sandys. Sandys didn’t demolish the abbey, but built his house around it using the old walls as the basis of his Tudor mansion. Later in the mid 18th Century the Tudor house was given a Georgian makeover. Today, therefore, the visitor is confronted with a Georgian facade that from the front betrays little sign of the ecclesiastical bones under the surface of the building. In fact the concept of a convincing façade permeates the whole building; from the mock painted “faux marbling” of the long gallery, through the extremely clever trick perspective artwork of the dining room, to the stunning trompe l’oeil effects of the Whistler room; these are just some of the amazing spectacles that make a visit well worth it. But peel away the two-dimensional veneer and a more ancient history is revealed: In the Yellow room some of the original abbey walls with their heavy early gothic stone work have been exposed, looking very incongruous in the Georgian setting. For the post dissolution builders the original abbey no longer held any sacred authority or sense of fearful holiness; it was a bygone that could be covered up and forgotten.

The Sediments of time: Georgian window layered on Gothic arch

In Georgian times English society was morphing into something completely different; an industrialised culture. But like Mottisfont house itself with its gothic vaulted undercroft, one still finds here and there the signs of a strange medieval ethos at the foundation of our civilization. One marvels at how society can so radically change its rationale and philosophy.

Bembridge Mill, Isle of Wight:

This mill was built at about the same time as the Georgian alterations were being made to Mottisfont abbey. A mill is one of those early non-miniaturized machines that one can actually get inside of and walk round; it is full of wheels, shafts and cogs. Bembridge mill wasn’t just about brute power, it was also about the control of power; it had a centrifugal regulator governing the separation of its grinding stones. The mill “reads out” the information from the relatively delicate regulator via a serious of levers that effectively acted as transducers; the lever arms increase in thickness as they get closer to their job of having to raise a ½ ton grinding stone.


The aristocratic background of Mottisfont abbey contrasts with the lower class of millers who understood and operated the mill. Conceptually speaking the mill was a precursor and symbol of the industrialised world to come. It is ironic that this lower class of millers were totally unaware that they were dealing with the basic concepts of mechanism, energy, power and control that were eventually to dominate the rationale of an industrialized and instrumentalist society. I was reminded of the fact that my schoolboy introduction to physics was via pulleys cogs, and levers.

Compton Bay, Isle of Wight.

Compton bay has strata that straddle a good part of the cretaceous period, and it seems to be a good place for fossil hunting. (We were there looking for fossils until nearly sunset) The thickness of strata are measured in thousands of feet and I always marvel at the depth of time they represent as evidenced by the very different conditions under which the strata formed, sometimes separated by periods of uplift, folding, tilting and erosion. And here’s the peculiar part: If physics is fundamental those prosaic looking principles derived from levers, cogs and pulleys are reckoned to be sufficient to describe the prehistory of the changing face of our planet.

A Lower Cretaceous fossil we found in Compton bay (to me it looks like a form of coral[?])