Down where the charted Thames doth flow

I took these pictures in March. The black & white ones, I developed myself and scanned at 6400 dpi with 16 bit greyscale . This gave an average file size of 100Mb. The colour one's were processed by Michael in Spark's photo lab round the corner in Stroud Green Road and were scanned with 48 bit colour at 6400 dpi giving an average file size of 250Mb. At these sort of sizes this is less like photography and more like wallpaper design.

Down where the charted Thames doth flow

The Fortingall Yew

The Fortingall Yew

Some twenty two thousand years ago

a bone was notched with a clumsy tock

from a flint glancing across time.

stone struck ticking bone

for some seventeen thousand more years.


And then about three thousand BCE

the yew put down roots when

a settling seed pinned itself to

some holy ground in Perthshire

and called it home

just as the footings for Stonehenge were dug,

here in Fortingall, foundations were grown.


Neolithic tombs built of eschatology gave

a floor show for the sapling yew,

as the graveyard grew.

Our death was its witness.

The sight of burial by a poison bower

soon gave us ways to conjure war

by ritual and artifice.

The yew gave up the long bow

to Thanatos and our vice,

performed by ghosts

in the half life of misty groves.


The yew watched and bore testimony.

And grew.


Until our mercantile ways

saw off large splinters

for sale as souvenirs

and nearly killed it.


It was walled and protected

for its own good, and some say

that the bones that once were

sixty five foot round,

eleven, stretched finger tip to finger tip round,

in the graveyard by the barleycorn,

might be good for another

five thousand years.


Witness of our death.








John Ochiltree 2007-03-05

My first blog.

Dominica 2005

Well, this is it. My very first dip in the toe of the elbow in the hot baby water of blogging.
I'd thought I'd try and make it a bit of a showcase so it will have a mixture of photos (the one above is from a magical 3 weeks spent in Dominica. It should link to my Picasa photo site), poems, and, if I can work out how, links to music. Occasionally I might even put up some comment on new technology but I get enough of that at work!
I'll stay off politics, too. Well, as much as I can resist, but I get enough of that at work as well!