Pictures, Poems and Songs From the Riverbank

These photographs and the drawing are by a local child with autism who loves this area, and finds walking here with family, and taking photographs of the birds, the river and the trees, very therapeutic...


I's Castle through the trees.


I's Birds.


Save the birds!
Thanks to "I" and mum for sending these in for the blog!

We've received a number of emails and messages from people from all over the world, the following is from Jonathan in France... Salut Jonathan!
'One of my favoured poems is "September 1 1939 " by W H Auden which has guided me and which was pointed out to me by a teacher at school-he wrote it in New York 1939 about his feelings about the coming Nazi darkness. My French understanding is probably different but I get the message. The darkness is now not Nazi but ourselves with our capitalist Happiness.
The final verse:

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

Let us all be up to these these signal makers on all Fragrances and frequencies. Or at least try.
I was a student at Preston at the university of Central Lancashire in 2003. I am French. Excuse my English if you can for it goes bad when I am not in England. I enjoyed the stay in Preston and made many Gentle friends. I was told it is the Northern Happiness you have there. I think about your town and Lancashire a lot.
I looked the internet recently to find out the town information and was unhappy to see that the area I walked through was going to be built on for the development and houses. I walked and cycled there when having to the difficult time with my studies to help me think. It settled my mind away from the urban. That countryside was near my student house and from the bridges and the trees by the Tram Road I found very beautiful. It reminded me of the town near my own town that is called Argenteuil. Monet, he painted the bridges when they were countryside but now it is not Gentle like your side of river. We have urban problems for their light drugs and driving Joy cars that are burnt-out by the riverside. I think about it a lot more. Flowers in those Preston fields were so Gentle in the warm Spring day.The cows were good near the town.
I looked at your good website and have decided to send you my song to protest.
Music is my passion and my belief. It changes hearts. We now protest a lot more in my France to change society that we do not like. We have to fight "the Suits" who make all grey for money and take joy. This music of hurt people is my passion and again my belief.
Please listen to my song a 'Trashing A Monet' that I written to protest at the building near the Ribble river.My good friend Maxime helped. I hope it changes some hearts!!! It is my gift to help.
Bonne Chance !’
Jonathan Penetti

Trashing A Monet

They will trash Monet
They will steal beauty

Why do we pave paradise?
Turn it to Concrete,
Green places beautiful,
To my heart sweet,
I hear the business man wants,
A place like that,
Near where I was a student,
I lived in a flat,
I was taken by the place,
I went to walk there for the quiet,
I escaped the city pace,
Flew my soul as a kite,
It was beautifully England,
Down by Ribble river,
In its morning mists,
I enjoyed the Winter!
Now the song of its birds,
Will be run over,
By a blind man,
In a bulldozer.

Busy City at my back,
I walked across the bridges,
Into the silence,
In the nature so rich,
That It could be painted,
by the Impressionist,
Also tainted,
By the industrialist,
And found as I walked,
In the green so kind,
It was time to take,
The sadness off my mind,
We all need open space,
To ease the heart pain,
The Ribble was beautiful,
In November rains,
The money mad world,
My soul drains,
To watch the Ribble hurl,
I felt my soul regain.

This situation
Is the microcosm
Of the Earth’s peril
We must save her.

In this life we have a choice,
To turn away the head,
Or use the strong voice,
To say something said,
About a place so sweet,
For Ribble-Land
They will drown it in concrete,
They will pave paradise,
To the green tree tunnel
It will be 'Au revoir'
To be left with the housing scar,
All will be left with,
Is memories,
You sad where you live,
I sad overseas,
So I am rousing,
People in my song,
To say the new housing,
By the Ribble it is wrong,

Please don't touch, businessman,
Don't come again,
Any day,
You take beauty,
Throw it away,
Like trashing,
A Monet!

River Ribble in Poetry and Literature - Service and Belloc in the Mud

Poet Robert Service was born in Preston, and I like to think he played in the River Ribble’s mud as a child. That’s what I think inspired his poem ‘Mud’:

Mud

Mud is Beauty in the making,
Mud is melody awaking;
Laughter, leafy whisperings,
Butterflies with rainbow wings;
Baby babble, lover's sighs,
Bobolink in lucent skies;
Ardours of heroic blood
All stem back to Matrix Mud.

Mud is mankind in the moulding,
Heaven's mystery unfolding;
Miracles of mighty men,
Raphael's brush and Shakespear's pen;
Sculpture, music, all we owe
Mozart, Michael Angelo;
Wonder, worship, dreaming spire,
Issue out of primal mire.

In the raw, red womb of Time
Man evolved from cosmic slime;
And our thaumaturgic day
Had its source in ooze and clay . . .
But I have not power to see
Such stupendous alchemy:
And in star-bright lily bud
Lo! I worship Mother Mud.



The people who back Riverworks don’t have any poetry in their souls, and cannot see the beauty, or the key importance to wildlife (and children) of the Ribble’s mud - lets not drown it, cover it with concrete, or impede it's journey to the Ribble Estuary!

A redshank enjoys the Ribble's Mud



And here is what Hilaire Belloc had to say about the Ribble:

"The sources of the Ribble are in a lonely place up in a corner of the hills where everything has strange shapes and where the rocks make one think of trolls. The great frozen Whernside stands up above it, and Ingleborough Hill, which is like no other hill in England, but like the flat-topped Mesas which you have in America, or (as those who have visited it tell me) like the flat hills of South Africa; and a little way off on the other side is Pen-y-ghent, or words to that effect. The little River Ribble rises under such enormous guardianship. It rises quite clean and single in the shape of a little spring upon the hillside, and too few people know it."

If you know of a reference from great literature or poetry to the River Ribble, please feel free to post it here!

By the way, on the subject of the Ribble's muds and silts, a great letter from C.P. Wash was published in today's Lancashire Evening Post:












He says

"The fact is ... that regardless of how far up river of the Special Protection Area and RAMSAR site a barrage might be situated, and regardless of whether it is a few metres high or several, or the incoming tide washes over the top or not, it would still create a barrier to the movement of silts down the river, and therefore reduce the silt-bound nutrients to the SPA/RAMSAR site that the tidal nature of the river currently replaces twice a day.

This would deplete this delicate ecosystem, and thus significantly damage an internationally protected bird habitat"

Keep those letters going in to the papers - if enough people speak up, perhaps the council will start to see what is blindingly obvious to everyone else!

river poetry literature belloc mud service
silt

Click here for more photographs of the Ribble