Today we drove home and once again on this journey from London to Cornwall through the English countryside, I was struck by the electricity pylons “striding” across the fields and reminded of this poem by Stanley Snaith in 1933 when these things were new in the landscape.

• Over the tree’d upland evenly striding,
• One after one they lift their serious shapes
• That ring with light. The statement of their steel
• Contradicts nature’s softer architecture.
• Earth will not accept them as it accepts
• A wall, a plough, a church so coloured of earth
• It might be some experiment of the soil’s.
• Yet are they outposts of the trekking future.
• Into the thatch-hung consciousness of hamlets
• They blaze new thoughts, new habits.
• Traditions
• Are being trod down like flowers dropped by children.
• Already that farm boy striding and throwing seed
• In the shoulder-hinged half-circle Millet knew,
• Looks grey with antiquity as his dead forbears,
• A half familiar figure out of the Georgics,
• Unheeded by these new-world, rational towers.

 Stanley Snaith, “Pylons,” in The Silver Scythe (London: Blythenhale Press, 1933)

Pylons in the landscape

Driving West we are often lucky enough to catch a lovely sunset.

Sunset

Everyone coming home to Cornwall along the A30 knows that they are almost home when they see this copse at Cookworthy Knapp, a few miles before the Cornish border.

Cookworthy Knapp

My photos were all taken with my phone today, from the moving car.