If you’re seeking sanctuary from the madness of this world, is there anywhere better than a place like this? I feel that I could stare at this image for hours. Simple yet sublime. Lacock Abbey yesterday, warmed by the afternoon sun.

The Boleyn Cup, made in 1535 for Queen Anne a year before her head was removed by Henry VIII. Kept behind reinforced glass at St John the Baptist in Cirencester.

Fly buttresses, fly. The 600+ year old strongly buttressed tower of St John the Baptist in sunny Cirencester today. #SteepleSaturday

Tonight am giving my first history talk for a few months. For Dilton Marsh Local History Society. Main focus is on Salisbury but won’t be able to resist looking at two interesting churches local to here.

RT @Jopolkadot: “We read books to find out who we are” Ursula K. Le Guin

Dunnet Head Lighthouse, Caithness was commissioned in 1829 and completed in 1831 by famed engineer Robert Stevenson ❤️ 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

Excellent afternoon in Bath today with my oldest to hear Anthony @Scaramucci give an insider’s view on many things Trump 🤮 as well as a deeper analysis of the roots of populism in the USA. Funny, insightful and even humble at times. Good stuff.

More of the rarely used St Mary’s, Old Dilton - replaced by a new church in the 1840s and so escaped Victorian “improvement”. Though the font is 19th C. Arms are George III - small but rather nice. Lovely triple decker Georgian Pulpit too. #LesArmoiriesduVendredi #FontsonFriday

This is the 16-year-old English actress Ellen Terry. But you haven't seen her in any recent blockbuster, not least because the photo was actually taken 162 years ago, during the height of the American Civil War, and 3 decades before moving film was even invented! I have cleaned-up this astonishingly modern-looking portrait which was taken in 1864 by photographer Julia Cameron on the Isle of Wight. She simply called the portrait "Sadness".

"The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true." - Steinbeck

You get a better standard of dress in Bath bookshops. @ToppingsBath today.

Stillness personified. Heron on the Kennet & Avon canal.

Interested in studying pilgrimage with me at Oxford University? Applications for my course @OxLifelongLearn now open! Follow this link for more information: lifelong-learning.ox.ac.uk/c…

If anyone deserves a monument, it's Benjamin Zephaniah. What an honour to curate 'Poet of the People' where George Triggs' extraordinary sculpture shares a space with words by the late poet of the people ✨️

Multilateral multicameral multivolume reading is essential: multiple books, fiction and non fiction, one or two for each room - kitchen, study, bedroom and of course bathroom - in a tournament of attention until sometimes one book triumphs over all the others and demands total attention in all rooms....

I love second hand books. They are books that breath, that have lived, in other places & other times. You sometimes find the name or marginalia notes or even laundry receipts of those who owned them before. Who were they? Secondhand books and secondhand bookshops are a special pleasure. They have a past

The Plague by Albert Camus. In fact, anything by Camus did change my life. I was in my late 20s in college studying Modern European Fiction and there he was....Camus. Before that I had been a Romantic with a fixation on P B Shelley.

Time has stood still not just for decades but centuries at Old Dilton near Westbury. Lovely to go back there today ahead of a talk I am doing nearby in a few weeks. Churches unspoiled by Victorians are such special places.

I’m forever blowing bubbles. Pretty bubbles in the air. Late 16th C Memorial brass to Nicholas Grobham with a strange image of a bubble blowing boy (far left of full image). Hard to photograph as in a glass case. St Mary the Virgin Bishop Lydeard, Somerset. #MementoMoriMonday

The smiling sunken pillbox of Porlock Weir earlier this month. #SundayStonework

On a random stop at Bishops Lydeard in Somerset a couple of weeks ago I came across this Ninian Comper window beautifully set by him under a golden tester. Rather superb. #StainedGlassSunday