three hares stained glass

Today's picture. This is the third version of the three hares that I've painted. I got the idea when Suzanne asked about something for the porthole on her narrowboat. Now to see about getting the design made up into stickers!

Three Hares in Devon churches: a map

get a copy of this map here

(edit, added June 2020: I have updated my map, and you can see the newer version here)

The image of three hares sharing three ears can be found all the way from here to China, where the earliest examples are found. But Devon, and especially Dartmoor, is particularly rich in them.

I've been visiting the churches where the hares can be found; the search has taken me to some beautiful places. Deborah Harvey has written a poem about them, which you can read here. Some of her poem features on the map...

Here are places where you can find the hares in the churches, but do take a torch!

Ashreigney
Bradford
Broadclyst
Chagford
Cheriton Bishop
Iddesleigh
Ilsington
Kelly
Newton St Cyres
North Bovey
Paignton
Sampford Courtenay
South Tawton
Spreyton
Tavistock
Throwleigh
Widecombe

Here is photographer Chris Chapman's Three Hares Project, with lots of excellent pictures.

The map is available as an A5 print, over on my Etsy shop.

three hares quilt

 Bimbling along the Gloucester Road the other day, I bumped into Judi Brill at the Bishopston Trading Company, and we told our news. Judi's been over in Kenya recently; she took this quilt to present to the Quaker conference being held there. I was particularly interested in the presence of the three hares on the quilt; and as I (and hopefully you) am interested in the three hares motif, and the quilters have kindly given their permission to post the picture, here it is!

A Quilted Hanging of Greetings 

Fabric has often been used to carry messages and meaning – flags, banners, samplers, handkerchiefs, tapestries and quilts.

We are following a well trodden path. This quilted hanging has been made to send loving greetings to all the Quakers who will be gathering at the University of Kabarak, Kenya in April this year from all over the world.

Many Quakers in Britain, have worked on it.The central blocks were made using Quaker men's recycled shirts. The diagonal 'strippy' blocks represent bursts of Light. The central medallion of three hares chasing each other is an ancient symbol adopted by early Christians to represent the Trinity. The same symbol is used in other faiths too. There are only three ears but each hare has two!

Three of the inner borders are embroidered with the words 'Be Salt; Be Light; Live the Kingdom in a Broken World' which is the essence of the title of the Conference and the fourth border has ' Loving Greetings from Britain Yearly Meeting'. The corners have appliqued trailing vines, another biblical reference.

The outer borders are strip-pieced, (a method called 'piano keys') using fabrics supplied by the Bishopston Trading Co.which is a Women's Fair Trade Co-operative linking India with the UK. For these borders the children at Yearly Meeting Gathering in Canterbury in 2011 drew British animals, birds, insects and flowers which were then bondawebbed onto fabric and applied to the hanging. The outer corners have the same tree in each of the Four Seasons.

We hope the quilted hanging will speak of Light and living sustainably, the Natural World and the Divine Presence in our lives.

a hunting of the hares

 small patch of sunlight

hares over the Devon hills

hounded by rainclouds

I was down in Devon the other week, staying in the Thrushell valley near Lifton as a guest of Richard and Ute at Barbaryball; a lovely spot, and highly recommended. The rain was at times positively elemental, so that the smaller roads became rather more like rivers. It was good fun, and made the occasional sunny interlude all the more welcome.

dawn over the Thrushell

I sat in the car park at Brent Tor for a while, listening to the rain hammering on the car roof, then gave up my intention to scramble up. There were sunny intervals in Devon on that particular day, but they and I were never in the same place at the same time.

Still, it was good weather for wandering around churches, and I was particularly pleased that Kelly was very close to where I was staying, as it is one of the seventeen places around Dartmoor where you can find three hares.

Nice as it is to find the three hares where they should be, it is perhaps even nicer to find something new and unexpected, both in the fabric of the place and in the encounters, like the brindled lurcher in the church at Throwleigh who came to say hello while the owners attended to something; though that encounter was a part of the fabric of the place too, of course. Some of those things I'll keep to myself; some of them are in the picture below. I especially liked the owl, because I didn't know it was there. And the green man at Drewsteignton was a treat, too; peering up through the gloom, I saw what I was sure was a face peering back at me, and so I took the picture, and hoped. And there he was, when I uploaded the pics to the computer; looking like a friendly hippy, or the sort of chap who has his own pewter tankard behind the bar at the pub. But without the folk songs. Result.

1. South Tawton hares
2. Cheriton Bishop hares
3. Throwleigh hares
4. Kelly hares
5. Tavistock hares
6. South Tawton owl
7. South Tawton green man
8. South Tawton green man
9. Drewsteignton green man

easter hares

 

 With Easter upon us, the moon waxing towards full and the celandines in bloom, here's a timely picture. (I just re-uploaded it because I realised that the version I had online was the unfinished one, without the Uffington White Horse....)

Here's Deborah Harvey's poem.

Full Circle

In ancient China
the moon is made of figured silk,
woven with the pattern of galloping hares,
three conjoined by a single ear,
together whole.

An eternal circle
embroidered on bolts of cloth,
carried by camel through singing sands,
the booming dunes of wind-whipped
Xhiang Sha Wan,

where Silk Road
frays to quick oasis, and
wondering artists paint three hares
on sacred temple cavern walls.
The Buddha’s wheel

of life and death
rolls through Persia’s burning plains,
eclipses sere, salt-desert suns: a brazen tray
engraved with hares, a stamped,
Islamic copper coin.

Crossing rivers, bridging rifts
in hidden groves of moss and stone,
these three hares chased on Jewish tombs
and makeshift tabernacle roofs,
the blackened beams

of Dartmoor churches
at the edges of the earth, bear
a trinity of hares, three in one, the risen son,
beneath a moon that pins
the universal oceans.

mapping

Dart map, originally uploaded by Dru Marland.

Here's a map of Dartmoor in the 14th century, at the time of the Black Death. It's for Deborah Harvey's novel Dart, due to be published this year. It was fun to draw, once I'd worked out how to go about it- something vaguely in the style of a mediaeval map, and those brightly coloured postcard maps that you used to get in the 60s.

A useful tool for getting the perspective right was Google Earth, and a fun by-product of using Google Earth is goofing around on the flight simulator that's available in the tools options. Flying under the Saltash Bridge in an F16 is great fun, and one unattended by the risk of a knock at the door from the CAA. Very unmediaeval!

three more hares

three hares , originally uploaded by Dru Marland.

I went back to this picture because I wondered what it would look like with some colour inked in.

And now we know.

We were walking along the coast at Clevedon yesterday. Here is a wild onion, growing on the limestone grassland above Poets Walk. Andrew Sartain thinks that it's a local variant on the Bristol Onion, and I'm sure he's right.

You can see some distinctive mountains in Wales, from the Clevedon seafront. Here, for instance, is the Skirrid, or Ysgyryd Fawr, a very neat little mountain just north of Abergavenny.

back to work then

It's back to the drawing board, here at Schloss Marland. In a good way. Probably. This is another go at the three hares motif. And yesterday's picture was inspired by Alan Summers' haiku (below).

I've started looking into ways of selling pictures, too, before this room disappears under the teetering mounds of paintings, drawings and tubes of old paint that I have to fight my way through to get to the keyboard and type this. It's all rather messy. I've opened an Etsy account, but had to stop because I destroyed my credit card in error. As you do.

virgin snow
a fox makes prints
for the morning

Three Hares

Full Circle

In ancient China
the moon is made of figured silk,
woven with the pattern of galloping hares,
three conjoined by a single ear,
together whole.

An eternal circle
embroidered on bolts of cloth,
carried by camel through singing sands,
the booming dunes of wind-whipped
Xhiang Sha Wan,

where Silk Road
frays to quick oasis, and
wondering artists paint three hares
on sacred temple cavern walls.
The Buddha’s wheel

of life and death
rolls through Persia’s burning plains,
eclipses sere, salt-desert suns: a brazen tray
engraved with hares, a stamped,
Islamic copper coin.

Crossing rivers, bridging rifts
in hidden groves of moss and stone,
these three hares chased on Jewish tombs
and makeshift tabernacle roofs,
the blackened beams

of Dartmoor churches
at the edges of the earth, bear
a trinity of hares, three in one, the risen son,
beneath a moon that pins
the universal oceans.

The poem is by Deborah Harvey. I did the picture because it's a hares time of year. Here are more trinities of hares.