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.

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!

some wildlife pictures

card collection, originally uploaded by Dru Marland.

Another addition to my Etsy shop; it's a set of 6 large, flat card reproductions of my paintings:

• Moonlight bear
• Starling roost
• Fox in a hailstorm
• Three Hares
• Egret over the Severn
• Fox in the snow

The cards measure 21.5cm x 13.5cm

Some of these pictures appeared in Geraldine Taylor's 'The Case Of The Curious Crow', a book of adventures in wildlife around the Bristol area. The three hares are inspired by the 'tinners hares', that can be found in churches around Dartmoor.

The set costs £5. Which works out at 7p per creature illustrated, by my reckoning. And that's not even counting the slug.

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.