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The Heritage Trust
Preserving the Past for the Future
About Me
- Littlestone
- Studied art and design at Swindon School of Art, Wiltshire, England and afterwards Japanese painting and calligraphy at Kyoto University of Fine Arts, Kyoto, Japan. In 1966 I was a lay monk at the Zen Buddhist temple of Ryozen-an in Kyoto and practiced under the guidance of its Director, Ruth Fuller-Sasaki and senior monk Dana R Fraser (co-translator of Layman P'ang: A Ninth Century Zen Classic). Also present at Ryozen-an was the author and poet Gary Snyder. Gary Snyder was one of the first Westerners in Japan to study Zen Buddhism and was the inspiration for Jack Kerouac's book, The Dharma Bums. I was assistant conservator (paintings) at Kyoto National Museum from 1969-1980 and Chief Conservator (Eastern Pictorial Art) at the British Museum from 1980-1986. Japan Foundation Fellow 1973-1974 and Fellow of the International Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works since 1985.
1 comment:
"Cursus monuments are one of the big problems of the Neolithic period. They consist of long parallel ditches running across the landscape, with no obvious use. There are a number of them known in the country, and there are two at Stonehenge for example. The Springfield (Chelmer) cursus (late 3rd-early 2nd millennia BC) is of medium length about 700m, but it has very definite right-angled ends, so that it forms a long thin rectangle. The ditches are not exactly parallel - there is a kink in the middle of the south side, so that whereas at the west end the ditches are 49m apart, at the east end they are only 37m apart... At the east end, however, there was a circle of post-holes... centrally placed in the middle of the cursus...
"It looks as if the cursus was originally a monument with no entrance. There may have been some bridge or approach which has left no trace, or was it a strip of sacred land from which all human contact, at least originally, was forbidden?"*
* Chelmsford Museums Service, 1991.
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