Talking of public monuments, here, viewed from behind, is a tree sculpture that overlooks Rudyard Lake in Staffordshire, which I visited at the weekend. I took the picture from behind because, frankly, it looks better: seen from the front, that tightrope walker has an unnerving look of the Monopoly Man about him. The sculpture, carved from a beech tree, overlooks the lake, and is intended to commemorate the feat of Carlos Trower, the 'African Blondin', who in 1864 (and again in 1878) walked across the lake on a tightrope 100ft above the water. He was not actually African but African-American, and I'm surprised he isn't better known in these days when 'black history' is so popular. His feat was replicated in 2016 by funambulist Chris Bull, aka Bullzini, as the climax of a day of activities replicating Rudyard's heyday as a Victorian inland resort to which hundreds of thousands of day trippers and holidaymakers flocked, arriving on the North Staffordshire Railway. Among these visitors were John Lockwood Kipling and Alice Macdonald, who met there on a visit from Burslem, and were so taken with Rudyard Lake that they named their first son after it.
The lake was not intended as a tourist resort when it was created in 1799 as a canal reservoir, but such was its size – nearly two and a half miles long – and the beauty of its setting in a wooded valley that it was bound to become one, once the railways had reached it. It is still beautiful today, and visitors still come, though probably in smaller numbers than in its Victorian heyday – and they no longer arrive by train: there is now only a miniature railway, running in the summer months along the shore of the lake. When I was last at Rudyard, in 2016, I saw my first swallows of the year there, skimming the surface of the lake – and again this year my first swallows were waiting for me at Rudyard. They were two and a half weeks later than in 2016 – a testament to this year's cold wet April. I wonder if the swifts will be late too...
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