Gargrave Autoharp Festival - Accommodation 2014

Gargrave Autoharp Festival - Accommodation 2014

This year, 2014, the Gargrave Autoharp Festival, June 2014, is part of the Yorkshire Festival, the programme of cultural events building up to the Grand Depart of the Tour de France, July 2014...

http://festival.yorkshire.com/events/gargrave-autoharp-festival

http://festival.yorkshire.com/

Gargrave Autoharp Festival

Weekend of Friday June 27, Saturday June 28 , Sunday June 29 , 2014

Gargrave is a pretty  village, on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales, not far from the market town Skipton.  The main road through the village is the A65.  The Pennine Way, long distance footpath, comes down to the village, before climbing to Malham.  The Leeds & Liverpool Canal, one of the 3 trans-Pennine canals, goes through the village.

Gargrave has its own railway station, on the Leeds-Morecambe line - which also connects with the Settle-Carlisle line.  But do note that Gargrave Station is a little halt, no facilities, no taxis, and a bit of a trudge to the centre of the village.

The local large and busy station is Skipton, with many taxis, ten minutes drive away from Gargrave.

Remember that the Gargrave Village Hall is the main venue...

See the simple map on

http://www.gargrave.org.uk/streetmap.htm

Accommodation

A:  Gargrave

1.

River Cottage B&B

Kath and Keith Bradley, very helpful and supportive.

http://rivercottagebandb.com/

Contact Information

Tel: 01756 749541

Email: keithbradley1953@yahoo.co.uk

Rooms available for our weekend...

2.

The Old Swan Inn - pub and B&B

Old coaching inn, in the centre of Gargrave, now run by Kevan Lawson and Amy Dalgleish.  Refurbished and open for business.

Phone 01756 749232

Email   theoldswaninn@gmail.com

There isn't a web site, but they do now have a Facebook page.

Rooms available for our weekend...

3.

Masons Arms - pub and B&B

http://www.masonsarmsgargrave.co.uk/Masons_Arms_Gargrave/Welcome.html

John Baker, the landlord, is very helpful and supportive.

Tel: 01756 749 304

info@masonsarmsgargrave.co.uk

However rooms at the Masons seems to be fully booked on Friday June 27.  Saturday and Sunday some availability.

4.

Premier Inn

http://www.premierinn.com/en/hotel/SKIANC/skipton-north-gargrave

The Premier Inn is on the western edge of Gargrave, where the A65 crosses the Leeds & Liverpool Canal.  It shares a site with the Anchor Inn, a Brewers Fayre pub restaurant.  There is a safe walk to the centre of the village, along the towpath.

Do remember that with hotel chains like Premier it really pays to book ahead through the web site...

B:  Camp and Caravan

Generally caravan and camper van people have their own contacts and lists.  But, briefly, Eshton Road Caravan Park is quite small, on the eastern edge of Gargrave, next to the Leeds & Liverpool Canal.  There is an easy walk into the village, along the canal towpath.

Eshton Road Caravan Park

Eshton Road

Gargrave

Skipton

North Yorkshire

BD23 3PN

Contact Details

Tel: 01756 749229

Fax: 01756 748060

http://www.ukparks.co.uk/eshton/

A possible alternative, but ONLY for members of the Camping & Caravanning club, is the club's gathering for our weekend on the Gargrave football pitch.  Details are in the club members part of the web site and in the club's magazine.

http://www.campingandcaravanningclub.co.uk/

Own sanitation essential - there are no toilet or shower facilities.  Arrive on the Thursday, any time after 4, and check in with the steward.

There are many other Camp and Caravan sites nearby, in Skipton and in the Yorkshire Dales generally.

C:  Further Afield

Skipton is nearby, and has very many hotels and B&Bs, of every standard...  See

http://www.yorkshire.com/

http://www.yorkshirenet.co.uk/yorkshire-dales/skipton.htm

...and many other web sites.

Gargrave is about 10 minutes drive from the centre of Skipton.  There is a Travelodge on the Gargrave edge of Skipton, on the Skipton by-pass - so 5 minutes drive.  Again, with hotel chains like Travelodge, it pays to book ahead through the web site.

If you do book accommodation in Skipton make sure that the parking problem is solved.  The more established hotels, like Herriots Hotel and the Rendezvous, have their own car parks.  Otherwise, parking in Skipton is annoying and/or expensive.

Near to Gargrave, but NOT walking distance, are other possibilities - depending on budgets.  For example

The Coniston Hotel

http://www.theconistonhotel.com/

Newton Grange

http://www.newton-grange.co.uk/

All of the villages and towns around Gargrave, especially within the Yorkshire Dales, have hotels, B&Bs, camp and caravan sites.  There are also many holiday cottages, but they are usually let through agencies/web sites, and usually by the week.  Weekends are sometimes available.

For those in an extravagant or adventurous mood it is possible to hire a canal boat in Skipton, or nearby, bring the boat up the locks and moor in Gargrave.  But canal boat hire is not cheap.

For those who want to experience the most beautiful stretch of canal in England...  I will be bringing my boat down from Barnoldswick (pronounced Barlick) to Gargrave a few days before the Gargrave Autoharp Festival, and we can take about 8 passengers.  The journey takes a whole day by boat, 20 minutes by car.

Patrick O'Sullivan

April 2014

Ceiliúradh (Celebration), Royal Albert Hall, Thursday 10 April 2014

Just received an invitation from Uachtarán na hÉireann, the President of the Republic of Ireland, to attend this event.

Very nice to be remembered, and I am sure it will be a wonderful evening of music.  It looks like the event came together at short notice - but if it is just the Philip King house band that will be enough to fill the Albert Hall...

https://www.royalalberthall.com/tickets/ceiliuradh/default.aspx

http://www.irishpost.co.uk/news/royal-albert-hall-concert-president-higgins-sold-within-hours

http://www.irishpost.co.uk/news/philip-king-choose-acts-royal-albert-hall-concert-president-higgins

http://www.embassyofireland.co.uk/home/index.aspx?id=90062

Gargrave Autoharp Festival, the weekend of Friday, Saturday, Sunday, June 27, 28, 29, 2014

Gargrave Autoharp Festival, the weekend of Friday, Saturday, Sunday, June 27, 28, 29, 2014

The core of the Gargrave Autoharp Festival, Yorkshire, England, is now in place - the weekend of Friday, Saturday, Sunday, June 27, 28, 29, 2014.

As ever, we are in alliance with the Gargrave Village Hall, in the pretty village of Gargrave in Yorkshire.  The village lets us use the hall, for free - for autoharp lessons and demonstrations.  And we give them music.

This year our autoharp tutors are...

Mike Fenton, and his wife Rachel - demonstrations and various classes

Guy Padfield, teaching the beginners

Nadine and Ian White - 2 workshops

Heather Farrell-Roberts - 2 advanced workshops

Basically, the A Team...

And this year, 2014, we are part of the Yorkshire Festival, the Cultural Festival of the Grand Depart of the Tour de France.  The weekend after our Festival, July 5, the Tour de France starts out from Leeds, in Yorkshire.  Which is fun...

Gargrave Autoharp Festival posters can be seen and downloaded from

http://goo.gl/cc7SAm

The two little ballerinas are pupils in a little dance school in Gargrave village.

The Gargrave Autoharp Festival on The Yorkshire Festival, Cultural Festival web site, see...

http://festival.yorkshire.com/events/gargrave-autoharp-festival

See also

http://letour.yorkshire.com/cultural-festival

http://festival.yorkshire.com/

For more on Mike Fenton see

http://www.harperscraft.com/

Note especially his contribution to the new BBC version of Tess of the D'Urbervilles.

Patrick O'Sullivan

Yorkshire

England

The Irish World Wide, 1992-1997, SIX VOLUMES ONLINE

Much of my earlier work, rescued from pre-digital age, printed books, is now available on the web.

This includes the 6 volumes of Patrick O'Sullivan, ed., The Irish World Wide, 1992-1997.  See...

https://www.mediafire.com/folder/ooj5btdttc9y4/Documents

https://www.mediafire.com/folder/f9ccfk929abbj/

It is possible to download the 6 volumes of The Irish World Wide as 6 individual, large pdf files. 

But each volume is also separated out into individual chapters - each chapter in its own pdf file, and easy to download and carry around.  This solves a recurring problem, that I get requests for copies of specific chapters.

Special attention is drawn - of course - to my own chapters on The Irish Joke, in Volume 3, and on Famine Theory, in Volume 6.  But if someone wants to jump in at the deep end, I recommend reading my Introduction to Volume 5, Religion and Identity - gives an idea of the style and the method...

Patrick O'Sullivan

Gargrave Autoharp Festival, 2014 - weekend of Friday, Saturday, Sunday, June 27, 28, 29

At the Yorkshire end the core of the Gargrave Autoharp Festival, the weekend of Friday, Saturday, Sunday, June 27, 28, 29, 2014, is now in place.

Many factors influence the choice of that weekend - what the Gargrave Village Hall could offer us, I was told to avoid the dates of the TT races on the Isle of Man, meeting up with Mike Fenton's fan base amongst the caravanners...

Yesterday we had a very good photo shoot for the Festival poster - in line with the Gargrave Autoharp Festival tradition that we have a beautiful and striking poster.

This year, 2014, we are part of the the Cultural Festival of the Grand Depart of the Tour de France. The weekend after our Festival, July 5, the Tour de France starts out from Leeds. At that weekend Yorkshire is FULL. No accommodation left.

Will that affect our weekend? Do I need to worry? As yet I do not know. There could be leakage forward from the Tour de France, as people extend their stay. Or Yorkshire might be empty. Or something in between.

Patrick O'Sullivan

http://letour.yorkshire.com/

Book Review, McCarthy, Scottishness and Irishness in New Zealand since 1840

This Book Review - or a version of it - will appear in a forthcoming issue of the Australasian Journal of Irish Studies.

 

REVIEW

McCarthy, A. (2011). Scottishness and Irishness in New Zealand since 1840. Manchester University Press, 240p.

We take into our hands a new book by Angela McCarthy, aware that there is already a body of work in place.  Amongst my favourites, amongst the published articles, is the 2001, ‘ ”A good idea of colonial life": personal letters and Irish migration to New Zealand’, which firmly laid ground rules.  New Zealand was going to study its migrants’ letters, and was going to contribute to our better understanding – and better use – of the Emigrant Letter elsewhere.  As for books, my favourite is the 2005 Irish migrants in New Zealand, 1840-1937: 'the desired haven', which should be better known to scholars of the Irish Emigrant Letter.  That book explores its letter collections using the ground rules – again, ground rules – of David Fitzpatrick.  And it bravely shapes its Thematic Index alongside that of Fitzpatrick’s Oceans of Consolation.  Since I am especially interested in how knowledge is created and shaped, the Diaspora Studies geek in me always enjoys Angela McCarthy’s literature reviews.

In tandem with such studies of Irish settlement in New Zealand there has appeared a sequence of articles studying Scottish settlement and letters, and a book which combined perceptions, the 2007 Personal Narratives of Irish and Scottish Migration, 1921-65:'For Spirit and Adventure'.  I should pedantically make the point that it is now easily possible to track the influence of all these works using online resources like Google Scholar and JSTOR – and if we are going to theorise about ‘the Irish’ and the Emigrant Letter, New Zealand will not be ignored.

We are therefore looking at scholarship about, cumulatively, two emigrant groups, the Scots and the Irish, and scholarship which often studies them in a comparative manner.  Since most statements about ‘the Irish’ are disguised comparisons, this approach is valuable.  And this approach is rare – partly for almost geo-political reasons, and here I would include the politics of academic careers.  Communities themselves are interested in difference – to track the real life effects of prejudice, or as a way of shaping a distinctive identity, or as part of generation control systems.  This new book by Angela McCarthy is about identities, Scottishness and Irishness.  It is thus an exploration of repertoires of identity, which – I have pointed out elsewhere – mostly coalesce around leisure activities.

There are obvious dangers, for the writer and for the reader.  The specialist reader is inclined to read with most attention the material about one specific group, and I must confess that that is what I did, at a first reading of Scottishness and Irishness.  This is, sort of, fair.  We see how the writer handles the material with which we are most familiar.  There are dangers with cumulative material about ‘Irishness’ - literature reviews can, over time, develop into a kind of shorthand.  Detail is lost, time and place, research discipline and methodology.  An inter-disciplinary approach must be critical.  Here, for example, Stivers (p17), is a study of alcohol use in the USA and American stereotypes – it is not a study of ‘the Irish’. 

A second, closer reading, truer to author’s intentions, took on the themed chapters, the matched Scottish and Irish detail – each chapter shaped by a knot in the research material and in background theory.  This sent me back to the literature on Scottish identity – see above, online resources – so that I could begin a better dialogue with the book.  There is no doubt that, at times, the book can be a bit programmatic – but after a while I found this to be a strength rather than a weakness.  The geek in me sees this book as the literature review, writ large.  And I am struck, as I read the material about the Scottish identity alongside the Irish, not by difference, but how similar the two groups are.  Both groups move from one little archipelago in the northern hemisphere to another little archipelago in the south – and, for the most part, entirely within the structures, economic, control, patronage, of the British Empire and its successor organisations.

It is always possible to find a difference, of course – but is it, to coin a phrase, a difference that makes a difference?  One difference that McCarthy does highlight is that whilst Irish societies in New Zealand frequently articulated political aims, Scottish societies were predominantly cultural (p 142).  In our own time, when there is a restored and active Scottish Parliament – and, soon, a referendum on Scottish independence – this certainly makes us pause.  We are certainly looking at matched control systems here.  And the detail of the ways in which the Scots of New Zealand ‘forged’ – to use Linda Colley’s word – a cultural identity are revealing.  Look, for example, at the Scottish use of Robert Burns (p140) – there is no matching Irish use of Thomas Moore.  In another part of my working life, the study of song, I look at Burns and Moore as models for nineteenth century lyricists.  When it comes to repertoires of identity some bits of the possible repertoire simply work better than others.  In the new country, in the new communities, selection processes take place.  Yes there will be discussion of authenticity, but there will also be a willingness to invent tradition, as the need arises.

Another way into McCarthy’s material is to explore gaps and absences.  If we were to indulge a typical focus group study of Irish identity, discussion of violence would loom large – particularly a willingness to use violence for political ends.  This is how we were seen in the world, and still are, to a certain extent.  Lee and Casey (2006), the standard work on ‘Making the Irish American’ – ‘making’, not ‘forging’ – must pause to give Kevin Kenny a chapter to explore that very issue.  And this makes discussion with our colleagues in the Armenian or the Basque Diaspora so… productive.  There is very little about this part of the repertoire in McCarthy’s book, but the author is, of course, aware of debates – there is discussion of the 1988 movie, The Grasscutter, a standard thriller in which a violent secret organisation intrudes into the idyll.  But in that case the secret organisation is Irish Protestant and loyalist.  Mostly we see the Irish and the Scots behaving like a standard subaltern group within the British Empire – if anything McCarthy’ selected quotations give an impression of Irish unwillingness to engage in violence.

So, a book that makes us work hard, and makes us think – especially when we place it alongside wider study of diaspora.  For this we give thanks.

Patrick O’Sullivan

2013

The rescue of 'Tolkien in Oxford'

A quick report, to thank those who expressed interest...

I nipped down to London for 2 days last month.

The BBC paper file of Leslie Megahey's 1968 film 'Tolkien in Oxford' was made available to me, and I was able to go through it.  I spent all of Wednesday, December 18, in the editing suite, with Leslie Megahey and Charles Chabot, film and video producer.  The video file supplied by the BBC Library - technically a PRORES 422 HQ file - was of very good quality.  We were all very pleased with the quality of the images - especially remembering that the film was originally shot on 1960s 16mm film. 

Just to sum up what was done on the day...

1.  Captions

Captions were inserted where they would have been inserted during the original transmission.

2.  Credits

The original film was broadcast in 1968 as part of a BBC arts magazine series called 'RELEASE'.  It shared the evening, I understand, with a film about Barbara Hepworth, and combined credits for both films were floated in towards the end of the slot.

On Wednesday December 18 2013 we created and installed a sequence of credits for the 'Tolkien in Oxford' film ALONE - the sort of thing that would have appeared in 1968, had the 'Tolkien in Oxford' film been broadcast alone.  In re-creating these credits we called upon our joint memories AND the BBC paper file, which we had to hand.  So, we think they are right.

Typefaces for the Captions and Credits were simply a judgement call, as were placing and timing.  Since we had the original director of the film in the room, there was no argument about that.

3.  Some tidying of the actual video file.  A few scratches were removed, as were most of those jumps and clicks that are artefacts of the original negative cutting technology.  These are especially noticeable in the rostrum camera sequences.  A little bit of theological discussion here, about how much we should interfere with an archive 'document' - but from the BBC side an insistence that what we were aiming for was a 'transmission quality' file.

The amended and restored video file has been returned to the BBC.

I think we are happy enough with the quality of the restored piece.  The image quality is generally very good.  The overall structure, now that we can see it, is good.  The gags work - now that we can see the complete piece.  Individual contributions are good - we were struck, for example, by how good a job Joss Ackland had done with the readings. 

And, I think I will add, we liked the integrity of the piece.  Leslie Megahey remind me about the decision to NOT include talking heads academics - for example, he remind me that I had negotiated on his behalf with J. I. M Stewart (Michael Innes), before he decided that that was not the way to go.  And you have to think, what, in 1968, could the talking heads academics have contributed to the discussion?

I understand that there is now beginning within the BBC some discussion about how these BBC TV arts 'magazine' films might be restored and re-displayed - though they were not broadcast as individual pieces, they were costed and created as individual films, and work as standalone films.  So, we might have started something.

Patrick O'Sullivan