Friday, August 15, 2008

Perspective and Cotswald Cottage

It was a recent beautiful late summer day when I visited Greenfield Village in Dearborn Michigan.
I hadn't been back in 20 years but Cotswald Cottage is still my favorite building there.
This time we returned with my 7 year old daughter in tow. (She spent the whole time pretending she was riding her horse "Buttercup" throughout the village.)
Built early 1600s in Chedworth, Gloucestershire, England
The families who lived in this home had a variety of jobs. From the early 1700s to the mid-1800s, several generations of the Sley/Robins/Smith family worked as farmers and stone masons.
One of the most interesting features of this stone cottage are the leaded windows. The glass is original made by the "crown process" A lump of molten glass was rolled, blown, expanded, flattened and finally spun into a disc before being cut into panes. This makes them beautifully imperfect.

There is a sort of melancholy I feel inside this cold stone cottage but looking through this distorted glass to the outside world is an almost mystical experience for me.

What is not the most clear is sometimes the most compelling.
There is beauty in mystery.

We do not have to know all the worlds secrets.

3 comments:

  1. Blog hopping and thought I'd stop in......

    How awesome to be able to look through the "magic" windows.
    The pictures look like something from a fairy tale....me likes the tree.

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  2. Gorgeous post, Diane. I love your photos of the windows - they are beautiful - as is what you can see imperfectly through them.

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  3. Great pictures through the windows of time! Don't you just love the feel of old windows?

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