I'm interested in footprints - real and metaphorical. It always fascinates me when, through happenstance or circumstance, an otherwise transient moment is captured in time. A few years ago I was doing some doing some research on the fate of a family living next to Saint Peter Mancroft church during the plague of 1666. I was looking through the parish record, following the fate of a single family (the Phipps') as they were decimated one-by-one. I noted with sadness when the - by now - familiar handwriting of the Churchwarden suddenly changed, and the previous incumbents name was added to the list of fatalities (noted by the abbreviation, 'pla'). Likewise, I was fortunate to be involved in an archaeological excavation in south Norfolk where an ancient butchery site, containing several mammoth skeletons had been discovered. It was so poignant to find the tip of an antler (used to pressure sharpen flint axes) that had last been held by another hominid c10,000 years previously - and that hand belonged to an living, breathing Neanderthal...
And that takes me to the photograph above. This captures a moment in the brickyards at Sprowston in the late nineteenth century when a cat sprang up from a brick drying in the sun, leaving its impress for us to wonder at. The footprint is by the door of a relatives terraced house in north Norwich. History isn't just written in books.
~ Colin ~
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