John Dunn

Meeting the man who commissioned the 17th Century Chesterton Windmill

Friday, 10 February 2023 at 17:50

Last year I motorcycled to Chesterton in Warwickshire to see the great seventeenth century landmark windmill, the unique design of which can be seen from miles around, most especially from the Roman Fosse way.

I recorded my two-wheeled excursion, with a view to publishing a memory of the day on my YouTube channel. The publication date will be announced on this website.

What follows are some notes towards a commentary on the video. They cover the part of the ride that leads to my meeting with the man who commissioned the windmill and its designer-architect.

Meeting the man who commissioned the 17th Century Chesterton Windmill

Walk up to the church

St Giles at Chesterton is a long low church mostly dating from the 14th and 15th centuries.

There’s the sundial over the porch, embellished with the words “See me and be gone about your business”.

Take note of the ancient graffiti on the stone seats in the porch. Are those types of board game scratched into the surface?

Enter church

There’s no structural difference between the nave and the chancel, which creates a tunnel-like effect down the building

But it is the west end that interests me today.

At the west end of the church are Baroque memorial monuments to the Peyto family, the local lords of the manor.

On the south wall is a late sixteenth century alabaster tomb of Humfrey Peyto and his wife, Anne.

On the north wall is the memorial to William Peyto, 1619, and his wife Eleanor, which was commissioned from by the Sculptor and Architect Nicholas Stone, who was famous for being the master mason to James I andCharles I.

Here is the man I have come to see. This is the memorial to Edward Peyto 1643 and Elizabeth his wife. It was Edward Peyto who commissioned the great landmark windmill.

The memorial was made by John Stone, son of Nicholas Stone. As mentioned before (earlier blog), John Stone was also the designer of Edward Peyto’s windmill, and also the architect who designed the Peyto mansion behind the church.

Leaving the church

Outside there is a Doomsday plaque to record that Chesterton was long ago substantial enough to be entered into the Doomsday Survey of 1086.

Around the back of the church there remains the gateway arch designed by John Stone to stand above the pathway that led from the Peyto’s mansion to the church. The mansion is no more, having been demolished in 1802.

Edward and Elizabeth Peyto would have walked from their grand home, through the arch, to their special entrance to the church through that door there, long since bricked up.

Right, having met the man who commissioned the great windmill of Chesterton, as well as some examples of work done by the windmill’s architect, it’s time to ride over to the hilltop landmark itself.

© John Dunn.

I, me and everything

Thursday, 9 February 2023 at 21:42

The living dead of Dante's Hell

It is life that we truly do not live. We perceive only its sensory manifestations. Thus, by deceiving ourselves into believing that we live it, we must die. Our death, in fact, in spite of our apparent existence begins with the dying of thought into reflectivity and into abstractness. These give us the image of life, but not life itself. (Massimo Scaligero)

I, me and everything

My mind is all.

Were I not the subject what would be thinking? Were there no object what would I be thinking? It is impossible to conceive the process of thinking without me because thinking is me.

My thinking is the “I”.

My thinking is not mere activity but activity which is self-sufficient, and is myself as a person.

I realise myself as an object of knowledge.

When I conceive myself as the subject, then myself the object is also conceived. Each is real since my thinking is real, but...

...nothing is real outside my thinking, there is no being outside my thinking, only the abstract realm of darkness from which the children of Satan haunt the lives of the damned.

Not being real distinguishes this as the realm of the living dead, i.e. of those who have an image of life, but not life itself.

© John Dunn.

This is the I

Wednesday, 8 February 2023 at 20:22

Mikalojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis, THE SUN IS PASSING THE SIGN OF SAGITTARIUS 1906-7

Shoot down the albatross of necessity and abandon the ship of fools (Child of Encounter, 2019)

Not having fallen into reflectivity, thought is light, or life, still imperceptible to the “I” that is satisfied with reflection that it regards as being. As the “I”, it cannot live withing this reflection. But this rising up again of thought as light, or life, or the light of life, demands to be willed, willed with determination - provoked ascetically. (Massimo Scaligero)

This is the I

Alone my mind, and all that is, is real

I am inconceivable as something anterior to and separate from the consciousness in which I am the object.

I know myself as both subject and object.

This is the I.

It is my spiritual reality.

It is the identity of myself with myself.

I duplicate myself as self and other, and find myself in the other.

To be self without the other would mean not even to be myself, because I only am in so far as the other is.

Nor would the other be would it not itself be other, because the other is only conceivable as identical with me as the subject.

In affirming reality, that which I affirm confronts me in the affirmation.

© John Dunn.

Eros proclaims:

Sunday, 5 February 2023 at 17:52

The ultimate purpose of thought’s transcendence, gathered up in its everyday immanence, is to reveal its power to resolve instincts, to transform evil into good, to dissolve the darkness of the human psyche, so as to again become light. After all, it is the power of love, which can be recognised as the incarnating of thought’s transcendence, as the Logos incarnating. (Massimo Scaligero)


Eros stands above the darkness, as the vivifying sun begins its daily journey, and addresses the children of Satan.

Eros proclaims:

You are the root of all evil.

You conceive the world as other than yourself who conceive it, and the necessity of that concept is a pure logical necessity because it is abstract. You observe the world and its moral necessities as though it did not concern you. You proclaim your unhuman mantra - 'freedom is the recognition of necessity'.

But I conceive the world (as you should and at bottom perhaps always do conceive it) as my own reality, there being no other, a self-possessed reality. Unlike you, I cannot suppose the world outside the necessity of my concept as though moral law did not concern me.

The rationality of my concept appears to me as my own law, as duty. What else indeed is duty but the unity of the law of my own doing with the law of the universe?

And what else is your immorality, with eyes only for your own interest, if it be not the separation you make between yourself and the world, between its law and your law?

The formation of the moral consciousness, must mean also deepening of the spiritual meaning of life, a greater realising of reality as self-conceived.

You inhabit the dark recesses of my psyche, the darkness that will soon be extinguished by the vivifying sun.

© John Dunn.

Thus Eros Spake

Sunday, 5 February 2023 at 17:40

“Man is a dynamic unity or dialectic of the finite and the infinite, but mediately.”

“In man, the finite and particular is universalised and made infinite and the universal and the infinite become incarnate in the finite.”

(Uno Spirito)

Thus Eros spake

If I believed that I had been dropped at birth into a ready-made world, evil would be inconceivable.

But that would be to conceive of my mind as though it were one aspect of the world amongst many, as though it were a stone is a stone or two is two.

But my mind is not like that; it has differences within it.

My mind without difference within it would not be god-like or human; it would belong to some sub-human entity that has no capacity to think.

What else is evil but the contrary to the gain that I seek for myself?

My mind's not-being is the evil that must be extinguished.

As I am thinking I am doing, bringing to life that which is not yet being.

Itis in that which is not yet being, i.e. non-being, the realm of Ananke into which angels have fallen, that my mind seeks fulfilment, in that which is dead, inert and unawakened, not yet brought to life.

The need to violate Ananke is the driving force of my being.

Before the Beginning there was non-being, after the Beginning there is everything. This is the Creation; and it is always and evermore shall be.

(This is the guiding force of Scaligero on political action etc)

My mind always confronts itself as its own negation. There is no respite from Ananke, who spurs me on from task to task, the providential pain goading me on to penetrate non-being as the condition of my being.

I am always the error (non-being) opposed to the true (the Beginning) which is the Creation.

Evil is at the heart of my reality because the Creation must always move beyond non-being.

Evil is not a fixed reality opposed to a static mind.

Evil is always there, but metamorphosing, driving me forward to be.

Evil is non-being that I must and will determine to be.

© John Dunn.

Erased from the landscape

Sunday, 5 February 2023 at 17:21

All that remains of Chesterton (early 1900s)

I motorcycle through the English countryside seeking out the many old, historical and quirky aspects of the land as I do so. I like to record what I see, and this I publish on my YouTube channel.

Riding in Warwickshire, the great Chesterton Windmill could not help but catch my eye. This I visited, but before I did, I rode along to the place name on the map that gave its name to the landmark.

What follows are preliminary thoughts towards an eventual commentary to my next video production.

Erased from the landscape

I’m riding to the place that gave its name to the great windmill that overlooks the Roman Fosse Way in Warwickshire, and that place is Chesterton, a mile or so down the lane from the windmill.

Seeking out historical places of interest in the landscape has given me wonderful motorcycling opportunities over the years… roads and little lanes like this, through a variety of landscapes that bear the scars, marks and imprints of those that have trodden, worked and fought on the land before us. I also think that any excursion, whether it be by motorcycle, car, bicycle or on foot, is always enhance by having an object, or goal in mind. I could take no pleasure in riding around just for the sake of it. I never take exercise, but I would walk miles if I thought there were something interesting to see… the historical, the quirky, the monumental.

Chesterton as it remains to this day

Well here I am at Chesterton; and what does Chesterton consist of? Only this church and a neighbouring house. The village is no more; the settlement here, certainly since Roman times and probably before, is no more, the dwellings erased from the landscape. Even the old manor house is long gone. The only evidence for this place at one time being of some significance is the medieval church over there, and the house next to it.

Where did all the people go, you might be asking. I don’t know for certain, though there is some evidence in the name of a nearby farm, Ewefields Farm. It is highly likely that the lord of the manor here kicked the peasants off the land, enclosed the fields, and introduced sheep.

© John Dunn.

Vivifying sun

Saturday, 4 February 2023 at 21:34

It is the thinking that rises… like a dawning sun rises. Such thinking has within it all the wisdom and, therefore, all the love, for which it can give itself as incorporeal warmth to the other beings and flow into the world. Being one with pure willing and with pure feeling, it is the only force that can operate as love. No hatred, or pain, or fear can exist before it. Its presence does not imply a struggle. It is everything. (Massimo Scaligero)

Vivifying sun

The living movement of my thinking has no limit of space and time or external boundaries.

In conceiving the universal I conceive myself as the reality itself.

Nothing in the living movement of my thinking is expelled to fall outside, inert and brute.

Outside there remains only the darkness inhabited by the children of Satan, the world of the material and graspable, where the innocents of Beulah are held in thrall.

It is the dark shadow that must be extinguished by the vivifying sun.

© John Dunn.