John Dunn

By motorcycle to the Great Chesterton Windmill

Wednesday, 22 February 2023 at 20:19

Below can be found the text to the commentary I will be using on my latest video production, which I hope to publish on my YouTube video channel in about five days time. I will announce the publication here on this website, but better still, please subscribe to my channel to be notified.





By motorcycle to the Great Chesterton Windmill

Hello, and welcome to the ride.

I’m in Warwickshire, just east of the Fosse Way.

There’s the left turn I’m looking for.

And there on the right is a rather unusual building, standing in the distance.

It looks like I’m not the only one interested in this iconic Warwickshire landmark

No, it’s not a water tower, but rather a windmill.

To the other side of that windmill, the land drops down to the Roman FosseWay. And because of its hilltop position, that landmark can be seen from miles around.

Now that was not just any old windmill, but one built to a special one-off design by the architect John Stone, back in the seventeenth century.

I fully intend to take a closer look at that great landmark, but there’s one other place I’d like to see first that has a close association with it.

I’m riding to the place that gave its name to the great windmill, and that place is Chesterton, a mile or two away.

Seeking out historical places of interest has given me wonderful motorcycling opportunities over the years… roads and little lanes like this, through avariety of landscapes that bear the scars, marks and imprints of those that have trodden, worked and fought on the land before us .

And I also think that any excursion, whether it be by motorcycle, car, bicycle or on foot, is always better for having an object, or goal in mind. I could take no pleasure in riding around just for the sake of it.

There has to be a mission.

And, with that in mind, I like to use my motorcycle to seek out the ancient, the quirky, the monumental, and enjoy the ride, taking in the views, and “reading” the landscape, its geology and history, as I do so.

Over there, in the distance, on the horizon, you’ll see the church tower of the village of Chesterton, the place after which the Great Chesterton Windmill was named.

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, outstanding for that long row of castellations across its tower and roof..

Let’s take a look.

Wheredid 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’s highly likely that the lord of the manor here kicked the peasants off the land, enclosed the fields, and introduced sheep.

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”.

Well I’m not going to be put off that easily.

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 the memorial monuments to the Peyto family, the local lords of the manor.

Onthe south wall is a late sixteenth century alabaster tomb of Humfrey Peyto and his wife, Anne, watched over by their many children

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

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

This memorial was made by John Stone, son of Nicholas Stone. As mentioned before John Stone was also the designer of windmill commissioned by Edward Peyto, and also the architect of the Peyto mansion behind the church.

Let’s take a look.

I’m at the opposite side of the church to the one I first entered…

…just walking to the site of the Peyto Mansion.

There is the gateway arch designed by John Stone to stand above the pathway that led from the Peyto’s mansion to the church…

And there once stood the Peyto mansion, but…
…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 other work done by the windmill’s architect, it’s time to ride over to the hilltop landmark itself.

Are these sheep descendants of the one’s who replaced the peasants of Chesterton?

So,as I have said, the windmill I’m riding to see was commissioned by Edward Peyto, and John Stone, who designed the now lost manor house, was the architect.

Some of the building accounts for the windmill have survived and we know the names of several of the craftsmen, how long they worked and how much they were paid. For example, John Richardson and his son were employed as stone masons and were paid 15s 6d for half a day digging stone at the quarry, and 15 days’ work at the windmill itself. It is also recorded that sailcloth for the mill was bought at 9d per yard from a Mr Saunders, who supplied 97 yards for £3 12s 9d.

There’s the windmill again. It’s time to start walking to see what it’s all about.

There you are, the great landmark that is the Chesterton Windmill and, as I’m sure you can see, it’s not just any old windmill this, but one built to a one-off design. When he commissioned the windmill back in 1632 Edward Peyto certainly wanted something unique, and he got it.

The location is most suited to catching the wind, standing high above the flat plain below. From here you can see the site of a Roman town that once stood on the Fosse Way Roman road below.

The most striking feature of the windmill is the way that the cap and turning mechanism which holds the sales sits on six semicircular arches, on piers, the outer faces of which are arcs of circles radiating from a common centre.

The machinery was repaired in 1776 and again in 1860. Chesterton Windmill continued to be used until shortly before the First World War when the winch which turned the sails into the wind failed to operate, and milling became impossible.
Truly a unique design, there being no other anywhere in the world.

© Dr John Dunn.

Disillusioning

Tuesday, 21 February 2023 at 22:04

Disillusioning

The common herd represents nature as concrete and actual reality.

It ignores entirely the true character of thinking as absolute reality. Naturalism is the necessary consequence of such ignorance, a naturalism which is the fallen thought of fallen angels.

Fallen thought is the conception of a reality which is the opposite, and nothing but the opposite, of mind.

If my mind had such independent reality confronting it, I could only know it by presupposing it as already realised, thereby limiting myself to the role of simple spectator.

What is this apparent other-than-mind that so seduces the common herd? It alone is nature, one which fallen thought does not require to be deduced from anything. To fallen thought nature is itself the first principle.

The problem of the deduction of nature did not arise until I left the false standpoint of fallen thought and so rid myself of the illusion of a natural reality.

© Dr John Dunn.

In the Becoming

Thursday, 16 February 2023 at 21:44

Prior to this I have used the word ‘Beginning’ as the expression of the Originatory Principle of all things. Beginning resonates with the words from John’s Gospel, the opening lines of which in their usual form I have long considered to be a mistranslation.

My nearest approximation to a correct translation until now has been:

In the Beginning is the Word, the Word being the Logos, or God, or Love. In the Beginning is Love.

I now assert that the opening words are better expressed as In the Becoming, thus:

In the Becoming is the Word, the Word being the Logos, or God, or Love. In the Becoming is Love.

The Becoming is a better expression of what I have until now described as The Beginning, always.

The following is therefore to read as a transitional piece.

In the Becoming

When I wrote in the preceding blog ‘my thinking is the Logos’, I meant thinking in process. I might try to explain my position further as present thinking in process, but that would imply a present which is a chunk of time between the past and the future, which is an abstract concept and something that does not exist in reality. The now cannot be captured. All aspects of thought considered in such a way are idolatrous considerations, the stuff of fallen angels.

By ‘my thinking is the Logos’ I mean thinking which is absolutely mine, in which the ‘I’ is realised. My thinking in the process of realising everything is my Beginning, always, and, therefore, the Beginning, always.

The Beginning always is thus better expressed as the Becoming.

My thinking is self-caused and therefore it is freedom. My thinking is the Becoming, the Originatory Principle, therefore it is in the mystery which will not be explained that my freedom lies.

My thinking becomes, the thing of nature is.

That of which I am thinking is a thing of nature.

The thing of nature is one amongst many, in relationship to other things, which implies multiplicity, number.

My thinking, on the contrary, is realised in itself as other.

It is therefore a relation with itself, an absolute, infinite unity, without multiplicity.

In the Becoming, with the violation of Ananke, the oneness of nothing becomes the oneness of everything.

This contrasts with, on the one hand, any transcendental idealism like Plato’s, which has the ideal outside the mind, or the crudest materialistic naturalism on the other, which has everything outside the mind, or the most sacrilegious idolatry, which kicks god upstairs.

For were there to be a reality outside the infinite unity without multiplicity of my thinking, i.e. my mind, then there is no Becoming, there is no Creating, no being.

© John Dunn.

Thinking the Logos

Wednesday, 15 February 2023 at 20:33

We must pass from being created beings to beings that create according to our own principle - the Logos. For each creature bound to earthly conditions, waits for us to liberate it. (Massimo Scaligero)

Thinking the Logos

I have come to know the Absolute, the Beginning, the Logos, which is my thinking, and no less. It is not a thought, or a moment in my thinking, or my thinking now, for now is a moment always gone. It is my thinking.

Anything less leaves matter outside of my thinking.

How could my thinking be absolute if it has something outside it on which it is based, instead of being the foundation of everything and therefore having the whole within myself.

The absolute, the cosmos, everything is my thinking. Were my thinking not the process itself through which the whole, the absolute, the cosmos is, then it would leave something outside it as a presupposition, which is the stuff of idolatry and mysticism, the trap into which the Platonists, Berkeley,Kant, Fichte and Hegel ultimately fell.

My thought comes not from nature and nature from the Logos, but my thinking is the Logos.

© Dr John Dunn.

Nature without and within

Sunday, 12 February 2023 at 10:50

We must become. We are not passive receivers of earthly experience, but cooperators in its fulfilment. This demands that we change from being nature-dependent creatures to being free beings whose moods are no longer the play of nature within us but the stirring presence of the spirit. In this way, we realise within nature our true state - the supernatural state. (Massimo Scaligero)

Nature without and within

Once I saw the face of nature from without, as a thing before me, a pure abstract object, and my mind was limited by it and ruled by it.

I conceived myself mechanically, in space, in time, without freedom, without value, mortal.

But I found the other face of nature when, awaking from my idolatrous dream of a distanced materiality, I found nature itself within my own mind as the non-being which is life, the eternal life, which is the real opposite of immortal death.

Nature now is the eternal past of my eternal present, the iron necessity of the past in the absolute freedom of the present.

Embracing nature in this non-idolatrous way, I recovered the whole power of my mind and recognised the infinite responsibility which lies in the use I make of it, rising above the mindless chatter of insects who are happy to live as though on the back of an unfeeling Earth, turning instead to the life breath of the Whole whose reality culminates in my self-consciousness.

© Dr John Dunn.

My non-being

Sunday, 12 February 2023 at 10:47

The object of thought has always been abstractness in need of reanimation - that is, what has already been thought by us or by the universe: nature.

However,the reanimation sketched each time, is never carried out, because abstractness is normally thought by the thinking activity, but not resolved. It is led back to the moment “of its becoming abstractness,” but not to “its not being abstractness,” where true thinking arises. (Massimo Scaligero)

My non-being

Dr John Dunn 2022

I descend into my soul and take it by surprise, as it is in the living act, in the quivering of my spiritual life, that nature which grows so formidable in all the vastness of time and of space which I confer on it. What is it?

It is the obscure limit of my mind beyond which my living spirit is ever traversing and to which it is ever returning.

Seen from within my soul, this nature is my own non-being, the non-being of my own inward commotion, of the act by which I am to myself.

It is not my non-being as something existing for others to recognise.

It is the non-being which belongs to my thinking act only; what I am not and must become, and which I bring in to being.

Any object of my thinking whatsoever can be no other than my own thinking.

It is what I am thinking and is the object in my consciousness.

It is my non-being to which I must counter-pose myself in order to be myself a reality.

© John Dunn.

Landmark over the Roman Road

Sunday, 12 February 2023 at 10:38

This is now the fourth time that I have blogged about a motorcycle excursion I made last year to the great windmill of Chesterton in Warwickshire. (Previous posts can be found by scrolling through I made a video of my visit which I will shortly be publishing on my YouTube channel. As I post the words up on this website I am in fact also pulling together the notes from which a commentary to the video will eventually emerge. Bear in mind mind that it's written to speak.

Landmark over the Roman Road

…And there it is again. I’ll park here and take a walk to see it up close.

There you are, the great landmark that is the Chesterton Windmill and, as I’m sure you can see, it is not just any old windmill this, but one built to a one-off design by John Stone. When he commissioned the windmill back in 1632 Edward Peyto certainly wanted something unique, and he got it.

The location is most suited to catching the wind, standing high above the flat plain below. From here you can see the site of a Roman town that once stood on the Fosse Way Roman road below.

The most striking feature of the windmill is the way that the cap and turning mechanism which holds the sales sits on six semicircular arches,on piers, the outer faces of which are arcs of circles radiating from a common centre.

Truly a unique design, there being no other anywhere in the world.

© John Dunn.