John Dunn

Halliwell Sutcliffe: additional information*

Wednesday, 21 February 2024 at 21:28

Halliwell Sutcliffe: additional information*

The family home at the time of his birth was Lees Farm Manor House on Haworth Road near Cross Roads on the outskirts of Haworth, and this is where he spent the first three years of his life.

A blue plaque in celebration of Sutcliffe’s years at Lees Farm Manor House was unveiled on Saturday, 13th November 2021 by the Lees cum Cross Roads Village Association (Keighley News 4th November 2021).

Halliwell Sutcliffe would have had only the vaguest of memories about this low beamed old manor house, with its pre-Reformation connections to Rievaulx Abbey, Nostell Priory and the Knights Hospitallers, and thereby very likely to the Templars. However, he spent the greater part of his life within a few miles of the home to his earliest childhood, and would have known something of its history from his parents. His self-perception of rootedness in this place might well have fostered the romanticised historicity that pervaded his novels and many aspects of his life.

Halliwell was the son of John Sutcliffe (b.1835), the local schoolmaster, and in 1873, aged three, moved with the family to the Old School House, on Old Main Street, by the church at Bingley on his father’s appointment as headmaster of Bingley Grammar School. The father held this post until his retirement in 1901 and his son was educated at this school.

*Information building towards a new Halliwell Sutcliffe Blog.


Halliwell Sutcliffe was born in Thackley near Bradford on the 25th of April 1870 at the house of a relative, and died in Linton-in-Craven in 1832. He was an author of popular novels. Most of then are historical romances set in the Yorkshire Dales and the moors around Haworth, and many of them romanticise the Stuarts, especially Bonnie Prince Charlie.

© John Dunn.

Born fallen to die risen

Tuesday, 20 February 2024 at 20:06

Turn to face the new dawn

Born fallen to die risen

Creation as Resurrection



You experience a relationship of sorts to the Logos at the very inception of thought.
The Logos is the flaming light, endowed with creative power.This light of fire is continuously extinguished in reflected consciousness. Reflected thought, ‘fallen thought’, has opposed the Logos. The point is that, where thinking is not yet reflected and it has its intuitive moment, it moves as the light of the Logos. The logical consequence of this is that you must grasp the light before it flickers out. The secret to your healing lies in perceiving the light of fire, and grasping the moment of thought’s inception, which is the rebirth into the light of the Logos.



The Creation is the Resurrection and vice versa. From the moment the Logos incarnated and defeated death,you have had the possibility to think according to the Resurrection, insofar as the flaming light of the Logos lights up within each thought that you think. But to perceive this light, you must overcome the darkness of reflected thought. This is why Nietzsche’s death of God does not mean atheism, but rather the end of idolatry. Was not the state of pre-being the fallen state? Are you not all born into a fallen state, from which most people never rise?


© John Dunn.

They have made of your birth a death

Sunday, 18 February 2024 at 10:40

They have made of your birth a death

That which violates the interminable and indiscriminate oneness, the unviolated equilibrium of Ananke, is Love. The cosmic creation story is is your individual coming to being, but the religionists (the scientists of the Big Bang included) have made of the Creation a ‘reality’, a one-off start of things, describing it as an event apart from you, in your cosmic past, so to speak. They have torn the mystery of the Creation away from you, placing it before you as the concluded reality into which you are thrown at birth. They have made of your birth a death.

When finally you recognise what they are, I challenge you to find:
Warmth in their smiles
Comfort in their words
Love in their hearts

© John Dunn.

In thrall to Urizen

Sunday, 18 February 2024 at 10:31

Trapped in the nets of William Blake's Urizen 



In thrall to Urizen

The first steps to freedom will emerge from reflected thought’s adherence to the ‘truth’ of the other, the mineral ‘appearing’

Love is the awakener to freedom, which is the Beginning. The cosmic story, which is the metaphor for the individual’s story has Love as its Beginning. Love is the Originatory Principle, the founding principle beyond which there is not even a metaphorical explanation. Love has no explanation. In the words of the correct translation of John 1 ‘In the Beginning is Love.’



Until there is Love you live rhetorically, in thrall to Urizen, and worship at every moment in the 'Synagogue of Satan’. Disenchantment is the necessary precursor to freedom. This applies at an individual and the wider human level. There is no freedom without awareness of error. Your move towards the freedom that not even the angels possess has to occur in a world of error, where freedom can only ever be ‘rhetorical’, where to live ‘rhetorically’ is to be subject to the conventions of social life, rather than being in full possession of yourself



If the pure unheeded relation with the Logos controlled thinking, you would completely realise truth; you would not know error, nor consequently evil, but you would not be free. Such is the fate of the angels. Each of you would be an impeccable spiritual automaton, whose imperfect and distorted counterparts are the blind adherents to faith, holding us to laws, religious and scientific, that oppose and block the unseen impulse of the Logos on Earth.

Your first steps to freedom will emerge from reflected thought’s adherence to the ‘truth’ of the other, the mineral ‘appearing’, which separates subject from object, thought from life, man from God and man from himself. Before Love is known, you must take you seat amidst whole congregations in Urizen's 'Synagogue of Satan'.

© John Dunn.

Eros warns, their quest is to impose a Loveless life upon you!

Saturday, 17 February 2024 at 10:51

William Blake's Urizen and the nets of debt

Eros warns, their quest is to impose a Loveless life upon you!

Satan fell into the objectivised world, to become god of this world, and Adamand Eve and their issue worshipped Satan as the god Urizen, the demiurge, a distant Jehovah, the 'self-deluded and anxious' shaper of pre-existent matter. And the children of Urizen led you into Beulah with the promise of happiness to come, into the land of false innocence, that is innocence devoid of Love, from which arises the constant and nauseating refrain… “we just want to be happy…, we just want to be happy…”

In a world devoid of Love, the children of Urizen objectify god, which is to say they idolise their god. Their god is an all-knowing god who controls the affairs of man from across a divide, the puppeteer pulling the strings of mankind, an over-bearing father, a failed architect, and the ‘Accuser of the World' who unfairly condemned Adam and Eve when he was the one at fault.



And you, deluded innocents of Beulah, have carried over the worshipping of the demiurge from the children of Urizen, which makes you complicit in their Devil Worship.

Halliwell Sutcliffe: a brief overview

Friday, 16 February 2024 at 10:50

Halliwell Sutcliffe and his wife, Mabel

Halliwell Sutcliffe: a brief overview*

Halliwell Sutcliffe, born in Thackley near Bradford in 1870 and died in Linton-in-Craven in 1832, was an author of popular novels. Most of them are historical romances set in the Yorkshire Dales and the moors around Haworth, and many of them romanticise the Stuarts, especially Bonnie Prince Charlie.

Sutcliffe’s father was headmaster of Bingley Grammar School from 1873 to 1901, and Sutcliffe was educated there and at King’s College, Cambridge. In 1904 he married Mabel Cottrell of Twickenham, and they lived first at Embsay near Skipton, where their elder son Derek was born in 1905. After eighteen months in Embsay, they moved to Linton on the banks of the Wharfe, and here their younger son Noel was born in 1906. Their house was called Troutbeck, but about 1913 Sutcliffe renamed it White Abbey, believing that it had once been a grange of Fountains Abbey. It was here that Halliwell Sutcliffe died in January 1932, aged 61. Mabel Sutcliffe stayed in the house until 1950, when she moved to London to live with her unmarried sisters. She died in London in 1960, aged 93.

*Text building towards a new Halliwell Sutcliffe blog that I hope to start once content is sufficient.

© John Dunn.

Great Chishill Windmill

Thursday, 15 February 2024 at 21:41

My next YouTube video production is based upon a motorcycle excursion, beneath lovely summer skies, to the Cambridgeshire village of Duxford. However, on the way I was waylaid by the sight of the Great Chishill Windmill as I climbed the chalk escarpment to the Cambridgeshire Hills. What follow are the notes to a forthcoming commentary that cover this windmill part of the journey. In the meantime, please see the other videos on my YouTube Channel.

Great Chishill Windmill

I’m on the B1039 road out of Barley in Cambridgeshire.

I’m on my way to Duxford village, but can’t help but be impressed by the windmill up ahead.

I just have to stop.

This is the Great Chishill Windmill. Built on the site of earlier mills, it’s one of only seven open trestle postmills in the UK.

This is the only one fitted with a fan tail for automatic turning to wind.

Old photographs to be inserted at this point.
1892 Heyday of windmilling
1916 WW1 years
1936 Mill at work
1958 Mill after closure (with a distinct tilt to the right)
1965 Year before restoration

The first surviving record of a mill here is from 1592.

This mill was built in 1819 using timbers from an earlier mill of 1726.

It was last worked in 1951.

It’s an amazing example of rural engineering and is scheduled, quite rightly as an historic monument.

OK Better get on…

I’m now climbing the chalk escarpment to Great Chishill village which is the highest land in Cambridgeshire. A couple of videos ago some of you will have seen I was at the lowest point in Cambridgeshire.

These chalk hills extend via the Chilterns, to the North and South Downs in the South and, to the Lincolnshire and Yorkshire Wolds in the North.

© John Dunn.