John Dunn

Ride back into the Middle Ages

Monday, 26 February 2024 at 21:53

St John's Duxford

I continue to edit material for my next YouTube video production, which will go public within the next week. In the meantime, my supporting commentary has been honed down to the following draft, published here, if nothing else, to keep the home page fresh for Google searches. In the meantime, my previous videos can be seen on my YouTube Channel here.


Ride back into the Middle Ages

I’m on the B1039 in Cambridgeshire.

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

Hello and welcome, thanks for joining me on the ride today.

Greta Chishill windmill, not to be missed.

One of only seven open trestle post mills in the UK.

The only one fitted with a fan tail for automatic turning to wind.

And what glorious views over the chalk downs from this elevated position.

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

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

It was last worked in 1951 and restored in 1965.

An amazing example of rural engineering.

Better get on…

I’m climbing the chalk escarpment to Great Chishill village which sits on some of the highest land in Cambridgeshire. A couple of videos ago some of you will have seen I was at the lowest point in Cambridgeshire, indeed in the whole UK.

These chalk hills extend via the Chilterns to the South Downs and northwards to the Lincolnshire and Yorkshire Wolds.

Great Chishill, a pretty hilltop village.

Lower down now, but still clinging to the edge of the chalk geology, I’m now approaching Duxford from the West, along a dead straight Grange Road. That’s the M11 motorway.

St Peter’s Street, Duxford.

Duxford is famous for its airfield and aircraft museum, the largest in Britain,and well worth a visit incidentally, but my interest is in things much older on this ride.

There’s one of the two medieval parish churches in Duxford, St Peter’s. There’s been a church on that site since the 1100s.

There were once two parishes in Duxford, until 1874 when the two parishes of St John’s and St Peter’s were united, and regular services at St John’s ceased.

This meant that St John’s church was spared much restoration work, leaving us with a rare example of a rustic and unspoilt country church from the Middle Ages. It’s this that I’ve come to see.

St John’s.

A quirky rather than beautiful exterior.

Quirky because every mediaeval architectural period remains in place. It’s a textbook of architectural styles.

The lead ‘spike' that passes for a steeple on the tower was twisted in 1897when a flagpole tied to it, to celebrate Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, was blown about in a gale. Twisted it remains.

Zigzag carvings over the door, scream out Norman origins. On the lintel, that cross is Saxon from an earlier church on this site.

In the Middle Ages churches were decorated with paintings such as these. Imagine them newly done in the full brilliance of their colour.

That roundel framing the Lamb of God is an Ouroboros symbol – a snake swallowing its tail – an ancient symbol, long pre-dating Christianity, representing rebirth.

What is this crustacean-like sub-humanoid with the segmented body. Who-knows?

Above this is the martyrdom of a saint, St Margaret or Catherine, cruelly tortured.

Here we have two saints. The colours must have been once brilliant. Remember, these have been recovered from underneath whitewash.

To the bottom left you might make out a depiction of the crucifixion. You’ll certainly see the devils up above.

A wonderful church allowing us to glimpse something of the medieval world.

There’s another interesting building nearby dating from the thirteenth century. It is to this that my wheels now turn.

A building with Templar connections called Duxford Chapel, but in a settlement north of here that grew up around the Whittlesford bridge over the River Cam.

Getting there means joining the busy A505 for a short while.

TheA505 runs 50 miles from Leighton Buzzard to Bourn Bridge, Great Abington, broadly in alignment with the ancient Icknield Way.

This now inconsequential road was itself once the A505 until bypassed in 1962. I love finding these old stretches of road. This was once part of the Baldock and Bourn Bridge Turnpike established back in 1769.

Duxford Chapel. Originally a hospital of St John, founded around 1230, it was run by a prior and monks, giving medical assistance to the poor, and hospitality to travellers on the Icknield Way. In the fourteenth it was rebuilt as a chantry chapel.

That east end of the building has the most complete stonework, and features that clearly indicate the mass was celebrated here in the fourteenth century.

The south door. Left of this the arched seat for the priest. Left of this the piscina, where the priest would have washed the chalice used in the mass – you can see the drain hole in its base.

There’s a simple rectangular aumbry, a recessed cabinet for storing sacred vessels and vestments.

That arched recess is an Easter sepulchre, where sacred items were placed during the Easter celebrations.

A rectangular chapel simply built from local flint, with dressed limestone.

Since the demise of chantry chapels under Henry VIII, the fifteenth century Red Lion Inn has provided the hospitality and prospered whilst the chapel was used as a barn by the inn, falling into disrepair, until restored in 1949.

A religious building, intimately connected to the history of an important road, now bypassed and hidden from most travellers who race by.

Thank you for joining me on this ride back to the medieval world. It’s been great to have your company.

If you’ve enjoyed what you’ve seen, please like, subscribe, perhaps even share. I’ll then let you know when I’m next out and about.

For now, I’m done.

© John Dunn.

In the infinity of consciousness, the without is always within


Sunday, 25 February 2024 at 21:40

In the infinity of consciousness, the without is always within



I cling to my humanity. Anything accomplished does not diminish the need to accomplish more and more and more. To become a simple passive spectator of my soul, even after a life of the mind intensely led, would be to become an inert spectator in the void, in the nought which is absolute, in the nothingness before the Beginning that never ends.



I made the activity of others the object of my own thought, and to that extent I objectivised my lovers, and yet, the objects of my own thinking became my own activity, and in that way I entered into the spiritual fact of them, that is into their inmost essences. Seek and ye shall find, for so long as it is sought it is found. Love is not found outside the seeking, for once what is known is stored away safely and possessed, Love is gone.



Love is God, hence the God I find is the God whom in seeking I make to be. To prove a spiritual reality in Nature would be folly; such were Satan’s temptations of Christ.
For in the infinity of my consciousness, the without is always within. There is no means of transcending my consciousness.

© John Dunn.

The without is always within - there is no means of transcending my consciousness

Saturday, 24 February 2024 at 10:46

The without is always within - there is no means of transcending my consciousness


I cling to my humanity. Anything accomplished does not diminish the need to accomplish more and more and more. To become a simple passive spectator of my soul, even after a life of the mind intensely led, would be to become an inert spectator in the void, in the nought which is absolute, in the nothingness before the Beginning that never ends.



I made the activity of others the object of my own thought, and to that extent I objectivised my lovers, and yet, the objects of my own thinking became my own activity, and in that way I entered into the spiritual fact of them, that is into their inmost essences. Seek and ye shall find, for so long as it is sought it is found. Love is not found outside the seeking, for once what is known is stored away safely and possessed, Love is gone.



Love is God, hence the God I find is the God whom in seeking I make to be. To prove a spiritual reality in Nature would be folly; such were Satan’s temptations of Christ.
For in the infinity of my consciousness, the without is always within. There is no means of transcending my consciousness.

© John Dunn.

The humanity of my mind is in process not substance 



Friday, 23 February 2024 at 21:57

The humanity of my mind is in process not substance 



You innocents are because you are already all you can be. You have realised your essence. All your determinations are a necessary and pre-ordained consequence of your natures. You are what you can be, and you have no will to break out in to new unforeseeable manifestations. All the manifestations by which your natures are expressed are already there existing implicitly. The empirical manifestations of your beings are closed within limits already prescribed as impassable boundaries. You are as stones or plants or animals. 



The open capacities of my mind are to be distinguished from the closed capacities of nature, be it animal, mineral, or the sub-humanoid innocents of Beulah and their deceivers. I am withdrawn from every pre-established law, and cannot be defined as a being restricted to a definite nature, in which the process of my life is exhausted and completed. The humanity of my mind is in process not substance. There is no reality which can be opposed to my thinking as independent of it and as the presupposition to it. An acceptance of such a reality would be idolatry. I banish thought itself as an activity if that thought is conceived as a reality existing apart from its developing process, as a substance independent of its actual manifestation.

© John Dunn.

Transcendental ego, the light of the Logos shining through

Thursday, 22 February 2024 at 22:20

Transcendental ego, the light of the Logos shining through

You the mentally wounded, you the unloved, you the never having loved, you can only be realised through the transcendental ego, through me.

In the Beginning, I became aware of the unreality of my being as an empirical ego opposed the separate ready-made ‘reality’ into which I was thrown. Instead I realised that the things that once seemed opposed to me were given being by me. Through encounter and Love I saw others’ needs as my own, and discovered that my life is not closed within the narrow circle of my empirical personality, but ever expanding as a mind above all particular interests and yet immanent in the very centre of my deeper self. My inner self was not lost in the feeling of others' needs as my own. On the contrary, I unified in myself all particular and empirical egos to become the transcendental ego, the light of the LOGOS shining through.

In the Beginning is Love, and Love is the mystery which cannot be presupposed or understood as something apart or pre-existing.



And yet what are the criteria of true love? There are none. Criteria only exist in the order of the objective and problematical. Criteria, those presuppositions, belong over there, with them, ‘the they’. Love belongs over here, with me as an individual and the mystery. (Child of Encounter)



Love teaches that I can only know an object when there is in that object nothing given and presupposed, nothing which my thinking finds there already, as though it were ‘real’ even before I knew it.



© 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.