John Dunn

Take an ordinary road

Tuesday, 9 April 2024 at 10:39

The ghost of Toby

Below is the latest draft of a commentary to a forthcoming YouTube video. (Please bear in mind the spoken word nature of the scripting.)

To be published within the next couple of weeks on my YouTube Channel.

Take an ordinary road

Mildenhall in Suffolk. There’s the parish church on the left, the biggest in Suffolk, and the covered medieval market cross on the right.

My objective is to pick up the route of the Mildenhall and Burntfen Turnpike, later designated the A1101 in the 1920s.

Welcome to the ride. It’s good to have your company.

And here’s the A1101, which I join at this junction.

The current A road goes straight on. I’m following the original route, which bears left.

Opened in 1828, this was one of the last turnpikes established. The trustees wanted a connection to Littleport and roads leading on to the ports of Wisbech and Kings Lynn.

It was so late because of the problems posed by constructing a road across the wide stretch of fenland up ahead.

Still on the old road, but up ahead it comes ignominiously to a dead end. Why? RAF Station Mildenhall opened 1934. The airfield was built over the road.

Having skirted the airbase, I’m back on the old turnpike route, the A1101, just after descending Kenny Hill.

Well that’s a bit of an exaggeration. The hill was just above sea level, and now I’m just below.

Entering Cambridgeshire now, with Shippea Hill Station up ahead (named after nearby Shipea Hill, which rises to the dizzying heights of 0, yes, sea level!)

Shippea Hill Station has been recorded as the least-used railway station in Britain.

It’s a request stop, so passengers must signal to the driver if they wish to get on board.

Now on a dead straight course to Littleport, even though it bucks and bounces over the shrinking peat, something that’s not picked up on a self-levelling Go-Pro.

This is Burntfen, after which the old turnpike took its name. Here the A1101 has the honour of being the lowest A road in the UK.

Having crossed the bridge over the River Great Ouse, I’m leaving the modern A1101 which continues as a bypass around Littleport, to follow the old road, along Wisbech Road, through the heart of Littleport itself.

At its heart is the church of St George. Fine and lofty, the 15th century tower can be seen from miles around.

But at the other side of the church is a monument of very specific interest to motorcyclists. It’s to that that I now wend my way.

(Walk round and read)

This stainless steel monument celebrating Littleport’s connection to the famous brand (however tenuous) was unveiled in 2003 and depicts a 1937 Knucklehead. It was commissioned to celebrate the 100th birthday of the Harley-Davidson company in 2003. Relatives of the Harley family still live in the area.

Having Continued through the village, I rejoin the A1101 where the bypass reconnects with the old turnpike route at this roundabout.

From Littleport I’ve crossed Mare Fen, at or just above sea level.

And up ahead is the great bank holding back the New Bedford River.

At this road junction too I leave Cambridgeshire to enter Norfolk.

This man-made river was cut in 1652 as part of Vermuyden's grand plan to drain the fenlands.

It runs dead straight from Earith to the Denver Sluice, for 21 miles.

The great earthworks were dug by Scottish prisoners-of-war captured in the Battle of Dunbar.

From here I’m looking for the bridge over the river.

I find it at a small settlement called Suspension Bridge. Aptly called because…

…a suspension bridge was erected here in 1826. It had a central carriageway with a footpath on either side.

It was replaced in 1926 by a concrete bridge with a central concrete arch.

In 1996 this bridge was replaced by the modern steel and reinforced concrete structure you see before me.

This New Bedford River runs parallel with two others. The River Delph and another man-made river of Vermuyden’s, cut between 1630 and 1636, known as the Old Bedford River.

The land between them is known as the Washes, and these flood each winter, with the water being contained by the banks of the parallel man- made rivers.

And there you see the flooded Washes.

A1101 that runs across bridges over the rivers is frequently covered by floodwater after prolonged heavy rainfall upstream in Bedfordshire and Northamptonshire. This can result in long diversions. Thankfully, no road closures today, despite weeks of rain.

Let’s take a look.

The water is high, and lapping up the side of the road, but thankfully not flooding it.

This road across the Washes was built in 1820. It was this road of course that made the project of a turnpike to Wisbech possible in the first place.

I’m now crossing the River Delph on a late twentieth century concrete bridge.

Now the Old Bedford River, on a concrete bridge 1994.

And so into Welney.

Here’s an old 19th century milestone at Lake’s End, just beyond Welney, placed here by the Wisbech Turnpike Trust.

The Inscription reads:-
: ELY / 13 : : UPWELL : : WISBECH / 11 :

Travellers in the other direction get to Ely via Littleport.

Still on the A1101, I’ve passed through the village of Upwell and I’m now in the conjoining next village of Outwell.

That wide grassy verge to my right used to be water.

I’m crossing what was the canal to travel down the other bank.

The canal used to occupy the space taken up today with the trees, bushes and grass to my left.

To my left was the old canal basin of Outwell. From this point, an arm of the canal used to continue on to Wisbech. It was opened in 1797, abandoned in 1926, and filled in during the 1970s.

From here the dead straight modern A1101 runs on top of the filled in canal, bypassing the winding course of the old road.

The road at this point runs along the border between Norfolk and Cambridge.

From 1883 a tramway cum railway used to run near the canal to Wisbech.

Here’s the steam tram engine that worked on the line.

Aficionados of Thomas the Tank engine will know this unusual steam engine as Toby the tram engine. The Rev. W. Awdry was the vicar of Emneth, a village near Wisbech and took his inspiration from the Wisbech tramway.

Sadly for Toby, the tramway closed in 1966, many years after it had already made the canal redundant.

In Wisbech now. Having passed from Norfolk into Cambridgeshire.

This dual carriageway, Churchill Road, was built on top of the filled in canal, in the late 1960s and 70s. It follows the canal’s course right upto the point where it meets the navigable River Nene.

That’s where I am now, by one of the towns flood prevention gates next to the River Nene, near to where the old canal met the river and the port of Wisbech.

So… having taken an ordinary road with a turnpike history, from Suffolk to Cambridgeshire to Norfolk and back to to Cambridgeshire, to find it is the lowest A road in the UK, with the least-used station, a monument to Harley Davidson, near-flooded Washes, with a lost canal haunted by Toby the tram engine… this is where I take my leave of the A1101

Thanks for joining me on the ride today, as ever it’s 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.

My mind is the one and the many

Monday, 8 April 2024 at 22:00

My mind is the one and the many

My nature and my history only

Sunday, 7 April 2024 at 10:38

My nature and my history only

Theliving process of my thinking is what radically operates in the world -not the dead thought passed down from generation to generation as knowledge or history. The true being of my living thinking is the Logos,the Originatory Principle, enlivening itself directly when my thinking does not renounce, even in the sphere of nature, the source from which it arises.

I do not distinguish between the object of knowledge and myself as knowing subject.These things are reconciled in the living process of my  thinking. The whole of natural and historical reality is reconciled in me. My experience is the infinite begetter of an infinite offspring in which reality is realised, and all future and all past is to be found. There is neither nature nor history, but always and only mynature and my history.

© John Dunn.

What I am looking for is what is looking


Saturday, 6 April 2024 at 23:26

What I am looking for is what is looking



I do not presuppose as knowledge the reality which is the object of knowledge. I cancel that independent nature of the world, which makes it appear the basis of my thinking. In this cancellation I find the most radical, most logical, and the sincerest, conception of the sayings of Jesus.


The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you. (The original Bible collated by Marcion of Sinope 17: 20-1)

Nothing transcends the living process of my thinking. What I am looking for is what is looking. The only individual I can know is the Creator, he who is the positive concreteness of the perpetual Beginning, in short, me, the absolute I. The absolute I is the very essence of my spiritual existence. It is the I who thinks and feels, the I who fears and hopes, the I who wills and works and which has responsibility, rights, and duties. I know the all where alone it is, within me.

© John Dunn.

I rise above humanity

Friday, 5 April 2024 at 21:48

Rise above by Stranger Aeons

I rise above humanity

I will myself in accordance with freedom. I turn my back on the life disguised as nature, tradition and culture, which wrongly obligates me by imposing conditions of existence outside the creative process of my thinking. My reality is nothing until I create it, and is what I create. I reject the idolatry of a presupposed world waiting to be known, until a philosopher, religionist or scientist comes along to contemplate it. My reality is love and will, because it is the inward living process of my soul, not its ideal and external model.



I rise above humanity and allow the Logos to live through me, for the Kingdom is within me. God is no longer a reality who already is, but the God who is begotten in me, in so far as I with my whole being rise to Him.



My world is not what I know but what I make: I not only conceive the mind as freedom or moral activity, but the world is freed and redeemed. My world is a world which is what it would be, a world essentially moral…



…that is, apart from the dark recesses into which others are pulled by the children of Satan, from whom spew the words of idolatrous worship of the super-Objective.

© John Dunn.

I reject the amorality of philosophico-religious dead-ends



Thursday, 4 April 2024 at 21:10

Hell Priests by Poisoner


















I reject the amorality of philosophico-religious dead-ends



My moral compass turns way from the Greek, Indian and Judaic philosophico-religious dead-ends.

In the Greek philosophers I see only the natural order, or what is presupposed as the ideal order, but I find no creation of a new world outside of these. I find no conception of the mind as creator. I find no understanding of the moral nature of mind in the Greek philosophers because their world was nature, not mind. Their nature need not be material, it might be ideal, but it is what the mind contemplates, not what it makes. Stoical suicide is the end consistent with this conception of a reality apart, in which the subject has no worth.



Indian religions have the same end, in the suppression of the passions, in the extirpation of desire and every root of the human incentive to action, in the nirvana. Their ideal is the negation of the realm in which morality realises itself, human personality.

In the Judaic constructions, be they original, Christic or Islamic, morality is prescribed as laws to be followed. Tablets of stone descend from the super-Objective, the Jehovah who stands wholly apart, with laws to fill the vacuous minds of believers, who hand over their moral compass to the priesthood.

You all reduce every inner demand to a religious, philosophical or psychological dimension. Idiots, you have been led astray by the children of Satan. The inner spiritual life of your mind is neither philosophical, nor mystical. Your own living thinking is the Logos, not the dead thought imparted by mystic masters that weighs upon you as knowledge. Worship not the super-Objective, find the truth instead in the living thinking of the Absolute Ego.

© John Dunn.

Kabbalistic mysticism - the suicide of the self


Wednesday, 3 April 2024 at 21:22

Gun to head by Rimeligbarsk

Kabbalistic mysticism - the suicide of the self


The mystic’s absolute reality is not subject but object. The mystic's reality, so essentially objective and anti-spiritual, has no place for anything depending on the subject. The individual personality of the mystic is tormented by the desire for a God who is, in comparison with his own sense of nothingness, everything. Man, the world and all particular things exist as but modes of existence of the super-objective One, the Absolute.



All particular things dissolve as illusive shadows as the mystic strives to turn the dross of one reality into the pure gold of another. The spirits must be seen, one’s guardian angel evoked, super-objectivity upon objectivity. Ultimately the kabbalists’ struggle must lead to the surrender of the self to the envisioned super-Objective. Mysticism is the suicide of the self.

© John Dunn.