Complete silence, a ban on bathing and a love of solitude are all part of the job description for a unique position that has become available at Tatton Park – after remaining vacant for the last 150 years.

Head gardener Sam Youd is appealing for an individual showing promise as a modern-day hermit to take residence in his Hermit’s Grotto garden, which will be on display at the RHS Show Tatton Park this month.[…]

The successful candidate must take a vow of silence and be able to live alongside a skull, to encourage human reflection.

@ Liverpool Daily Post (via Hermitary)

Ah, if only this were closer to home — it would be such wonderful research for the novel I’m working on.

One Square Inch of Silence is the quietest place in the United States. Located in the Hoh Rain Forest at Olympic National Park, it is 3.2 miles from the Visitor’s Center above Mt. Tom Creek Meadows on the Hoh River Trail. Hiking time from the parking lot at the Visitor’s Center to the site is approximately two hours along a gentle path lined by ancient trees and ferns. The exact location is marked by a small red-colored stone placed on top of a moss-covered log at 47° 51.959N, 123° 52.221W, 678 feet above sea level.

(via Hermitary)

Today I had a simple enough job. Put in a new post for a gate – known here as a ’strainer’ because it takes the strain of either the weight of the gate or the tensioned fence in the other direction, or both. The post itself is like a 7ft section of telegraph pole and it weighs about twice as much as I can lift. And we live on a very slopy croft. So I devise a sort of strap arrangement which allows me to drag it with one end on the floor. I traverse the steep part of the slope above the chickens with no possibility of stopping. Like some all-or-nothing ice climb. If I let the damned thing go it will roll down the hill and be a 30mph sledgehammer long before it has got to the chicken house. Chickens are so trusting. They cheered me on from the other side of the electric fence, unaware of their mortality.

@ Tales from Green Willow Croft

Writing, publishing, and crofting in northwest Scotland — what’s not to like?

After reading — and immensely enjoying — Tom Hodgkinson’s How To Be Idle: A Loafer’s Manifesto, I’m left confused and annoyed about the book’s classification as “humor.” Sure, it’s funny, but not like the joke books and sitcom tie-ins I found it shelved with in the store. It’s funny because it points out as absurd the stupid assumptions we take for granted as inescapable, inevitable “facts” of our lives; it’s funny because it’s radical in a lighthearted way. The cynic in me thinks the strange categorization must be a conspiracy by Big Publishing and Big Work to defang the book, lest we all stop going to work and stay home reading and idling instead.

If you look back on your own education, I am sure it will not be the full, vivid, instructive hours of truantry that you regret; you would rather cancel some lack-lustre periods between sleep and waking in the class. For my own part, I have attended a good many lectures in my time… But though I would not willingly part with such scraps of science, I do not set the same store by them as by certain other odds and ends that I came by in the open street while I was playing truant… Suffice it to say this: if a lad does not learn in the streets, it is because he has no faculty of learning. Nor is the truant always in the streets, for if he prefers, he may go out by the gardened suburbs into the country. He may pitch on some tuft of lilacs over a burn, and smoke innumerable pipes to the tune of the water on the stones. A bird will sing in the thicket. And there he may fall into a vein of kindly thought, and see things in a new perspective. Why, if this be not education, what is?

~ Robert Louis Stevenson, An Apology for Idlers

It’s a shame that the noble word ‘pedestrian’ has come to be used in a pejorative sense. ‘Terribly pedestrian’ is how we dismiss a piece of creative work if we want to convey the idea that it is humdrum, ordinary, unspectacular. It’s as if the humble ramble has become tedious and boring in comparison with flashier, faster modes of transport like trains, planes and automobiles. But in the pedestrian, the wanderer, the rambler, the flâneur can be found the soul of the idler. The pedestrian is the highest and most mighty of beings; walking for pleasure, observing but not interfering, happy in the company of his own mind.

~ Tom Hodgkinson @ Resurgence

The rule:

Man may be a social animal, but solitude has traditionally been a societal value. In particular, the act of being alone has been understood as an essential dimension of religious experience, albeit one restricted to a self-selected few. Through the solitude of rare spirits, the collective renews its relationship with divinity. The prophet and the hermit, the sadhu and the yogi, pursue their vision quests, invite their trances, in desert or forest or cave. For the still, small voice speaks only in silence.

@ The Chronicle Review

The exception:

I only wanted to be left alone. I could not bear the jostle of people.[…]

No one here had ever believed that anyone could want to be left alone. To them the worst fate that could befall anyone was being left alone and solitary. “All work is better in company.” “A man sits alone only to plot evil.” “Not even monkeys walk alone.” The very worst of the terrible consequences of the greatest moral and magical trespasses (fratricide, witchcraft, the breaking of treaties), following the leprosy, madness and dire disasters that befell such evil doers, was the most horrible fate of all: “and such a man will sit alone in a silent homestead.”

The fate they abhorred was a necessity to me. (173-174)

~ Elenore Smith Bowen, Return to Laughter

With a few exceptions, only one keeper was appointed per station; however, some keepers took it upon themselves to hire an assistant. The keeper’s routine was to light the lamps at twilight, then trim the wicks between 11 and 12 that night. I.W.P. Lewis, engineer to the U.S. Light-house Survey, remarked that it was not uncommon for a light gradually to disappear between 3 and 4 a.m. He added, “The best keepers are found to be old sailors, who are accustomed to watch at night, who are more likely to turn out in a driving snow storm and find their way to the light-house to trim their lamps, because in such weather they know by experience the value of a light, while on similar occasions the landsman keeper would be apt to consider such weather as the best excuse for remaining snug in bed.”

~ Lighthouse Keepers in the Nineteenth Century

The wise hermit is meticulous, artful, subjectively introverted, but not neurotic.

Neurotics is exactly what recluses are. At least that is the definition that can be proposed to distinguish hermits and solitaries from recluses. Neurotics do not create philosophies of life. They do not contemplate the eternal lessons of nature and wilderness, monitor the interaction of nature and culture to achieve the right expression of spirit. Neurotics are fearful of others, even while wanting others to do something for them — obey, command, sympathize, serve them. The hermit — the true solitary — no longer wants anything from anybody, but feels free to talk, counsel, listen, accept, and exchange.

@ Hermitary

Meanwhile, notice the red-roofed blue buildings. According to National Geographic, they “appear every few miles [and] house workers who maintain the greenbelt.” The workers sign up for stints that may last up to two years. They may be with their spouses or get paired up with someone, but essentially, they live solitary lives, an eccentric group of monastic botanists in a mystical struggle to arrest this ephemeral landscape in time and space.

@ Pruned
(via 12 frogs)