Penshaw Monument
Wednesday, January 28th, 2004 09:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lethargic_manA propos of nothing (bar displacing)...
I dislike the Angel of the North. Not very much, it's true, but still. It's supposed to be a eyecatching monument dominating the view from road or rail on the way into Gateshead, but unless you get a good close look it just looks like a 'plane has flown head first into the hillside and stuck there.
The fact of the matter is there already was a impressive folly overlooking the road and rail lines -- Penshaw Monument, located not far from the Washington from which George Washington's ancestors hailed. It's a scaled-down version of a temple in Athens, and is a damn sight more aesthetically pleasing than the Angel of the North, IMNSHO. As a child it always used to intrigue me as we drove past, because the number of pillars supporting its roof kept seeming to change due to the changing parallax between the pillars on the near side and those on the far.
The only problem is that it is a long way from the road and rail, ten or so miles, so does not loom over them like the Angel of the North does. But it deserves to be more widely known, IMO; and I'm doing my little bit here to help that.
I dislike the Angel of the North. Not very much, it's true, but still. It's supposed to be a eyecatching monument dominating the view from road or rail on the way into Gateshead, but unless you get a good close look it just looks like a 'plane has flown head first into the hillside and stuck there.
The fact of the matter is there already was a impressive folly overlooking the road and rail lines -- Penshaw Monument, located not far from the Washington from which George Washington's ancestors hailed. It's a scaled-down version of a temple in Athens, and is a damn sight more aesthetically pleasing than the Angel of the North, IMNSHO. As a child it always used to intrigue me as we drove past, because the number of pillars supporting its roof kept seeming to change due to the changing parallax between the pillars on the near side and those on the far.
The only problem is that it is a long way from the road and rail, ten or so miles, so does not loom over them like the Angel of the North does. But it deserves to be more widely known, IMO; and I'm doing my little bit here to help that.
