In my end is my beginning.

So, starting from the end.  This is a copy of Nathaniel's burial record, taken from the net.  And there's something mightily depressing about seeing it in black and white.  Obviously, since he was born in 1806, I was never going to contact him on facebook, but... this is sad.  And why is this much-travelled man being buried in Edgbaston of all places?  And why do they appear to have his age wrong in the burial record - oh but that's minor, clerical errors happen all the time. But why in Edgbaston?

A mystery put aside for another day.  Let's go back gratefully to Nathaniel still alive and receiving impressions and transferring them onto paper, for long-term storage and the ultimate pleasure of people not alive when he was breathing that Pyrenean air.

He's travelling through Basque country to Burgos, ancient capital of Castile. And it's quite...small.

"The extent of Burgos bears a very inadequate proportion to the idea formed of it by strangers, derived from its former importance and renown. It is composed of five or six narrow streets, winding round the back of an irregularly shaped colonnaded plaza. The whole occupies a narrow space, comprised between the river Arlançon, and the almost circular hill of scarcely a mile in circumference, (on which stands the citadel) and covers altogether about double the extent of Windsor Castle."

 He adds that the medieval town has "received a sort of modern facing, consisting of a row of regularly built white houses, which turn their backs to the Plaza, and front the river"

Perhaps those "regularly built" modern houses of his are now bijou holiday lets, renting on the strength of their cute antiquity?  Maybe they've vanished under concrete.  A quick visit via the net to modern Burgos (...aaargh my god it's huge!! No, no it's not: but bigger, yes, obviously bigger.  Has an airport and everything.  Still looks a great place for a tourist though, and still possesses all those creamy white historic buildings and some narrow medievally streets.)

He gets a little prickly about the small size of his Burgos.  We must not patronise it, we Brits, despite its surprising, ah, compactness to our Victorian eyes, which are more used to the great suburban sprawl of London or Brum, or Edgbaston.  But you couldn't build cities as neatly as this in Britain though because of all the rain...:

"The dimensions of this, and many other Spanish towns, must not be adopted as a base for estimating their amount of population. Irun, at the frontier of France, stands on a little hill, the surface of which would scarcely suffice for a country-house, with its surrounding offices and gardens: it contains, nevertheless, four or five thousand inhabitants, and comprises a good-sized market-place and handsome town-hall, besides several streets. Nor does this close packing render the Spanish towns less healthy than our straggling cities, planned with a view to circulation and purity of atmosphere...The humidity of the atmosphere in England would be the principal obstacle to cleanliness and salubrity, had the towns a more compact mode of construction; whilst in Spain, on the contrary, this system is advantageous as a protection against the excessive power of the summer sun, which would render our wide streets—bordered by houses too low to afford complete shade—not only almost impassable, but uninhabitable."


Okay.  Small is not only beautiful in Spain, but also populous, dry, well-planned, hygienic and shady.  Because it's Spain, and we love Spain.

Which brings us to Nathaniel's first attempt to render a picturesque antiquity visually, the Arco de Santa Maria.  What do you think of him as an artist?