OH! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,/And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings,’ wrote John Gillespie Magee in his sonnet High Flight. The Second World War pilot may have flown lark-like in a Spitfire, but that feeling of liberation, lift and those ‘wind-swept heights’ conveyed can equally be applied to ballooning.
‘That’s a poetic way of looking at it,’ acknowledges 82-year-old Don Cameron, a ballooning pioneer both in the air and in his business, Cameron Balloons, which is half a century old this year. ‘Ballooning has a beauty to it, a magic and a mystery—you are defying gravity and you never quite know where you will end up.’
On cloud-free, still mornings and evenings, balloons take to the troposphere, turning the uniform blue to a kaleidoscope of color. Many of these vibrant envelopes (the technical term for the balloon’s fabric element) will have been given life within Cameron Balloons’s 42,000sq ft factory in Bedminster, Bristol, the most prolific producer of balloons in the world.
First, the nylon fabric, in varying thicknesses and a potential rainbow of colors, will be cut out, either by machine or by hand, in the latter case following a paper template. Then, on the second floor, the sections are joined and sewn, the semi-finished envelopes cascading waterfall-like from machine tables and swathing the floor in their voluminous folds. After eight weeks, a completed envelope containing more than 3,000ft of fabric will be ready for inspection, as well as partial inflation on the near-empty first floor. Finally, on a clement day, the balloon-to-be will be taken to nearby Ashton Court Park for total inflation, the last before it takes to the skies in earnest with a basket beneath.
Denne historien er fra August 11, 2021-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Denne historien er fra August 11, 2021-utgaven av Country Life UK.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
