An AMAZING walk! Part 1.

You will have to forgive my absence from blogging this month, but life has been very busy, and we have had our eldest daughter here for 10 days (with the Green Man Festival taking her off at the beginning of it).  Last Saturday we joined up with a good friend of mine, who suggested a walk down on the Gower again.  It is fast becoming one of my favourite places to visit.  

Above is the view from the sand dunes at Broughton, looking back towards the Carmarthenshire coastline and Burry Port.

Turn slightly East, and you take in the Carmarthen Fans and start of the Brecon Beacons.

This is the Blue Pool at Broughton. As you can see, lots of youngsters were thoroughly enjoying themselves leaping into it again and again.  Some being more adventurous than others, climbing to the highest part to jump.  It's about 8 feet or so deep, so safe to leap into.

Harebells were growing here - the area is limestone with  masses of sand dunes.

Looking across to Worm's Head at the far end of Rhossili Bay.

Burry Holms, which becomes an island at high tide. We ventured across but didn't dare to linger as the tide was coming in fast.

The remains of a small chapel built by monks who once lived here in the Medieval period.  Before them, there was a Hillfort built in Iron Age times, and previously, the isle was used in the Mesolithic by peoples who visited it periodically during certain times of the year, to add to their larder.  (Marine resources I don't doubt).  As we were leaving, several fishermen passed us on their way to the isle to spend the night fishing.  I should imagine it is incredibly atmospheric there at night.

Pointing my camera into the sun darkened the photos and made them a nice combination of gloom and sparkling waves.

This one turned out very well.  Worms Head in the background again.

A backdrop of Rhossili Downs (192m, 632 feet) behind a lovely holiday home owned by the National Trust.  I mention the Downs, because I actually managed to climb up them with T and D!!!  What I should also mention is that having found out that I have a Dairy intolerence, by cutting it right out of my diet, my peak flow is back to 420 - 440 and my Respiratory Nurse said I was 95% of back to normal again.  My peak flow is pretty well normal for someone of my age.  SO, with much encouragement from D and T, I made it up the hill.  I shall put the photos in Part II.

Meanwhile, we had the entire length of Rhossili Beach to negotiate - a level walk at least, but 2 1/2 miles long.

I have to admit, half way along the beach, when I was committed to the other half AND the return trip, I wondered if I was doing the right thing.  As it turned out, YES I WAS!!

Part II tomorrow, and I wish I could include every photo I took (about 150 of them!) but no time or room . . .

Belated Pembrokeshire walk photos and update

Apologies for not having updated my blog regularly this month.  It seems to have started off with an empty calendar then every day suddenly filled up and it has been hectic here.

Anyway, finally some photos of a walk I did with my friend Debs last week.  We started off taking a breath of sea air at Wiseman's Bridge, just over the Pembrokeshire border.  I wonder who it was named after?

Whilst the weather didn't look too promising at this point, we only had a couple of heavyish showers the whole day, so no complaints really.

Then we drove to Stackpole Quay.  Once there was a very grand house and stables here which belonged to the Cawdor family, but now only fragments are left.  You can just see the quay here, with the tide completely out. 

 http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/stackpole/history/

The link shows you just how grand the house once was.

Looking Eastwards along the coast.  You can just see the heaving-up of the rocks millions of years ago.

Overlooking Barafundle Bay is an old doorway built into a long stretch of wall.  It framed a lovely view through to Stackpole Head in the distance.

What a beautiful beach it is, and only a few people enjoying it.

Looking back on it from the Western side.

This shows you the wall and the doorway - and the climb back up the steps from the beach!  It would have been easier if I was a couple of stone lighter!!

The rock here is limestone, and there were lots of Scabious growing.  It was windy so a little difficult to get things stationary enough for a photo!

Carline Thistle.

Caves formed largely by rockfalls.

Viper's Bugloss.  When I was 6 I had the Observer's Book of Wild Flowers (I have always loved wild flowers).  Viper's Bugloss was the most exotic-looking illustration in the book, and I longed to find one, but had to wait until I was 30, and walking in the Purbecks.  I can still remember my excitement!

The views were so beautiful.

This looks like the remains of a Neolithic burial chamber, but I know nothing about it, sadly.

From Stackpole Head, looking West.

Then a walk back and up the steps to the car and on to St. Govan's Head.  More of that later.

Catching up with life

The new header photo was taken in the Usk Valley, near Tretower.

So sorry to have been tardy about updating this blog, but I have been keeping more than busy and have had a lovely walk with a good friend - this is Barafundle Bay on the Pembrokeshire coast.  Stunning.  Back with more photos over the weekend.

So pretty - my blue hydrangea putting on a show.

The wheel turns

It felt a little like Autumn today, even though I haven't noticed that day in late July when there is the first tiny hint of the wheel turning, a sort of standing still day is how I would describe it.  Now as I look out across the garden, the apples are slowly ripening - enough to attract the wretched jackdaws with their colouring, and the windfalls have recently been stewed up, along with a few of the larger apples from the tree at the end of the driveway.  The rowanberries are colouring up and bowing the branches with their weight, and I have noticed the first blackberries.  Perhaps it is the recent rain which has brought this change with it - when it was still really hot and sunny in July, autumn seemed so far away.

I am picking the first gluts of garden produce - different sorts of French beans, the first Runner Beans, Firenze and an un-named spring onion above and eating the autumn fruiting raspberries as they ripen! The greenhouse cucumbers are still doing well and the first ripe tomatoes have been picked.

The beans have been trimmed, blanched, flash frozen and bagged up for the winter months.  So have the spring onions, for use in stir fries.  The cucumbers are being eaten as fast as they can ripen!

Yesterday we drove up to Leominster as there had been an antiques warehouse barn clearout highlighted in the trade gazette we picked up.  No real bargains for us, but we had a nice day out, looking around the other antique shops, and I had a delicious slice of Lemon Meringue Pie when we sat down for a cuppa.    We just bought a few things - printed wooden buttons, a book on getting in touch with your psychic self, 3 mahogany Regency chair legs (OH says he has something in mind for them!) and a couple of embroidered cushion covers which need a stitch or two.  I also paid more than I wanted to/it was worth for a bag of oddments of craft wool and several cards of very fine beige/fawn darning wool, which is what I really needed, to repair a geriatric Welsh shawl which has a few moth-holes.

On the way back we stopped at the junky antique shop and although I didn't find any more cards of darning wool, I did find some American craft magazines which had been sold through Borders bookshop when it was still open (and I miss it still).  One was Sew Somerset, and the other two Cloth Paper Scissors, all dealing with mixed media and creative sewing.  I need my brain stretched!  I looked on Fleabay to see if I could add to this small collection and found they were desirable and fetching good money.  One of the mags I had bought was £11.95 on there!

I had a definite feeling of Autumn yesterday, as we drove past the dried, sun-bleached grass of the verges, fallen leaves encouraged to drop early by last months' sun and lack of rain, fields which had been harvested and just stubble and large bale straw remaining and fields in anticipation of next year's harvests.  The beautiful Rosebay Willowherb of my header photo is romping up its pyramid of flowers and soon will be covered in cotton wool strands from its seed pods.  The creamy froth of the Meadowsweet is already over and the earlier Umbellifers brown seedheads.

The Swallows have been lining up on the telephone wires here - the last group of nestlings taking their flying lessons and then lining up to be fed - in strict order! - by their parents.  Soon they will be leaving us for Africa.

We have plans afoot - I will say no more now - but leave you on tenterhooks until September arrives . . . not to do with house-selling, sadly, but something positive all the same.

4th August 2014 - A hundred years ago today

Dartmoor View:

This afternoon, as I peeled and cut windfall apples to cook up for a pie, I thought how, on a summer's day, just like this one, a century ago, our ancestors went about their work pretty much as we are all doing today.  The young Swallows would have been skimming around in groups of 20 or more, practising their flying skills just as they are today.  The harvest would have been ripening, the hay would have been in stooks or carefully stacked and thatched, rowanberries turning orange on the trees and countrywomen would have been trying to make 6d do the work of a shilling, just as they have always done - and still do - whilst their menfolk laboured in the fields.

Down on Dartmoor my female relatives might have been amongst the tors gathering whortleberries for pies or to be sold at local markets at 6d or 7d a quart.  Staggering home with huge baskets full, their thoughts would doubtless have been more on events close to hand than those unfolding in a foreign country they had scarcely heard of.

I wonder how long it took for news of war to percolate to the more outlying farms?  I wonder if folk realized the impact it would have on their lives, and that by the end of four years, scarcely a household in the country would remain unaffected by lives lost - fathers, sons, brothers, cousins.

I thought today of the excitement the young men had felt at the idea of fighting for their country - those country lads especially thinking that at last they had a chance to get away from their humdrum life and have the chance to have a dependable regular wage coming in instead of every chance of being laid off because business was slow or the farmer could get a younger boy cheaper to do their work.  To escape their cramped living conditions and monotonous diet and to be the envy of their friends.  After all, it would all be over before Christmas.  It strikes me that they were full of such innocence.  They truly believed what their leaders told them.  Only the old sweats who had experienced war knew differently, but not even they could have dreamed of the carnage and futility and terror of trench warfare for years on end.

I hope that you will join me in lighting a candle of remembrance tonight and remember all those who fought, whether they returned or stayed, in the words of Rupert Brooke, who sadly fulfilled the prophecy of the poem he wrote in 1914:

THE SOLDIER BY RUPERT BROOKE

IF I should die, think only this of me;
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,	5
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less	10
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

Many thanks to www.bartleby.com from whence I copied the words. .

Spare a thought, especially, for those 54,000 men whose bodies were never recovered, but are remembered on the Menin Gate, like my husband's Great Uncle, George Brown Bird, left mortally wounded in a bomb crater which later received a direct hit from another bomb.  Think too of those who were broken in body or in mind, yet returned home, and men whose mental breakdown was simply called Cowardice and punished as such by a firing squad at dawn.  Forgiveness is a word to choke on . .

Devon Vernacular

I bought a few copies - old ones from the 1940s and 1950s - of The Countryman recently.  I love them for some of the obscure stories and reports they carry.  Here is a wonderful piece of "Devon-speak" which appeared in the Spring 1948 copy of the magazine:

"I'll baste thy hide vur thee ef thee dissent come into th'ouse dreckly minit!" exclaimed the old lady to her five-year-old grandson.  "What with yurr mumbudgetting an' trapsying roun' th' drange-way, yu'll be rinnedaver."  When she caught sight of me, she crooned, "Aw, me dear sawl, how 'ee be grawn zince I zeed 'ee last!  Come in an' zit yezelf down, midear!"  Little Archie followed us into the cottage where a fire burned cheerfully in the "bodley".  Giving the boy a playful clip over the head, his grandmother said, "It vair makes me bivver to zee littul Arch, the way 'e du love a drap o' dirt.  'E's wors'n 'is farthur were at 'is age.  An' 'ave 'e zeed 'Aryot Webb's littul maid zince 'er comed back vrom schule?" she rambled on.  "'Er's a praper maid right enuv.  'T'ath adued 'er gude gwaine away."



I love to think of my Devon ancestors talking like this.  Dad never did - he always had a nice speaking voice without any Devon accent, but he used to tell me about t'owd bwoys up on't moor, who said thee and thou like they had done for centuries . . .

A very wet weekend . . .

As I write it is chucking it down with rain outside. Not a good day to be out and the good car boot sale in town will definitely NOT be taking place, which is disappointing.  We shall head up to our nearest village to check out the indoor car boot sale there (nothing to get excited about usually) and also a garage sale in the same village.

We may go into town afterwards as I need more seagrass to cover with material to restore a little footstool.  It is in shades of purple, lilac and white, with a bit of purply-maroon thrown in for good measure.  These cottons come from a couple of pillow cases I found in charity shops, so they came cheaply.

After a fortnight of my very low histamine diet, I am ending today, as it would appear it is Alcohol, Dairy, and one or two other bits which affect my asthma. Anything with sulphites in is a no-no too, and of course, I have long known that motorway driving with lots of heavies about does me no good either.  All those tiny particulates from the diesel affect me.

I shall still be aware of what foods are high in histamines and try and avoid them.  To be honest though, it would be very easy to get paranoid about what you were eating for fear it would make you ill, and then you are just a step away from food-phobia and Anorexia.  I have an appointment at the Hospital later this month, so will discuss it with my Respiratory Nurse then, and see what the way forward is.

We had a lovely morning yesterday when friends came round for coffee and cake. I made a luscious Rhubarb and Custard cake, the recipe of which will be swiftly added to my personal recipe book of favourites.

We were talking about re-caning a child's highchair I have had awaiting restoration and my friend is an expert at recaning and will show me how it's done so I can restore things in future.  I can't wait for my lessons, as I love learning new crafts.  

Time to get on with the day now.