Circle of the Year

A R Quinton

2012-01-20T16:55:00.000Z

I first came across the artist A R Quinton years ago in a series of little cookery books that I found in a bookshop in Bakewell. I started collecting them as I really enjoyed looking at the cover illustrations and I also discovered that the recipes in them are actually very good. There must be about forty of these books now and I have 31 of them. Only the early ones in the series have illustrations by AR Quinton though, the later ones use other artists from the same era. The painting on the front of the Kentish recipes is of Smallhythe where the actress Ellen Terry lived. DH and I visited the house a few years ago and it still looks very much as it did in the painting. All the photos will enlarge if you click on them by the way.

In the same shop I eventually came across this book illustrated by Alfred Quinton and I enjoy it as much for the artwork as for the prose. In fact let's be honest here - the artwork is definitely the real reason that I love it!

When I'm in Suffolk I like to spend time exploring the lanes and villages that are off the main roads. Brent Eleigh is one of the places I came across and the view of this beautiful house is pretty much unchanged - only the geese and the horses are missing. If you click on the link it will take you to the post where I wrote about this village along with my photo of the house.

I would love to walk into this painting of Bossington in Somerset, it looks idyllic. I wonder whether it's still the lovely, quiet lane that appears here - I do hope so.

Gradually I came across one or two more books full of A.R.Quinton's paintings, some like the one above were second hand. Alfred Robert Quinton was born in 1853 in Peckham, London. He studied at Heatherley's Art School and by 1880 was sharing a studio with another artist at New Court, Lincoln's Inn. His watercolours were regularly exhibited at the Royal Academy and two of his paintings were bought by the then Duke and Duchess of York the parents of our present Queen. From the early 1900s Quinton travelled all round England painting local scenes which were published as postcards by the firm of J.Salmon Ltd. He paints the kind of rural scenes that appeal to me immensely and he has left a wonderful pictorial record of the England that existed before the advent of the car.

Another book of paintings, I enjoy just leafing through these and slipping back in time. It also goes with me if I'm travelling in areas where I know he painted so that I can try and find the villages and cottages.

This is Kersey in Suffolk then and now - certainly still recognizable as the place in the painting though the large tree has gone and the ever present cars and telegraph pole have appeared - neither improve the view! Most of the cottages have been done up too and have lost some of their charm as a result.

I discovered that there are lots of the Salmon postcards to be had so I have started collecting a few of the village and cottage ones. They are quite hard to find as many that are on ebay are views or of places like Oxford or Windsor. They are very nice but it's the rural ones that I really like.

This is my favourite book as it has a biography of A.R.Quinton along with lots of his paintings and a great deal more information about rural life in late Victorian and Edwardian times than appears in the other two books.

One of the paintings in the above book is this one of Cockington in Devon, it brings back a lot of happy memories for me as we always spent our annual holiday in either Paignton or Torquay when I was a little girl and we always went to Cockington. The painting is of the forge which dates back to the 1400s. When I was a child it was still a working forge, now I believe they sell miniature horseshoes to the tourists. Cockington is definitely one of those 'never go back' places I think, I'd rather remember the quiet, pretty village of my childhood.

Oh dear, I'm afraid I'm going to have to add all these to my book pile - the top of the pile too! I'm still ploughing through Mr Ditchfield's Vanishing England but I shall be rather glad when I've finished it and can move on to Alfred Quinton.
Blogger does seem to have come back to normal now so hopefully it will stay that way. I really didn't like being locked out of my own blog!

The Other Book Pile

2012-01-16T15:57:00.001Z

This pile of books mostly came at Christmas and I'm afraid I've actually bought one or two (or even three!) since then. These are mostly fiction and four of them I've already finished.

'Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day' is a gentle book and a delightful story set in (and written in) the 1930s. Miss Pettigrew is a governess who goes to the wrong address for a job interview and gets involved in the life of a nightclub singer. I really enjoyed reading this.
I've also read both the Laurie R King books, they are the latest in a series about Mary Russell and her husband Sherlock Holmes! I've enjoyed all of them and am now waiting for the latest one to appear in paperback. I've also read Nancy Mitford's 'Christmas Pudding' as Christmas seemed the obvious time for a book with that particular title. It was OK but nothing to get over excited about.

Next on my list is going to be this which is the story of a farming family in Surrey during the Second World War - always a favourite period of mine.

There is quite a thick section of photographs in the centre and I'm looking forward to getting to know this family. It's going to take over from 'Vanishing England' for a while. I was wrong about having read this one before - I was thinking about another book by the same author called 'Rural England Cottage and Village Life'. The latter is an altogether delightful book illustrated by the paintings of A R Quinton. .Vanishing England' is, I fear, rather heavy going and will have to be read in chunks sandwiched between more entertaining affairs!

'Hedgerow and Wildlife' is a little book for dipping into and is small and light enough to carry with me if I want to have it handy on the spot. As it says on the cover it's a guide to animals and plants of the hedgerow and I especially like these illustrations showing the winter silhouettes of the three trees. It's mostly the written word though and would need to be combined with more specialist books on trees, wildflowers etc. It's more a starting point than anything else.

Rowland Parker was a retired teacher who lived in an old cottage in a village called Foxton in Cambridgeshire. He became interested in the history of the cottage and the people who had lived there before him and this book is the result of 12 years of research done (published 1973) before researching houses and families became a popular pastime. Thanks to John from By Stargoose and Hanglands blog for bringing this one to my attention. His blog is well worth reading.

'The Island Queen' arrived in the annual Christmas parcel from my friend in New Hampshire. It's a novel but about a real person. Celia Thaxter made a wonderful garden on the island of Appledore, one of the Isles of Shoals which lie 10 miles off the coast of New Hampshire. It should be interesting.

The remainder of the Christmas pile of books - I really did rather well for new books:)

I'm very taken with this hat and shall be acquiring some Noro yarn to knit it up very shortly. Now that the weather has turned much colder and the ground is frozen I shall be able to spend time reading and knitting - since New Year the weather has been so mild that I've spent a lot of time working in my garden. Winter seems to have reasserted itself for the moment though so it's back to the more usual January pastimes.

A Winter's Tale

2012-01-08T20:45:00.001Z

I have a great many books - shelves and shelves of them in fact. Some I have bought and never quite got round to reading properly and others I haven't read for many years. A couple of days ago I decided to gather a pile of these together and put them on a small table next to the sofa so that I can spend some of the dark winter afternoons and evenings reading or re-reading them.

Vanishing England is one of the pile that I've read in the past but I want to make a few notes of the places and buildings mentioned this time and see whether later this year I can look for some of them to see whether they have indeed vanished. If they are still there it will be interesting to see how much they have changed from the time when the book was first published in 1910. There's quite a lot on East Anglia so those I may well be able to check on when I'm visiting Neil and Cesca.

England is A Village I have read not just once in the past but several times, it was written during the early months of WW2 and published in 1940 and describes a country village life that is now long gone but one that I can just about remember.

Something else that makes this one of the books I would grab if there was a fire are the lovely illustrations by Denys Watkins Pitchford, they are so atmospheric.
Denys Watkins Pitchford is the real name of the author of three of the other books in this pile - 'The Wayfaring Tree', 'Tide's Ending' and 'Dark Estuary'. 'BB' was not only an artist but a wildfowler, angler, conservationist and superb naturalist.He was responsible for the re-introduction of the rare Purple Emperor to a wood in Northamptonshire which is now one of the best sites in Britain to see this beautiful butterfly. I own 16 of his books at present and hope to acquire more but the ones I don't have tend to be expensive as they are very collectible. The two I want most are 'A Summer On The Nene' (a really good copy is over £100 - by some distance!) and 'Indian Summer' which ranges between £40- £110! There is every chance that one of these will be joining my collection this year:)

These are the two little books sitting on top of the pile, there are two more in the series which are on my book wish list. Published in the late 1940s they are simple guides to what you might see through the year in each location. 'A Walk Down The Lane' begins

"It is damp and raw on this Winter's morning, with heavy clouds, cold,clinging mists,mud and sodden grass; chilling to the very marrow of ones bones. The lane takes on a forbidding appearance. Nature is in her nakedness and the trees shiver as Boreas, the great North Easter, blows through them."

That pretty much describes many winter mornings on the lane that leads up to Blackamoor where I walk every day with B Baggins.
The other three are 'A Walk In The Woods', 'A Walk By The River' and 'A Walk O'er The Downs' - I rather suspect that the author lived in Sussex:)

This photograph comes from Seasons of Change and shows a woman plaiting rushes into baskets. Many women supplemented the meagre wages of their ag lab husbands by making lace, straw plaiting and other rural crafts in the 19th century. The book itself chronicles the impact of the Industrial Revolution on rural life between 1850 and 1914. It is profusely illustrated with photographs throughout. I've had this book a long time but have never yet done more than leaf through it.

From the same book comes this photograph which shows how quickly people forget how hard life was only 100 years ago - the lifetime of my grandparents! This is John Brinkworth still working as a hedger and ditcher at the age of 81! No old age pensions in those days, you had to keep on working as long as you could and then if your family couldn't support you it was into the Workhouse. My mum was born in 1910 and all her life she was terrified of having to go into hospital because she associated hospital with the Workhouse. Of course many hospitals did begin life as the local Workhouse which was definitely not a place where you would want to end your days. I do seem to have strayed off the subject a bit here don't I? :)

A modern reprint of book originally published in 1952 and full of all kinds of interesting bits and pieces about the countryside and country life as it was then. I was 6 years old in 1952 and regularly walked 5 or 6 miles with my mum along local country lanes, my dad worked on Sundays so in Spring, Summer and Autumn mum and I usually went out walking taking a picnic lunch with us. We used to sing as we walked - The Happy Wanderer, Daisy,Daisy (Lend Me Your Bicycle Do),The Gypsy Rover, It's A Long Way To Tipperary and lots of other songs. It was a different world then.
Edited to add:
Did anybody notice? I was walking up the field back to Short's Lane this morning when I started singing to myself 'Daisy,Daisy, Lend me your bicycle do' when I suddenly thought 'LEND ME YOUR BICYCLE'? By the time I reached the lane I was laughing out loud and singing the proper words ''Daisy, Daisy give me your answer do'. What on earth was I thinking last night when I wrote that? Talk about a senior moment!

The Time Travellers group has a little sub group devoted to researching the Brigantes tribe which ruled a large area of Northern Britain. Cartimandua was queen of the Brigantes at the time of the Roman conquest so she is going to be my introduction to the Brigantes about whom I currently know very little indeed.

Another book I've had a good while and still not read, it's about the history, folklore, wildlife and people of the Fens - a very special area of England most of it barely above sea level which until very recently was remote from the rest of the country.

The Fens are famous for the wonderful array of wildfowl, waders and other birdlife to be found there. Here also can be found the fen raft spider, this is the UK's largest and rarest spider, one I trust I shall only ever see from a distance and preferably not at all!

So that is that is my reading for the next few weeks. I think you can glean quite a lot about me from those titles. There is of course another pile - the new books that arrived over Christmas! That's for another post though.

Happy New Year!

2011-12-31T22:31:00.000Z

Janus am I; oldest of potentates;
Forward I look, and backward, and below
I count, as god of avenues and gates,
The years that through my portals come and go.
I block the roads, and drift the fields with snow;
I chase the wild-fowl from the frozen fen;
My frosts congeal the rivers in their flow,
My fires light up the hearths and hearts of men.

from The Poet's Calendar by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Janus is the god of gates and doorways, beginnings, endings and time and it is for him that the month of January is named. I like the idea of looking both forwards and backwards. In the past lie the experiences both good and bad that have enriched and shaped our lives. We learn from all of them. In the past also lie our memories of friends and family many of them now dead and gone - how empty our lives would be without the ability to recall all the happy times shared with those who have been most important to us. As for looking forwards - a whole new year lies ahead full of possibilities and opportunities. I intend to make the most of it and I hope you all do too.

That's the serious bit - now for a peep into my past. This was taken on New Year's Eve 1997 and may not be quite the way you usually picture me:) My friends had a Barbie and Ken theme at their New Year party. My daughter's first reaction when she saw my outfit was 'You're never going to wear that!' closely followed by 'Whatever you do, mother, DON'T BEND OVER!!' I won the prize for the best ladies costume though - I've never known whether it was for a good costume or the sheer nerve it took to wear it.

Happy New Year Everyone!

Boxing Day Morning

2011-12-26T18:47:00.000Z

Bilbo Baggins and I went up on Blackamoor this morning, this is our usual morning walk these days. It was windy but very mild and, being early we had it entirely to ourselves.

The Blacka Dyke was dancing past the moss covered rocks about twenty feet below the path we were on, I love this part of the stream, it always seems a magical place to me.

A little further up the hill and set back from the path behind elders and silver birches is this holly bush which is still covered with berries.I left it untouched when I was gathering my holly and I suspect most people didn't even notice it:)

At the top of the hill is this beautiful weeping silver birch, it is beautiful at all seasons of the year but I love it best in winter with the delicate tracery of its branches outlined against the sky. I have better photos of it taken in different weather conditions but this is how it looked today.

B Baggins again, he's never far away from me on all my walks and I don't take his photograph as often as I should - he's pretty fit for a dog who will be nine years old in March.

This fragile looking lichen in the palest of greens is almost like a flower.

I have no idea of the age of this wonderful beech tree but I think it must be very old, it's a wonderful and huge tree with a canopy that spreads over a wide area.
I should think that what is in the photo is less than half of its full height.

There is still a surprising amount of fungi around and this little patch of warm yellow nestling at the foot of dead tree caught my eye. I have absolutely no idea what it is - any suggestions?

As I walked back up the lane to my car there was a thunder of hooves as William, Holly and Melissa galloped up the field to say 'Hello'. I was so busy talking to them that I never thought to take a photo! As I turned away and walked to my car I suddenly saw this gorse bush covered in flowers, a lovely spot of colour on what was quite a dull morning but definitely not a dull walk.

Merry Christmas!

2011-12-24T10:52:00.000Z

Here we are again with my traditional Christmas Eve post:)

The Night Before Christmas was always my children's bedtime story on Christmas Eve.
So for all of us who still feel the magic of this night......

'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;
The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there;
The children were nestled all snug in their beds,
While visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads;
And mamma in her 'kerchief, and I in my cap,
Had just settled down for a long winter's nap,
When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from the bed to see what was the matter.
Away to the window I flew like a flash,
Tore open the shutters and threw up the sash.
The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow
Gave the lustre of mid-day to objects below,
When, what to my wondering eyes should appear,
But a miniature sleigh, and eight tiny reindeer,
With a little old driver, so lively and quick,
I knew in a moment it must be St. Nick.

More rapid than eagles his coursers they came,
And he whistled, and shouted, and called them by name;
"Now, Dasher! now, Dancer! now, Prancer and Vixen!
On, Comet! on Cupid! on, Donder and Blitzen!
To the top of the porch! to the top of the wall!
Now dash away! dash away! dash away all!"
As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,
When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky,
So up to the house-top the coursers they flew,
With the sleigh full of toys, and St. Nicholas too.
And then, in a twinkling, I heard on the roof
The prancing and pawing of each little hoof.

As I drew in my hand, and was turning around,
Down the chimney St. Nicholas came with a bound.
He was dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot,
And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot;
A bundle of toys he had flung on his back,
And he looked like a peddler just opening his pack.
His eyes -- how they twinkled! his dimples how merry!
His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry!
His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow,
And the beard of his chin was as white as the snow;
The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth,
And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath;
He had a broad face and a little round belly,
That shook, when he laughed like a bowlful of jelly.
He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf,
And I laughed when I saw him, in spite of myself;
A wink of his eye and a twist of his head,
Soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread;
He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work,
And filled all the stockings; then turned with a jerk,
And laying his finger aside of his nose,
And giving a nod, up the chimney he rose;
He sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle,
And away they all flew like the down of a thistle.
But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight,
"Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night."

May I wish all of you a very Merry Christmas!

Happy Winter Solstice!

2011-12-21T23:21:00.000Z

"So the shortest day came, and the year died,
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world
Came people singing, dancing,
To drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the winter trees;
They hung their homes with evergreen;
They burned beseeching fires all night long
To keep the year alive,
And when the new year's sunshine blazed awake
They shouted, reveling.
Through all the frosty ages you can hear them
Echoing behind us - Listen!!
All the long echoes sing the same delight,
This shortest day,
As promise wakens in the sleeping land:
They carol, fest, give thanks,
And dearly love their friends,
And hope for peace.
And so do we, here, now,
This year and every year.
Welcome Yule!!"
- Susan Cooper, The Shortest Day

This is the third year running that I have used this poem by Susan Cooper but it is so perfect for the Winter Solstice that I'm afraid that this will probably not be its final appearance:) The beautiful illustration at the top is by Wendy Andrew from her magical book Luna Moon Hare - she has been kind enough to give me permission to use it in this post.

Today is the shortest and darkest day of the year, there is little colour in the countryside and most of the trees are bare but from this point on the days will slowly lengthen and in a few short weeks we shall see the first signs of Spring appearing. Winter is a time of slowing down and resting and if we are wise we also will use the winter to rest and reflect and renew our energy ready for the coming of Spring. A Happy and Peaceful Solstice to you all.

Images for Yule

2011-12-20T18:02:00.001Z

I thought I'd do a post about some of my Yule decorating, I still have to make a table centre and bring in my little live tree which goes on the kitchen counter but I shall do those on Christmas Eve so that they stay fresh. The wreath above is now on my back door, it was made for my daughter and was hanging on the inside of the kitchen door waiting for her. When she arrived she said she preferred the one I'd made for us so we are left with the reject:)

I love all my tree decorations which have been collected gradually over the last thirty nine years. I have special favourites though and this green Santa is one of them.

The photo doesn't do my little glass hummingbird justice, it sparkles beautifully with the tree lights shining through it.

I cross-stitched this little goose ornament about 25 years ago.

My beautiful porcelain stag cost an arm and a leg at Country Living Christmas Fair a few years ago but I had to have him.

If I could only keep one of my ornaments I think this would be the one I chose.

I made this little primitive pin tuck a couple of years ago. I keep meaning to do more as I have some lovely designs. There's still time......

I love the little mouse peeping out of the top of the stocking, it's another primitive piece that I found at a Christmas Craft Fair at Nostell Priory a year or two back.

The sledge belonged to one of my sons, every Christmas for several years now I have loaded it with holly and added tiny lights, there are actually 80 on there! The holly looks dark because I used the 'fireworks' setting on my camera to try and show the lights without any glare. The boys had a sledge each but Neil's is now in Suffolk waiting for the first snowfall so that Gabriel and George can play on it:)

The wreath on the front of the house - I'm not thrilled with any of my wreaths this year, they took forever and I just couldn't get them the way I wanted so I ended up just settling for what I'd got before I threw them on the floor and jumped on them!

And finally - this tree decoration is 35 years old now. Stephen made it out of egg cartons and silver foil at nursery school when he was 3 years old. I still hang it on the tree every year though not necessarily at the front:)

Winter

2011-12-18T08:11:00.001Z

Clouded with snow
The cold winds blow,
And shrill on leafless bough
The robin with its burning breast
Alone sings now.

The rayless sun,
Day's journey done,
Sheds its last ebbing light
On fields in leagues of beauty spread
Unearthly white.

Thick draws the dark,
And spark by spark,
The frost-fires kindle, and soon
Over that sea of frozen foam
Floats the white moon.

A short post just to get back into the swing of blogging. The last few weeks have been very busy but now the freezer is full, the tree is up and the presents are wrapped so I'm more or less ready for the festive season. My younger son is here this weekend delivering and collecting gifts so for us the winter festival has started and I have a nice quiet week ahead to enjoy it. I shall be blogging much more regularly again from now.

I must also belatedly acknowledge the Liebster Award given to me by Susanna Holstein of Granny Sue's News and Reviews. I really appreciate the honour and there are many deserving bloggers that I could pass it on to but at the moment I simply don't have time to do it. Thank you anyway Granny Sue:)

Armistice Day

2011-11-11T07:12:00.000Z

Roy Milner is one of the young men named on our local War Memorial. He was the younger son of the family who lived at Totley Hall and after leaving Repton School he went to the Royal Military College at Sandhurst. On 22nd January 1913 he was commissioned into the 2nd Battalion of the Sherwood Foresters and began his career as a regular soldier. The Milner family were well liked and respected and on the outbreak of war in August 1914 the local people lined the lane and cheered as he left to join his regiment. On September 11th 1914 the regiment landed in France and Roy wrote home to his parents to say that he was on his way to the front and in good spirits. Below is an excerpt from our book describing the last few days of his life. The details are taken from the regiment's War Diary.

On 14 September Sec. Lt Milner and his men of ‘A’ company began the 350 mile march to the area around the River Aisne in Picardy. The following day the battalion marched for fifteen hours in heavy rain. The drenching rain continued as they marched for another twelve hours on the 16th. Finally, weary and footsore, they arrived at Chacrise on the 18th where they were billeted on a farm and were given a 24 hour rest period. On 19 September with three other battalions of the 18th Brigade they moved forward to the village of Vendresse in the steep-sided Troyon valley where they relieved the 1st Black Watch in the trenches. Later that day they were moved back to a reserve line.

20 September dawned wet and cold with heavy rain and sleet falling. The Sherwood Foresters joined other regiments as they attempted, with some success, to retake trenches broken into and occupied by the Germans. Roy Milner, with a fellow officer and most of their men, was cut down by heavy machine gun fire as he led a charge up the valley. On 24 September Mr and Mrs Milner received a telegram from the War Office announcing the news of their son's death. Roy’s body now lies in Grave Ref. 6. C. 5 in the Chauny Communal Cemetery British Extension in Aisne, France. He was just 21 years old.

Remembering also Gt Uncle Harry 1880-1916 and Uncle Harold 1911-1942

When you go home, tell them of us and say
For their tomorrow, we gave our today.

What I've Been Doing!

2011-11-07T16:06:00.000Z

Once again I've been rather busy and not had much time to either blog or comment recently. There was a rather large pile of letters to answer and I've managed to get some work done in my garden too though there's still a long way to go there I'm afraid. I'd intended doing more outside today but it started drizzling while I was up on Blackamoor with B Baggins this morning so I've done other bits and pieces indoors instead. This afternoon I'm trying to catch up a little with the blogging world. Making the Christmas cake was one of the things that kept me away from the computer. It's turned out OK I think and will be wrapped in clingfilm and put up on top of a kitchen cupboard now until ten days or so before Christmas only coming down briefly a couple of times to be fed with sherry.

I've made the mincemeat as well and used some of the pretty labels that I bought at Country Living Spring Fair earlier this year. On Wednesday I'm off to London again with my friend L for the Country Living Christmas Fair where I'm hoping to find something (or even more than one something!)on which to spend the money I got for my birthday in September. I turned 65 this year and one of my gifts was £1 for each year of my age:)

This is what has really been taking up a lot of my time though. For the last couple of years two friends and I have been researching the lives of the ten men on our local War Memorial who died in the First World War. Jim and Pauline did five of them and I did the other five and also wrote the introduction, a chapter on the village in 1914 and a conclusion. It doesn't sound much but it took ages as I had to do quite a bit of research to discover something about life here at the start of the Great War. It has finally been published to coincide with Armistice Day as that seemed a fitting time for it's appearance. Now we are hoping that a few people will buy it! The vicar of the local parish church is basing his sermon for Remembrance Sunday on our book and Jim, Pauline and I will be laying a wreath at the War Memorial. Last year I did it but this year Jim is going to do it as one of the soldiers is (was?) his uncle.

A couple of peeks inside, this is the first chapter on the village as it was in 1914 and....

.....this is part of the story of Jim's uncle with a wonderful family photo. Hopefully this year instead of being just a list of names on a brass plaque these men will become real people who once lived here in our village and whose deaths will have left a huge gap in the lives of their families and friends.

A Short Visit to Wales - Great Orme

2011-10-12T15:42:00.000+01:00

A bit of back tracking is involved here as the visit to Wales was made in mid September just as the tail end of Hurricane Katia arrived in the UK! We spent the first night in Oswestry which is just on the English side of the border. Kaitlyn was so desperate to actually be in Wales that late in the afternoon we drove over the border and into the small Welsh town of Llangollen.The photo above is the River Dee which rises in Snowdonia and flows through the centre of Llangollen then on towards Chester.

The next morning we headed for Llandudno on the North Wales coast. My DH had told us that we should go up the Great Orme as it was really worth seeing. We managed to park very close to Victoria Station where the Great Orme Tramway begins its ascent.
This is the only cable-hauled tramway still operating in Britain and has been taking people up the Great Orme since 1902. With wooden seats and no glass in the windows it isn't exactly luxury travel:) The line is in two sections the lower half being the steepest with a gradient of 1 in 4. At Halfway Station you have to change on to another tram to do the second half of the journey to the top.

Journey's end - just outside the little station at the top is a statue of one of the feral Kashmir goats which have lived wild on Great Orme for over 100 years - the original goats came from a herd at Windsor Great Park which belonged to Queen Victoria.

Maybe you are wondering what the word Orme means (or maybe you aren't but I'm going to tell you anyway!)- it's believed to originate from the old Norse word 'urm' which means 'sea serpent'. The Vikings thought that the headland resembled a coiled serpent. The word worm has the same origin.
Our original plan was to do some walking and visit the iron age hillfort and hut circles and also the 12th century St Tudno's Church. The wind was incredibly strong though and once out of the shelter of the station and up on the summit it was obvious that we weren't going to be able to do this. Kaitlyn and Lucy were actually being blown about by the wind and I had trouble standing up in it as well. The different shades of blue and green in the sea were really beautiful but the photo isn't sharp because I couldn't hold the camera still.

Instead we headed down the hill to Bishop's Quarry and looked for fossils. The limestone here is full of the fossils of sea creatures from the time around 300 million years ago when the land that is now Wales was covered by a shallow tropical sea. The fossils you find have to stay put though, you aren't allowed to take any away.

Steve was anxious to visit the prehistoric copper mine so we went back down to Halfway station and followed the signs to the Ancient Mine. Originally there would have been opencast mining and this is an artist's impression of how it would have looked 4000 years ago. You'll need to click on it to see it more clearly.

This is the opencast site as it looks today.

If you want to go into the underground mines then you have to wear a hard hat so after collecting these we set off down the path to the mine entrance which is that narrow opening under the righthand sign! More clicking required here.

Kaitlyn and Lucy absolutely loved it in here much to my surprise, I thought they'd find it either boring or scary but I was wrong! All the tunnels are very narrow and the narrowest could only have been worked by children, some of them as young as five - the age that Kaitlyn is now. The mining was done using stone hammers and bone scrapers and mostly in total darkness. Archaeologists have so far found over 2500 stone hammers and over 30000 bone scrapers in the mine and more than half of it has still to be explored. Every so often as we made our way through the tunnels we found these little information boards.

I love the colours in this photo and it also shows again the narrowness of the tunnels. The tourist route through the mine only goes down through two levels but there are nine levels descending to a depth of about 230 feet/70 metres.

This is the 3500 year old Bronze Age cavern, it's thought to be the biggest prehistoric underground excavation in the world. At this point we were about 80 feet below ground.

These tunnels were blocked up with mine waste during the Bronze Age and are still to be explored by the archaeologists - this is an ongoing archaeological project that will last for many years. It's been estimated that more than 1700 tonnes of copper was extracted from this mine during the Bronze Age, enough to make 10 million axes! The copper was combined with 10% tin to make the hard alloy Bronze which was used not only for axes but also for many other items too including swords and jewellery.

This clearly shows the green malachite which contains copper. It has to be smelted at a very high temperature to extract the pure copper metal - 1100 degrees centigrade to be precise.

Eventually we returned to the surface again after a really interesting and fun visit. We were first on the tram for the second half of the descent back into the town so had time to make a thorough examination of our surroundings:)

The ride back down provides some spectacular views, this is about halfway down with the sweep of Llandudno Bay and, finally, a bit of blue sky.

This is about the steepest part of the tramway and you really,really hope that the cable doesn't break at this point! On the left is another tram on the way up. One day I'd like to go back and spend more time both in the town and on the top of Great Orme but we still had quite a long way to travel before reaching our hotel in Caernarvon. In my next post we'll visit Caernarvon Castle.

Autumn Again

2011-10-07T07:31:00.002+01:00

A very quick post this time as my entire family will be here over this coming weekend. Neil, Cesca and the boys are coming up from Suffolk to see Steve, Hannah and the girls before they return to South Africa on the 17th. Juliette will also be around for part of the time so it's going to be a busy weekend. The weather has changed drastically since my last post, it's much cooler and finally we've had some rain. The first thing I saw as I walked down Short's Lane was a rainbow - and it isn't the way I'm holding the camera, the field really does slope like that:) The green is the new crop coming through, I'm not sure yet what it is.

Further down on the other side of the lane there's a rabbit warren, usually I'm not quick enough to get a photograph but this little rabbit posed nicely and happily B Baggins didn't see him:)

I was really surprised to spot this lovely foxglove in full bloom.

There are a lot of silver birch trees in the woods and up on the moor so I see quite a lot of bracket fungus but this one was perticularly splendid.

The bridle path leading up to Lenny Hill looking very autumnal now.

Almost at the top I was admiring the view when I realised that the view was looking back at me:) I'm not sure whether this is a young red deer stag or a roebuck. In spite of desperate attempts to see whether the telltale heart shaped white patch was on his backside I couldn't make an identification. There are a few roe deer on the moor so either is possible. Anyone know for sure?

I climbed up a track to try to get a better look from higher up but he was hidden in the bracken. It was worth the climb to see the lovely view though.

Walking back down Strawberry Lee I spotted these fly agaric on the other side of the little stream at the bottom of a steep slope so risked life and limb scrambling down a deer track so I could get near enough for a photograph.

More wildlife - this was actually the previous morning, I looked down to see Mr Toad struggling through the dead leaves towards the stone wall. In spite of missing the large rabbit and the even larger deer B Baggins did spot the toad! By the time I got his lead on Mr Toad had made it to the wall.

He decided that discretion was definitely the better part of valour and with much scrabbling of feet and rustling of dead leaves he disappeared slowly from sight.
That will be it from me until next week now - hope you all have a good weekend.

Autumn Mornings

2011-10-01T13:06:00.002+01:00

We've been having some really wonderful weather over the last few days and I've been taking B Baggins up onto Blackamoor every morning. Early in the week I was lucky enough to see this stag, he had his little harem with him but they were half hidden in the bracken which is shoulder high now. Of course I only had my small camera with me so it's not a great photo, ever since seeing him I've been taking my Olympus but naturally I haven't seen him again!

This was a real surprise, I certainly wasn't expecting see and catch the scent of honeysuckle flowers in late September.

I've been seeing a lot of fly agaric and some of them have been really big - a good 6 inches in diameter in several cases. These are poisonous mushrooms......

but not to some creatures judging by all the evidence of feasting on many of the ones I see:)

There are still blackberries around but now that Michaelmas Day is behind us they are best left to foxes, birds and mice.

There are quite a lot of different fungi around and I find them fascinating even though I can name very few of them. These were growing on dead wood and I think might be sulphur tuft.

The purple sloes have almost disappeared from the area where they were so abundant a couple of months ago - obviously they have been gathered by people who don't know that they are best picked after they've had a frost on them.

There are a lot of rowan trees up on the moors and the red berries add a lovely splash of colour to the scene especially now that the leaves are beginning to turn as well.

Can you spot B Baggins in this photo? At this time of year he blends into the background so well that he's almost invisible.

This is cowberry which often grows among the bilberry bushes on the moors and they are equally edible. If you click on this photo to enlarge it you will be able to see the heavy morning dew glistening on the leaves and berries.

I'm thinking that this might be a Cep mushroom but I'm not thinking it confidently enough to try eating it!

Ripe elderberries looking really beautiful with the sun shining on them.

I don't have even a guess to offer on this one, if any fungus experts reading and can tell me what this and any of the others are I'd be delighted to hear from you.

I'm wondering whether this is a Shaggy Inkcap?

Now these I do know! The hawthorn trees are absolutely laden with berries this year - a sign of a bad winter to come in old country lore.

There are still plenty of lovely ripe rosehips about. Autumn has so much to offer especially when we get wonderful golden days like these. It's always been my favourite season of the year.

Another of my wild guesses - a yellow russula? There are likely to be quite a lot more fungus photos during October as this is the best month to see them especially if we get some rain. I do keep saying that I hope to post more regularly and it should start happening now. What I'd forgotten is that I would need to put a lot of hours in on the book I'm co-writing about the WW1 soldiers on our local War Memorial. It is just about ready to go to the printers now and they will produce a proof copy and tell us how much it will cost - then we have to persuade our Local History group to pay for it!

All's Well

2011-09-04T15:01:00.000+01:00

I've been absent from the blogging world for a while but it's simply because I've been so busy. This is just to catch up with one or two things that have been happening over the last few weeks, there has been a great deal of working on my garden which is now looking at least reasonably under control. There's also been a lot of walking with B Baggins when we've had several sightings of deer including this stag who suddenly appeared on the lane in front of us and was trotting away before I could get a good photo.

There have been several outings with both Time Travellers and Totley History Group including a visit to Beauchief Abbey. The church that is there now was originally part of the Abbey church. After the Reformation the Abbey was aquired by Sir Nicholas Strelley and it remained in this family until 1923. It was converted into a private chapel in 1662 and the interior has hardly altered since then.The pulpit, pews and altar table are all the original 17th century fittings. It deserves a post to itself which I'll do at some point when life is less hectic. Clicking on the photo will enlarge it so that you can see more detail.

We also had the once in a life time chance to go behind these gates and explore the 17th century Beauchief Hall which, after decades as a hotel and then offices has now been bought by someone who plans to restore it sympathetically and live in it as a private home again.

This is the front of the Hall with steps leading down from a lovely stone terrace into the garden which doesn't look very inspiring from this angle.....

.....but it's actually a lovely walled garden which has been well maintained.

Just to one side of main entrance is this wonderful stone mounting block.

I loved these curved steps leading down from the terrace, the archway on the left is where carriages would have driven through, the family and their guests would have then have gone up the steps to the main entrance. The doorway to the left led to the kitchens, servants hall etc. It was really great to be able to wander all over the house and explore at our leisure. It required a degree of imagination in many areas which is why there are no interior photos as they wouldn't have been very inspiring.

Then of course there was two days at Bakewell Show in early August, with my friend J (the countrywoman) on Wednesday and then on Thursday L (the shopping queen) came with me. J and I always go and see the cattle first and we are invariably the only people there apart from the farmers. We got a close up of this lovely English Longhorn which is a very ancient breed originating in the north of England.

J and I picked this handsome Hereford bull as a winner as soon as we saw him and here he is with his proud owner.

Diane and her family are at Bakewell every year demonstrating spinning and J and I always go and see them. Hopefully this winter we'll be getting some lessons from Diane - J and I both have our own spinning wheels now. Mine is purely decorative so far!

I always love seeing vintage cars.

This was one of the more unusual exhibits - not quite the vehicle I'd envisaged for my final journey!

I defintely prefer the more dignified Victorian version:)

The heavy horses are always my favourites, this one was in the decorated harness class, in the 19th century the horsemen took great pride in decorating their working horses for special occasions.

There are more entries in the heavy horse classes in recent years, it's good that they are also being used more for logging in woodland areas where they do far less damage than tractors.

For once I actually agreed with the judges - the title of this class was 'Still Life' and I think that this was perfect.

I was in East Anglia over the August Bank Holiday weekend staying with my son and his family. I don't know quite whether to say I was in Suffolk or Norfolk as they literally live on the border of the two counties. On the Sunday we went to Gressenhall Farm and Workhouse where they were having a WW2 'Village at War' weekend.

Another favourite thing - I love these old hay wagons.

George having fun 'milking'.

This was absolutely right down my street, the farmhouse kitchen being used to demostrate wartime cookery. If you enlarge the photo you'll be able to see the remains of the infamous 'Woolton Pie' on the table at the back on the right. The lady in the pink blouse told me that it's really nice and that she often cooks it at home for her family. I plan to have a go at it this autumn.

When we bought our tickets (which were like Identity Cards)the boys were given a 'ration book' so that they could go to the village shop and collect their 'sweet ration'. They are looking rather bemused about the whole thing but it took me back to when I was a little girl - I remember clearly going shopping with my mum and having the ration book with us. Sweets didn't come off the ration until I was 6 1/2 years old. It's worth enlarging this to see the expression on George's face:)

There are three Suffolk horses at Gressenhall and this is one of them working, there was a crop in the field so he may be pulling some sort of hoe? - I wasn't close enough to see and I'm no expert on farm machinery. The Suffolks are my favourite of all the heavy horses.

Gabriel trying out the wheelchair and being 'tended' by the VAD nurse - another of the many re-enactors. We had a really brilliant day here and will be going again.

Ever since Neil and Cesca went to live in Suffolk I've been angling for them to take me to Sutton Hoo. What a disappointment! In true National Trust fashion everything was fenced off and the only way to get near the burial mounds was to join a guided tour at a cost of an extra £2.50 each - I'm a member of the NT but we'd already paid £18-50 for Neil and Ces to get in. In any case the boys are too young for guided tours so we didn't want to do that anyway. There was a complete lack of imagination in evidence and it makes me once again question whether I want to belong to the National Trust - it seems to me that it's an organization that is far too full of its own importance. English Heritage is much better! Anyway we didn't stay very long and the only photos I took were of Gabriel climbing a tree and...

....this rather splendid carved seat.Wish I'd had the sense to include the whole thing in the photo so that you can see properly the it's shaped like a boat.Anyway Sutton Hoo is somewhere that we shan't be visiting again!

I shan't be around now for the next couple of weeks as my eldest son and his family are over from South Africa and he and my two granddaughters are staying with me while Hannah does the two week residential course at the start of the second year of her Masters Degree. They are over at their other grandparents house today hence the chance to do a post. We are off to Wales for a few days next weekend - first time I've been since Steve was a 6 week old baby. Apparently we are going to be climbing Snowdon!

Aspects of Africa

2011-07-17T15:52:00.000+01:00

The area of South Africa where Steve and Hannah live has many other beautiful and interesting things to see apart from the wild animals. Above is a strelitzia which is often called the bird of paradise flower and you can see why. I took this photo in the Botanical Gardens in Nelspruit but it grows wild on the Eastern Cape. As always clicking on the photos will enlarge them. This is a long post but since it's nearly 4 months since I returned from South Africa I thought that it's about time I drew a line under things this time!

Another trip up into the Drakensbergs took us to the Mankelexele Massif. Inside this dolomite mountain are Sudwala Caves which were formed about 240 million years ago, making them the oldest known caves in the world. No-one knows the true extent of this huge cave system and legend has it that there is no end to them.
The caves were used for shelter in prehistoric times, probably due in part to a constant supply of fresh air from an unknown source in the caves. This flow of air maintains the temperature at a constant 18C.

The caves are full of the most amazing stalagmites, stalactites and flowstones. Many of them have names and the one above is known as 'The Screaming Monster' and has taken 160 million years to form. A stalactite in the Sudwala caves grows at about 2.5cm in a hundred years. In case you are wondering there is a simple way to remember which is which - a stalagmite grows up from the ground and a stalactite grows down from the ceiling

This formation is called The Three Nuns because the shadow cast on the wall looks like three nuns kneeling in prayer.

Here we have the Lowveld Rocket. In this case a stalagmite and a stalactite have formed a single column which is about 150 million years old.

I think this was my favourite of all the spectacular formations in the caves - it's a piece of flowstone in the shape of a horse's head. Flowstone is formed when water is flowing down a wall or along the floor but it is made of the same calcite deposits as stalagmites and stalactites.

These are stromatolites - fossils of the first oxygen producing plants on earth called collenia. They were a type of blue-green algae that floated in the oceans of the world over 2 billion years ago!

Back to the present and it's time for some lunch. Important decisions to be made here!

Mine's a chocolate ice lolly please!

Me too - but it's melting faster than I can eat it.

This is the beautiful view we had as we ate our lunch, we could see for miles from our perch high up in the mountain. The drive up to the caves was quite something and going back down was even more breathtaking in more ways than one - you just hoped that the brakes wouldn't fail!

This orb spider was one of many in the area around the shop and cafe. Steve took this close-up - I wouldn't have dared to go that near to it.

Hannah spotted these 'whatever-they-ares' and their nest on the ceiling in the Ladies loo! It made me wonder what other wildlife was lurking about in there - we certainly saw a spitting cobra disappearing into the rocks on the opposite side of the path. Steve spotted it and it was much smaller than I expected. He had a very close encounter with one a couple of months before we arrived when it got into their washing machine (which lives on the verandah) and he had to deal with it - fortunately thanks to help from an African friend all ended well except from the snake's point of view.

The following day we went up to Hoedspruit to the Endangered Species Centre. Here they focus on the conservation and breeding of rare and endangered species particularly cheetahs. They also care for orphaned and injured animals.

This is the African Wild Dog or Painted Wolf which is Steve's favourite wild animal. The Wild Dog is an endangered species because of loss of habitat, they hunt in packs and require very large areas of territory and much of this has been taken over by the ever expanding human population. Once there were about half a million Wild Dog in Africa, now only somewhere between 3000 and 5000 of them remain.

One of the features of the Endangered Species Centre is the 'vulture restaurant' seen in this photo with some of the clientele. The long-legged birds are Marabou Storks, these can be up to 3 feet in height with a wingspan of 10.5 feet. Along with the Andean Condor it has the largest wingspan of any landbird. I confess that I find them rather cute:)

This handsome pair with the beautiful blue eyes are Hooded Vultures - believe it or not they are among the smallest of the African vultures! Vultures get a very poor press but they are actually extremely important ecologically. They are scavengers and keep natural and man-made habitats free of carcasses and waste and by doing this they restrict the spread of diseases such as anthrax and botulism. The different types of vulture each have a different role to play in stripping the carcase of every scrap of flesh, those with the strong sharp beaks opening it up the others taking their turn until finally the smaller ones clean up the remaining scraps.

Mpumalanga's sub-tropical climate makes it one of the best areas in the world for growing bananas and everywhere you go you see banana plantations with the trees all apparently growing a fine crop of blue plastic bags! Actually the bags are there to protect the fruit from damage by sun, wind, birds and insects:)

These are my favourite road signs in the whole world! It's a poor photo as it was late in the afternoon and the sun was shining straight into the camera but I had to take it while I could. The sign makes me smile but it is a very serious sign indeed as hippos are extremely dangerous animals.

Our last day and as the girls were both in school/nursery and Hannah had to work, Steve,Juliette and I had a day on our own. We decided to drive up to Sabie to visit a couple of the waterfalls, I love this photo of Steve and Juliette standing in front of Lone Creek Falls.

Lone Creek Falls pour over a 222ft high cliff covered in trees, moss and ferns.

Steve said I should take an 'artistic' shot of the Falls so here it is:)

I think that this photo of the water hitting the rocks at the bottom is rather good though I say it myself!

As we were driving from Lone Creek Fall to our next stop the sky was beginning to look rather threatening.

After parking the car there is a stiff climb of about half a mile up a narrow track through lush forest and you can hear the waters of Bridal Veil Falls long before you see them.

The Falls are 192 feet high and get their name from the resemblance to a bridal veil, this is Juliette's photo which caught the delicacy better than any of mine.We kept hearing a rumble of thunder in the distance and I saw Steve keep glancing up at the sky. Suddenly he said "Time to go" and we set off back down the steep track. I was picking my way carefully as befits a lady of a certain age when there were a couple of cracks of thunder closely followed by lightning flashes and I was off down that track like a young mountain goat! Suffice it to say that I arrived back at the car ahead of both Steve and Juliette:):)

Just in time too - African storms can be both violent and spectacular but I'd rather see them from inside a car than from halfway down a mountain. The windscreen wipers were going full belt when I took this photo. We headed back to Sabie and the Pancake House where the staff dashed out with golf umbrellas to shelter us as we raced for the entrance. We sat and watched the storm as we ate our pancakes, there's a huge choice of fillings and they are really good, Steve and Hannah go here quite often.

Finally the storm began to pass and the Drakensberg Mountains started to reappear through the mist. It was a pretty memorable end to a brilliant holiday.

Pilgrim's Rest

2011-06-30T20:41:00.000+01:00

We are back in South Africa again on a very hot Saturday afternoon when we drove up along the Eastern Escarpment of the Drakensberg Mountains to Pilgrim's Rest. This was site of the first great goldrush in South Africa in 1873. A man called Alec 'Wheelbarrow' Patterson discovered gold in a stream now known as Pilgrim's Creek and although he tried to keep it quiet the word soon got out and miners appeared from all points of the compass anxious to try their luck - 1500 of them by the end of that year!!. These men had some wonderful names - Yankee Dan, Black Sam, French Bob, Spanish Joe and One-Eye Spinner among them. Pilgrim's Rest must have been a pretty lively place in those days:) By 1972 the gold had run out but the village was preserved as a living museum. The top photo is mine and shows the Post Office as it is today and the lower one is a photograph of it in the 1890s with the Royal Mail coach outside. As ever clicking will enlarge my photos though sadly not the old one.

Dredzens was the general store which has been preserved as it was during the period between 1930 and 1950. I found the interior absolutely fascinating, you could buy just about anything in this place.

Looking for a new teapot or some kitchen china? Or maybe you're off on a trip and need a suitcase.........

......and if you're off on holiday better get a pretty new hat and a couple of new shirts and a panama for the man of the house! And maybe a new pair of gloves? A lady would never be seen out without gloves even in summer.

You can buy a wireless or a record player or a new bike or maybe more mundane things like Jeyes Fluid or Vim. And all those barrels - I wonder what they contained? I could have spent hours in here.

Behind the shop are the family's living quarters which are furnished in the way they would have looked during the 1940s. This is the combined living and dining room which was a decent sized area.

Steve and myself (holding Lucy) in the kitchen with the pantry in the background.

The other end of the kitchen with the old shallow stone sink. My gran had a sink like this in her scullery when I was a little girl.

The 1940s bedroom with someone's best frock hanging on the wardrobe and a photo of a soldier on the wall - a son serving overseas perhaps? Many South Africans served with the Allied Forces in WW2.

The old Garage with its vintage petrol pump now houses a small but interesting transport museum.

Among the exhibits was this fabulous 1928 Chevrolet.

Even more interesting and atmospheric was this transport wagon. These were drawn by teams of up to fourteen oxen and were the lifeblood of South Africa in the 1800s and early 1900s. The journeys were slow as the animals needed to graze for eight hours a day and also needed to rest for eight hours, the travelling was mostly done in the cooler hours of the early morning or late afternoon and they would cover around 18 miles each day.

I bought this book on my first visit to South Africa and it has strong connections with Pilgrim's Rest.Percy Fitzpatrick was a transport rider carting supplies for the goldfields at Pilgrim's Rest and Barberton from Delagoa Bay in what was then Lourenco Marques but is now known as Mozambique. Jock was his dog, a bull terrier who travelled all over what is now Mpumalanga with his master. The story is fascinating for the picture it gives of the lives of these transport riders as they travelled in what was then dangerous and often unexplored country.

Jock became so famous that there are memorials to him all over Mpumalanga where the routes he travelled cross modern roads and this includes the area that is now Kruger National Park.

This is the cemetery at Pilgrim's Rest, I'm not holding my camera at an angle, it really is this steep! Steve and Kaitlyn climbed to the top but it was so hot in the midday sun that I gave up halfway. Hannah, Lucy and Juliette didn't even come this far.

This was the original grave in the cemetery, a man was caught and convicted of tent robbery and banished from Pilgrim's Rest. He was later found on this nearby hill and shot. He was buried in a grave facing north-south branding him as a thief. Every other grave in the cemetery is oriented eat-west.

Many of the graves belong to people who were a very long way from home and at 38 George Davies was two years younger than the average person buried here. Few died peacefully in their beds - snake bite,malaria,dysentery and other diseases,drowning and accidents claimed most of the lives.

No burial records were kept until 1911 but the earliest marked grave is that of a man crushed by a boulder on his claim in 1874. There are 320 known graves but only 163 of them have headstones or markers of some sort. Most are simply marked out with stones like these in a quiet corner near the entrance.

I think there are worse places to be buried than here though with this stark but beautiful view over the Drakensberg Mountains.

Scenes From My Week

2011-06-20T08:14:00.001+01:00

A very wet Sunday morning in the herb garden at Hardwick Hall.

On Monday morning I finally caught a glimpse of the deer that I've been looking for on Blackamoor for nearly a year! They were passing through some woodland on Strawberry Lee Lane and were there and gone before I had chance to take many photos. What with them being on the move and B Baggins on his lead and equally interested in seeing them the few photos I did take were poor - but at least I saw them!

All week both in Ecclesall Woods and in the woodland areas on Blackamoor I've been assailed by the wonderful perfume of the wild honeysuckle which seems to be exceptionally abundant this year.

A close up - the honeysuckle does at least stand still:)

There are cattle on the moor at the moment, they are there to help control the bracken which is threatening to swamp the bilberries and heather. These seem to have lost their way and were on the path down from Lenny Hill to Strawberry Lee Lane. I finally managed to herd them back up into the woods - my calm 'Cush Cush's' were interrupted at intervals by yell's of 'STAY THERE' as B Baggins showed signs of making a closer inspection of them! Happily he did as he was told and all was well. I certainly had no intention of putting him on the lead in that narrow space!

These two friends I see every morning grazing in the field at the bottom of Shorts Lane.

On Thursday morning I was surprised to see these two young stags in the field just below where I park the car. Having looked in vain for nearly a year I saw the deer three times this week as they were up on Big Moor on Wednesday too but only on the skyline and much too far away for photographs. I shan't be around for the next week as we are off to our house in Lancashire today. I hope the weather turns out better than the forecast which appears to be wall to wall rain!

Walking Into The Past

2011-06-18T18:01:00.000+01:00

In recent months a new archaeology group has started up in our village with the great name of Time Travellers. We are a small and friendly group of enthusiastic amateurs, a mixture of hands-on types and those like me with more of an interest in the results of someone else's hard work:) Earlier this month we had an outing to Creswell Crags to see the prehistoric cave art that was discovered there recently. Creswell Crags was among the most northerly places on earth to have been visited by our nomadic ancestors during the Ice Age and there have been hundreds of finds there of stone, bone and ivory tools. (All the photos will enlarge if you click on them.)

These are all replicas of the original finds which are now in various museums around the country. Near the top you can see a bone needle which would have been used to sew animal skins and furs into clothing and bags. The bags would have been used to carry things both large and small. Some of the axe heads and arrow heads are really beautiful when you look at them closely. The replicas are all made by experts in these ancient crafts.

The interior of the cave which contains the cave art, I have to tell you that I was horrified to discover that there were spiders all over the walls and ceiling!! I concentrated very hard on the art which was actually very necessary as you would never spot it unless it was pointed out. This was not painting as in the caves at Lascaux but simply drawings scratched into the rock using a flint tool of some sort.

This is a carving of an Ibis bird, the top photo is borrowed from the Creswell Crags website and the lower one is my photo. It's hard to photograph it as it's done on a curve of the rock and the man (or woman!) who did it used this curve to form most of the body. At the top is the beak with a natural indentation in the rock forming the eye and then the lines coming down at an angle are the bird's neck. Once you get your eye in it's easy to see but had I been the one searching in the cave the drawings would have remained forever undiscovered I'm afraid.

This is part of what you can actually see on the wall, can you pick out the stag? Look for his eye to the left of the modern graffiti and then try. No? Then move on to....

....the useful interpretation which shows not only the stag but various other things as well!

There are not only caves to be seen at Creswell Crags,the land originally belonged to the Duke of Portland and it is thanks to him that the site still exists. There were plans to put the a railway through the gorge in the 19th century and in order to prevent this the Duke had a large artificial lake made thus preventing the destruction of the archaeology and also providing a home for large numbers of waterfowl including Mama Mallard and her babies.....

.....and this little family of cygnets. Mummy and Daddy Swan were close by too:)

On Wednesday of this week a small group of us went up onto the moors in search of stone circles and burial cairns. On the way up to Frogatt Edge we passed this huge rock which one of our number called 'The Dog Stone'. We all saw straightaway what he meant, if you enlarge the photo I'm sure you'll see it too:)

Here is one of the entrances to Stoke Flat Circle on Frogatt Edge. The Peak District circles are not on the same scale as places like Stonehenge and Avebury of course but this one is unusual because it has two rings of standing stones on each edge of a low bank. The circle is too big to get the whole of it into a photograph unless you are in an aeroplane or have a very much more powerful zoom than I possess.

This is all of the group except me posing artistically by the largest of the standing stones. You can see for miles in every direction from here.

The moors are covered in wild flowers at this time of the year, this is sheep's sorrel (the red stuff) and what I think may be heath bedstraw.

This is a reconstructed burial cairn on Big Moor, it has been excavated and an urn containing the cremated remains of a child was found. I confess that I don't like the idea of burials being excavated even when they are very ancient. No-one would be allowed to go and excavate a grave in a churchyard however old and interesting it might be so why is it OK if the burial is elsewhere? There is great debate about this of course the main excuse being that 'we can learn so much from the remains'. Possibly, but I still don't think that this is a valid reason for desecrating a grave.

This is another cairn burial that has been excavated but it has been left open. The moors are covered with both stone circles and ring cairns - over 40 of them in the Peak District in fact! I knew that there are three circles near here but had no idea that there were as many as that.

This stone circle is known rather unromantically as Barbrook 2 Circle. It's been excavated and then reconstructed to give an idea of how it would have looked originally. There is a stone cist and a cairn inside the circle both dating to about 1800BC.

There are many of these guide stoops on the moors most dating from the 18th century. They were put there to help guide travellers over the bleak and dangerous moorland tracks, this one has a hand pointing to Sheffield in one direction and on the other side is a hand pointing towards Bakewell. Even today the moors can be dangerous, the weather can close in very quickly and it is very easy to become disorientated.This particular stoop is now close to the main road and marked the end of a really interesting and enjoyable day - and we got home just before the downpour that had threatened all day finally arrived:)

A June Morning

2011-06-06T22:10:00.000+01:00

We've been having some beautiful early mornings recently and B Baggins and I have been up on Blackamoor taking advantage of the sunshine and the tranquility. The wild roses are beginning to flower and I could look at them for hours. They are so beautiful and delicate with a lovely faint perfume.

They are equally beautiful when the buds are just beginning to open.

There is often a small herd of cows in the fields at the top of the lane where I park my car. They have several calves with them at the moment but the only time they were right near the road I didn't have my camera with me!

At the bottom end of the lane is this friendly looking ram who has a little harem of eight ewes to keep him company.

B Baggins taking advantage of Blacka Dike to cool down and have a drink before we start the steep climb up to Lenny Hill. A lot of these photos are clearer if you click on them, the sun is so bright that you can't actually tell that he's lying in a river in the small version. The water levels are very low at the moment because we've had so little rain this spring. I don't need to use the stepping stones as it's shallow enough to walk across.

The flowers on this wild rose are white and I think it's a field rose rather than a dog rose but I'm open to correction here.

The highest point of this particular walk, the small mound is the top of Lenny Hill. Just below where B Baggins is standing four tracks meet so you have a choice of walks from here. I shall be turning down the track to Strawberry Lee Lane as it makes a nice circular walk back to Shorts Lane.

I usually spend a few minutes sitting on this bench which stands where the four tracks meet. Carved around the top of it are these lovely words. I'm not sure whether it's poem or prose but I always read it and this morning I put a small notebook in my pocket so that I could write it down.

Heather welcomes all
Purple petal blowing
Sways of breeze
Cuddle with clouds of fragrance
Gusts of wind tickle softly
And so you carry on your journey.

Where a few weeks ago these branches were thick with blackthorn blossom now they are thick with sloes which will be put to good use in the autumn. They are green at the moment of course but as the year progresses they will ripen to a beautiful deep purple/black.

The huge soft leaves of the burdock with pink clover and buttercups. Burdock roots can be eaten and with the addition of dandelion root plus various spices and other bits and pieces they make the world's most wonderful soft drink - dandelion & burdock:)

I was really surprised to see that the spiky beech nut cases are already very visible and there are going to be lots of them by the looks of it.

Here I have turned off Strawberry Lee Lane onto a footpath that leads down between two farms. Until a couple of years ago it was just a steep,muddy track but now there are steps and a rough surface and happily all the wild flowers are now coming back.

B Baggins was determined to be in this photo! I was actually trying to photograph the plant by the wall which I've always known as vinegar plant because that's what my mum called it. I think it's proper name is common sorrel though. I grew up calling a lot of things by their country names, my dad showed me a bird that he called a peewit and I was an adult before I realised that it was another name for the lapwing. The call it makes sounds like 'peewit' which is how it got its country name.

This pretty daisy is the Scentless Mayweed.

Right at the bottom of the path is a small enclosure filled with ox eye daisies and pink campion. You definitely need to enlarge this to see properly how pretty it looks.

The path must have been straightened here at some point as it now goes past rather than through this lovely old stone squeeze style.

I knew what this was well before I got there because I could smell the wonderful scent of aniseed in the air - these are the seed pods of Sweet Cicely. The leaves can be used when you are cooking rhubarb or gooseberries as it reduces the amount of sugar that you need. The seeds are also aniseed flavoured and can be dried and used rather like caraway seeds. I love this plant for its name alone and have it growing in my garden but it grows wild in many places around here.

Finally we cross the narrow wooden bridge over the stream and walk up the field back to Shorts Lane. It's sheer delight to walk up here at the moment as the fields are thick with buttercups and it looks cheerful even on a dull morning. The whole walk can be done in about 45 minutes if you treat it like a route march but B Baggins and I take about an hour and a half because we are both looking for interesting sights and smells - in my case the smells are wild roses, elderflowers and sweet cicely:) I think B Baggins has a different agenda:)

Close Encounters of the Elephant Kind

2011-05-30T12:18:00.000+01:00

We are back in Africa now as I still have a couple of posts to do about my visit there earlier this year. For Steve and Hannah it was still term time and although they took some leave there were a couple of days when Juliette and I had to amuse ourselves. On one of these days we went to Elelphant Whispers.

There are six elephants living here and all have been rescued from planned culling operations at various game reserves and now spend their time as 'elephant ambassadors'. They are used to teach visitors about elephants and to allow close interaction with these magnificent animals. All are young elephants the oldest being Tembo who is 27 years old. The four in the above photo are Medwa, Andile, Shamwari and Ziziphus.

Andile has been asked to lie down so that we can go up and really look at her closely. She is a young elephant still in her teens.

A good portion of an elephant's foot is composed of fibrous fatty tissue which acts as a shock absorber. It's like an elastic spongy cushion which helps the elephant maintain its grip on the ground and also allows it to move silently. When I pushed on the sole of Andile's foot I could feel it give quite substantially. You can see the huge toe nails here as well but these aren't actually attached to the toes and there are only four toenails whereas there are five toes buried deep inside the foot.

I found this illustration which shows the inside of the foot which doesn't look the way you'd expect. The elephant essentially walks on tiptoe!

Andile is showing us her teeth and tongue in this photo. Clicking on it will give you a better view. Her tongue feels like smooth satin when you touch it. An elephant has six sets of molars during its lifetime and as a tooth wears out from the constant grinding another one pushes forward to replace it. The worn down teeth wear off onto a shelf which eventually breaks off and falls out.The final set of molars appear when an elephant is about 30 years old and last until around the age of 65. As the final molar breaks down it becomes increasingly difficult for the elephant to break down and digest food and the main cause of death in mature elephants isn't old age but starvation.

The thick, wrinkled skin helps elephants stay cool because water gets trapped inside the wrinkles and evaporates slowly thus cooling the elephant. And just look at those eyelashes!

Elephant's use their ears to help regulate their body temperature. The back of the ear has a huge network of veins and capillaries and the hot blood from the arteries is cooled as it filters through them before returning to the body. They are used for signalling too - if you see an elephant with its ears spread wide it means it sees you as a potential threat!

Time for Tembo to take centre stage now as we take it in turns to stand between his front legs to have our photograph taken with him. I'm actually leaning against him and feeling extremely small! Those magnificent ivory tusks are used to dig for water, salt or roots, for debarking trees and on occasion for fighting.

There was only one young couple there at the same time as us and they had only booked to do the interaction. Juliette and I had also booked to go for a ride and there were just the two of us for this part of session. We were lucky as the previous day had been very busy and we wouldn't have had quite as much time with the elephants when a large group were there. I was riding Lindiwe as she is the smallest elephant and as I have back problems I was told that the smaller elephant was a wiser choice.

Riding an elephant is an odd feeling to begin with, like camels they get up front feet first but the motion is different once they start to walk - I've ridden both horses and camels and it isn't like either. Apparently some people get motion sickness and we were told to tell our handler if necessary as there is an emergency stop command for the elephants!

Happily Juliette and I were fine and once I had adjusted to the rhythm I felt I could have gone on all day. Although only two elephants were being ridden all of them came on the walk presumably because they like to move as a herd.

Here I am saying 'thank you for a lovely ride' to Lindiwe, she is very keen to accept the treats I'm offering:) Her trunk is incredibly sensitive and can pick up something as small as a blade of grass. It's used for smelling, drinking, feeding and as an exploratory organ rather as we would use our fingers. It also gets used as a snorkel when they are swimming.
It was a really wonderful experience, being so close to these magnificent creatures and spending time with them was a real privilege and something I shall never forget.

The Tudors Again!

2011-05-15T18:14:00.000+01:00

Last Saturday I had the pleasure of meeting up with Diane of Heart Shaped and Rosie of Corners Of My Mind at Haddon Hall. I hadn't intended doing a post about it as I still had the Tudor Revels post and at least a couple more from my Africa trip to do. On reflection though I decided I would write a little about it as I had such a lovely time with them (in spite of the rain!). Both have written much more extensively and with many more photos than I'm doing so do go and visit their blogs.
The photo above shows the fabulous topiary in the Gardener's Cottage which lies at the foot of the slope that leads up to the Hall itself. The Boar's Head and the Peacock are emblems of the Manners family who have owned Haddon Hall since the mid 16th century. Haddon itself dates back to the 12th century though and is one of the best kept secrets of the Derbyshire Peak District.

The reason for our visit was to see the Tudor Re-enactment that was taking place over the weekend. As we climbed up towards the Hall we met these Tudor youngsters on their way down.

I couldn't resist putting in this photo of the old stone trough planted up with wallflowers even though I know Diane and Rosie have both used it in their posts. It made such a lovely splash of colour on what was a decidedly grey day.

Gathering herbs to be used in some of the dishes being prepared for the Lord of the Manor and his guests.

In the Great Hall the menservants are receiving instructions on the correct way of approaching the Lord of the Manor's table when they are serving the meal. There was a very strict and formal way of doing this in Tudor times. I've visited Haddon many times but this was the first time I've seen a fire burning in the great hearth and it made such a difference to the room.

Pastry being prepared for one of the many elaborate pies that would form part of the meal. I have a green glazed bowl exactly like the one on the table but I confess that I've never made pastry or anything else in it in case it gets chipped!

Haddon has the most wonderful medieval kitchens and it's fantastic to see them being put to use again. The young man has the fiddly task of removing half the shell of these quail eggs so that they can appear at table looking as though they are whole!

Just look at all these wonderful bowls and jugs and jars - I can't tell you how much pleasure it gives me just to look at them.

More of the dishes and flagons and in the background you can see one of the bread ovens which has been fired and used to bake bread and pastries.

Again Rosie and Diane both featured these lovely arrangements that were in may of the rooms of the Hall, they are so simple - sprays of beech and hedge parsley in a plain glass container but they look stunning. All three of us loved them.

The upper servants dine before the Lord of the Manor and his family and guests. I was surprised to learn that' the family's priest was counted as an upper servant but apparently this was the case. These servants eat well though not the elaborate kind of meals that are served to their master. The lower ranks of the servant class certainly wouldn't be eating the beef and cheese that appear on this table, a bowl of pottage and a hunk of bread would have been about it. Sadly at this point I had to leave as my husband was away and a certain dog was waiting for me to take him out for his afternoon walk - a very late afternoon walk by the time I got home poor lad. It was such fun seeing it all with Diane and Rosie and hopefully we will have another joint outing at some point.

Tudor Revels

2011-05-10T21:33:00.000+01:00

This is a rather belated post about May Day, I was staying with my son and his family in Suffolk and on the Sunday we went to the Tudor Re-enactment at Kentwell Hall. Kentwell is an Elizabethan manor house which was built in the late 16th Century by the Cloptons, a wealthy local gentry family.

Kentwell is a moated manor house. Originally built as a first line of defence the moats gradually became ornamental rather than practical.

In the kitchen servants were busy preparing the midday meal.

I really love all the baskets and pottery from this period, I have quite a few replica bowls and jugs in my kitchen and would like more of them too:)

The lord of the manor and his guests at their midday meal.I thought this was interesting as it shows details of the clothes and also you can see that only the head of the household sat on a proper chair. The other guests and members of the household are sitting on wooden benches.

People are eating off either pewter plates or wooden trenchers and the utensils consist of only a knife and a spoon.It was perfectly acceptable, even in the most aristocratic circles, to use your fingers to pick up and eat many items of food.They are probably drinking ale as most water was polluted and dangerous to drink. Even children would drink 'small beer' which had a very low alcohol content.

Meanwhile these young girls were making May garlands weaving wildflowers and sprigs of willow or honeysuckle onto a circle made of willow withies. They are so pretty that I'm going to have a go myself next year as it's only the same priciple as I use to make my wreaths at Yule.

The procession of villagers going towards the Hall to begin the day's revelries. The man dressed in the colourful costume made of rags is the Master of Ceremonies who will be taking part in the Mummer's play.

St George being despatched by Saladin! Of course being a Mummer's play St George is eventually restored to life in a very dramatic fashion by the Quack Doctor and lives to fight the Dragon another day:)

After the excitement of the play the gentry can relax and enjoy a quiet chat....

.....while the villagers look forward to the next part of the May Day celebrations as they return to the Village Green.

The high spot of May Day is the raising of the Maypole, a young tree gaily decorated with coloured ribbons.

The village band strikes up and......

.....the revels begin.

A certain young man has his first archery lesson. Through his grandmother (me!) the blood of Cheshire bowmen runs in his veins - they were reknowned as the finest archers of medieval England.

Earlier we had George and the Dragon, here we have George and the peacock:)

A quiet moment at the end of a wonderful day.

Queen of the May

2011-04-29T09:25:00.000+01:00

You must wake and call me early, call me early, mother dear;
To-morrow ’ill be the happiest time of all the glad New-year;
Of all the glad New-year, mother, the maddest merriest day,
For I’m to be Queen o’ the May, mother, I’m to be Queen o’ the May.

There’s many a black, black eye, they say, but none so bright as mine;
There’s Margaret and Mary, there’s Kate and Caroline;
But none so fair as little Alice in all the land they say,
So I’m to be Queen o’ the May, mother, I’m to be Queen o’ the May.

I sleep so sound all night, mother, that I shall never wake,
If you do not call me loud when the day begins to break;
But I must gather knots of flowers, and buds and garlands gay,
For I’m to be Queen o’ the May, mother, I’m to be Queen o’ the May.

The honeysuckle round the porch has woven its wavy bowers,
And by the meadow-trenches blow the faint sweet cuckoo-flowers;

And the wild marsh-marigold shines like fire in swamps and hollows gray,
And I’m to be Queen o’ the May, mother, I’m to be Queen o’ the May.

The night-winds come and go, mother, upon the meadow-grass,
And the happy stars above them seem to brighten as they pass;
There will not be a drop of rain the whole of the livelong day,
And I’m to be Queen o’ the May, mother, I’m to be Queen o’ the May.

All the valley, mother, ’ill be fresh and green and still,
And the cowslip and the crowfoot are over all the hill,
And the rivulet in the flowery dale ’ill merrily glance and play,
For I’m to be Queen o’ the May, mother, I’m to be Queen o’ the May.

So you must wake and call me early, call me early, mother dear,
To-morrow ’ill be the happiest time of all the glad New-year;
To-morrow ’ill be of all the year the maddest merriest day,
For I’m to be Queen o’ the May, mother, I’m to be Queen o’ the May.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

The painting at the top of this post is called 'Queen Guinevere's Maying' by an artist called John Collier.
I shall be away visiting my son and daughter-in-law in their new home in Norfolk for a few days and hopefully going to a Tudor Living History Day at Kentwell Hall on May Day. This is one of the lovliest times of the year now filled with all the wonderful fresh new leaves and flowers of early summer.

The wonder of the world,
the beauty and the power,
the shapes of things,
their colours,lights, and shades;
these I saw.
Look ye also while life lasts.

I wish all of you a very Happy Beltane.

Kruger

2011-04-18T12:58:00.000+01:00

I'm finally back again with another post about my trip to South Africa. There is so much to do in the garden at this time of year and in the UK you can never be sure how long the good weather will last so I tend to make the most of it while it's here! The forecast for the rest of this week is good though so I'm going to get this done before going out for another gardening session.
We had two visits to Kruger National Park but neither was especially great as it's the wrong time of year, the grass is very long after the summer rains and it's hard to spot the animals even when they are fairly close by. We didn't see any of the big cats at all sadly but the animals we did see we got pretty close to, the photos are a selection from both days. Above is a huge bull elephant who was right by the side of the road. He made it clear that he intended crossing and that we were in his way so Steve reversed a short distance to let him pass.

This isn't a great photo but I put it in to show just how much it was raining and just how close we were to the elephant.

There is a lot to see besides the big animals, there are many beautiful birds for instance. This is a European Roller and you can see from the sky in the background that we weren't having the greatest of weather!

This photo was taken by my daughter as most of the good sightings we had were on the side of the car where she and Steve were sitting so I found it hard to get good shots a lot of the time. This is Juliette's favourite animal - a warthog. I must admit that I rather like them too.

Steve is very good at spotting small things at the side of the road, while we are all shouting 'elephant, elephant' he's busy shouting 'chameleon' or 'dung beetle'!
This smartly dressed chap strutting along the side of the road is a chameleon of course. It's worth enlarging the phot so that you can see his face and the beautiful markings more clearly.

We didn't actually see any dung beetles this trip so I am cheating and putting in this photo taken when I was there in 2004. They are amazing little creatures and I can still remember watching as he staggered across the road pushing something that was 3 or 4 times his size.

One thing we did see a lot of was baboons invariably in big family groups. This one was sitting by the roadside peacefully enjoying what looks remarkably like an apple.

Baby baboons are very cute indeed.

This is the nearest you are going to get to seeing a leopard in this post! A leopard tortoise pottering along the road. It's actually very interesting to see this kind of thing. I suspect that a great many people are so busy looking for lions and elephants that they miss the smaller and often equally interesting creatures.

If you enlarge this you will see impala in the background. There were actually four giraffes but they were never close enough together to get them all in one shot. We saw quite a lot of giraffe but they were surprisingly hard to spot among all the trees and undergrowth.

The Southern Ground Hornbill is the largest of the hornbills and is increasingly rare. They are mostly only seen within game reserves now and they are not all that common even in a protected environment so we were lucky to see them and especially as close as this. They were within a few feet of the car and I was the one who spotted them:):)

The hippo and two buffalo were on the other side of a fairly wide river but fortunately we had binoculars with us so were able to get a good view of them.

I've cropped one of my photos of the hippo so that you can see him better.

Same hippo but he's trundled along into the river now.

This handsome bird is a saddle-billed stork. They are huge birds and the males can be up to 5 feet tall with a 9ft wing span.

We were fortunate to get a really good view of this herd of zebra, you don't see zebra anything like as often as you'd think.

Another of Juliette's photos, the baby elephant was on her side and my view was also blocked by an excited Kaitlyn leaning across in front of me:)

It was the end of the second day and we were heading towards Phabeni gate when we saw what was the best sighting of all as far as I'm concerned. This female spotted hyena was laid by the side of the road suckling her cub. I never expected to get as close as this to a hyena.

She raised her head to look at us as we sat watching but gave no sign of being afraid or moving.Hyenas have a poor public image but after seeing this they have taken their place among my favourite animals.In fact they are not primarily scavengers but are very efficient hunters who will successfully tackle prey as large as buffalo. They are highly intelligent animals too.

We did actually see a rhino and various types of antelope - waterbuck and kudu among them but they were too far away or too invisible among the grasses for good photos. Here, for instance, we have my rhino photograph! Not a candidate for wildlife photograph of nthe year I think you'll agree:) It does show how hard it was to see things though.
So there you have it, not all that exciting really but one or two moments worth waiting for. Other people's Africa blogs will show you lions, leopards and cheetah, with me you get chameleons and dung beetles! At least it's a bit different though:)

Green Rain

2011-04-08T12:30:00.000+01:00

Into the scented woods we'll go
And see the blackthorn swim in snow.
High above, in the budding leaves,
A brooding dove awakes and grieves;
The glades with mingled music stir,
And wildly laughs the woodpecker.
When blackthorn petals pearl the breeze,

There are the twisted hawthorn trees
Thick-set with buds, as clear and pale
As golden water or green hail--
As if a storm of rain had stood
Enchanted in the thorny wood,
And, hearing fairy voices call,
Hung poised, forgetting how to fall.

By Mary Webb

Just a very quick interim post, I'm really busy trying to catch up in the garden while we have this lovely weather but there will be more on Africa soon.

An African Adventure

2011-03-30T21:57:00.001+01:00

I've been back from South Africa for a week and a half now but have been both too busy and too tired to post - the journey back involved a long wait between flights at Johannesburg so, since neither J nor I can sleep on planes, it meant that we were awake for well over 36 hours and it took me a while to recover. Above is the view from the plane as we flew from Johannesburg to Kruger. It's a small (very small!) plane so you are always flying at a low enough height to see the scenery below.

These Vervet monkeys were at the side of the road as Steve drove us from the airport to our hotel in White River, they are all over the place including the verandah of Steve's bungalow on occasion!

Impala are also very common but I always enjoy seeing them as they are such attractive animals. This too was at the side of the road between the airport and White River - in spite of being called Kruger International it's actually a very small and rural airport and all the buildings have thatched roofs, it's easily the most attractive airport I've ever seen. Of course I never thought to take a photo of it!

On our first full day Steve drove us up to Blyde River Canyon which is the third largest canyon in the world. This is the Pinnacle, a 30 metre high pillar of quartzite rising out of the wooded canyon floor with spectacular views from the viewing platform.

Next stop was Bourke's Luck Potholes where we had some lunch accompanied by more Vervet monkeys. One jumped onto our table and snatched half of Kaitlyn's toasted sandwich, I'm afraid I burst out laughing and a furious little voice informed me that 'It's not funny Granny!' Actually she's quite right, these monkeys can become very aggressive where food is concerned so you don't argue if one wants to share your lunch - her face was an absolute picture though as the monkey disappeared up a tree with her sandwich:) Steve told me that a bite from a Vervet would mean an immediate rabies shot - not a pleasant prospect.

The girls loved it here as they were able to paddle in small shallow rock pools while further along bigger people could sit and cool their feet in the fast flowing Treur River.
In 1843 a group of Voortrekkers led by Andries Potgieter reached the edge of the Great Drakensburg Escarpment as they searched for a route to Delagoa Bay in Mozambique. There appeared to be no possible way down for 50 km in any direction. Leaving the women, children and a few men outspanned on the banks of a river just below the top of the escarpment (near what is now the town of Graskop) Potgeiter and the rest of the men set off on horseback to try to find a way down to the Lowveld. The group who stayed behind were given strict instructions to turn back if the scouting party hadn't returned in 2 months time. They remained a fortnight beyond the two months and then sadly they started the long journey back - the river they had camped by during those long anxious weeks they named Treurrivier - the River of Sorrow. This is the river where Kaitlyn and Lucy were so happily playing.
NB Outspanning means unharnessing the animals that are pulling the wagons and making camp.

I couldn't resist taking a photo of this beautiful damselfly - there were several of them around looking like flying jewels.

This is where the Treur River begins its spectacular descent to join the Blyde River. Click on the photo to enlarge it.

Bourke's Luck Potholes where the Treur River cascades into the Blyde River. Over millions of years the meeting of the swirling waters of these two fast flowing rivers has eroded the bedrock to form these fantastic potholes. It's an amazing sight.

The Blyde River - as our Voortrekkers slowly continued their sad journey home they had to ford another river. As they were crossing what must have seemed like a miracle occurred. They were overtaken by the men they had believed to be dead and this happy reunion was marked by naming the river Blyderivier - River of Joy. So we have a happy ending after all:) The scouting party had eventually found a route down the Escarpment by following an animal track and had successfully reached Delagoa Bay and signed a trade agreement with the Portuguese.

I'm afraid I couldn't resist ending this post with another monkey photo - they are so very cute:)

The Pepys Connection

2011-03-02T22:49:00.001Z

On my final morning in London I walked to the City again but this time I had two definite objectives in mind. The photo above shows Lovat Lane which runs from Eastcheap down to Lower Thames St and gives a real feel of the historic City. It is still cobbled and down the centre where there are two lines of cobblestones would once have run an open sewer. All the photos will enlarge if you click on them.

My first objective was the church of St Olave, Hart St. My reason for visiting it was that the sister of one of my husband's ancestors was baptized here in 1794. Once inside I discovered that it had much more important connections than 4xGt Aunt Matilda!

St Olave's was the church that Samuel Pepys attended when he lived and worked at the Navy Office on Seething Lane which runs along the back of St Olave's. The photograph shows the Pepys Memorial which marks the site of the Navy Office pew, this was in a gallery above the main church. At the end of May each year there is a Commemoration service (Pepys died on May 26th 1703) and a laurel wreath is placed on the Memorial.

This is the memorial that Pepys commissioned after the death of his wife Elizabeth in 1669 at the age of 29. She is looking directly across to the Navy Office pew where her husband would have sat each Sunday. Samuel and Elizabeth are buried together at the East end of the church 'under the Communion table' according to the burial register.

This lovely monument is to Dame Anne Radcliffe who died in 1585.

A rather splendid memorial to Sir James Deane with his three wives. He was a merchant adventurer who made a fortune in India,China and the Spice Islands. He was a very generous benefactor to the poor of all the parishes he had lived in. He died in 1608 and was survived by his third wife .

A detail of the pulpit which is believed to have been carved by the renowned sculptor and wood carver Grinling Gibbons

The rear of the church is a pleasant little refuge from the City streets. Look at the photo closely and notice that there are steps leading down to the South door - this is because the level of the churchyard has risen due to the thousands of burials that have taken place here! There is a plague pit here too, during the Great Plague of London (1665-1666) people were dying at such a rate that there was no time for individual burials and bodies were simply thrown into a pit. A nicer story though is an entry in the burial register in 1586 for a lady known as 'Mother Goose'. She used to knit little boots for her geese so that their feet wouldn't get sore as they were herded to market. Isn't that a lovely story?

The somewhat forbidding entrance into the churchyard from Seething Lane. Built in 1658 these became the gates of 'St Ghastly Grim' in Charles Dickens' book The Uncommercial Traveller. It was fine on a hot, sunny day but I don't think I'd fancy going through there on a dark, wet winter's night!

Directly across the road from the skull ornamented gate is the little garden that marks the site of the Navy Office where Samuel Pepys worked and lived. The stone with the blue plaque on is virtually hidden by the shrubs so I thought I'd better do a close up of it.

St Botolph Bishopsgate was the second of my objectives, my husbands ancestors were being baptized and buried here for over 100 years, the earliest baptism is in 1715 and the latest burial in 1846. The burial ground was turned into a garden in 1863 so there are no graves to find unfortunately.

This is the interior which survived both the Great Fire and the Blitz but was badly damaged by an IRA bomb in 1993 which opened up the roof and destroyed all the doors and windows.

This lovely window was commissioned by the Worshipful Company of Bowyers to mark the restoration of the church.

The eighteenth century font where so many of my husband's ancestors were baptized. The poet John Keats was baptized here as well in 1795.

St Stephen Walbrook is tucked away on a little side street and though it was closed when I passed by on Sunday I was able to go inside on Monday morning. This is another of Wren's churches and he actually lived next door to this one.

The interior is spacious and full of light, the altar in the centre of the church is by Henry Moore and is a rather controversial addition. I really like it which is rather odd as I'm not usually an admirer of modern art. It's utter simplicity seems to fit beautifully into this particular interior though. The marble for the altar came from the quarry near Rome that was used by Michelangelo.

The lovely dome was the first of its kind in any English church and was a sort of trial run for Wren's masterpiece - the dome of St Paul's Cathedral.

Just around the corner from St Stephen's Walbrook is the Temple of Mithras. It was only discovered in 1954 and was actually on Walbrook originally but it was moved to Queen Victoria St as the original site was destined to become office blocks.

By this time I needed to be heading back to my hotel to pick up my suitcase ready for the journey home. On the way though I wanted to try and find Ely Place which is technically still part of Cambridgeshire as it was originally the site of the London Palace of the Bishops of Ely. The entrance to Ely Place is gated and a beadle oversees the comings and goings of people and traffic. As you walk down there is a tiny alley on the left and if you go down the alley you will find this tiny pub. The Mitre was originally built for the servants from the Bishop's Palace but the present building dates from the 1700s in spite of the date on the lantern.

Tucked away at the end of Ely Place is the 13th century church of St Etheldreda once the private chapel of the Bishop's Palace. It is the oldest Roman Catholic church in England.

Around the walls of the church are the statues of eight martyrs who died for their faith during the Reformation. This is St Anne Line, a seamstress executed at Tyburn in 1601 for sheltering a priest.

Here we have John Roche, a Thames waterman executed at Tyburn in 1588 for helping a priest to escape.

The Crypt is thought to date back to the 6th century, there are massive wooden beams and the walls are eight feet thick. It is still in use as a chapel and the font is down here.I think that the two statues in the window embrasures are St Francis and Our Lady. It was very dark down there so the other photos I took are too murky to post.
You'll be glad to know that this is the final London post:) It's rather long but as I said in my previous post I use my blog as a record of the places I've visited.

This will be my last post for 3 weeks or so as on Saturday I'm off to visit my elder son and his family in South Africa. If you look for White River on the map that's where my daughter and I will be staying. DH gets to stay home with B Baggins:)

We're hoping to see plenty of these....

.....and lots of spectacular places like this - Mac Mac Falls near Sabie. I'll be back towards the end of March and hopefully will have some interesting photos to share with you.

Fleet St to The Strand

2011-02-24T16:53:00.002Z

This is yet another of Sir Christopher Wren's London churches - St Bride's, Fleet St. It's often known as the Wedding Cake church because the spire is said to be the inspiration for the tiered wedding cakes that have graced so many wedding receptions over the years. Samuel Pepys lived nearby as a child and he and his eight brothers and sisters were all baptized here. St Bride's was another victim of the bombing on December 29th 1940. Firebombs reduced it to a shell and only the spire and the outer walls remain from Wren's church. As ever you can click on the photos to enlarge them.

The interior was rebuilt after the war using Wren's original plans and the church is now light and pleasant and has a well known choir who were practising when I went in. I didn't go right into the church because of this.

Instead I went down into the crypt where there is a fascinating museum. The first church on this site was built in the 6th century and before that there had been a Roman building, you can see a section of Roman pavement and remains of all the churches that have stood here over the last 1500 years - archaeologists discovered all this during excavations done when St Bride's was being rebuilt in the 1960s. The crypt was, of course, originally a medieval charnel house and the bones of several thousand people are still there in a bricked up chamber.

On that rather gruesome note we'll move on to Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, this famous old pub has been here since 1667 when it replaced the original inn which was burned down in the Great Fire. Unfortunately it is closed on Sundays so I wasn't able to get any photos of the interior which I gather is well worth seeing. Among those who frequented the Cheshire Cheese in their time are Samuel Pepys, Charles Dickens, Voltaire, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde and US President Theodore Roosevelt. This view is of the side entrance which is on a narrow alley leading off Fleet St.

When you turn into the alley called Wine Office Court you will see this sign fixed on to the wall of the Cheshire Cheese. Dr Johnson's advice is very sound, exploring the little alleys and courts leads to all kinds of interesting discoveries.

Wine Office Court opens out into Gough Square where Dr Johnson lived. He was the author of the very first English Dictionary published in 1755. This is a memorial to his cat Hodge ' a very fine cat indeed'. Regrettably the best photo of Hodge is also graced by my shadow:) Dr Johnson's house was covered in scaffolding and closed for renovations so what with that and the Cheshire Cheese being closed I think another visit to Fleet St on a Saturday is indicated!

Another reason to return to Fleet St. This is the entrance to the Temple church which is open between 1pm and 4pm Sunday afternoons and it was much later than that by the time I passed by. I would really love to go in here, it was built by the Knights Templar in the 12th century and I believe there are some wonderful 13th century effigies inside. It featured in the Da Vinci Code too. It's no use - I've just got to go London again!

"Oranges and Lemons say the bells of St Clement's"
The spire of St Clement Danes which stands on a little island in the middle of the Strand. The bells of this church ring out the tune of the old nursery rhyme. St Clement's was another victim of the Blitz and all except one of the bells had to be recast. The sole survivor was the Sanctus Bell which was cast in 1588 and it is still ringing out over London 400 years later.

I don't know how well the name Twinings is known overseas but in the UK it's been associated with high quality tea for over 300 years. Thomas Twining (1675-1741) founded Twinings by purchasing the original Toms Coffee House at the back of this site in 1706, where he introduced tea. In 1717 he opened the Golden Lyon here as a shop to sell tea and coffee and Twinings has been been here ever since.

Thomas Twining's grandson was responsible for the building of this doorway which incorporated the golden lion symbol. You can also see the Royal Warrant - Twinings are suppliers of tea and coffee to the Queen.
By this time it was 6pm and I'd been walking since 9am with just a short break to have some lunch so I turned up Chancery Lane and made my way back to my hotel in Bloomsbury for a nice refreshing shower and then a leisurely dinner.

The Square Mile and Beyond

2011-02-18T12:06:00.092Z

This is yet another post about my visit to London last year, I thought I'd better try and get the rest of them done before I go away in a couple of weeks. I use my blog as a record of places I've visited and things I've done so this is for my benefit really while I can still remember it:) It's worth clicking on many of the photographs as you will see much more detail that way.

The area around St Paul's Cathedral is always busy whatever the season or day of the week but if you walk round to the back you will find yourself in the quiet oasis of Paternoster Square. Prior to WW2 a street called Paternoster Row stood here, it was the centre of the London publishing trade and had been since the early eighteenth century. However on the night of December 29th 1940 the whole of this area was devastated during the Blitz and the offices and stores of twenty-seven publishing firms were destroyed and several million books went up in flames. Paternoster Square was part of the post war rebuilding programme and the elegant Corinthian coloumn you can see in the photo above is, I believe, a memorial to the books that were lost.

This famous photograph of St Paul's Cathedral was taken on the same night that Paternoster Row was destroyed.

Paternoster Square is now home to the original Temple Bar a stone arch built of Portland stone completed in 1672 and reputedly designed by Sir Christopher Wren. Temple Bar was one of the entrances or gates through which people and traffic had to pass into the City. If you look you can see the gates (replicas I should think) which were closed at curfew every night. It originally stood where Fleet Street now meets the Strand, the photograph at the beginning of an earlier post shows the dragon that marks the boundary these days.

I don't suppose that Smithfield is the first place you'd think of heading to after leaving the area around St Paul's but if you pass under Temple Bar, cross Newgate St and walk down King Edward St and Little Britain you will eventually see this lovely old building. It is the entrance to one of London's hidden gems - The Priory Church of St Bartholomew the Great. The stone archway was the entrance to the south aisle of the original 13th century church. This part of the church was destroyed on the orders of Henry VIII during the Dissolution of the Monasteries but the choir and transepts were allowed to remain as the parish church.

This is the other side of the gateway showing the back of the little Tudor house that was built on top of the original stone archway in 1559. It was one of the few timber-framed buildings to survive The Great Fire of London. I love this little house.

The font dates from 1405 and the painter William Hogarth was baptized here in 1697. His works include The Rake's Progress and Marriage a la Mode, he is very famous and much admired but not by me:) The architect Inigo Jones was also baptized here in 1573.

This is the tomb of Prior Rahere, former courtier and minstrel to Henry I, who founded an Augustinian priory on this site in 1123.At the same time he founded a hospital for the sick poor nearby and that became the world famous St Bartholomew's Hospital. Better known as Bart's, it still stands on its original site and is the oldest hospital in London.

Part of the original cloister still survives and is now in use as a small cafe which was unfortunately closed during my visit - it was a very hot day and a cold drink would have been welcome.

St Bartholomew's has one of the finest Norman interiors in London, this is the ambulatory with its wonderful Norman pillars and vaulted ceiling. It encircles the main body of the church, the high altar is on the right and the entrance to the Lady Chapel is on the left. The church has had a somewhat chequered history over the years and at one point the Lady Chapel housed a printers where Benjamin Franklin, one of the men who drafted the American Declaration of Independence, was employed.

To north side of St Bartholomew's is a street called Cloth Fair once the site of the St Bartholomew Fair which was one of the great annual events of medieval London and a source of considerable income for the Priory from tolls levied on the goods for sale. Originally the fair was just for clothiers and drapers (from which came the name Cloth Fair) but after the Dissolution the fair moved into Smithfield and became a more of a funfair with a very dubious reputation. It was finally closed down in 1855 because it 'encouraged debauchery and disorder' - so much for the Good Old Days! The two houses in the photo are Nos 41 & 42 Cloth Fair built between 1592 and 1614 and they too are survivors of the Fire of London.

I think that quite a lot of people know that the Great Fire of London started in Pudding Lane near the Monument but I wonder how many are aware of this monument marking the place where it finally burned itself out? This is the junction of Cock Lane and Giltspur St and originally the monument was fixed to the front of an ancient pub called The Fortune of War which was demolished in 1910. I had no idea it existed until I walked past it and stopped to read the inscriptions.

This is close up of The Golden Boy, you will need to click on the photo and also the one below if you want to read the words of the inscription.

This is well worth enlarging and reading! Bear in mind that both the churchyard and Barts Hospital are very close by - Barts is literally just across the road.

If you walk down to the bottom of Giltspur St you are back on Newgate with the Old Bailey opposite. This is the Central Criminal Court of England, it was built in the early 1900s and stands on the site of the infamous Newgate Prison. To the right of the modern building is the street called Old Bailey and it is here that public executions took place until 1868. These executions drew huge crowds and they were regarded as a source of considerable entertainment.

The golden statue of Justice on the top of the Old Bailey, she carries a double edged sword in her right hand and the scales of justice in her left. A walk down Old Bailey will bring us back onto Lugate Hill where we turn right and head towards Fleet St but that had better be for next time:)

Wood and Garden

2011-02-11T21:15:00.002Z

With apologies to Gertrude Jekyll for borrowing one of her book titles:) I took these photos earlier this week so that I can actually show you some little bits of Spring rather than just talking about it. The strong winds that we've had have brought out many of the early wind pollinated plants and trees. The pussy willow looks beautiful with the sun shining on it and you can see a piece of the bud's protective casing still clinging on here.

The tightly furled hazel catkins have turned into lamb's tails now and if you look carefully you can see the tiny red female flower tucked into the angle between the catkins and the branch. You will need to click on the photo to be able to see it unless your vision is a good deal better than mine.

I've mentioned in previous posts that the Limb Brook which flows through Eccleshall Woods formed the ancient boundary between the Saxon kingdoms of Mercia and Northumbria and later between Derbyshire and the West Riding of Yorkshire. The area is full of small streams which flow down from the moors and into the Limb Brook and other local rivers. This pretty little stone bridge carries the path over one of the steams at the point where it joins the Limb Brook.

This little stream is always stained red by the ferrous iron which lies in a disused coal seam under the fields near the woods. At least I think that is what my DH meant when I asked what caused it. He has a degree in geography with geology as a second subject and he used a lot of long complicated words which he obviously thought that any fool would understand. After he'd said it all three times I decided I'd better not ask again:)

Snowdrops flowering in my front garden, the large group on the left of the photo are a lovely double snowdrop, I was given five bulbs many years ago by a gardening friend who has written several books on the subject, he told me that they are called 'Ophelia' though I've never come across a snowdrop of this name in any bulb catalogues.

As I got in the car on my way to the woods I caught a glimpse of yellow among the snowdrops and there they were - the first lovely bright yellow crocuses.

Another surprise in the small bed opposite my back door, I always forget these pushkinias are there until the leaves start pushing through. They have a beautiful delicate sky blue stripe on the backs of the petals, clickon the photo and have a closer look.

Another surprise, these were planted a few years ago and I think they are called 'Queen of the Blues'. They are very early for a Dutch crocus, I think being tucked away under piles of dead leaves might have brought them on a bit.

I know that this is looking rather boring at the moment, it's the little woodland area at the bottom of my garden and in a few weeks it will be a sheet of gold, these are the leaves of lesser celandine coming through the bare earth. They were there long before our house was built when this area was a shady hedgerow path through the fields.

In a recent post (Gardening in January) I showed a patch of woodland with the spears of snowdrops which had been buried deep under dead leaves so deep that some of the spears were yellow rather than green from lack of light. Here it is looking rather better now, still not exactly a swathe of white but definitely showing promise. From now on things will gather pace and more and more shoots and buds and flowers will start appearing, the weather may still have a good deal to throw at us - rain, wind, frost and quite possibly snow but also there will be days with blue skies and sunshine and one day soon we shall feel the heat of the sun on our backs again.

February Filldyke

2011-02-05T20:48:00.000Z

February Filldyke is certainly living up to its reputation this afternoon and looks as though it is going to try even harder over the next couple of days! Still the old saying is

'If February brings no rain
Tis neither good for grass nor grain'.

The painting above is called February Filldyke and is by an artist called Benjamin William Leader (1831-1923). It was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1881 to what was,I gather,a less than enthusiastic reception! Personally I like it a lot, it's very atmospheric.

I love this illustration from the Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry. The Tres Riches Heures is a beautiful medieval Book of Hours part of which is a calendar illustrated with scenes of daily life in the village. In February we see people warming themselves by the fire in the farmhouse, a man chopping wood and another man driving a heavily laden donkey towards the village. The detail is exquisite and the more you look the more you see. Surmounting each monthly picture is a hemisphere containing the chariot of the sun and the appropriate sign of the Zodiac - for February these are Aquarius the Water Carrier and Pisces the Fishes. It really is worth enlarging this and looking at it more closely.

I don't think February is very high on anyone's list of favourite months but it does have some good things to offer, this morning on a wet walk in Eccleshall Woods I saw that the first of the herons is back and inspecting the nesting site, the pussywillow is appearing, the tight little hazel catkins are turning into fluffy lamb's tails and the small, heart-shaped green leaves of the lesser celandine are pushing up through the earth - Spring really is just around the corner.

Imbolc

2011-02-01T21:00:00.002Z

Today is Imbolc the ancient Celtic festival marking the transition from Winter to Spring. The Celts measured their days from sunset to sunset so Imbolc is already with us if we use their way of measuring time.
The beautiful image above is another example of the work of Angela Jayne Barnett.The poem is one I used last year in a post about snowdrops,it's a lovely poem so to save you straining your eyes trying to read the words on the image here it is:)

One month is past, another is begun,
Since merry bells rung out the dying year,
And buds of rarest green began to peer,
As if impatient for a warmer sun;
And though the distant hills are bleak and dun,
The virgin snowdrop like a lambent fire,
Pierces the cold earth with its green-streaked spire
And in dark woods, the wandering little one
May find a primrose.

Hartley Coleridge

The Snowdrop

Yes, punctual to the time, thou 'rt here again,
As still thou art:—though frost or rain may vary,
And icicles blockade the rockbirds' aery,
Or sluggish snow lie heavy on the plain,
Yet thou, sweet child of hoary January,
Art here to harbinger the haggard train
Of vernal flowers, a duteous missionary.
Nor cold can blight, nor fog thy pureness stain.
Beneath the dripping eaves, or on the slope
Of cottage garden, whether mark'd or no,
Thy meek head bends in undistinguish'd row.
Blessings upon thee, gentle bud of hope !
And Nature bless the spot where thou dost grow—
Young life emerging from thy kindred snow!

Hartley Coleridge(1796-1849)

It's true as Coleridge says that there are snowdrops to be found in January but really they are the iconic flower of February. They are the harbingers of Spring and their gentle presence assures us that soon the warmth of the sun will soon strengthen and new life will be blossoming forth wherever we look. The weather in February can be cold, wet and frequently snowy too but it's a short month and soon the full beauty of Spring will be with us.

Save Our Forests

2011-01-30T09:29:00.025Z

I've never added anything like this to my blog before but I do feel that the proposed sale of our national forests, particularly the ancient woodlands, is very wrong indeed. The thought of these beautiful places getting into the hands of people who are just interested in making a profit from them makes my blood run cold. If the Government no longer wants to maintain them then they should be signed over to organizations like The Woodland Trust or the local Wildlife Trusts. There is a mounting feeling against this proposal and the stronger and more numerous the opposition is the more likely it is that we will be able to stop it. There is an online petition which is available here and I do urge all English readers of my blog to consider signing it.

Save Our Trees Petition

Selling off the forests may well produce a large sum of money for the Government but the idea is both short-term (you can only sell them once) and short-sighted.

Gardening in January

2011-01-23T21:04:00.001Z

I don't think I can ever remember being able to work in my garden in January before but the last week has been almost springlike in my part of the country and I haven't been able to resist the temptation. Of course when I say working in my garden I really mean that I've started clearing the debris from last year. Normally I would be able to garden well into December but the snow and freezing temperatures put paid to that last year. There are plenty of signs of life around already the most noticeable being the lovely yellow stars of the winter jasmine.

There are all kinds of gardens, people have rose gardens, herb gardens, Japanese gardens and so on. In my case I have a particularly fine example of a dead stick garden.

In many areas the dead sticks are greatly enhanced by the artistically arranged heaps of dead leaves!

The piece de resistance - a magnificent white plastic football takes pride of place in this border:)

Removing dead leaves revealed crocus' pushing through even though the earth was still frozen earlier in the week. The new green leaves of the cowslips are appearing too.

I decided to begin by giving the woodland area at the bottom of the garden a much needed sorting out, it hasn't been touched for two or three years and was badly in need of attention. There were what appeared to be three or four little groups of snowdrops poking their noses above all the dead leaves by the beech hedge. As I raked and cleared it turned out to be a positive swathe of them which will be lovely in a few weeks. You can see how deep the leaves were as many of the snowdrops spears are yellow from the lack of light, hopefully they will turn green now. There are some daffodils in here as well and it's also where my comfrey grows though there are few signs of it at the moment.

The snowberries are especially ambitious if left to their own devices for too long and the long whippy branches bend over and root in the surrounding soil. I have raked and pruned and filled bag after bag with offerings to go to the local rubbish dump. I have filled my own capacious leaf container to the brim and the local council composts all the green waste so I don't feel too guilty about. Yet another jewel lay under all the mess, a plant I'd forgotten was there - the beautiful bud of the winter flowering cyclamen coum. I shall pay a visit to a local nursery and buy some more of these to add a little glowing colour to the winter days. I've so enjoyed being outside and hopefully shall get a few more hours in before the forecast 'light snow' appears on Thursday. It will give me a head start on spring which will be especially useful this year as I'll be in South Africa in early March.

Special thanks go to my little companion and helper who has been cheering me on enthusiastically as I revealed more and more nice soft earth full of fat, juicy worms:)

A Winter Walk

2011-01-11T21:29:00.002Z

B Baggins and I went down Shorts Lane and onto Blackamoor this morning, there were grey skies and a cold wind blowing. I saw the farmer ploughing this field in the autumn and now it has a new crop growing - barley I suspect if it's the same as last year.

I don't think the farmer will be very pleased to see these little heaps of soil! Moldy Warp the Mole has been busy by the looks of it. Does anyone else love the Little Grey Rabbit books by Alison Uttley - Moldy Warp is one of the characters from these delightful stories. I have only ever seen one mole and that was a dead one kindly deposited on the back porch by my wonderful old cat Raffles - now long gone across the Rainbow Bridge. It was totally undamaged and must have died of shock I think. It was a lovely little creature with the most beautiful fur. I was very sad about it's death and after I'd told him off Raffles was very sad too! I apologize for the poor quality of the photograph, I tried several times and this is the best of a very bad lot.

These old moss covered dry stone walls give me pleasure every time I walk past them. It's sad that so many of them are poorly maintained these days. Dry stone walling as a country craft is definitely reviving but it's very expensive to employ someone to repair walls. In the old days the farm labourers would have had the skill to do such jobs in the winter months. My dad had this skill along with several others including being able to use a sickle. Judging by the rabbits that came home in his capacious pockets I suspect he had some skill as a poacher too!

B Baggins investigating the various scents in the grass verge, apart from other dogs there are horses,foxes,rabbits and badgers around here. There's a large badger sett close by and in the early summer I'm going to go at dusk without B Baggins and see if I can watch them for a while.

Even in the depths of winter, when everything looks lifeless at first glance, there are signs of life if you look for them, these are fresh young nettle leaves emerging in a sheltered spot protected by a high bank from the icy winds that come whistling down off the moors.

After the snow melt and a couple of nights of heavy rain Blacka Dyke is looking pretty lively, it sounded as though it was having fun as it raced merrily along.

This stone plaque has appeared very recently and will weather nicely into its surroundings I think. Although we have Alderman Graves to thank for giving Blackamoor to the people of Sheffield he hadn't actually owned it for very long. It was bought from the Duke of Rutland in 1927 when the Longshaw Estate was sold.

Thick stems of ivy twisting round the branch of this tree. This doesn't, contrary to common belief, strangle the tree. Ivy has its own root system and simply uses trees for support in the same way that a climbing rose does. I speak with the authority of the Royal Horticultural Society behind me:) Ivy has great value for wildlife. As ground cover in woodland it greatly lessens the effect of frost, enabling birds and woodland creatures to forage in leaf litter during bitter spells. Growing on trees, it provides hiding, roosting, hibernating and nesting places for various animals, birds and insects (including butterflies), especially during the winter months and in areas where there are few other evergreens.

Even in this wintry landscape there is some colour, the reddish brown of the dead bracken fronds adds some warmth to the scene and the green of the moss cheers things up too.

This is where I often cross over Blacka Dyke via the stepping stones and climb up to Lenny Hill, from there you can take several routes depending on how far you want to walk. Today though I stayed on this side of the river and walked further up into the woodland area. No photos though as this is also where my camera instructed me to 'Change Batteries' and I hadn't brought any spares!

Catkins

2011-01-10T10:58:00.001Z

This is a not very good photograph of one of two hazel trees that grow at the bottom of my garden. As I walked down to the compost bin a few days ago in the snow I gazed hopefully at the one near the bin as I have done in the early part of every one of the last few years. When I say 'hopefully' I suppose I really mean 'longingly' because I didn't really expect to see what I was looking for and it was more of a casual glance as I passed by.

I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw these at the end of a twig, I searched and there were a few more to be seen as well!

I dashed across to the other hazel and sure enough there were a few catkins on that one too. 'She's getting rather over excited about a few hazel catkins' I can hear you all saying and it's true that there are many country hedgerows to be seen with hazel trees covered in catkins at the moment. These are rather special ones though because.....

......I grew both of these trees from little cobnuts sent to me by a friend in Hampshire. I planted them about 10 years ago and they grew and flourished but this is the very first time they have ever had any catkins on them and as the spring comes they will lengthen and fluff up and I shall have some little lamb's tails blowing in the wind. I am thrilled to little pieces:)

A New Year

2011-01-02T11:23:00.001Z

A very Happy, Healthy and Adventurous 2011 to you all from B Baggins and I!

Merry Christmas!

2010-12-24T09:25:00.001Z

As with the previous post I don't think I can improve on my Christmas post from last year so here it is again:)

The Night Before Christmas was always my children's bedtime story on Christmas Eve.
So for all of us who still feel the magic of this night......

Winter Solstice

2010-12-21T07:45:00.001Z

"

So the shortest day came, and the year died,
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world
Came people singing, dancing,
To drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the winter trees;
They hung their homes with evergreen;
They burned beseeching fires all night long
To keep the year alive,
And when the new year's sunshine blazed awake
They shouted, revelling.
Through all the frosty ages you can hear them
Echoing behind us - Listen!!
All the long echoes sing the same delight,
This shortest day,
As promise wakens in the sleeping land:
They carol, feast, give thanks,
And dearly love their friends,
And hope for peace.
And so do we, here, now,
This year and every year.
Welcome Yule!!"

- Susan Cooper, The Shortest Day

I know that I used this poem as part of my Winter Solstice post last year but it is so perfect for the occasion that I make no apology for using it again this year.

Today is the Winter Solstice, for a short time the sun pauses and then gradually, gradually the days begin to lengthen again. There are many long cold days ahead for 'as the days lengthen the cold strengthens' but one day we shall feel the warmth of the sun on our faces again and it will be Spring once more. From today the Oak King begins his reign and we start the long slow journey back to the Earth's reawakening. Happy Winter Solstice!

NB The beautiful image of the Holly King is by Angela Jayne Barnett. The photograph of the sun is taken from the web but I don't know who to give the credit too unfortunately.

Recipes for Gracie and Mrs Nesbitt

2010-12-20T15:58:00.002Z

Gracie asked for the recipe for cheese and onion tarts, it comes from a little book called Teatime Favourites which I bought from Sainsburys in the early 1980s.

250gm (8oz) shortcrust pastry
150gm (5oz) onion, chopped small
6 tablespoons milk
salt & pepper
275gm (9oz) Lancashire cheese, grated
1 small egg, beaten

I often use mature Cheddar cheese rather than Lancashire - though Lancashire is best if you can get it, it's a wonderful cooking cheese.

Roll out the pastry and use it to line about 20 tartlet tins.
Put the onion in a saucepan, add the milk and season to taste. Bring it to the boil then simmer for 1 minute. Take off the heat and stir in the egg and cheese - I always put the cheese in first so that the hot mixture doesn't start cooking the egg. Leave the mixture until it is cold then spoon into the pastry cases.
Bake in a pre-heated oven 200C/400F/Gas Mark 6 for about 15 minutes until they are golden brown. They are equally good served warm or cold and freeze well.

For Mrs Nesbitt we have Delia Smith's Truffle Torte.

5 tablespoons liquid glucose
5 tablespoons rum
1lb (45-gm) plain dessert chocolate. This needs to be good quality not just cooking chocolate.
1 pint (570ml) double cream
3oz (75gm) Amaretti biscuits crushed finely

I use a 9in loose bottomed cake tin to make this. Brush bottom and sides lightly with oil (Delia says groundnut oil, I'm afraid I use ordinary vegetable oil) and line the base with a circle of silicone paper. Sprinkle the crushed Amaretti biscuits evenly over the base of the tin.
Break the chocolate into sections and put them in a heatproof bowl along with the rum and liquid glucose. Fit the bowl over a pan of barely simmering water and leave the chocolate to melt stirring occasionally to help things along. When all the chocolate is melted give it a final stir, take it off the heat and leave it to cool for 5 minutes or so until it is just warm.
Now in another bowl whip the cream until it is slightly thickened. It's hard to describe the right consistency, it's something you learn from experience. A rule of thumb is to run a fork through it, if there is resistence and you can feel that it has thickened then it's about right. What you do NOT want is whipped cream! On the other hand you don't want it too thin either. Anyway, when you think it's about right fold half of it into the chocolate mixture and then fold this mixture into the rest of the cream until it is smoothly blended - no streaks of cream should be left in it. Spoon or pour it into the prepared tin and tap the tin gently to even the mixture out. Actually I use a broad bladed knife to make sure it's reasonably even. It doesn't matter if it leaves a few marks or swirls as the top will be the bottom when you serve it:) At this point I freeze it still in the tin. Delia's instructions are to cover it with clingfilm and chill overnight in the fridge. You do need to make it the day before you want to use it if you aren't freezing it.
Just before serving run a palette knife round the edge to loosen the torte, put a serving plate on top of the tin (having defrosted it if it's frozen of course)and turn it upside down so that it comes out with the Amareti biscuits on top. Gently remove the silicone paper then serve it with chilled single cream - and serve small portions, it's very,very rich! Those with large appetites and a sweet tooth can always have seconds:) My elder DIL's two brothers absolutely love this and appear to be able to consume unbelievable amounts of it!

Any US readers who want to try either recipe please remember that I am using Imperial measures and US tablespoons are not the same as British ones nor are US pints the same as British pints. Enjoy!

Here We Go Again!

2010-12-16T22:45:00.001Z

Took this photo of the garden this afternoon covered in a fresh fall of snow. Happily I refilled all the birdfeeders this morning, they'll need it - the temperature now at 10.30pm is 21F and apparently it's going to drop even further during the night. DH says the roads are like a skating rink.

I was hoping for a light dusting of snow on the sledge piled with holly but this isn't quite what I had in mind. The poor red ribbon looks very disconsolate. Shall have to try a spot of first aid in the morning!

This is what I spent most of this afternoon making and I'm quite pleased with it. I've done a simpler one for the back door too but it was too dark to take a photograph by the time I finished it.

Today's other achievement was a chocolate truffle torte which is now in the freezer. This is not for those who are counting calories! It consists of chocolate, cream, rum and liquid glucose, you turn it out of the tin so that the base of crushed amaretti biscuits becomes the top. Heaven on a plate:)

I did summon sufficient energy to make the cheese and onion tarts mentioned in the previous post and here they are. I tested one and they're good!

My favourite little mouse is waiting in his stocking.......

......and the Christmas Goose is in his place. We're nearly there!

The Frozen North

2010-12-07T16:50:00.001Z

You will need to click on the photos to enlarge them to see them properly. The river looked amazing this morning. The outdoor thermometer was registering 11.4F when B Baggins and I went out so I thought it might be worth taking the camera. In the 33 years I've lived here I've never seen Old Hay Brook frozen over to this extent. There have been icy borders at the edges once or twice in the past but nothing like this. It was even more frozen when we went this afternoon but I didn't take the camera thinking there would be less ice not more!

Each of the little weirs looked like a scene from The Snow Queen, there were tiny areas where the water was still flowing over but most of it must have been getting through underneath the ice.

This is a close up of the previous photo, you can see the blocks of ice and the small frozen waterfall with frozen foam at the base. I know this is a common sight in Canada and other countries in the northern latitudes but it isn't very common here I can assure you!

While the weather has been so cold I've been busy indoors. I made the Christmas cake two weeks ago and here I've unwrapped itso I can give it two more tablespoons of sherry. It's now back on top of the cupboard and will sit there until around the 16th December when I shall make the marzipan and put it on. Then that has to dry out for a few days before the final layer of fondant icing goes on. It's beautifully moist and smells wonderful!

I've started knitting again, this is the first thing I've made since I broke my wrist. It will be going in the post for George tomorrow. I'm now knitting a second rabbit also for George.

Some of you may remember seeing this one that I made for him earlier this year. He apparently loves it so much that Cesca can't get it off him to wash it so she's asked me to make another one in the hope that he'll accept the substitute on a temporary basis. Personally I wouldn't count on it:)

..

It will be a quiet Christmas for us this year so I'm not doing quite as much baking and cooking as usual. However this morning I did a batch of tiny cheese scones.....

......and a fruit scone round which have joined the Yule Log and the Lemon Cream pies that are already in the freezer. Now I'm going to go and make a big pan of leek and potato soup and maybe a batch of cheese and onion tarts - the soup is for my meal this evening but the tarts are destined for the freezer - if I get round to making them anyway:)

All's Well That Ends Well

2010-12-03T23:22:00.003Z

Here is my personal entry for the Idiot of the Year contest! (Not B Baggins, that's just his 'this woman is absolutely nothing to do with me' look !)
It's Friday evening, cleaning week has been brought to a succcessful conclusion and the house is like a new pin. 8.30pm and it's time for B Baggins and I to go for our short evening constitutional before I relax in a contented and virtous glow of achievement. I gear up, this takes a good five minutes then off we go, half an hour later we are back and we go into the garage to disrobe - yak traks, boots, waterproof trousers, hat,coat, gloves and, in B Baggins' case, his lead. Then disaster strikes! I can't find my keys! Extensive searching reveals nothing so on goes all the gear again and leaving B Baggins shut in the garage I retrace my steps. Nothing {:(
As I get back neighbour out with his own dogs enquires if I'm OK so I tell my sad tale. He puts his dogs in the house and says he'll walk round again with me. Still nothing{:(
Not to worry says neighbour, he can break in for me and then make all secure for the night. By this time it's 10.30pm so we go into the garage to reassure B Baggins that he hasn't been abandoned before starting on the breaking and entering bit. 'What are these?' enquires neighbour picking up a bunch of keys from the table. He got a very big hug and while I get the award for Idiot of the Year Paul gets my award for World's Most Brilliant Neighbour.

Winter Wonderland

2010-11-30T16:54:00.004Z

This was the sight that greeted me when I looked out of the window this morning. I knew it was going to snow during the night but I wasn't expecting this!

B Baggins and I set out for our morning walk regardless and we were rewarded by some really beautiful scenes. The snow was several inches deep so walking was quite hard work so we just went a short walk to some fields near home. It's a very ordinary field really but the snow transformed it into something truly beautiful. Thank you for all the concern re me and falling over - hopefully a combination of my trusty hazel staff and my Yak Traks will see me safely through! As for staying in Diane - one dog plus no DH = 3 walks a day for B Baggins and me I'm afraid!

Happily someone else had been there before us so that made it a bit easier to walk round - not that B Baggins has any trouble getting around in it, he absolutely loves the snow.

A magical entrance to the realm of the ice fairies.

Behind the high wall is Grove House built in the mid 1800s on the site of one of Totley's old water powered mills which was used for scythe making.

The dam that powered the mill was here, you can't see it in the photograph but Old Hay Brook runs along the line of the trees.

The kissing gate that leads onto an old pack horse bridge.

Well done chaps - home and breakfast!

Snowstorm

2010-11-29T12:01:00.001Z

Winter is come in earnest and the snow
In dazzling splendour—crumpling underfoot
Spreads a white world all calm and where we go
By hedge or wood trees shine from top to root
In feathered foliage flashing light and shade
Of strangest contrast—fancys pliant eye
Delighted sees a vast romance displayed
And fairy halls descended from the sky

The smallest twig its snowy burthen wears
And woods oer head the dullest eyes engage
To shape strange things—where arch and pillar bears
A roof of grains fantastic arched and high
And little shed beside the spinney wears
The grotesque zemblance of an hermitage

Part of a poem by John Clare which seems appropriate at the moment. The photos are actually from January 2006 so I don't know quite why they are so blue - maybe I used flash? Who knows! We haven't had that much snow so far, just an inch or so here but I know that other parts of the UK have a good deal more. I feel as though it ought to be January as we don't normally have much in the way of snow in November and we certainly don't get the low temperatures, it was 14F here on Saturday night - decidedly chilly! The sort of weather for hot chocolate, a warm blanket and a good book. Not my destiny this week I'm afraid as I've sent DH over to our other house for the week so that I can do a proper deep clean of the house ready for Yule. Last time I sent him over there so that I could 'get on with things' I managed to break my wrist so I'm hoping hard that history isn't going to repeat itself!

A Morning Walk

2010-11-26T16:47:00.002Z

Just a short post to get me back into the swing of blogging again. I've been really busy catching up on a huge pile of letters, doing some Christmas baking for the freezer, trying to make a bit of impact on the disaster that is my garden and a good many other items from my 'to do' list. I'm back on track again and will hopefully be putting in more regular appearances from now on. These photos are from a walk on Blackamoor on Wednesday morning, there had been quite a hard frost which B Baggins loves, it seems to give him an extra injection of energy. I know how he feels, I love bright,frosty mornings.

There are still little splashes of colour here and there from various berries, these rosehips looked lovely in the sunlight.

A moss covered dry stone wall - always a favourite of mine, they seem so atmospheric somehow.

Even in late November there are flowers to be found, this is the flower of the ivy which appears between September and November and provides a valuable source of nectar for bees, butterflies and insects late in the year. Each little flower will become a black berry and will provide another source of food for birds all through the cold winter months.

The Blacka Dyke tumbling downthrough the woodland to join up eventually with Old Hay Brook and then on to become part of the River Sheaf which is one of Sheffield's five major rivers.

Another bit of stone wall with frosted moss, dead leaves and bracken. These have their own quiet beauty.

The moon setting in the western sky above the beautiful autumn colours of the moors.

The frost accentuates every detail of the bracken fronds and leaves especially the thistle which looks really beautiful. Winter brings out a beauty in some things which isn't as obvious in the summer.

More frost rimed leaves, I must admit that I never tire of looking at the work of Jack Frost:) It's now late on Friday afternoon and B Baggins and I have just come back from walking up on Blackamoor with my friend J and her dog Martha. We've been higher up than the area where these photos were taken and everywhere was white with frost and the boggy pools of water were frozen hard even in mid-afternoon. I banged one of them hard with my hazel staff and it didn't even crack! No staying in where it's warm for me tonight though, DH and I are off to see 'Improbable Fiction' the latest offering from our local amateur dramatic society.

Remembrance

2010-11-11T12:07:00.001Z

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old;
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

Pte Albert Pinder 1891-1917 17th Battalion Welbeck Rangers.
Died of wounds received during the Battle of Messines Ridge and buried in Mendinghem Military Cemetery.

Sgt Herbert Allan Hill 1888-1917 4th(Hallamshire)Battalion York and Lancaster Regiment.
Died of wounds received during the Battle of Bullecourt and buried in Tournai Military Cemetery Allied Extension.

These are two of the men named on our village War Memorial, they were brothers-in-law. Ella Pinder lost both her husband and her brother in June 1917.

As always I remember also our two family members who gave their lives

Pte Harry Hindley Simpson, 1st Battalion Lancashire Fusiliers killed in action August 1916

AC2 Harold Harrison RAF buried in Jakarta War Cemetery, Indonesia 1942

"When You Go Home, Tell Them Of Us And Say,
For Their Tomorrow, We Gave Our Today"

Autumn

2010-10-06T13:04:00.004+01:00

"Come said the wind to the leaves one day,

Come o'er the meadows and we will play.

Put on your dresses of scarlet and gold,

for summer is gone and the days grow cold."

The photograph was taken about this time last year at Canterbury Shaker Village in New Hampshire. It's always a wonderful place to visit but on this beautiful golden autumn day it was perfect.

The Square Mile - Sunday Morning

2010-10-02T18:47:00.002+01:00

I'm finally getting round to writing more about my visit to London earlier this year - as you can see from the cloudless blue skies and brilliant sunshine I managed to time my visit to coincide with wonderful weather:) The photo above shows the statue of a dragon that marks the boundary between the City of London and the City of Westminster on Fleet St. The dragon is the emblem of London and ten of them stand guard at various points on the City boundaries. As always clicking on the photos will enlarge them.

I decided that on Sunday morning I would join one of the 2 hour guided tours run by London Walks. You just turn up outside Monument Underground station at 10am and pay the guide, there's no need to book in advance. I'm not normally a guided tour enthusiast but I thought that I might see a few things that I wouldn't find on my own and then I would have the afternoon to make my own discoveries. I set off early and got off the Underground at Bank so that I could walk slowly down to the Monument. The station at Bank is, of course, named for the Old Lady of Threadneedle St otherwise known as the Bank of England. The Bank was established in 1694 to raise money for a war against France. Quite a large part of our history over the last 1000 years or so has involved wars against France! Some chap called William the Conqueror started it all I think:)

Across the road from the Bank of England is Mansion House which has been the official residence of the Lord Mayors of London since 1753. There has been a Lord Mayor of London since 1189 but the one whose name nearly everyone knows is Dick Whittington. Most people think of him as a character in a fairy story or pantomime but Richard Whittington was a real person who lived from around 1354 to 1423. He was the younger son of minor Gloucestershire gentry and was sent to London as an apprentice to the Mercer's Company. He became a wealthy cloth merchant and was four times Lord Mayor of London. He died childless and left his fortune to The Charity of Sir Richard Whittington which is still in existence today. Was Richard Whittington leaving London with his cat when he heard Bow Bells ringing out the message 'Turn again Whittington, thrice Lord Mayor of London' ? We shall never know but he certainly married a girl called Alice and it's a nice story isn't it?

This blue plaque is on the wall of Mansion House - the Stocks Market has nothing to do with the Stock Exchange, it was a livestock market built in the reign of Edward I. The new market got its name from the stocks that had previously stood on this site.

Tucked away behind Mansion House is St Stephen Walbrook which was built by Sir Christopher Wren after the 15th century church was destroyed during the Great Fire of London.
The street is called simply Walbrook and it marks the east bank of one of London's many lost rivers. The River Walbrook was culverted and built over in the late 1400s but it still runs underground and flows into the River Thames near Cannon St Railway Station.

Almost all the City churches are closed on Sunday so I returned on Monday to take one or two pictures of the interior. It is very simple inside but absolutely flooded with light. The church was badly damaged by bombing in WW2 but Wren's original 17th century wooden pulpit survives. In the centre is the controversial altar by sculptor Henry Moore. It is very plain and simple but in my opinion rather beautiful.

The dome was the forerunner of the great dome of St Pauls. St Stephen Walbrook is considered to be Wren's finest City church and is well worth a visit if you in the area.

Walking down Lombard St one passes this rather unprepossessing branch of Sainsburys which is built on the site of Edward Lloyd's coffee house. It became a popular place for sailors, merchants, and ship owners to meet, and Lloyd provided them with reliable shipping news. He opened his first coffee house in 1688 in Tower Street, London but in 1691 it was relocated to Lombard Street where it remained until 1795. The shipping merchants met here to discuss insurance deals among themselves and from these informal beginnings grew the world's leading insurance market - Lloyds of London.

The blue plaque on the wall by the entrance is the only reminder of what once stood here. If you look around as you walk you will find these plaques all over London marking the places where historic buildings once stood and linking them with the famous figures from the past who lived or worked there.

The sign of the grasshopper appears a good deal in the City, it is the emblem of the Gresham family. This one at 68 Lombard St marks the site where Sir Thomas Gresham (c1519 -1579) lived. He was an English merchant and financier who was a trusted agent of Queen Elizabeth I and founder of the Royal Exchange. The Royal Exchange building that stands near the Bank of England now is the third one on the site, Gresham's original building was destroyed in the Fire of London.

I finally arrived at the Monument and joined up with the other people waiting to do the walk. Our guide spent some time giving us an outline of London's history but eventually we set off. The photos from this part of the day are poor as I had to snap them quickly and then race after the tour party again. There were a couple of occasions when I nearly lost them as they disappeared round corners and down narrow medieval lanes! Our guide took us up a little alley off Eastcheap to show us these mice carved on the wall of one of the buildings. When it was being constructed many years ago an argument broke out when one of the workman accused another of stealing the cheese from his sandwich. During the row one of the men fell to his death. It was later found that the thieves were actually mice and these two mice eating cheese were added to the wall as a kind of memorial. If you want to see it for yourself the alley is called Philpott Lane - it's one of the old medieval streets and is mentioned in Samuel Pepys' Diary.

Leadenhall Market is built on the site of the Roman Forum - did I say that London's history goes back to Roman times? This was the most important medieval market in London though it looked very different then, the present building is Victorian.

One of the many dragons that greet you at every turn.

The Lamb Tavern dates back to 1780 and is a favourite lunch place for City workers. Fans of Harry Potter might recognize Leadenhall Market - it was used as the location of Diagon Alley in one of the films! If you need a new wand, a cloak or The Standard Book of Spells then this is the place to go - though unfortunately if you are a Muggle it will just look like Leadenhall Market! Only wizards can see the entrance to Diagon Alley:)

Down another medieval alley off Lombard St stands The George and Vulture built in 1746. It is mentioned many times in The Pickwick Papers and Charles Dickens drank here regularly. There has been an inn on the site since 1268. We carried on to the Bank of England and Royal Exchange which I'd already visited earlier but I hadn't noticed that right on top of the Royal Exchange is.......

.....the beautiful golden grasshopper of the Gresham family. Tradition says that it is the same one that graced the top of the original Royal Exchange.

Here is one of the things I would certainly never have noticed if I hadn't done this guided walk. Although I've been familiar with the name Poultry for a large part of my life I'd never really thought about why this London street has such an odd name. The answer is obvious really - this area was once the poultry market. The stone figure of a child holding a goose sits high above the street on No 36 Poultry as a reminder of this.

Of course it's only a reminder if you actually see it! The reason that Poultry is so familiar to me is that No 36 Poultry was, until recently, the Head Office of Midland Bank which is now part of HSBC and my husband worked there for several years when we were first married. He says that until I showed him this photograph he had never seen the sculpture!

This bronze statue, The Cordwainer, stands outside St Mary Aldermanbury church on Watling Street which was the area where the cordwainers (leatherworkers) lived and worked. Watling Street is considered to be the oldest street in London – it was the Saxon Athalingestrate and is also the only remaining section in the City of the old Roman road that ran from Wroxeter through London to Dover.

The Olde Watling stands on the corner of Watling Street and Bow Lane. It was re built in 1668 on the site of its predecessor which was burnt down during the Great Fire of London. It acted as a hostel for the men who were building the new St Pauls cathedral which stands at the end of Watling Street.

By now we were running late so this part of the walk was done at some speed as we dashed down Bow Lane, across Cheapside and down King St to the Guildhall. This has been the administrative centre of the City of London for over 800 years. The line of black paving stones that you can see in the photograph(you'll need to click on this one) marks the outline of the Roman amphitheatre which lies below the Guildhall. Unfortunately time didn't allow us to visit the remains which lie beneath the Guildhall Art Gallery.

We were fortunate enough to be allowed inside to see the magnificent medieval Great Hall though. This is where royalty and important visitors from overseas have been entertained for centuries and The Lord Mayor's Banquet is held here every year. It was one of the few buildings to survive the Fire of London and WW2 but the roof was badly damaged in the Blitz and was restored in the 1950s.

Among the features of the Great Hall are the statues of the legendary giants Gog and Magog. The original Elizabethan figures were made of papier mache and were destroyed in the Great Fire. In 1708 they were replaced by 14 foot high ones made by Richard Saunders in oak. These,too, were destroyed by fire in the Blitz and were replaced in 1955 by two 9 foot high figures made of limewood. The one in the photo is Magog. It would have been nice to have more time to look round Guildhall but that will have to be for a future trip.

We said goodbye to our guide opposite St Paul's Cathedral. Happily, after walking a fair distance on a very hot day, I found myself right outside Haz restaurant on the corner of Foster Lane so in I went for a long cold drink and some lunch.

The Shepherd's Calendar - September

2010-09-26T11:15:00.017+01:00

Neath the old oaks mossed and grey
Whose shadows seem as old as they
Where time hath many seasons won
Since aught beneath them saw the sun

Within these bramble solitudes
The ragged noisy boy intrudes
To gather nuts that ripe and brown
As soon as shook will patter down

Thus harvest ends its busy reign
And leaves the fields their peace again

Where autumns shadows idly muse
And tinge the trees with many hues
Amid whose scenes I'm feign to dwell
And sing of what I love so well

But hollow winds and tumbling floods
And humming showers and moaning woods
All startle into sudden strife
And wake a mighty lay to life
Making amid their strains divine
All songs in vain as mean as mine.

A quick post to get September's excerpt from The Shepherd's Calendar in before it's too late. For those of you who are keen naturalists I do realise that the venerable tree at the start of the poem is a beech and not an oak but it's such a wonderful old tree that I decided to use a little poetic licence:)

All Together Again

2010-09-05T11:10:00.015+01:00

A slight hiatus in a hectic weekend gives me chance for a quick post with pretty poor photos. They do explain why I'm not around much at the moment though. My eldest son and his family are home from South Africa for 5 weeks and my younger son and his family are up from Suffolk to see them and my daughter also came over in the afternoon. This is the first time the whole family has been together in a long time.
There was constant motion so I just snapped a few photos when I could. This is the only one showing everyone who was at the park in the morning. Steve's wife wasn't here at this point as she is doing a two week residential course at the start of a Masters Degree. She joined us after lunch. The photo shows Cesca holding George, Neil, Steve with Lucy and Gabriel and Kaitlyn who got on like a house on fire.

Brothers - talking about football as they always have since they were about 8 and 6 years old!

Kaitlyn and Lucy having fun in the water.

Together we can do it! Gabriel and Kaitlyn discovering that one alone can't make it happen but two working together can:)

In the afternoon we played in the garden and Juliette and Hannah had both joined the party.

Lucy exploring, she is my youngest grandchild at 18 months. Their ages are easy to remember - Kaitlyn is 4 years old, Gabriel is 3, George is 2 and Lucy is 1.

Neil, Juliette and Stephen as always in photographs of the three of them you'd think they'd hardly met before. We had to tell them to put their arms round each other!

On Sunday we took a picnic up to Longshaw and met up with Rob and Rosie and their two children. Rob, Rosie,Stephen and Neil were all at primary school together so they go back a long way. No Juliette this time as she was taking part in the Great Yorkshire run.

Four on a log and finally an appearance by George who always seemed to be out of the shot or behind someone in most of the photos.Lucy is there hidden behind Hannah.

This is the view we usually got of George, he's always off to investigate something or other. Life is going to be pretty hectic for the next couple of weeks but hopefuly normal service will be resumed after that and the next London post will finally arrive.

One Hundred Years Ago

2010-08-27T07:15:00.004+01:00

Today would have been my mum's 100th birthday, she was born on 27th August 1910. I have no photos of her as a little girl and very few of her as a young woman. This was taken when she was in her early 40s.

This is my favourite photo of my mum and I'm using it here even though it is damaged - I wonder if you can guess who tore it? :) The little girl is me of course.
My mum was just as nice as she looks in these photographs, she gave me a wonderful childhood and I miss her still. Happy Birthday Mum!

Bakewell Show Again

2010-08-06T14:56:00.038+01:00

Bakewell Agricultural and Horticultural Show takes place on the first Wednesday and Thursday of August every year and has been going now for 180 years! I've been going for over 30 of those years but regrettably it is no longer the lovely rural event that it used to be. The farm animals and country crafts have been pushed into the background and the whole thing has become more and more urbanized. I feel that the Show committee are losing touch with their rural roots which seems a pity when there is so much interest these days in the countryside and the old rural crafts and skills. The cattle are now in a permanent building at the side of the Showground which is normally the cattle market and all the judging takes place in the area at the front. If you go early enough you can go and look round inside and the farmers are happy to talk to you about their animals. The photo above is of a lovely Hereford calf. As always, the photos will enlarge if you click on them.

An English Longhorn with her five week old calf. English Longhorns are a very ancient breed, they were used in the medieval times both for ploughing and as a source of milk for butter and cheesemaking.

A closer look at the Longhorn calf who was as interested in J and I as we were in her!

A Red Dexter having her tail combed and fluffed before her big moment.

A Limousin posing nicely for the judge - not necessarily always the case, one or two of the cattle were decidely frisky...

...such as this Black Dexter who obviously could think of more interesting things to do than walking round the judging ring!

This Eagle Owl is at Bakewell every year helping to raise funds for the sanctuary for injured birds of prey. Injured birds are treated and then released back into the wild apart from those who would no longer be able to fend for themselves.

A Harris Hawk was another of the birds of prey on the same stand. I'm hoping to have a closer encounter with one of these soon as a friend of mine has got one that he flies and he's promised to bring her to meet me. She's a working bird though not a pet so how close I get will depend on whether she like s me or not! I'm hoping to be able to wear the glove and hold her on my arm though.

Neither agricultural nor horticultural I admit but oh! how I love these wonderful vintage cars. The next few photos are just a personal indulgence:) This is the one I'd drive off in given half a chance - a fabulous 1936 Aston Martin. Racing green too, my favourite car colour.

1926 Bullnose Morris Cowley Tourer - not as dashing but kind of cute.

A 1936 Rolls Royce and very nice too. There was a really good turnout of vintage cars this year.

A different kind of horse power here, a lovely Shire horse decorated up to the nines. This wasn't work-a-day gear of course but is a reminder of May Day celebrations when the working horses were decorated with garlands of ribbons and flowers, and paraded through villages and around the countryside in order to encourage the health of the horses, and the fertility of crops and fields.

My favourite part of the whole Show is watching the heavy horses, each year there seem to be more teams entering and it's great to think that these wonderful horses are gradually regaining popularity again. This is a pair of grey Percherons pulling what I think is a vegetable cart.

Not a very good photo but it is in because the Suffolk Punches are my favourite heavy horses. Until the 1930s the Suffolks were very much an East Anglian breed and of course it was just as they were beginning to be used in other parts of the country that mechanization took over and the heavy horses became redundant. The Suffolk Punch is the oldest breed of heavy horse in Great Britain and in the 1960s they came very close to dying out. Even today the Suffolk Punch is on the Rare Breeds Survival Trust's critical list.

These are Belgian heavy horses pulling a lovely old Yorkshire Wolds waggon,the horses were lovely but definitely didn't do speed:) I loved the whole turnout because they weren't all professionally done up as all the other entrants in the class were, they looked as though they'd come straight off the farm which appealed to me very much.

I enjoy watching the carriage driving and the Concours d-elegance too.

I always enjoy seeing the display that the National Vegetable Society produce, it didn't seem quite as bountiful as usual this year and we did wonder whether it hasn't been a very good year for vegetables. It isn't a good photo as there was a constant crowd of people in front of it.

Finally some of the prize winners waiting to take part in the Grand Parade, that brief appearance in the main ring is about all that most of the public see of them. J and L both feel that since I'm a Patron of the Show I should write to the Committee and voice my reservations about the direction the Show is taking - not that I think they'll take much notice of a lone voice. On the other hand it may turn out that others agree with me so I shall send them a letter and see what the response is!

The Shepherd's Calendar - August

2010-08-04T07:31:00.001+01:00

Here are more excerpts from John Clare's poem, it is wonderfully descriptive of the heat and backbreaking toil of the harvest which involved all the village - young and old, male and female.

Harvest approaches with its bustling day
The wheat tans brown and barley bleaches grey
In yellow garb the oat land intervenes
And tawney glooms the valley thronged with beans
Silent the village grows, wood wandering dreams
Seem not so lovely as its quiet seems
Doors are shut up as on a winters day
And not a child about them lies at play
The dust that winnows neath the breezes feet
Is all that stirs about the silent street
Fancy might think that desert spreading fear
Had whisperd terrors into quiets ear
Or plundering armys past the place had come
And drove the lost inhabitants from home
The fields now claim them where a motley crew
Of old and young their daily tasks pursue

When the sun stoops to meet the western sky
And noons hot hours have wanderd weary bye
They seek an awthorn bush or willow tree
Or stouk or shock where coolest shadows be
Where baskets heapd and unbroachd bottles lye
Which dogs in absence watchd with wary eye
To catch their breath awhile and share the boon
Which beavering time alows their toil at noon
All gathering sit on stubbs or sheaves the hour
Where scarlet poppys linger still in flower
Stript in his shirt the hot swain drops adown
And close beside him in her unpind gown

Next to her favoured swain the maiden steals
Blushing at kindness which her love reveals
Who makes a seat for her of things around
And drops beside her on the naked ground
Wearied wi brambles catching at her gown
And pulling nutts from branches pulld adown
By friendly swain the maid Wi heaving breast
Upon her lovers shoulder leans at rest
Then from its cool retreat the beer they bring
And hand the stout hooped bottle round the ring

The ruddy child nursed in the lap of care
In toils rude ways to do its little share
Beside its mother poddles oer the land
Sun burnt and stooping with a weary hand
Picking its tiney glean of corn or wheat
While crackling stubbles wound its legs and feet
Full glad it often is to sit awhile
Upon a smooth green baulk to ease its toil
And feign would spend an idle hour to play
With insects strangers to the moiling day
Creeping about each rush and grassy stem
And often wishes it was one of them
In weariness of heart that it might lye
Hid in the grass from the days burning eye
That raises tender blisters on his skin
Thro holes or openings that have lost a pin
Free from the crackling stubs to toil and glean
And smiles to think how happy it had been
Whilst its expecting mother stops to tye
Her handful up and waiting his supply
Misses the resting younker from her side
And shouts of rods and morts of threats beside
Pointing to the grey willows while she tells
His fears shall fetch one if he still rebells
Picturing harsh truths in its unpracticed eye
How they who idle in the harvest lye
Shall well deserving in the winter pine
Or hunt the hedges with the birds and swine

The paintings are
1.Harvest Time, Lambourne, Berks by Henry H Parker
2.Harvest Rest by George Cole
3.Harvest by Robert Gavin