Hello lovely people!
I thought you might like a little catch up on life down here in Devonland. I've been doodling away making things out of string for the last few days, but I've only just finished them tonight and it's not really light enough to take pictures tonight so I will do a Marvellous Crocheted String Item Reveal tomorrow. Hold onto your hats everyone it's going to be explosive! Or slightly scratchy. For now though let's look at pretty pictures of pretty things.
First case in point:
This is the bridge over the river in the middle of my little town. It has three weirs which are sometimes too tall for the water to flow over (you can see the water is pretty low here) and sometimes so deep that you can't see there are weirs, the water just rushes over in one big roaring almost-waterfall. The river is really responsive to rain, I think it's something to do with being so close to Dartmoor. When we moved here eighteen months ago it was the winter with all of the storms that battered the southwest and this river was totally mental. It nearly broke its banks. We were staying in our caravan on Dartmoor for the first couple of months during the mayhem and it nearly blew over. We had to park it behind a massive lorry-sized motorhome so we had a bit of a wind break. Mind you our caravan was eighties-tastic and a bit leaky before being pummelled by about four billion inches of rain and gale winds so the fact that it didn't totally disintegrate is actually testament to the very fine (questionable) craftmanship of the aptly named Craftman caravan. Anyhoo, the purpose of this photo is to show you the beginning of a very fine walk that meanders out from the town centre to a couple of miles out of town to a huuuuuge viaduct. It's along an old canal that goes all the way from Tavistock to Morwellham Quay - a big old tin/arsenic mine on the river, incidentally where they filmed a lot of Edwardian Farm. You can go and have a look about nowadays, they do a lot of living history stuff - and my fave bit, the train into the mine (we took the dog one day and he was utterly freaked out, kept wanting to sit on my lap)
So there's about half a mile of fairly boring going-past-playing-fields walking before it all starts getting rather pretty as you can see above...
And best of all, there's nowhere for my sheep-chasing labradoodle to bugger off chasing sheep! Just up and down the path, and that's fine. So he can come off the lead! Yaaaaay! You can see him here with his bestest buddy Ralph. Just as a side note, I love proper, sensible human names for animals. It just makes the animal seem so much cuter. Like calling a baby Dave. Incidentally, in the course of my job as a baby nurse I once looked after a baby called Dave. No really, it was hilarious. Try saying 'I'm just giving Dave his bottle' with a straight face. See?
Ah yes, the old 'it's my stick, give it back' game. They both had zero interest in the stick until I threw it, and then they would both grab an end, run about with it looking faintly ridiculous like they were pulling an invisible chariot, then Ralph would win (being decidedly less camp than Mungo) and Mungo would look at Ralph, look and the stick, then look at me as if he was asking me to get the stick back for him. Hahahaha! No. Treat it as a life lessons Mungo.
I love sunny days filtered through trees. Reminds me of finishing exams when I was a teenager and being able to read the new Harry Potter books guilt free. I miss new Harry Potter books, I know what happens in all of them now. Some might say slightly too well. Perhaps this is why I could have done better in my exams...hmm...
The Tamar Valley looking particularly lovely. Would you believe this is only a mile out of town? It feels like being transported into an Enid Blyton novel. I almost expected to come across a group of kids solving a murder via the medium of having twenty eight picnics a day or a questionably racist live golliwog jumping into a tree after some pesky fairies.
The viaduct! Isn't it prreeeetttttyyyyyy?!?! It feels so huge in real life. Also kind of sad. This railway line was closed in the seventies by the evil man who closed all the district lines. It just seems like so much design and engineering and building that is just being left to quietly sit unused for decades and decades. Now some of the old railway is used as a footpath - and it is lovely, the deep cuttings feel almost like caves - but you can't get onto the viaduct. It's understandable as it is very high with low walls but can you imagine the view? This whole area used to be alive with heavy industry. Kind of strange to think of it now as it looks so unspoilt, but it used to be very much spoilt! There's the canal and railway and mines and hydroelectric plants and tunnels and aquaducts. It really must have kept the engineers quite busy. You can see bits around that hint at all this effort sometimes, like the random pits excavated by the canal for the slate, or the big bridges that just go to feilds now. I saw this wheel as well, which I wonder was used on the canal boats at some point - maybe in a winch?
Now, I don't want to overdo the comparing-everything-to-stuff-in-books thing, but this really reminds me of Moria in Lord of the Rings. You know, the forgotten, hidden industry thing. Sort of romantic, partially a bit creepy. No dead orcs here though! Yay!
And some rather lovely cow parsley. I think cow parsley is a very underused flower. As I walked past it I thought it would look lovely in a bridal bouquet, or perhaps a hippy hair piece.
Thanks for popping by! I really enjoy sharing these little snippets with you. To be fair I don't share the late-night Morrisons dash for nappies or the state of my back garden, but you know, it's so much more fun to muse about the happy, sunny crafty-Devony bits. I'm looking forward to sharing my stringy adventures with you already :)
xx
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