Back from the Car Boot Sale

A strange day here today - blardy cold, but it can't decide whether to snow or rain, so it's doing both by turn. I feel very much in the need of stretching my legs, so will get out and about shortly, then try to piece the new patchwork block I cut out yesterday.



I nearly didn't buy anything at the car boot sale - there were very few people selling (hardly surprising), but I did end up with 5 of the prettiest dinner plates with rosebuds round the borders for £2, and from the same stall, a part service of 2 oval serving plates, 5 dinner plates, and some large side plates and small ones for £4. We have had some breakages recently, and I am not the sort of person who has everything brand new and matching - completely the opposite in fact. I could have bought a box-full of china at yesterday's auction, but then I would have had half a box-full of junk I didn't want! My husband spotted a wall plaque of knights at Agincourt which is a good companion to one we already have and I got a Winter 1946 copy of the Countryman magazine (I collect them) from the same stall. It will appear on here throughout the week as it has SO much in it that I think readers of this blog might enjoy.

Plates too pretty to pass on.

Easy to see why I had to have THIS copy . . .



Then my son wanted a sponge cake. I murder sponge cakes - the best I could do was a Madeira, which apparently counts as a sponge cake to him. I also made my own recipe Manderin Orange Cake, because I have been fancying a piece all week - as you do when you're trying to LOSE weight! As I beat eggs and measured flour, fat and sugar, I had the joy of listening to David Suchet's wonderful voice on Desert Island Discs (he is on a par with Stephen Fry and both would definitely be candidates for my Dream Dinner Party). When the BBC do something properly such as much of Radio 4, and pretty well ALL costume drama) they are superb, if only they could steer clear of promoting idiots, everything EXCEPT heterosexuality, political correctness, politics and getting the knife out for people who say something off record but UNDER THEIR ROOF. Yes, I'm still angry about that Golliwog incident, and for Jo Brand to say she was shocked to the core by it - gee willikers, when she has a mouth and mindset that could do with a dose of carbolic, how she could ever profess to be shocked by ANYTHING is beyond my comprehension.

But hey ho, I am glad I am not out in the Real World and can enjoy the smallest of pleasures, like second hand plates and flowers on my jasmine and the prospect of a piece of my still-warm home-made cake . . .

The Devil on Dartmoor

Wistman's Wood, Dartmoor . . .


Apologies for blog quietness for a couple of days, but what with no internet connection all afternoon yesterday, and then the excitement of finding my ancestors in other people's family trees (still on a high over that as I found another link this morning!), blogging has been on hold.

Regulars to this blog may know of my love of Dartmoor and fascination about its history, natural history, people and archaeology. I will include ghostie stories in that remit too.

If you know Dartmoor at all, you will know that even today, there are remote spots where myth and legend seem but a breath away. How real these stories must have seemed to my ancestors, in the days when you only saw neighbours on high days or holidays, or at market, and when life was so parochial and insular.

The Devil figured large in Dartmoor legend. Perhaps the best-known tale is of the Wisht Hounds, the spectral hounds of the Devil who hunt no normal quarry - they seek the souls of unbaptized babies. I can imagine only too well the distress of a poor uneducated mother whose child has died before it was recognized in the eyes of the church and was condemned to be buried outside of the churchyard walls, like poor Sorrow, Tess's bastard child in Thomas Hardy's novel Tess of the D'Urbervilles, despite her "home baptism" involving her younger brothers and sisters. The Wisht Hounds were said to set off at midnight from Wistman's Wood, led by the devil on a headless black horse. The red-eyed hounds bay as they chase their victims towards the Dewerstone, where they are chased over the edge of the precipice above the River Plym.

Wistman's Wood, as in the photo above (many thanks to Creative Commons) is a strange place even in sunshine, with the mossy boulders trapping stunted, twisted oak trees, hundreds of years old but some no bigger in circumference than my lower leg. At night, a spooky place indeed.

Last snow pic - honest!

Just to go on with - I've had NO internet connection ALL AFTERNOON. Hiss and spit! I shall do a proper posting later (I hope).

This is the view from yesterday's walk up by old Isaac's place (he's now pushing up daisies in the chapel graveyard, bless him). Black Mountain is now white . . . though thankfully things are thawing a bit here now and we had rain rather than snow today.

More snow tales - tell me when you're bored . .

Just a few of snow pics from Tuesday afternoon, when Danny and I had a walk along the fields by the river.
A rapid thaw of the branch-snow led to this speckled effect beneath, reminding me of a white strawberry . . .

Along the field beside the river, which is now being allowed to regenerate.


Snow-magic beside the river.

We followed in the fox's footsteps.


A craggy island mid-river, where the otters play.



I borrowed Danny's laptop yesterday and was able to open my CD-ROM of the Blizzard in the West, and jotted down some notes. Apparently the winds were hurricane-force and that, combined with the heavy snowfall, is what really did the damage. On Mutley Plain, Plymouth, women and children were blown off their feet and half suffocated with the rush of snow-laden wind. People described the wind and snow "so fierce, it was like inhaling icicles." Chimneys crashed, roofs were ripped off, and the wall of one building collapsed, leaving the mistress of the house clinging to broken floorboards at the edge of what had been her children's nursery. Another falling chimney resulted in a house-fire, where the flames were so tremendous it was like a furnace.

Lambs were born under the snowdrifts and were still alive when rescued - older ones began grazing straight away, especially after a bottle of gin was passed amongst them to perk them up! Elsewhere a horse had been buried by drifting snow, and was dug out after a night's burial, and was alive but cold. Near Bickleigh, hens were covered in snow and one had laid two eggs whilst incarcerated.

On the train from Princetown to Plymouth, passengers were snowed in on board for 36 hours, when the train hit huge drifts and could go no further. "The snow beat in our compartment through closed doors, ventilators and windows so much that in a few minutes I had 2" of snow on my umbrella. We stuffed paper, handkerchiefs and cloth into every hole or crevice we could."

In "A Welsh Childhood", Alice Ellis Thomas writes of snow:

"If it snowed . . . you could go out sledging down the field, taking care to turn sharply before you slammed into the iron bedstead that formed part of the fence at the bottom of the best run. One year it snowed so much that the lanes filled up and you walked on the crest of the hedges. The sea froze too, and the adults didn't like it, but for irresponsible children the conditions were ideal.

There is a story from further inland about another occasion when snow filled the lanes. A man was going home one evening when he saw a funeral procession in the distance. He pressed aside to keep out of the way, but as it drew closer he knew it to be unreal, for the mourners and bearers were treading the air, their slowly stepping feed on a level with the hedge-tops. It was already deep winter and the nedt week it snowed until the lanes were full. A neighbour died and the cortege had to make its way to the graveyard walking above the hedgerows. It is not related how they managed to bury the body." (Taken from: "A Welsh Childhood" by Alice Thomas Ellis).

Which reminds me of a tale associated with the Warren House in, on the Moreton to Postbridge Road on Dartmoor. "At the end of a spell of wintry weather, when the moors had been covered in snow for weeks, visitor called at the inn in search of overnight accommodation. He was shown to his room, in which was a large chest. The visitor stared at it for ages wondering what treasures it might contain until, eventually, his curiosity got the better of him. As he listed the heavy lid, he had the shock of his life: inside was a corpse with an extremely white, ghostly face. Thinking he had uncovered a murder victim, he rain downstairs screaming. Almost nonchalantly, the landlord said, "Don't worry, 'tiz only feyther." 'Father' had died a few weeks earlier; his corpse had been salted down to preserve it until the weather relented, and it could be carried for burial at the parish church many miles away across the moor." (Taken from: "Dark and Dastardly Dartmoor" by Sally and Chips Barber.)

GOLLIWOGS!

There, I've used a bad word, and not just in a private conversation which was overheard and then reported to the Thought Police at the BBC. But then, although this blog is open to anyone to read, unless Someone Doesn't Like Me, I will get off scot free. My name's not Thatcher you see. My husband is very political. I suppose, perhaps by default, that makes me have Opinions. Dunno. What I do know is that the BBC have two different codes of practice and if your name is Jonathon Ross you can say or do anything which thousands of people deem offensive and not have to apologise. If your name is Thatcher, and you say something in private, and are overheard, then the BBC Stazi deem it a racist comment and you are out on your ear.

As for Golliwogs, I used to have one as a child. I wish I still had it, as I would blardy-well brandish it right now.

Snow!!!

Sunrise over the snow from the garden this morning. . . Stunning.



We had a pathetic amount yesterday, but it more than made up for that overnight and we woke up to a goodly blanket of it and as it's been snowing most of the morning, we have about 6" outside now. I went out with my camera after an early breakfast and walked to the top of the hill and back, and then carried on down the hill and along by the river. It was magical. The whole landscape looks so different under snow and it seems to peel away the present and reveal the past - the landscape as it truly looks. Mini blizzards of snow were blown from trees and hedgerows by fingers of soft wind playing the branches like a harp. Animal tracks showed where rabbits had passed. Several together by our field gate, running this way and that, helter-skelter and back over the bank and hedge. Seen singly, they are two long slots where the hind feet have been and a double mark together where the forepaws have rested. On the bend a fox had slid down the bank and crossed the lane up the Lime Kiln field trackway in search of a meal. Bird tracks criss-crossed our garden and they had been up to the cat bowl on the porch to check it out - jackdaws these, they are so nosy.


At top of the hill, but too cloudy to see Black Mountain.

This is the rabbit version of Edvard Munchs' "The Scream"!!!

Mr Fox passed this way . . .

Down by the river, the snowlight robbed all colour from the scene and gave me shades of grey . . .



We have snow so rarely that I am like a big kid with it and have to be out exploring. My Ag. Lab. ancestors would doubtless have thought me completely mad, especially the ones who lived through the Blizzard in the West, which began the night of March 9th 1891. Dartmoor author Eden Phillpotts lived through it too and wrote his experience into his novel "The American Prisoner" (my copy is signed by its owner in 1915). Several American prisoners have escaped onto the moor from Dartmoor Prison (the story is set a hundred or more years earlier). They are struggling "in the very shadow of death where Childe the Hunter's ruined cenotaph had risen, and where legend pointed to the sportsman's place of passing even on such a night, and in such an hour" (in fact, by Foxtor Mire . . .) "There was a sudden rent in the snow-clouds at this moment, for out of heaven burst a blast so awful that it tore the inky curtains of the storm, swept the air clear along its hurricane ways and brought a fleeting glimmer of light to earth. In the black chasm opened on high reeled suns, and the flames of bygone ages flashed into the eyes of dying men. Then these silvery star-fires were swallowed up again, and the tempest, shrieking like a fury, tumbled its pall over them to lift it no more. Yet in that blast another light than those of the indifferent universe had touched upon Cecil Stark's fainting eyes. Dear as the smile of a friend, as the sound of a voice, as the hand of a man strethced to save, he had marked a ruddy flash from one little window high aloft on the western face of Fox Tor Farm. Like a lighthouse lamp it hung above the chaos. It flashed serene and steadfast; then the blizzard thundered down again, and it vanished behind the snow."

And: "The snow no longer fell; the sky was clear, yet lacked colour; the wind, sunk from its sustained fury, now uttered gigantic but irregular sighs and slept between them. When it blew, snow-wreaths puffedd aloft in little spirals, and deep white snow-banks slipped and cracked. Like streams of ink the rivers wound beneath, and every rush and briar beside them bent under its proper wweight of snow. The glare of the earth upthrown made Mr Putt's eyes smart. A bitter, steely cold still held the Moor, and every man was wrapped up in such thick garments as he possessed. Mr Beer wore one of his wife's shawls wrapped round his ears, while each labourer had fashioned himself haybands to protect his legs. . . . "Us might so soon seek storm-foundered sheep or steer as a man," declared Putt, "I'll be tissicked up wi' brownkitty again to-night, an' nobody to care a cuss whether my breathing be hard or easy." . . . (I assume the "brownkitty" was medicine or booze!)

Needless to say, like C Henry Warren, Eden Phillpotts is another author I look out for. My dad - a Devon man descended from long generations of Devon men - said that Eden Phillpotts knew the Moor like the back of his hand, like Crossing and Worth did.

P.S. My son and I have just had another snow walk as the sun was making it thaw quickly on trees, roads and buildings. Photos tomorrow.

A Walk to the Snowdrops . . .

It's been perishing cold here today with a bitter wind. A lazy wind, the old folks used to say (and I still do) - it's too lazy to go round you so it goes right through you instead. My friend Deb came over for a chat and a plum muffin, and we walked up to the snowdrops on a neighbour's land up the valley. We were a week early for the best display, as they were only just starting to open out into flower, but it is still a magic spot, for all that. I showed Deb the remains of Ffosgrech, where the Lewis family lived in the 1881 census, and I even took a photo of the half a brick which is all that remains, apart from the rock-cut back wall of the cottage. They had wonderful views from up there but would have felt today's wind as it wuthered about the place with icy fingers.

The gorse was in bloom, and I wondered if they made Gorse Wine with it as I have in the past or whether it was just crushed as animal fodder, which is more likely.

On the East side of the country it is snowing and "they" threaten snow over much of the country, though it may just fall short of us (shame!)

The trackway upwards.

The purpose of the walk - drifts of snowdrops.


This fabulous old tree, which had incorporated a neighbouring one into its embrace.



And another, where a tree had been completely surrounded.

Half a brick. All that's left of Ffosgrech.


The rock-cut platform and navelwort now growing where the back of the house would have been.
The view along our valley. You can see the valley bottom is like a big sponge - waterlogged soil and very poor grazing and alder-carr woodland.

I loved this ancient fallen oak, striated with emerald moss so that it looked like corduroy.


At the Car Boot Sale this morning I spotted my old friend C Henry Warren in a collection of books on someone's stall and for 50p, "England is a Village" was mine. Written at the outbreak of war, he evokes country living with the most evocative descriptions. It had snowed then, and I will share with you a page or so . . . The author is speaking of the regular early morning passers-by, recognisable by their greetings, or their way of walking - the blacksmith shuffled in his heavy boots, as yet unlaced as he ambles to the forge, kettle in hand. But after snow . . .

"But now it is all quite different. No Tom or Arthur goes pedalling past, called from bed each morning for a pittance on some far-off farm. And when Sam does appear, the day is already so far advanced that nobody could rely on such a belated cock-crow. In that cold silence when the snow throws its first white light on to the ceiling, it is almost as if the end of the world had happened overnight and, unaccountably, we were the only souls left alive in a blank and muffled world. at last, however, there are voices - voices unnaturally clear, and as it were suspended, because unaccompanied by the sound of passing feet, in a vacuum. And then, once we are up, we see what all the mystery is about. There is nothing the snow has not clung to and changed past all knowing. Roof and tree, road and garden, all have been fashioned anew in the night by a hand of miraculous cunning and to the whim of a mind that loves not colour. And down by Mark Thurston's cottage, under the knot of elms we had thought so friendly and so familiar, half a dozen men have suddenly appeared from nowhere with a couple of horses and the village snow-plough. Monkish in their sacks, which they wear over their heads, the two corners tucked one into the other, the men handle the cumbersome implement that has lain on the grass by the roadside all the year, its massive shares decorated with cowslips in the spring and hidden under a foam of kexes in summer. While some of them attend to the harnessing of the horses, others stand by, flinging their arms about like flails, in an attempt to stir some sort of warmth in their shivering bodies. . . . For awhile yet the village maintains its empty silence. Double-thatched now, with straw and snow, the cottage roofs project their picturesque angles against the deadened sky. Over Goose End the ruined windmill flaunts its broken sails, set at Miller's Pride until they fall and ill able to support the weight of snow lodged on their upper edges. Gardens there are none, and every bush is a frozen fountain. Our meagre river, running through the centre of the village, is indistinguishable now from the Green that rims its banks. At other times, it alternates swiftly from a convenient mirror (beloved of photographers) for the reflection of the surrounding cottages to a muddy stench that causes the passers-by to pinch their noses in disgust; but to-day both mirror and stench are sealed in ice. Buried somewhere beneath its white, unruffled surface are the inviting slides that traverse it from end to end - slides where the children of the village have enjoyed themselves as never since they were born and where even the farm-hands, returning from the fields in the early dusk, could not resist the temptation to drop their bicycles against the bridge and take a flying turn or two before they went home to tea. Later on . no doubt, somebody will brush the snow away, or at least enough of it to uncover the precious slides. But it will be beyond their power to restore the simple sport to the pitch of ecstasy it engendered all last week and the best part of the week before. For then there was a moon. And whilst the frost dropped silver stars on to the roofs and spun from every branch and twig a hoary lace that only the morning would discover, lads and girls, and children who should long ago have been abed, sped over the glassy river, wings at their heels, and filled the blacked-out village with their laughing voices."

C. Henry Warren: "England is a Village", publ. 1941 by Eyre and Spottiswood.







I also splashed out 20 pence on a book about ghosties which looks interesting reading, and £3 on a lovely old pot-bellied earthenware jar. My husband will have to make me a wooden lid for it, but then it can house the mixed fruit in the kitchen.