… on the arts and the outdoors
Tuesday, 26 February 2013 1 Comment
A bracing walk from the house onto the moor last Saturday afternoon. The natural ‘cheesewring’ formations are a marvel of nature, especially those that seem to defy gravity. Here are three on three separate tors.
Monday, 25 February 2013 Leave a comment
Visiting friends are always a good excuse for an excursion. This one was the first of the year to Tintagel. It was a clear, sunny and warm day for the time of year. A day later and we’d have frozen in the sunless, bitter NE wind.
Looking south at ‘The Island’:
Looking north from ‘The Island’:
What I call ‘The Claw’ – it looks particularly threatening in a storm:
St Materiana in the distance, above a column of slate whose jagged profile can take on perilous new forms:
Sunday, 17 February 2013 1 Comment
On a day like this, full of not-quite-yet-Spring sunshine, the lure of a walk up onto the moor for the paper was impossible to resist. Here are a few of the details and panoramas that met my eye. I would say they’re “in no particular order”, and pause idiotically between them, but they appear chronologically and in close sequence!
Friday, 18 January 2013 Leave a comment
ITV West Country News stated in its 18.00 programme tonight that there had been no snow in Cornwall today. Pah! In my neck of the woods, on the eastern flanks of Foweymoor (Bodmin Moor), there was loads of it as far as the eye could see. From deer tracks and bent saplings to snowy vistas in which familiar trees take on a quite new character, here are eleven photos taken before 09.15 this morning.
Monday, 14 January 2013 Leave a comment
While snow drifts in to the north and east of Cornwall, today has brought lashing rain to Foweymoor. All that was needed to conjure up a scene worthy of Hokusai were some soaked Japanese travellers, but we don’t get many of those round here.
Thursday, 3 January 2013 Leave a comment
Early signs of Spring? Pussy Willow buds behind the house this afternoon.
Tuesday, 1 January 2013 1 Comment
There’s nothing quite like a New Year’s Day walk with friends, climbing steep roads riddled with gullies from recent rain, striding along old granite railway sleepers, ending up with a good pub lunch at the highest village in Cornwall.
On the way back, we peered into a huge hole that’s opened up over a mine shaft, were too late to find gold in a prehistoric barrow, and scrambled over the ruins of a disused chapel once surrounded by a drunken shanty town.
Best of all were the views, when the sun shone between the heavy showers and the rusty corrugated roof of an old barn glowed in a deep raddle reddle ruddle.
Sunday, 2 December 2012 Leave a comment
In the dishevelled wilderness that is the top of the garden this year (I blame the weather…), I’ve finally got proof of what’s been causing damage to the shrubs. For each of the past few winters, since I planted them, the young witch-hazels and azaleas have been systematically top-sliced. Young buds are severed by clean, 45-degree cuts through the stem. It’s surgically precise.
This is in an area with two stock fences, one between the garden and the wood, another between it and the moor.
I caught the culprits just after dawn this morning. They’re the biggest I’ve seen hereabouts. I went out to remonstrate with them, as you do, but they can leap a four-foot fence from a standing start and were gone in a bum’s flash.
Thursday, 29 November 2012 Leave a comment
A lonesome foxglove still pining for the summer we never had. It’s seasonally disordered, but today’s a good day.
Cornish Adrian 