bunn

The bluebells are fading now, but this weekend I caught these just still scented in the sunlight at Grenofen on the edge of Dartmoor, on a short walk with my mother. It was rather warm, and we retired to the cafe at the top of the lane for smoothies and ice cream. The cafe used to be a pub, but there's more market now for selling tea and cakes to walkers than beer.

And on Monday we took the canoe out from Saltash and explored Tamerton Lake, which we have never been to before!
Up into the Hamoaze, carefully avoiding the speedboats, and under the railway bridge.
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What else has happened? Oh, I finished writing my Sutcliff Swap fic, so that's all ready to go when the collection opens. It has a terrible lack of historical notes, and I somehow feel something is missing, but I can't think of anything very historical to add. It's a Sword at Sunset story and didn't seem to need as much research as I sometimes do. Or perhaps writing Tolkien fic has spoiled me for things that can be quickly researched via Google.

I drew three new things, but they are all for Tolkien Reverse Summer Bang, so I'm not supposed to post them yet.

Oh, and I wrote some Silmarillion things!:

Spirits, Names, and Why It’s Important to be Specific 1,465words but not all mine.

When Sauron the Necromancer calls a spirit back into the body he is torturing, he expects a half-broken Curufinwë; Celebrimbor, pushed even closer to the brink. Instead, he gets a very, very ticked off Curufinwë Fëanáro. Sauron feels like he should technically still have the upper hand in this situation, but in that moment, he has a very hard time believing it.

This was a collabfic: two people wrote the first two chapters and I wrote the last one. I feel it actually works surprisingly well, given that it was written by three people who didn't know each other. But it was a very fun idea (sadly, not mine!)

The Passing of the King 966 words.
which is a short thing about Elros, Elrond's brother, and his death. I decided I'd like a version of him that was more weird and Elven than people often write.

Lingering in the Hither Lands 13575 words.
Thangorodrim is broken, and the Elves believe that Evil has ended forever. There's a certain amount of tidying-up to be done.

I feel this one is very self-indulgent really, and I almost didn't post it because... well, I already wrote Return to Aman, which is LONG and all about Maglor and Elrond, because when I wrote Quenta Narquelion, I had to work out how 'love grew between them as little might be thought' and ended up convincing myself so thoroughly that it made me sad. ONLY, Return to Aman can't be a fix for Quenta Narquelion, because I wrote them at the same time, and ended up dealing with a lot of things differently.

So, Lingering in the Hither lands was my very self-indulgent attempt to at least partially fix things for Maglor and Elrond in the Second Age in a way consistent with both Quenta Narquelion, and also with the 1937 version of the Silmarillion where Maglor doesn't wander off singing sadly into the sunset. But I somehow feel I really should make more effort to write things that don't have Maglor in them. Or Elrond, possibly, though given that all of Tolkien's works DO have Elrond, I feel that's somehow less of a problem.

Pp has gone off to a game expo leaving me in command of the Shop on the Borderlands. I fear I am inevitably going to screw something up, and am in suspense as to what it will be.

I rummaged on my phone and found a few photos I meant to post. This is not my painting, it's someone else in my art class, but I liked it because of the people nattering in the background and the tea and biscuits makes such a nice contrast with the rather austere Art.

I've been meaning for years to take a photo of this old house when the wisteria is in bloom, and recently I finally walked past and had my phone to hand and it had some battery. But the medievalishness of it doesn't come through so well in the photo, and you can't smell the flowers.

Pp's birthday today and an early high tide, so we got our act together and went out on the river again. I'm a bit sunburned now, I should have put cream on. I tend to be lax about sunburn since I almost never burn badly, but it's foolish really. We were on the river at nine and the water was full of that wonderful smell of leaves warming and drying as the sun shone on them (lots of very steep hills here, so though the sun had been up a good while, there were still leaves wet and shaded.

You can see the Wonky Chimney twice here: once on the skyline and once in reflection.

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We found this adit in the riverbank opposite Calstock village last week, at high tide. Alas, my phone ended up taking a rather blurry pic, for it was evening and the shadows were long. The passage looked like it went a good way in, and rose a little above the high tide mark.

According to the Heritage Gateway, the mine in the hillside above is the magnificently named Buttspill Mine, (also rather more boringly called Green Valley, or Tamar Valley mine) which still has surviving shafts and chimneys, and is part of the Bere Peninsula silver mines, which were in use at least from the medieval period, and possibly earlier: there's a Roman camp on the hillside opposite the mine on the other side of the river, and if the Romans knew the silver were there, they would certainly have been interested, but I don't think anyone knows for sure if they did.

Buttspill mine was opened in late 17th century and worked until late 19th century.

Heritage Gateway also says:

At the northern end of the eastern silver lode lies Buttspill Mine. Said to have been worked in Elizabethan times and operated intermittently throughout the 19th century under a variety of names. At the turn of that century it formed part of the Old Bere mines. In 1843 it was re-worked as the Green Valley Mine but changed hands shortly after and was re-named Wheal Fancy. In 1855 it was re-opened as Bere Alston United and a smelting furnace erected. At this time, attention was turned to the mine's reserves of fluorspar. Output records for both silver and fluorspar exist for the 1870's and, under the name of Tamar Valley, fluorspar was again produced during the mid 1880's.

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One quick photo of Rosie in our brief snow, which lasted all of a day, but snow in Cornwall is a rarity.

Whereas today the sun was shining so warmly it had tempted out a rash brimstone butterfly, which fluttered madly around the gorse-flowers then abruptly decided it was exhausted and sat on a twig, allowing me to photograph it rather closely. ( Read more... )

I was walking Rosie in the woods yesterday, when I found myself surrounded by a cloud of tiny twittering things darting between the trees and bushes. There must have been 7 of them at least, and my impression was of considerably more. I thought at first that they were wrens, but then I got a good look at a couple of them, and discovered that they were actually goldcrests, the tiniest of all British birds, but it seems, definitely not the quietest!

Of course, although I had my camera, getting a photo of goldcrests in a shadowy wood is not easy, so here is a photo of Rosie about to cross the stream instead.

Courtesy of two very cheerful gentlemen who phoned at exactly 7am to say they would be arriving in 10 minutes with a delivery. A good thing they did, because otherwise I would have been asleep. Before the delivery arrived the village looked like this:

And afterwards it looked like this:

I'd walk the dog but she refuses to admit that times before 8am exist and is still fast asleep refusing to awake.

On Friday evening, we decided to set off from Saltash and go downstream. The nice thing about launching from Saltash is that it's practically seaside down there, so the water is clear and salt and the bottom is all sandy and there is no mud! The slightly alarming thing is that the river is wide down there, so it can get a bit windy, and there are a lot of boats. If you go down towards Plymouth, there are frigates and submarines, too. I find being in a canoe and sharing a river with a frigate a bit alarming!

But fortunately there were not many boats moving on a Friday evening, and all of them were tiny. The wind was quite calm too, so we crossed the Tamar just downstream of the railway bridge, went downstream and found ourselves outside the naval dockyard. We weren't sure quite how close to it we were supposed to paddle, so we crossed the river to the Cornwall side again, which was much less daunting.

I forgot to bring the SD card for my camera, so you'll have to imagine the three egrets, the heron and the oyster-catchers, and the deep clear green water under the trees leaning down from the rocky shoreline. We went downstream a little, then went around into a cove, where we saw a labrador sitting sadly by the river waiting for its person to stop doing other things and throw a ball into the water. The labrador's person told us that the village was called Wilcove. I've never been there before, so we paddled in to have a look, and found that it had a pub, and a driveway going behind the pub that was currently underwater. I liked seeing the cars parked as far up as they could go, unable to escape until the tide went down.

I think these are from a couple of canoe wanderings. This was the day that we arrived a little later than planned and found that there was a lot of high tide to go around! That granite lump is actually a bollard on top of the quay, and behind it is a bench for people to sit on. It was hard to tell where the river began!

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We meant to go out on the river on Friday evening, but misread the tide times.
We meant to go out on the river on Saturday, but the skies were black, the rain fell, the wind blew and the storm warnings warned dolefully.
We meant to go out on the river today, and made it!
Halton Quay is a very convenient quay in some ways: it's easy to get to, has plenty of parking and is used almost entirely by fishermen and canoeists, so it's not too busy. Unfortunately the other thing is has in generous quantities is MUD.

Not too bad on the way out, because we arrived not long before high tide. The tide and the wind together helpfully wafted us up the river, listening to the sound of the wind in the reeds. I love that noise. It reminds me of childhood holidays in the Norfolk Broads.

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( And more bluebells... )
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I happened to get up early a couple of days ago because Brythen had an upset tum, and this was the view outside the door, so I snapped it before I went back to bed.

It was a cloudy day when we set off, but not too windy, which is good, because the river is wide at Weir Quay, and it's down at the point where the river starts to feel like it's turning into sea. We decided to go up-river, and found that the mud-bank on the far side of the bend at Weir Quay goes out a long way! It didn't matter, since the canoe needs very little water, but we had to paddle cautiously.

Turn the corner, and the sun was starting to show through the clouds as we came up to the Pentillie estate. Someone had noticed the sunbeams and had climbed out of the river to sunbathe...( Read more... )

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Coming back down into the village, looking west towards the sunset through an oak tree. I love the golden colour of oaks coming into leaf,and Brythen is such a wonderful long-legged curvy shape.

I had to go to Tutwell. It's close enough that I could have walked, if I'd had all day, but I did not so I took Helga the Saab. For some reason I took photos on the way home. ( Read more... )

On top of a fence post,
all covered in green
I photographed lichens
That evolved before the Eocene.

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A fabulous warm sunny day on Saturday. I shall go for a long walk, I thought! But when I got halfway up the hill, I remembered I still had a cold, and was very wheezy. So I hastily rethought my route and paused to take some photos. Here we are pausing, and admiring the early cherry tree.

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Today I was more ambitious and walked further, doing a walk that involves a steep uphill climb on the way home. Oh lord, that was a mistake. I have spent the rest of the day wrapped around a bath, a book and a lemsip. So I still have not done the long walk I planned, but the hounds seem to be prepared to accept that I'm not quite up to providing a mega-walk today, thank goodness. They are fast asleep.

We decided to go over to Mount Edgecumbe on Saturday, since the weather forecast was good. Of course, when Saturday arrived, it was snowing, but we thought let's go anyway. And in fact it was quite pleasant down by the sea, although it would have been a sunnier day today. Here's the folly and Drake's Island and Plymouth in the background.

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If Pp had not borrowed my car to take the Shop on the Borderlands to the Plymouth War-games show, I might have taken an Excursion, but as it was I just went out for a wander down the valley to admire the mist. The snowdrops are almost out, but they're looking a little draggled. But the mist and sky were beautiful.

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I had thought that the frost might be gone by the time I had finished wrapping the dogs up in layers of coats, but no, down in the valley, the frost was still lying on the old Gunnislake Clitters mine.

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Entries tagged with tamar valley

Summer Oncoming

I am In Charge

Sunny day on the river

Slightly blurry random mine of the day

What are you, little weird purple flowers?

Weather, wildlife, and an outbreak of weird woven oddnesses.

Twitterings

Sunrise in the Tamar Valley

Saltash to Wilcove

High tide paddlings.

Halton Quay to Calstock

I think we have achieved Peak Bluebell

Up the river from Weir Quay

All the flowers at once

Driving home from Tutwell...

On top of a fence post, all covered in green

Come for a walk!

Mount Edgecumbe on a Saturday

It stopped raining!

Bit nippy out

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June 2025

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