For the last week I have been staying near Kington which is on the Welsh/English border not far from Hereford. I arrived from an old mill situated on the Offa's Dyke footpath in North Shropshire to an old mill situated on the Offa's Dyke footpath in Herefordshire - how weird is that?
Unlike the previous mill, this mill still has a lot of the original internal workings in place, but the old wheel has long gone and the mill leat that brought the water to it has all been filled in apart from a small bit near the river. The owners bought the mill and house at auction a few years ago and have spent a lot of time and effort stabilising the mill structure below ground level and making it watertight. They are now starting on the long and arduous task of repointing the entire building as well as trying to do work on the house and earn a living!
On a couple of days I helped 'peck out' the old pointing on one face of the mill: this involved wielding a lump hammer and chisel whilst several feet off the ground on some scaffolding. After a couple of hours of doing this Alison and I were worn out and covered from head to toe in fine dust! Luckily, they had a very efficient shower so I was soon clean again and ready for a bit of light fruit-picking. The raspberries were fruiting well when I got there but it wasn't many days before the blackbirds descended en masse and cleared the canes of all but the greenest berries. We also picked blackcurrants and I made a blackcurrant and apple crumble for dinner one evening, as my minor contribution to the culinary delights.
Another day, we went down to the footbridge over the dried-up (at the moment) overspill stream and cleared the stream bed of masses of vegetation that had encroached from both sides. We managed to disturb a wasp nest while we were doing this but once we'd removed the vegetation that we had inadvertently thrown over their entrance hole, they very quickly calmed down and allowed us to continue.
On my afternoon off I walked into Kington and had a good look round the town and their little museum. It's a pretty little town but with a very quirky mix of shops. They have a very good fishmongers/greengrocers and a delicatessen that sells a wide range of specialist cheeses plus several charity shops, at least three card shops, a collectables shop, a tattoo parlour and an antiquarian bookshop, to name but a few! As with most towns there were several shops for sale and a couple of closed pubs - mind you as there were about 15 pubs in the town within living memory, that probably wasn't such a disaster.
I finished up at the top end of the town on Castle Hill, which is where the town was originally situated around the old market square, and decided to visit an important open garden, Hergest Croft Gardens that was nearby. I do seem to be drawn to these open gardens a lot more since I started this journey, particularly if they have a kitchen garden. Hergest Croft has an Azalea Garden, a Park, an Ornamental Garden and a Kitchen Garden, so I was in my element and spent an hour or so wandering round taking photos before I made my way back to the mill and an overdue cup of tea.
On my last morning in Kington I went into town with Alison as I wanted to revisit a shop called Grandad's Shed where I had seen a second hand stainless steel hand fork that I'd decided to buy, as it is my preferred weeding tool and so few places that I have been to have a decent small fork. Unfortunately the shop didn't open on Tuesdays and so I was resigned to disappointment, until we realised that there was someone at the back of the shop. He saw us outside and opened up specially so that I could buy my fork - you wouldn't have that happen in many places!
I am now back at Cheltenham with my Mum for a couple of weeks and then a brief trip to Oxfordshire for the Fairport Convention Music Festival followed by a couple of weeks near Banbury. I shall have to start contacting other potential hosts soon as I am only sorted until the middle of October - I think I shall head down into the South West for winter!
Wednesday, 28 July 2010
Saturday, 24 July 2010
Cornucopia in The Candy
Firstly, dear reader(s), I apologise for the lack of blogging recently, but I have had some issues with my internet connection so couldn't get online at all at my last host's house, and I didn't have a mobile phone signal either! What did we do in the 'olden' days, when I was just a lass?
My last hosts were situated about 2 miles outside Oswestry in an area called The Candy Valley. It's quite a steep sided valley (obviously U-shaped and therefore glacial in origin) with a small stream flowing in the bottom. Near to this stands the house in which I was staying, which used to be a pub and, at some point in history, a corn mill. There is nothing to show that the building was once a mill except for the mill pond that has just been re-excavated and a couple of old grind stones propped against the wall.
My hosts, Lindsay and Anita, have been there about seven years and have made huge alterations to the house to make it into a comfortable home, and now they have turned their attention to becoming more self-sufficient. Their vegetable plot, although not enormous, is incredibly productive, particularly at this time of year with soft fruit. The secret apparently lies in mulching well in winter with wood ash and manure. I couldn't believe the raspberry canes - they were fully ten feet tall and had been pruned back because they were getting too tall. Even standing on tiptoe I couldn't reach the raspberries at the top! We picked raspberries every day while I was there and froze pounds of them on trays so that they would be free-running when stored in plastic containers. On the second day that I was there we harvested gooseberries - just two bushes yielded nearly fifty pounds of fruit, so we made five gallons of gooseberry wine, froze some whole and pureed a whole lot more as they took up less space in the freezer and can be used for gooseberry fool, ice cream or swirled into yoghurt - or my own special favourite - served as an accompaniment to fresh mackerel. (Don't say I don't give out useful tips and information in this blog!)
One morning Lindsay and I went out to look at the chickens and I found the most beautiful moth in the grass. I picked him up gently and cradled him in my hand where he sat quite happily while I took some (out of focus) photos. He had white legs and antennae and his body was sage green and magenta. I thought it was some kind of hawkmoth but wasn't sure, so Lindsay took me down the road to meet a neighbour of his who was a bit of an expert. He also took photos and looked it up in his moth book and it turned out to be an elephant hawk moth (if you've ever seen the caterpillars you would know why it is called 'elephant' - not only are they huge but when frightened they can puff up one end of their greyish body and look just like an elephant's trunk!). We then walked back down the road with the moth still sitting on my hand and Lindsay got his camera and took some photos - he is going to email them to me as mine are just not clear enough, although I shall post them on my Facebook album shortly. Eventually I persuaded the moth onto some rosebay willowherb (it's preferred food plant) where it's incredible colouration immediately rendered it virtually invisible.
I was only in the Candy Valley for a week, but on my last day there I helped make raspberry and redcurrant jelly as it was raining heavily nearly all day and we couldn't go out into the garden. I had hoped to have done some work with Lindsay's bees but the weather was too changeable to go into the hives, so I had to content myself with viewing their activity from a safe distance and sampling some of last year's honey crop - delicious!
I'm now heading back south towards Hereford for a week before I go back to my Mum's for a couple of weeks break and the Fairport Convention music festival at Cropredy in Oxfordshire!
My last hosts were situated about 2 miles outside Oswestry in an area called The Candy Valley. It's quite a steep sided valley (obviously U-shaped and therefore glacial in origin) with a small stream flowing in the bottom. Near to this stands the house in which I was staying, which used to be a pub and, at some point in history, a corn mill. There is nothing to show that the building was once a mill except for the mill pond that has just been re-excavated and a couple of old grind stones propped against the wall.
My hosts, Lindsay and Anita, have been there about seven years and have made huge alterations to the house to make it into a comfortable home, and now they have turned their attention to becoming more self-sufficient. Their vegetable plot, although not enormous, is incredibly productive, particularly at this time of year with soft fruit. The secret apparently lies in mulching well in winter with wood ash and manure. I couldn't believe the raspberry canes - they were fully ten feet tall and had been pruned back because they were getting too tall. Even standing on tiptoe I couldn't reach the raspberries at the top! We picked raspberries every day while I was there and froze pounds of them on trays so that they would be free-running when stored in plastic containers. On the second day that I was there we harvested gooseberries - just two bushes yielded nearly fifty pounds of fruit, so we made five gallons of gooseberry wine, froze some whole and pureed a whole lot more as they took up less space in the freezer and can be used for gooseberry fool, ice cream or swirled into yoghurt - or my own special favourite - served as an accompaniment to fresh mackerel. (Don't say I don't give out useful tips and information in this blog!)
One morning Lindsay and I went out to look at the chickens and I found the most beautiful moth in the grass. I picked him up gently and cradled him in my hand where he sat quite happily while I took some (out of focus) photos. He had white legs and antennae and his body was sage green and magenta. I thought it was some kind of hawkmoth but wasn't sure, so Lindsay took me down the road to meet a neighbour of his who was a bit of an expert. He also took photos and looked it up in his moth book and it turned out to be an elephant hawk moth (if you've ever seen the caterpillars you would know why it is called 'elephant' - not only are they huge but when frightened they can puff up one end of their greyish body and look just like an elephant's trunk!). We then walked back down the road with the moth still sitting on my hand and Lindsay got his camera and took some photos - he is going to email them to me as mine are just not clear enough, although I shall post them on my Facebook album shortly. Eventually I persuaded the moth onto some rosebay willowherb (it's preferred food plant) where it's incredible colouration immediately rendered it virtually invisible.
I was only in the Candy Valley for a week, but on my last day there I helped make raspberry and redcurrant jelly as it was raining heavily nearly all day and we couldn't go out into the garden. I had hoped to have done some work with Lindsay's bees but the weather was too changeable to go into the hives, so I had to content myself with viewing their activity from a safe distance and sampling some of last year's honey crop - delicious!
I'm now heading back south towards Hereford for a week before I go back to my Mum's for a couple of weeks break and the Fairport Convention music festival at Cropredy in Oxfordshire!
Saturday, 10 July 2010
I have been here nearly two weeks now and feel quite at home - it never ceases to amaze me how 'settled' I can feel in just a short time. When I first started to plan my journey I thought that the minimum I would want to do would be four weeks in each place, but now I feel that two weeks is quite long enough to get a good feel about a place and learn how to do the jobs that are required.
I have continued to work in the vegetable patch weeding, preparing beds and planting a variety of plants. The vegetables are all grown in beds about eighteen feet long by four feet wide that are raised on one side to lessen the effect of the hillside and this means that they don't present such a psychological challenge when you come to work on them. It means that 'weeding the onions' can be seen as a finite job and then you can move on to 'weed the cabbages' rather than being presented with one huge plot to weed. I shall definitely go for raised beds or, at least seperate beds, when I have a veg plot of my own again.
Up until now I have been moving north ahead of the season, so everywhere I have been the fruit is not quite ripe before I move on again, but here, at last, the season has caught me up and we are beginning to harvest soft fruit. Yesterday I picked some blackcurrants and today the new Wwoofer (Helena from Hong Kong) and I picked more blackcurrants, gooseberries and raspberries. When it started to rain this afternoon, we came indoors and have just finished making jam out of the blackcurrants and gooseberries. Dawn is now going to start some winemaking with the rest of them and we will have a fruit salad with raspberries, etc tomorrow.
On a few days in the last week I have spent about an hour each day sawing up wood from some of the fir trees that they have felled and stacking it in the log shed for winter. The shed is beginning to fill up nicely now and I feel quite proud that quite a lot has been cut and stacked by me! I know - sad, isn't it!
When not involved in the veg patch or log sawing, I have been weeding one of the herbaceous borders and transplanting ornamental grasses and other plants from different parts of the garden into it. It is now beginning to look quite good and is inspiring us to gradually progress along this level, clearing as we go.
I had another day off on Thursday and decided to drive around and look at the scenery in this part of the country (which is actually Powys, not Shropshire). Just a few miles away is the pretty village of Llanrhaeadr and the famous Llanrhaeadr Falls, so I felt I should start there. As it feels a bit odd at times sight-seeing by myself, I have decided to share, as best I can, some of the places that I visit with you, my avid (and not-so-avid) readers! The Falls are 240' high from top to bottom which is 60' higher than Niagara Falls and are, apparently, very spectacular after a lot of rain. They were still pretty spectacular after hardly any rain at all! I decided to follow the footpath to the top of the falls but did wonder, halfway up the steep climb on slate steps cut in the rockface, why I wanted to climb yet another hill! However, the view from the top was quite impressive, but I didn't go too near the edge as there was no fence and I thought I might get vertigo and take the short cut back to the bottom! When I returned to ground level I treated myself to a cold drink from the cafe strategically placed at the bottom of the footpath.
Then it was off to Lake Vyrnwy, a large man-made reservoir, where I drove along the lakeside road before taking the mountain road to Bala. Up on the mountain there were only sheep for company and a single track road snaking away into the distance clinging precariously to the steep mountainside. In places there were metal crash barriers to prevent the careless driver from plummeting over the edge, but as the wooden posts that supported them looked pretty 'ripe', I hoped I wouldn't have to put them to the test. At last I reached civilisation again and turned northeast to continue my big circuit. At a place about nine miles from Bala was a glass studio called Glassblobbery where they made sophisticated versions of the glass ornaments I had in my bedroom as a child. The most beautiful ones were brilliantly coloured dragons that hung on the wall. They were about a foot long but as they cost £250 they were a little out of my league! I got chatting to the man who was in charge of the gallery and told him roughly what I was doing and as soon as I mentioned 'gardening' he handed me a leaflet about a garden back the way I had just come and said I really ought to visit it. As I didn't have a particular timescale for my drive I once more headed towards Bala turning off at a village called Sarnau and driving up (yes it was 1000 feet above sea level!) a small lane to Caerau Uchaf gardens. It was certainly worth a visit - the gardens were quite inspiring and the view across Lake Bala to Snowdon was breathtaking, plus the cream tea was quite good, too.
From there I headed back via Llangollen and Oswestry having covered quite a few miles during the day. It was only the next day when I went out to my car for something that I realised I had a completely flat rear tyre! All I could think was 'Thank heavens that didn't happen on the mountain road!' I'm going to get it mended in Oswestry on Monday as I shall need the car on Wednesday when I move to my next place just a few miles from here.
I have continued to work in the vegetable patch weeding, preparing beds and planting a variety of plants. The vegetables are all grown in beds about eighteen feet long by four feet wide that are raised on one side to lessen the effect of the hillside and this means that they don't present such a psychological challenge when you come to work on them. It means that 'weeding the onions' can be seen as a finite job and then you can move on to 'weed the cabbages' rather than being presented with one huge plot to weed. I shall definitely go for raised beds or, at least seperate beds, when I have a veg plot of my own again.
Up until now I have been moving north ahead of the season, so everywhere I have been the fruit is not quite ripe before I move on again, but here, at last, the season has caught me up and we are beginning to harvest soft fruit. Yesterday I picked some blackcurrants and today the new Wwoofer (Helena from Hong Kong) and I picked more blackcurrants, gooseberries and raspberries. When it started to rain this afternoon, we came indoors and have just finished making jam out of the blackcurrants and gooseberries. Dawn is now going to start some winemaking with the rest of them and we will have a fruit salad with raspberries, etc tomorrow.
On a few days in the last week I have spent about an hour each day sawing up wood from some of the fir trees that they have felled and stacking it in the log shed for winter. The shed is beginning to fill up nicely now and I feel quite proud that quite a lot has been cut and stacked by me! I know - sad, isn't it!
When not involved in the veg patch or log sawing, I have been weeding one of the herbaceous borders and transplanting ornamental grasses and other plants from different parts of the garden into it. It is now beginning to look quite good and is inspiring us to gradually progress along this level, clearing as we go.
I had another day off on Thursday and decided to drive around and look at the scenery in this part of the country (which is actually Powys, not Shropshire). Just a few miles away is the pretty village of Llanrhaeadr and the famous Llanrhaeadr Falls, so I felt I should start there. As it feels a bit odd at times sight-seeing by myself, I have decided to share, as best I can, some of the places that I visit with you, my avid (and not-so-avid) readers! The Falls are 240' high from top to bottom which is 60' higher than Niagara Falls and are, apparently, very spectacular after a lot of rain. They were still pretty spectacular after hardly any rain at all! I decided to follow the footpath to the top of the falls but did wonder, halfway up the steep climb on slate steps cut in the rockface, why I wanted to climb yet another hill! However, the view from the top was quite impressive, but I didn't go too near the edge as there was no fence and I thought I might get vertigo and take the short cut back to the bottom! When I returned to ground level I treated myself to a cold drink from the cafe strategically placed at the bottom of the footpath.
Then it was off to Lake Vyrnwy, a large man-made reservoir, where I drove along the lakeside road before taking the mountain road to Bala. Up on the mountain there were only sheep for company and a single track road snaking away into the distance clinging precariously to the steep mountainside. In places there were metal crash barriers to prevent the careless driver from plummeting over the edge, but as the wooden posts that supported them looked pretty 'ripe', I hoped I wouldn't have to put them to the test. At last I reached civilisation again and turned northeast to continue my big circuit. At a place about nine miles from Bala was a glass studio called Glassblobbery where they made sophisticated versions of the glass ornaments I had in my bedroom as a child. The most beautiful ones were brilliantly coloured dragons that hung on the wall. They were about a foot long but as they cost £250 they were a little out of my league! I got chatting to the man who was in charge of the gallery and told him roughly what I was doing and as soon as I mentioned 'gardening' he handed me a leaflet about a garden back the way I had just come and said I really ought to visit it. As I didn't have a particular timescale for my drive I once more headed towards Bala turning off at a village called Sarnau and driving up (yes it was 1000 feet above sea level!) a small lane to Caerau Uchaf gardens. It was certainly worth a visit - the gardens were quite inspiring and the view across Lake Bala to Snowdon was breathtaking, plus the cream tea was quite good, too.
From there I headed back via Llangollen and Oswestry having covered quite a few miles during the day. It was only the next day when I went out to my car for something that I realised I had a completely flat rear tyre! All I could think was 'Thank heavens that didn't happen on the mountain road!' I'm going to get it mended in Oswestry on Monday as I shall need the car on Wednesday when I move to my next place just a few miles from here.
Friday, 2 July 2010
Oh No! Not another hill!
On the Saturday before I left South Shropshire, as it was another day off, I decided to go to the nearby town/village of Clun. They were having their annual Open Gardens weekend and also the little town museum was open in the morning. The museum was quite fascinating as it had a lot of old artefacts from various rural craftsmen including a collection of the tools of their trade and old smocks, etc. It also had a lot of relics found at the various Iron Age and Neolithic sites around the area. There were a tremendous number of flint tools and, as the custodian pointed out, flints don't occur in this part of the country at all and probably had to be brought in from the east coast! Whilst I was there I purchased for the princely sum of £1 a booklet entitled Heritage Trail which took you on a walk around Clun detailing places of interest. The starting point was the ruin of Clun Castle and then I meandered around the streets looking at old tanneries, temperance hotels and mills. In the end, I combined both the trail and visiting the open gardens and had a truly wonderful day, stopping off for a cream tea at one of the farmhouses and chatting to all the various garden owners, who were all really friendly.
On the Sunday, I repacked the car and realised that I had a tiny bit of spare space, so I asked if I might buy one of the Shetland sheep fleeces as they were so lovely and soft, but Christine wouldn't hear of it and insisted I just helped myself. I chose a really pretty blue-grey fleece and hope one day to be able to spin it into a fine yarn. It's really nice to be able to take a little part of the places with me when I leave, especially as I feel that I have been leaving little bits of my heart behind in several of the places I have visited.
I arrived in North Shropshire late on Sunday afternoon and drove slowly along very narrow but thankfully deserted rural lanes further and further into the depths of the countryside. I was carefully following the directions that I had been sent so I knew I wasn't lost but I did wonder where I was going to end up! Eventually I entered a steep-sided valley and drove past a small lake and then I was there. The cottage is set in three acres of garden and woodland and it's all set on an angle of about 45 degrees up behind the house! I'm beginning to think I should have gone to East Anglia!
The couple who own it are about my age and have only been here for about three years. Before they bought it, the cottage had belonged to an elderly couple who had been there for thirty years. In that time they had turned the garden from a steep, bracken clothed hillside into a beautiful garden on several levels with interconneting pathways and steps. Unfortunately, as they aged the garden got beyond them and it is now like a mini Lost Gardens of Heligan. I still haven't seen all of the areas, but at every level there are the most beautiful specimen trees and shrubs all sadly over-matured and in need of some drastic action, even to taking out some of the ones that have got completely overcrowded. It must have been fantastic in it's heyday and will be again, I'm sure if Dawn and Tony keep working as hard as they do at the moment.
I try to split my hours equally between work in the vegetable garden (Tony's main domain) and the other areas (Dawn's pride and joy) and feel as if I have already made a difference. The trouble is, I get so absorbed that I forget the time and got totally exhausted the other evening when I realised that I'd done 9.5 hours instead of 6!
Tomorrow is a day off so I am going into Shrewsbury with Dawn as she has a stall at a Green Fair for the day and I'll be able to look around the town as well as perhaps help her set up and take down the stall.
On the Sunday, I repacked the car and realised that I had a tiny bit of spare space, so I asked if I might buy one of the Shetland sheep fleeces as they were so lovely and soft, but Christine wouldn't hear of it and insisted I just helped myself. I chose a really pretty blue-grey fleece and hope one day to be able to spin it into a fine yarn. It's really nice to be able to take a little part of the places with me when I leave, especially as I feel that I have been leaving little bits of my heart behind in several of the places I have visited.
I arrived in North Shropshire late on Sunday afternoon and drove slowly along very narrow but thankfully deserted rural lanes further and further into the depths of the countryside. I was carefully following the directions that I had been sent so I knew I wasn't lost but I did wonder where I was going to end up! Eventually I entered a steep-sided valley and drove past a small lake and then I was there. The cottage is set in three acres of garden and woodland and it's all set on an angle of about 45 degrees up behind the house! I'm beginning to think I should have gone to East Anglia!
The couple who own it are about my age and have only been here for about three years. Before they bought it, the cottage had belonged to an elderly couple who had been there for thirty years. In that time they had turned the garden from a steep, bracken clothed hillside into a beautiful garden on several levels with interconneting pathways and steps. Unfortunately, as they aged the garden got beyond them and it is now like a mini Lost Gardens of Heligan. I still haven't seen all of the areas, but at every level there are the most beautiful specimen trees and shrubs all sadly over-matured and in need of some drastic action, even to taking out some of the ones that have got completely overcrowded. It must have been fantastic in it's heyday and will be again, I'm sure if Dawn and Tony keep working as hard as they do at the moment.
I try to split my hours equally between work in the vegetable garden (Tony's main domain) and the other areas (Dawn's pride and joy) and feel as if I have already made a difference. The trouble is, I get so absorbed that I forget the time and got totally exhausted the other evening when I realised that I'd done 9.5 hours instead of 6!
Tomorrow is a day off so I am going into Shrewsbury with Dawn as she has a stall at a Green Fair for the day and I'll be able to look around the town as well as perhaps help her set up and take down the stall.
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