Dartmoor and Bigley

Bodmin Moor, Cornwall, The Hurlers

A field of flowers on December 23. Sunflowers? Not sure but they sure were tall! We're on the road, starting our holiday. (Got all of ten or fifteen miles from home and found plenty of adventure, as you'll see!)


About twenty minutes from home it seemed like we'd been driving forEVER, so we stopped at the farm shop by the side of the road just past Upton, Cornwall, and had the creamiest clotted cream I've had since King Island, Tasmania. Also the best strawberry jam I have had in memory. The tea... wait for it....

Is actually grown here in England! The only tea grown here, I think (and the only kind they'll be able to get after Brexit goes through and they banish all things foreign!).

This room was full of people when we arrived, escaping from the misty moors. The little model train goes round and round and round.

This is how driving was most of the day. Note the width of your Cornish roads here: one car, sometimes with room for a person besides. Sometimes they widen so that cars can squeeze past each other with inches (yes, just inches) to spare.

Aha! A point of interest. We get out of the car and Young Man asks me why I've grabbed the rain jackets. He soon ate those words. :) As you'll see.

Looking about, we saw a lady in a red jacket walking a very excited dog. I ran to catch up with her and shouted "Great weather today!" and she shouted back "Yes, isn't it!" (Yarrow now understands why some country folk in the James Herriot novels are always yelling -- you have to, to be heard over those moorish winds!). We asked her where "The Hurlers" standing stones were. They were very very close by, but she suggested we get in the van and drive over to the other car park, so we could be assured of a marked road to follow. 

Before we went over there, though, she showed us around this area, which is all collapsed (picturesque) mess from tin mining. 

Ah! So Christmassy the weather! Yarrow whinged a bit about it but I wouldn't have had my first walk on the moors be any other way. :) Loved it. Jeans totally soaked and dripping by the end, but I was so happy with the experience that I wasn't cold.

The lady in the red jacket let us know that these are from wild ponies out there. There are cows and sheep out there too, she says.

 

An old tin mining processing place. 

Portrait of man on the misty moors. :) My young man.

The Hurlers standing stone circles, Bodmin Moor. These guys were playing hurling on a Sunday and got turned to stone for it!

These are two pipers who were playing tunes on a Sunday. They got turned to stone.

This is a picture of a sheep. Or, as Yarrow says, a shoop. See it there? Solitary shoop. Too bad we didn't see any ponies but I'm sure we would if we spent enough time. Their tracks were everywhere.

You really don't want to stray too far from the recognizable road!

This (distance to that tower there) is how close we were to the standing stones when the lady in the red jacket said we'd really better take the car over to the other car park so as not to get lost! A few hundred metres, but the area is full of warnings from everybody not to get yourself lost in the mist. As we had a castle disappear on us after seeing it very close, I can see that the warnings are real and to be taken seriously. We were very careful with our navigating when walking off the road to the stone circles.