Anglesey

The weather was fantastic so at 8.30 am we started out for Anglesey. At 9.05 am we stopped at Cromford Mill to check out an art exhibition. The watercolours were lovely and unusually we liked all of them. The artist was obviously interested in everything, people, wildlife, scenery, interesting old cars abandoned in fields, in fact anything and everything.

So much for our early start and getting to Holyhead for lunch! At about 1.30 the same day we arrived at Fedw Fawr, a piece of coastline in the care of the National Trust on the North coast of the island. It was glorious, 150 foot cliffs, grass cropped short by a herd of feral ponies and covered in wild flowers, primroses, celandines, violets, and many more that I couldn't identify without my book.

The herd of ponies were unshod and ungroomed. The hair was moulting and you could see where the White ponies in particular had been rolling on the ground. They seem to be left to roam around the area in order to keep the grass cropped short.

The sun shone and we walked down onto the white pebble beach. You probably realise by now that I love pebbles! As it was the first day of the trip I was forbidden to collect any but he didn't mention sea glass!

We climbed onto the next headland and sat in the sunshine looking out to sea. The views are lovely both East and West along the coast and Pat did a sketch whilst I just sat and tried to memorise the moment.

The Anglesey coast path is exactly what it says it is and you can now walk the complete coast. We walked a short way towards the West and found a comfortable brew stop where we wouldn't be mugged by the ponies. It was fab and we really enjoyed the peace and quiet.

I was sky watching and trying to sort out some clouds, the one in the photo was eerie, it appeared to be travelling towards us like a huge lid. I think it was a bank of stratus with the sun lighting up the top and leaving the underside in the shade. Look at reflections on the water, the highlighted cloud is being reflected on the sea, doesn't it remind you of icebergs?

The next day we spent some time on heathland bordering the Valley RAF base. Valley is a training ground for the RAF and we were treated to some spectacular low flying by the Hawk jets. It was a bit noisy at times though, especially when three went over in formation. It's a great spot , not many people but plenty of wildlife. We saw 6 Buzzards at one time all thermaling in the same area, gaining height. There were quiet a few Skylarks but a local dog walker who remembered playing on the heath as a kid was telling us that there used to be a lot more. As a child he can remember seeing their nests everywhere, now you would be very lucky to find a nest. I was trying to work out why the decline because the heath has remained the same. We decided it must be that their food source has diminished.

We walked towards the golf course (we have a knack of finding footpaths that cross golf courses) and found a Hedgehog. It didn't look well, it was going round in circles on it's long legs and none of the photo's I took were good enough to even keep. It wasn't frothing at the mouth or anything but we decided not to touch it and we quietly walked away.

A green road that led off the footpath ended up at a 10 foot high iron gate, the sort that guarded the entrance to a drive leading to the big house! This one led straight into a field full of sheep, but you could just make out a faint track that once did lead to a fine house and the green lane we walked along was probably the main entrance.

That night we spent on the edge of the Newborough Forest, a large expanse of pine trees that cover a huge area of dunes. It's an important habitat for certain species of flowers and some birds. We did manage to walk to the sea, about a mile and a half, and it was heavy going in the sand. I managed to find enough shells to fill a margarine tub by walking another mile along the tide line. They were very few and far between because the beach was a huge expanse of nothingness, the sort I like, just me, Pat and the sea.

Back at the carpark I decided to sort out the shells and immediately found a comrade in arms in Abbey. She was 7 years old and came from Bolton. We were closely watched by Mum and Ollie (4 year old brother) until he decided he wanted some of the action. After parting with some of the shells they particularly liked we all started collecting the unbroken ones that were covering the picnic area. Ollie kept taking them to the van and telling Pat that 'these are for the lady, will you please make sure she gets them'. They were a couple of lovely kids and we enjoyed a half hour playtime while Dad got their bikes set up. Their Mum and Dad should be proud of them and we enjoyed meeting the whole family.

We had a relaxing few days and managed to stay away from the crowds but still had some wonderful walking before going home for more mundane things. Still we only need to be home for 4 days before we can set off again for partures new.

South Stack Lighthouse

Local Chat

It’s a few weeks now since I made an entry but I’m afraid we’ve been pretty boring, appointments with Dentist’s, van repairs, house maintenance and such like. We’ve managed to continue the local walks and recently met up with a local man on the Cromford canal at Ironville. He had found some old brown ceramic inkwells, probably from the 18th or early 19th century. Where the ground had been disturbed when the new cycle path was laid, the soil was full of inkwells and bits of old ceramics. Was it a canal barge load that was discarded? Was there an inkwell factory close by? I’ll probably never know but we found a couple for ourselves, one complete and one slightly damaged, they now reside in our garden along with lots of other interesting antiquities(rubbish). I feel a bit like an inland beach comber.

We also met up with a local Water Vole on one of the walks and my new camera certainly makes taking photographs easier.

We just had to get out somewhere so we decided to spend the night in the Goyt Valley near Buxton in The Peak District. Buxton, the highest town of it’s size in England is a Spa town with the Victorian Baths still in evidence. The Romans were probably the first to settle here and the town was called Aquae Amemetiae. The thermal spring water is a constant 27.5 degrees C and you can buy the bottled spring water from the little shop across the road from St Anne’s well. At St Anne’s well, if you don’t mind queuing, you can fill up as many containers as you wish, for free! It amuses us that the bottled water has a best before date, even though it’s well over 1000 years old when it leaves the spring.

The Goyt Valley was a hive of industry before the Errwood and Fernilee reservoirs were built. Pickfords removals started life here starting with Thomas Pickford in 1670 who turned to road mending and finding the packhorse trains an alternative load on their return journey from delivering quarry stone.

There was a gunpowder factory, a paint mill which had a water wheel providing the power to crush barites for the paint, farming, coal mines and a railway linking the Cromford canal to the Peak Forest canal at Whaley Bridge. It’s a very popular tourist area in good weather and has some lovely moorland walks. In late summer the hills are purple with heather and they look magnificent.

We spent another night in the Peak District near Brassington, oh how lovely and quiet it was compared with home. We live only 200 yards from the M1 motorway and just recently the wind has been from the North and we hear the constant roar from Junction 28, making the garden a no go area.

We spent the next day on the Staffordshire Moorlands, somewhere we’ve not walked in the past and we managed to park in small car park at Gradbach where an old silk mill has been renovated and is now the local Youth Hostel.

The area is called The Black Forest, sounds like a part of Germany doesn’t it? There are a lot of walks in the forest and Lud’s church is here, a natural rock formation. Unfortunately we didn’t have the time to walk up to the church so it’s a place we will certainly have to return to and get some photo’s and find out the history of the place.

Later that month we walked a footpath starting from behind Alfreton Church which leads down into the valley between Alfreton and Shirland. The views were lovely but we can’t say that it was a pleasant walk because it’s surrounded by busy roads and the traffic noise is constant.
The path took us across the Shirland Golf course and at one point you could see the footpath 200yds away, but across part of the golf course that does not form part of the right of way, so instead of making a dash for it (there were too many golfers about with long clubs and a liberal dose of barbed wire) and climbing over the fence, we took the legal route, a half mile walk including some of the busy road.

We were climbing back towards Alfreton when thirst overtook us so we stopped for the second brew of the walk (got to keep our strength up) and were treated to a Great Spotted Woodpecker flying straight towards us. Their flight is very distinctive, a flap of the wings which takes the bird up slightly in an upwards curve and then a short glide which means that it glides downwards in a curve so it’s flap, up, glide, down making a radio wave like pattern.

What followed next was fascinating, it must have been a male ‘cos it started to drum on the pylon that it landed on. The drumming noise is usually made by hammering on an old tree trunk with it’s beak, and this resonates throughout the area calling all females to step this way and telling all males to go someplace else. The noise the pylon emitted was loud and certainly resonated across the fields, so much so that two more Woodpeckers arrived simultaneously. One was certainly female and the pair flew off towards the church, an apt place to go when considering what they were going to do!

It’s amazing how much wildlife there is in the locality when you don’t have to spend all day in the office, apart from all the birds we’re seeing and hearing I’ve seen more stoats and weasels this year than I’ve seen in the last twenty.

Remember I mentioned in one entry about Shaw Wood Nature reserve and the small pits in the wood which looked like the hole left when a tree has been uprooted, well we met up with a friend, and he explained to us what the dips in the ground were. In the Depression the local poor people used to climb the hill and dig out the surface coal, I wonder if the coal mine owners allowed it to happen or whether they were ignorant of it. The contrast to today is unbelievable. It’s so difficult to imagine that the ordinary people were so poor when we take being warm and well fed so much for granted.

It’s now April and we can finally make a run for it, only for a few days but as Confucius says ‘the longest journey starts with the first footstep’ so perhaps our journey through 2007 starts with the first mile, Anglesey here we come.