West Country Wanderings - Leominster

It's my birthday!  I gave myself a castle!

South West holiday - the Guide

Drove to Dartmoor - a harder task than it looked!  It was a drizzly morning in Dorset, but as I got into Devon everything went very grey and saturated and 'orrible.  I was driving through quite a thick fog bank at one point, and getting rather worried!  However as I got towards Exeter it ended up as just a bit spitty and even a little blue sky.
Getting onto Dartmoor is a mini challenge in itself.  Once you turn off the big roads suddenly it's all steep climbs and sudden turns, much like the Peak District, and then you pop out the top onto an expanse of moor like entering another world.  There are vast spaces, Tors everywhere you look, moor ponies (shaggier and rougher than their New Forest counterparts) and the heights were hidden in clouds.  As was Princetown, where I was meeting my walking guide Simon Dell.

To be beside the seaside - North Norfolk Coastal Path part 2

Holkham to Blakeney - 10.9 miles

After Holkham the next stop is Wells-next-the-Sea, which is a small town with more facilities.  It's a walk I've done before, along the beach, but this time we struck to the path properly and found ourselves wandering down wooded lanes, behind the tall dark pine trees that this stretch is known for.  On another breezy but still sunny day, the shade was nice, and we had company!  A relay race was taking place, beginning at Hunstanton and going all the way round to Great Yarmouth over the course of a day or two.  We kept moving over to let runners pass, each wielding their barcoded baton.  We emerged at the carpark for Wells Beach and followed the sea wall back into the town.  

John captains the clinkerbill boat, so called for the Viking-style rivets in its hull.

Highland Fling! - 2 of 2

Day 5 - CairnGorm and Loch Morlich

You can get the Funicular Railway up the UK's 6th highest mountain, CairnGorm, but for some reason we decided to walk between the two stations along the very aptly named Windy Ridge.

A Highland Fling! - 1 of 2

This year the family had our summer holiday early - we went to the Scottish Highlands!  When I was young we had a holiday by Loch Ness, going as far north as Fort William, but it was long enough ago that I only remember bits and pieces of it. On my last solo trip I went to Edinburgh and Aviemore, and had wanted to explore further north again, so this was the perfect choice for a trip away together.

Le grand voyage Francais!

The other big trip that I did this summer was to the Loire Valley in France with my family.  It's a region famous for it's beautiful chateaus.  We stayed in a small gite (a cottage) near Chaumont sur Loire, surrounded by fields and fields of sunflowers.  The point was to relax but we're quite an active family so we'd regularly walk the half hour into town, baking hot in the cloudless sunshine, to fetch bread.

And of course we visited a lot of chateaux.  How could we not!  

Invasion

Last November I got the chance to visit the Roman Baths built over the hot springs in Bath.  I love history, and British history on either side of the Roman invasion particularly.  My visit gave me a lot to think about...

The same old town: Thetford

It turns out my home town of Thetford in Norfolk is a bit more interesting than I gave it credit for.  That is if you like history, long stories, and unexpected tours from random strangers.  Which I do.

The Norman motte - Castle Hill

The day I went round the town it was raining (of course!  This is Britain!) but that's ok because it makes the cloudier photos come out all monochrome and grainy, which always looks a little classy.

The same old town: The Brecks

I always go home for Christmas.  I grew up in Norfolk, a pretty quiet county in East Anglia with a lot of great coastline, in a small town called Thetford.  For a lot of teenagers the place you grow up is the place you want to get out of.  It's the place where everybody knows you, remembers you when you were tiny and everything you've done since, and knows you as the child of your parents (which is not unreasonable, considering that they have been looking after you for your entire life so far).  In some cases you stay in your home town, you grow up, and eventually you find your niche there.  You carve out a place and make a life for yourself.

In other cases, you leave, and do your growing up somewhere else, but then you come back.  It's one of the trademarks of almost every questing myth that at the end the traveller returns home.  Often it's up for debate whether it's the place that's changed, or whether it's the person...

Canada Geese flying in formation across the Brecks

What I'm driving at is that when I came home this year I began noticing things that had always been there, but that somehow I'd never seen before.  It’s been a bit rainy, but that never stands in the way of exploration!  So here’s a whistle-stop tour of the place where I grew up, starting with the land it sits on.

Bath, Bands and Baking

The run-up to Christmas is a busy time, even if you're like me and try to avoid as much of the hype as humanly possible.  And then of course there's the recovery period, which takes at least as long!  So here's a quick update of what's been happening since I saw you last:

Getting Out - 1 of 4

So having self-diagnosed myself with massive case of Cabin Fever, I decided to turn a brief trip home to Norfolk into a four day stay in the hope that this would give me enough space and quiet to... recalibrate or... whatever it is I do when I get like this.  I grew up in Norfolk, specifically the Brecks, and decided to re-visit places I’d been to as a child, but perhaps didn’t fully remember or had been too young to appreciate.  

Grimes Graves and West Stow

This was definitely the case with Grimes Graves, a Neolithic flint mine, and quite the loveliest heritage site to visit because there is really nothing there.  You drive into the middle of nowhere, enter what appears to be a large field (there is one small cabin for the loo, another marginally larger one for the visitors booth), and the rest is open land.  At least that's what you think at first...

A birds-eye view of Grimes Graves, scanned from the English Heritage guidebook