John and the apple blossom

A walk with John


This is John, in the orchard among the apple trees





When I went into the shippon, John was lying on the sofa with a hot water bottle. He looked tired and cold, but he felt better in a while, and we ate lunch outside in the sun. Afterwards we listened to Gardeners Question time (one of his favourite programmes) and I fell asleep on the sofa for half an hour! Then he decided he was feeling well enough to take me round the fields to see the apple blossom in the orchard and by the old railway bridge. I took his photo, with the blossom behind him.


John again

On the right is another photograph of John, on a bridge over the river.


Here is some more from the walk diary:

"Sunday, after coming back from Ashwater, and the walk with John...

Later I went over briefly and Dad broke off from his work to say a few words on film about his opinion of wind farms. I do hope I used it correctly. It was so good of Caroline and Neil to loan it to me, and I haven`t done very well with it so far. To be honest, I`m a bit of a technophobe when it comes to new equipment.

Back at the shippon we had pasta bake for supper. David my son rang to say he`d received a couple of photos of the start at Brent Tor that he had uploaded onto the website for me. Muriel had sent them, by email. David said the one of me was very unflattering, but I said there was no use worrying about that  On Monday Ivan Buxton is picking me up and taking me to the spot where I finish today. You could call that cheating – but this isn`t about wearing a hairshirt. Ideally, I`d sleep wherever I stopped walking – in a field for example – but I have a bit of a bad back and couldn`t cope with that very well. Also I have a problem carrying too much weight, because of past ankle injuries, so I have to compromise about carrying too much with me

This is a very dull diary so far – I am quite tired still. Tomorrow will be a long walk again. I`m not leaving till 12 as I want to spend as much time as I can with John, and hopefully to see Margaret as well. Dad and Sandy go off again early to Brighton.

Written Monday a.m.

Last night at 9 John switched the lights off, and we sat in the Shippon, watching bats flying by against a piece of sky. The Shippon has a small lawn but is enclosed mainly by trees so there was just a small patch of sky against which we could see them swooping to and fro. It was fascinating, and rather magical. (For more about bats, go back to the Ashwater page)

Suddenly we decided to go out, and walked across the little bridge over the leat into the meadow opposite, high with seeding grass. We crept along quietly so as not to wake Dad and Sandy who had already gone to bed. Dad had been round the edges with the tractor, cutting a path, and the smell of the cut grass took me straight back in time to a May I spent in the late 60`s, up in the Mid-Wales mountains on a farm near the Tregaron bog. One of my jobs there had been turning the hay with a pitchfork.

That part of Wales, then, was far off the beaten track, remote, peaceful, rural. I hope to visit Wales again soon, but the mountains that I used to love so much are being destroyed by giant wind power stations. I will always remember sitting one evening high up on a grassy mountainside, watching the sun go down over Cardigan Bay, listening to nothing but silence. I don`t know if I could ever bear to go back to that beautiful place, and see the devastation at Cefn Croes nearby. 

(2007 update - July 8, going back to Wales, and the demonstration at Cefn Coch)

I have been thinking about silence a lot on this walk. As John and I reached the top of the field we could could hear a distant roar, and I realised it was the traffic on the new A30. You didn`t hear it in the old days, when the A30 went through Lifton, but now it is on the higher ground above the village and the sound carried across to us. It is perhaps only two miles – as the crow flies – from that field. It wasn`t offensive – you only heard it when you stopped to listen to the silence – but it made me think about how all-pervasive man-made noise is in our world today, and how precious a resource silence is, if we want to be in tune with the earth itself."


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