The follies of the past

If you hoped that I was about to confess my past sins in graphic detail, then I'm sorry to disappoint you. As you know, I'm a good girl, so there's not much to tell anyway.

Rather, this is the aftermath of my post Flickred and Flopped, in which I bemoaned the loss of my photos, after moving this blog from WordPress. Since that fateful day I've been slowly working though the old posts, weeding out ones that can be deleted and restoring the photos in the remainder. Yesterday I alighted on a post from April 2013, entitled Wye we came here – definitely one I'd have liked to keep.  But O dear... I've lost the photos!

This is, of course, my own silly fault. Rather than carefully catalogue my photos, I'd lazily left them in folders called 'temp1', 'temp2', 'untitled', 'new folder', etc.  Still more were languishing on SD cards in 2 cameras and on my smartphone.  No surprise, then, that I've lost a few.  But now I've seen the light.  I've reformed. Henceforth, I promise myself, every photo will be edited and stored in properly arranged folders before it appears here and on my new Flickr site.

So today, in scorching sunshine, I returned to the River Wye to recapture the photos that once graced Wye we came here. In the intervening 15 months I've bought a new camera that takes much better photos than the old Fuji, so hopes were high. Sadly, though, some shots were impossible as then it was Spring and now it is summer; then the river was easily accessible, now meadow grass and Japanese Knotweed crowd the banks.  But the scene, though changed, is as beautiful as before and I had a lovely afternoon, waving to canoeists and chatting with passers-by.  I'm rather pleased with the photos, too. There are more on Flickr, if you're interested.  Just follow the link on the right, under my profile.

Holiday plans - it's Sussex by the Sea for me

"Rye - the town that time forgot."  www.tripadvisor.co.uk

I've just paid the final installment on a holiday cottage in East Sussex - one week in September, in the picturesque town of Rye.  Knowing almost nothing about this corner of the Kingdom, I simply worked my way through potentially suitable properties on the Cottages4You site, then checked out each town on Google Images.  Rye came out tops. Friends who know the area assure me that I've chosen well.

After booking, Lucy Melford informed me that the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway is almost on the doorstep, so we shall definitely have a ride on that. The Bluebell Railway isn't too far away either, though I've already travelled on that one a couple of times; but not since the line was extended to East Grinstead.  Mmmmm... tempting. Everything else will be a surprise, for we have never explored the South Coast further east than Eastbourne.  I'm particularly looking forward to visiting one or two of the Cinque Ports, that I vaguely remember from history lessons at school.

Today I discovered a bonus - The Rye Arts Festival runs from Friday September 12th, kicking off with a free concert.  Sadly, we had planned to depart for home on the morning of the 13th, but I'm very tempted to stay on for a few more hours to hear Mark Bostridge talk on "The Fateful Year - a year that started in peace and ended in the horrors of World War 1".  It begins at 3pm and tickets cost £12 each, so a late return home is in prospect. I'll phone the booking office tomorrow.

Flickred and Flopped

Flickred

I'm rather proud of this one from 2009, which has already been added to
the Flickr site.  It's of Crowns Mine, at Botallack  in Cornwall.

I've decided to open a Flickr account and go 'public' with a large collection of my photos.  I don't pretend that they're at all special, but it seems that someone is finding them interesting as the hit rate has been creeping up since Day One.  If you fancy a look, follow the link on the right, beneath my profile.

I'm using this exercise to properly title the photos and weed out the ones that are not worth keeping.  And, true to my rather scatty nature, I'm doing them in no particular order, so one day some ancient photos from Cornwall may appear, and on the next the last trip to Newcastle.

One thing that Flickr does enable me to do is to post the result of more walks in the Forest.  Such walks have appeared on this blog with monotonous regularity over the last 18 months, so I think my loyal readers need a break.  

Flopped

There's a far more appropriate word beginning with 'F' to describe this, but it's not at all ladylike... so 'flopped' it is.

Last week I deleted my old WordPress account.  Since moving to Blogger last November, the WordPress blog has simply displayed one post, with a link to this blog.  Over the months I've seen the hit rate on the old blog gradually fall, until last month there were no hits at all.  So no point in keeping it.

What I didn't realize was that, when I imported the blog to this site, Blogger didn't copy the photos; it simply linked them from the WordPress site.  So when I finally deleted that site, all my lovely photos went with it. Ahhhhh!

I am now pondering the alternatives:

1) Restore 4 years of photos from my own collection.  Each would probably need to be reduced in resolution - I generally don't post anything above 800x600, usually a bit less. Sounds like a big job.

2) Delete the lot.  The only old post that gets regular hits is one from 2009 about Olivia Woolley and University Challenge.  Perhaps the time has come to give her a well-deserved break.

Acorn Patch

In my post Return to the Mineral Loop I mentioned my failed attempt to locate Acorn Patch.  I now know that this was entirely due to looking in the wrong place! Your silly bloggist has a large scale Ordinance Survey map on her smartphone, but preferred to let the Noom app track her progress and count calories.  And before you ask the obvious, sadly the phone doesn't have enough puff to run both apps at once.

Acorn Patch has an interesting history, which is all the excuse we needed for another walk in the forest.  So yesterday S-- and I parked Bluebell at New Fancy View - the site of yet another colliery - and plotted a meandering course northward, before returning along the Mineral Loop and via the off-visited Rising Sun Inn.

The excellent publication Rails through the Forest* says this about Acorn Patch:

The site, together with several square miles of surrounding woodland, was first managed by the RAOC in 1942, before being handed over to the US Army Ordinance Corps in September of that year.  Acorn Patch rapidly became the second largest US open-air munitions storage site in the UK and at its peak was estimated to have contained around 30 kilotons of explosives.

Most of the stockpiles of munitions were removed around the time of the Normandy invasion in 1944, but vast quantities of chemical weapons and drums of liquid gas remained in open storage, or at best beneath tarpaulins or open-ended Nissen huts, where they began to deteriorate. Post-war clearance proved to be a massive and protracted task, the last train not departing until 16th June 1953.

It seems that the only attack the US Army guys had to repel was from sheep, who liked to doze in the Nissen huts and also developed an appetite for the canvas tarpaulins! 

This old photo, copied from the book, dates from 1947 and has deliberately been inserted at very low resolution, as the original is © LE Copeland, WSP.  I hope he doesn't mind.  If you're interested, you could do a lot worse than buy the book and thus swell the funds of the Dean Forest Railway Museum Trust.

* Rails Through the Forest: Silver Link Publishing Ltd. 
   ISBN 978 1 85794 409 0

Colossal Cave

In the summer of 1982 I found myself at Bath University for a week's Summer School with the Open University.  I was studying Statistics and Mathematical Modelling, which even 32 years later still sounds to me like pretty heady stuff.  Life at Summer School did, however, have its compensations.  Half pints of Old Peculiar in the student bar were my favourite, usually followed by more drinking and merry-making in someone's bedroom.  Mind you, one had to be careful.  It was not unknown for folk to abandon their wedding rings (and their morals) in order to have a good time.

By a strange coincidence, my Aunt Sarah was tutoring at the Bath Summer School that year, on the same courses and it seems that we only missed meeting by a week or two.  Funny old world, is it not?

Something else I used to enjoy, when the day's work was done, was to go to the computer room, sit myself in front of a teletype and run programs on the university's computer - probably a DEC PDP11, according to Auntie. And thus I discovered a text-only adventure game (no fancy graphics in those days) called Colossal Cave.  The idea was to explore a maze of underground rooms and passages, and collect treasure.  As you might expect, this cave had magical properties and if you typed a magic word ('plugh', I think it was) you were instantly transported to a room called Y2.  Anyone who bungled their way round the cave as I used to, would consume a lot of teletype paper and frequently arrive at Y2!

After that long introduction I return to the account my walk from Dilke Bridge, in the Forest of Dean, to my home.  My picnic lunch consumed, I descended on a rough track through woodlands to a junction of paths that has become very familiar.  Indeed, whatever my chosen route in the Parkend area, I seem to end up here. Perhaps it too has magical properties.  And guess what?  At this complex junction someone had erected a large wooden post with the characters 'Y2' upon it.  Which, of course, explains everything!

Wild Rose

Earlier this year I promised myself that I would take a good camera on my walks to record the changing seasons in the forest.  The trees are as green and as beautiful as before, and since my last hike on June 12th, clumps of wild rose have blossomed.  Here are some that I spotted near Acorn Patch.  Also, the brambles have begun to flower, promising a good crop of blackberries before too long.  In my younger days I used to stuff myself on blackberries as I walked along, and usually arrived home with a tummy ache.  Now that I am older and wiser, I look forward to homemade blackberry and apple pie, with a large dollop of Cornish Clotted Cream.  Scores of calories per mouthful, but by then I'm hoping that it won't matter too much.

The hardest stretch of the walk was the long climb from Whitecroft to Maple Hill.  Predictably, this was when the clouds parted entirely and the sun blazed down.  My pace slowed, my skirt started sticking to my legs and beads of sweat trickled down my face. Thankfully, though, a cool breeze greeted me at the top of the hill and my steps quickened again for the final stretch home.

Time to consult the Noom app. on my smartphone, which had been faithfully recording my progress. Crumbs... with deviations to explore Acorn Patch, Central Bridge and Moseley Green, I'd walked 8.5 miles at an average speed (not including the lunch stop) of 2.6 mph, and burned off 953 calories.  And thus I grow a little slimmer every day.

Return to the Mineral Loop

Three weeks ago I walked along the track of the old Mineral Loop that was built by the Severn & Wye Railway.  Since then I've been reading a bit about its history, so decided to return and walk at a more leisurely pace.

Dilke Bridge

I was dropped off at Dilke Bridge - not quite the beginning of the Loop but near it, and from there I headed for home, 7½ miles away. 

After a couple of hundred yards the track runs past the site of Lightmoor Colliery, where an engine house, which once contained a Cornish beam engine (hooray!) is the only sign of the old pithead that I could see over the high fence. It's looking very dilapidated and has lost its roof, but my book informs me that it's been 'listed' as being of architectural value, so perhaps it will be restored one day.  It beats me why anyone should bother, though - just a plain square building and not half as impressive as its Cornish cousins.

Central Bridge

Beyond Lightmoor, somewhere deep in the forest, lies Acorn Patch, where there was a huge ammunition dump during the last World War. I think I spotted the point at which the sidings once diverged from the 'main' line, but was reluctant to stray too far into the dense undergrowth and could find no other clues to its location.*  Instead, I pressed on and soon arrived at Central Bridge, which spanned the intended (but never constructed) route of the Forest of Dean Central Railway. Amid all the peace and beauty of the forest, it's easy to forget that this place was once a hive of industry.  If you'd told anyone, as late as the 1950's, that grass, trees and cycle tracks would triumph before the century was out, I'm sure they'd never have believed you.

Next, the track runs close by the site of New Fancy Colliery.  A sign post informed me that I had walked 3.5km, which a fancy app on my smartphone says is 413385 barleycorns, 174 chains or 2.17 statute miles.  So only a little over 5 miles to go. How would we survive without all this technology?

One of the old ventilation shafts
over Moseley Green tunnel

Soon, my chosen route left the course of the Mineral Loop, passing behind the Rising Sun Inn -a highly recommended lunchtime stop, though not today.  This is Moseley Green, where the old railway line went through a 503 yard-long tunnel that has a story to tell. In 1942 the Admiralty was desperate to find safe places to store munitions, so requisitioned the tunnel.  The tracks were lifted, the three ventilation shafts capped, and on one of the shafts they plonked an anti-aircraft gun.  Now perhaps I'm not the brightest girl around, but wasn't that likely to give the game away?  Imagine the scene... and here comes a German Spionageflugzeug, which quickly notices that the railway line present in 1941 has mysteriously disappeared. Then, flying down to get a closer look, he's fired on from one of the vent shafts!  Perhaps that's why the Admiralty moved out in 1943 and the railway line was reinstated.

By now the bell of Parkend Church could be heard, announcing mid-day. I was feeling hungry, and found a shady spot to eat my picnic lunch - tuna on homemade wholemeal bread, a nectarine and a pint of so of peach juice.  Yes, the diet continues.

If you have, then thank you for reading this far.  I'll attempt to complete this account of my walk in a later post.

* I found it a few days later. See my post on July 8th, Acorn Patch