Post Cornwall

'Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.'

Yes I am reading Rebecca once more, having been on Daphne Du Maurier's cold bleak moors, I know exactly how the narrator feels as she comes down the staircase after the disastrous ball, and the next day is a miserable misty day and the revelation that Maxim has killed Rebecca.....

The above photo shows exactly how misty, cold and wet, not forgetting the wind that howled in your ears on the first two days of our holiday.  Actually I quite enjoyed such wild weather but was soaking wet after a short tramp over the moors but it cured a headache!

Funnily enough the ponies did not show up till the end of our stay, and then a group of them lay around the Heritage Centre car park...

Our cottage was a former small chapel, and not bad but I don't think we will be staying there again.  Getting the car out of the driveway was difficult, especially as I had to keep four small yapping dogs in as I manipulated the gates.  We had a lot of advice from locals as to where to live in Cornwall, not in Minions village - 9 months of winter, near the sea but not on the coast, and near to the A30, the only decent road out of Cornwall.  The county is enormous, think North, middle and South, so house hunting has to be constrained to an area.  This is what we did, focused on Liskeard, it has a small train station but houses surprisingly are difficult to find.  Now I can say that my favourite villages, are Herodsfoot and Linkinhorne, beautiful tranquil places but so off the beaten track down steep narrow lanes, that you can't possibly get out of in winter.  At Herodsfoot where we saw a two bedroom cottage (no good) there was a river meandering through the village, and a friendly bantam hen curious about the car and what was inside.  Another house was not even looked at because it was in Pensilva, which was a bungalow housing estate.  Now I know people live in bungalows but they are not for us, in a book I read apparently bungalows had been the rage in the 60s and 70s down here in Cornwall but the author had called it a 'bungaloid' stage and that is what it is, so plenty of bungalows for sale.

This is the Doniert's stones, one commemorates the last king of Cornwall, King Doniert and you can read the history here.  Pretty in its enclosed ground with the daffodils flopped around.

The sun shining through the window onto the two chairs captures the mood of the moment in Sue's cottage.