Travelling in the mind

I borrow that title from the rather good blog on the Scottish Islands down below.  It is still dark, I have kneaded the dough for bread, talked to Lucy who has just woken up and has made her journey to the settee behind me to sleep some more. When it gets lighter will go out open the chicken's hatches and let them out.  They are only producing one egg a day between them but hopefully when the light lengthens will produce more after the Xmas holiday.  Yesterday there was a funeral in the graveyard, the hole was dug by the grave digger, dirt mounded under a green tarpaulin, and now the dead are laid to rest, we always draw our blind on the window overlooking the proceedings, not scary though;)

A couple of weeks ago I had an email from someone on Oliver Cope, the tailor who left Avebury to travel to America and start a small dynasty there, these emails often come on something I have written.  Well yesterday another arrived about John Wood the Elder, architect to some of Bath city beautiful buildings.  The fabulous thing about him though, was he constructed his architecture and thinking on past history and Druidism, and this person who had written the article had written a very elegant article about the Sols Rocks, long since disappeared under the Georgian buildings on the lower slopes of the Lansdown.  Well the writer wanted to know had I any knowledge of a 'circular 'mound/space by Laurence Chapel on top  of the Lansdown. 'Moon Temple' John Wood had called it.  Apparently John Wood was very well informed on the barrows round that area.  This was of course my prime walking area, wandering round in any weather, always on Sunday taking my favourite walk to the woods by the golf course and then down past the Beville monument to the ridgeway path that the Civil War fighting men had defended.  I wasn't much help, there are no surviving stones around though lower down in the fields I had once found a worked prehistoric stone by a gateway.

But history had overlaid this great ridge that moves the traveller out of Bath along to the Cotswold escarpment, prehistoric, Roman, medieval, civil war and then the airfield in the second world war all jostle for your attention, though reading through the green tapestry of fields that now cover all these happenings is almost invisible.  Druidical Bath an earlier blog.

I remember though walking with a friend, she came from the Orkney Islands, which links to the story below.  She owned a Irish wolf hound, a pretty apricot colour, large and playful.  Unfortunately he was a chaser of deer and the muntjac you would see on the downs.  One morning, he spotted a deer and was off in full chase, several hours later our search party was winding down with tiredness, I was wandering in a field further down the slope with Moss, when a very tired Monty appeared through an open gateway, I grabbed him and returned him to a very grateful owner.  Monty was a clown, when he walked in the snow would gather great clumps of the snow to his paws, he would sit down pathetically when this happened, holding his paw up to have the snow removed.

Rosemary still frozen in flower, bringing luck hopefully.

The mending of the fence slowly moves ahead, this is a 'sunday' job!

Travelling in the mind - Witches Whispers