Sauntering Vaguely Downward

I made my 1SE for February and then forgot to post it here, although I did circulate to friends and family. Includes my trip to the USA to see my parents and other relatives, a weekend in Wales and a couple of trips to London and Birmingham, as well the usual cats and children. Watching this, last month looks a lot calmer than it was to live through.

Keiki and Humuhumu running up the hill toward Paxton’s Tower in Carmarthenshire, Wales, whilst pretending to be aeroplanes.

( Goal Check-in 8/52: Mostly fail )

[Snippet of a log book entry featuring delicate pencil sketches of guinea pigs dressed for variable weather]

We’re currently holed up in a cottage in south Wales, listening to Storm Dennis howling outside. This is the bloke’s fortymumbleth birthday, so we’re following our tradition of going to a Landmark Trust (LT) property for the weekend.

LT properties don’t provide televisions or wifi, and are mostly in remote locations. A few years ago this meant you were properly cut off from the internet unless you were organised and downloaded a bunch of stuff onto your mobile devices before you left. Mobile coverage is now so good in 99% of places that this doesn’t work. For the adults, though, it helps a little with cutting screen time, since the main point of these weekends is sitting around the fire, snacking on all the tasty food we brought with us and plundering the bookcase.

Amongst my favourite items in the bookcases are the log books. My obsession with them began in the first LT property we stayed at, St Winifred’s Well Cottage, also in Wales. The log books there were things of beauty and frankly have not yet been surpassed. The artwork people drew and the little photos they stuck in were skilful and touching. Log books at subsequent properties have ranged from entertaining to mildly disappointing.

There’s an element of one-up-manship in most of the log book entries. For instance, “We walked 36 miles today and saw 8 different historical sites, even though it was pissing it down with rain! We observed 28 species of bird, one of which was the rare hoopentootle. PS Correction to the Thomas family entry on p36, Oct 1987: The notable feature in the Church of St Parpenfoogle is a cryptoporticus, not a cloister.”

I would like to start a tradition of one-down-manship. If I may suggest to future LT visitors the following:

• “Thought about walking up to the historical site 200 metres from here. Couldn’t be arsed. It was cold.”
  
• “Started 500 piece puzzle, completed by the Smiths and the Browns in 2.5 hours and 3 hours respectively as meticulously recorded on the inside of the box lid. Gave up after 30 minutes and put it back in the box.”
  
• ”Didn’t bother working out how to light the legendarily temperamental fire. It’s July.”
  
• “Tried to eat all the food we brought with us. Even failed at that.”
  
• “Wrote a poem about the cottage. It’s even worse than the limerick penned by Brian Wu, Age 10 ⅓, so I won’t share it.”
  
• ”Saw some pigeons. Didn’t count them.”

Poultry Cottage is located near the Welsh/English border, so the area saw its fair share of skirmishes over the years. Montgomery Castle didn't survive into the modern era, though it was surely much more functional than showy Powis Castle, which has.

The former is bordered on three sides by cliffs and a valley, and the "accessible" side involves a brief but vertigo-inducing hike up a precariously narrow footpath. We were visiting in February and it's Wales, so obviously it was damp and cold. The screaming, icy wind that greeted us on reaching the plateau on which the castle sits provided an additional deterrent to unfriendly visitors, I'm sure.


[Walking through Montgomery Castle.]

( Montgomery Castle, +5 )

We ended up visiting Powis Castle (National Trust property) twice: Once to tour the interior, where photography is forbidden because many of the items on display are still the private possessions of the earl, and once to tour the gardens. The centuries-old yew hedges are the highlight of the upper garden, not because they've been exquisitely sculpted into topiary or regimented into orderly barriers, but because they have been allowed to evolve into weird, organic shapes.


[Humuhumu running down a path in the lower formal garden. The clean sharp lines of the well-trimmed hedges contrast sharply with the undulations of the ones above.]

( Powis Castle, +5 )

[Humuhumu jumps off a stone outside the gingerbread Fowl House (strictly for the birds).]

On Friday, we piled into the car and drove to Wales to our fourth Landmark Trust property. It's become traditional for us to stay in one over the weekend nearest the bloke's birthday that isn't Valentine's that holiday which seems to have been designed to make people feel bad about enjoying being alone February 14th.

This one is called Poultry Cottage. Once it was part of a great estate that included a model farm. The estate is now broken up, and the Landmark Trust acquired the cottage (where the fowl-keeper lived) and the Fowl House (where the chickens, pheasants, turkeys, pigeons and doves lived). I'm afraid the keeper's cottage is rather plainer and smaller than the one intended for the galinaceous neighbours.


[Pretty Poultry Cottage, fit for humans.]

We used the cottage as a base for exploration nearby during the day, and as a cosy nest at night after the children were in bed. There was no mobile or data signal, no television and no internet connection. I'm not evangelical about disconnecting - we had some BBC programmes downloaded, mostly for Humuhumu to watch - but both the bloke and I do find it helpful for our mental health to be forced, for a few days, not to check our e-mail or spend our evenings constantly half-distracted by our computers.

Below the cut, some shots of the cottage interior, with children (and adults).

( +8 )