Bits and Bobs.

Again it's been mostly wet today and on the cold side.

This was our week for going to Mach to meet with our friends and work on our Welsh language skills, always a fun time. We gave ourselves a head start on this week's Zoom class by translating everything in our course notes. Then we moved on to the next written for learners book. This one is an interview with Wynne Evans, the chap who plays the curly moustached singer in the annoying Go Compare tv adverts. So far we have learned about his family history, his grandmother seems to have been a feisty lady and about Carmarthen. Afterwards I had a quick spin around the charity shops, found nothing and then bought a door stop to prevent the bathroom door handle slamming into the tiled wall. I'm making sure that everything that needs drilling into the tiles is done by the builders. Then home to hunker down in a warm house doing not very much at all except watching the wild sea.

Some more snippets from yesterday's walk.

An artist friend of H had asked him to collect oak galls to use to make oak gall ink. Between us we found some, mostly single galls and this leaf with three galls. Oak galls were used to make ink from the 12thC to the 19thC, think medieval manuscripts. The ink is made through a chemical reaction with iron and the plant tannin in the gall which gives oak gall ink its characteristic dark colour. It predominated until the advent of the printing press which needed an oiler and stickier ink.

As we sat inside the ruined cottage eating our lunch there was much speculation about the age of the cottage. It could have been hundreds of years old looking at the enormous fireplace with two built in bread ovens. Who knows? The cottage may well have been inhabited up to the middle of the 20thC. One member of our group recalled the roof being intact 30 years ago.

Something else that intrigued us was the placement of three round stones in what appeared to be a niche close to the floor level of the upper room. There was a carefully chosen flat slate across the bottom of the niche and I wondered if the niche had been made to allow heat from the chimney breast into the upper room. (I'm currently into niches since being able to incorporate one in the shower.)

Next our attention turned to a cast iron farm implement. B had worked with one of these in his youth and explained how the blades of the potato ridger first dug a channel that you dropped the seed potatoes in and on the way back up the row turned the soil back over the potatoes. The ridger would have been pulled by a horse and in later years a tractor. 

Walking through the woods we heard some birds, identified by B as ravens, croaking as they looked for mates. I didn't know we had ravens around here.

We found a dragon too, well it is Wales. A few bits of moss and some leaves made it look even more dragon-like.

There's not much in the way of bird song at this time of the year but this robin was singing away up in a tree.