Midsummer's Day.

I was up early this morning for a change and though it looked as if we were going to have a sunny day I could see cloud over the river being blown towards me. It was only a a layer because behind me the sun was beaming over the cloud/mist? keeping the terrace nice and warm. But eventually the cloud covered the sky and we had an overcast though warm-ish day.

 

The first thing I did this morning was to go round to the neighbours' garden and cut back the escallonia hedge from their side. That poor bush gets almost no chance to flower as it needs regular trimming so that it doesn't spread too much. 

My other outdoor jobs were not so much fun. Starting with tidying round the bins which are kept on the path that runs down the side of the house. It was just sweeping all the odd corners and sorting out the plastic plant pots which seem to grow more quickly than the plants themselves. Some I'll keep and the rest can go in the 'hard plastics' section at the dump. Then there were the storm drains at the bottom of the drive to clear. Again not that much to do but all the leaves that had blown in there had composted and weeds were beginning to grow. I did a little pottering about in the back garden as well.

As promised here are more photos from around St Michael's Church, Lledrod.

I've been researching yew trees in churchyards and found some interesting facts. The average lifespan of a yew tree is 400-600 years and there are 407 yew trees in Wales that are over 500 years old. There is  yew tree at Defynnog which is possibly 5,000 years old though some experts think it is more likely to be around 1,500 years old. Another tree at Llongernyw is said to be 4,000 years old. The oldest yew tree in the UK is the Fortingal Yew in Scotland which is thought to be 2,000 - 9,000 years old. Ancient yew trees have girths of over 5m so the ones in the churchyard yesterday are probably only hundreds of years old.

It was a shame that there were no paths mown between the graves and the slate gravestones were worn and covered with lichen so we couldn't read the inscriptions on most of them.

This stone tells a tragic story of a family devastated maybe by the last word-wide pandemic. The headstone tells us that in the Jones family Mary, the wife died in 1887 aged 54, a year later son John aged 24 died and the following year another son Daniel aged 38 died. Two years later the daughter Anne aged 32 died and Morgan the father died in 1894 aged 68. The stone doesn't give the cause of death but the Russian Flu pandemic ran from 1889 to 1890 plus there was an unexplained disease circulating in cattle 1870-1890 which may have spread to humans. The Asiatic or Russian Flu, possibly a coronavirus was one of the deadliest pandemics in history killing over 1 million people at a time when the world population was around 1.5 billion.

This imposing granite monument was for a church elder who died in 1890 and his wife who died 32 years later.

I just heard on the radio that it's Midsummer's Day, err what summer? and that it has been the hottest day of the year. Not here it hasn't.