We were woken by a lot of
engine noise on Friday morning and soon realised it was the local farmer and
farmhands using quad bikes to move some cattle, without dogs. We have watched them during previous days,
herding sheep using this method, which obviously works for them.
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| We now call farmers’ quad bikes, red sheep dogs |
We are moored by Thorlby
swing bridge and when we were here a few weeks ago it was just us and Dave on
his boat. It has now got quite busy with
six or seven boats moored here most nights, but for some reason it hasn’t
bothered us being in a crowd. Mind you,
the boats are either dumpers (ccers, who leave the boat during the week and
move it the next weekend) or holiday makers (on private or hire boats) who tend
to continue their journey the following day.
So, it’s not as if we’ve had to socialise 😉
NB: I’m not having a go by
using the word, ‘dumpers’ especially as we were dumpers once. It’s just a good term that describes those
who follow that way of life. They have
to work and still have a land home but want to explore the waterways so are
prepared to spend time travelling on Friday and Sunday evenings in pursuit of
their dreams.
There’s a house by the
swing bridge and they keep chickens which makes Karen very happy as she buys
fresh eggs from them. Before we moved
onto the boat and had to give the hens up, we used to pride ourselves on
keeping our egg prices low. The couple
we get them from at the moment charge next to nothing as most of their hens are
pullets thus laying small eggs. It’s
nice opening up the boxes and seeing a mixture of colours too – white, brown,
blue and green.
After visiting my parents
on Friday morning, we went off to Wendover for the weekend. We were staying with Karen’s mum Ann, who had
fallen and fractured her wrist. Karen spent most of Saturday batch cooking and
ended up freezing 20 meals for her mum.
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| I think Karen could open an Indian takeaway |
I did some odd jobs for Ann
including, ironically, installing and testing a personal alarm. I say ironically as we have just had my
parents’ personal alarm system removed now they are both in care homes.
On Saturday afternoon we
met up for a drink with Miranda (my second longest standing friend). She was visiting her mum, who also lives in
Wendover, and is also cared for by Miranda most weeks. It’s a coincidence that Ann
and Miranda’s mum live in the same town but when Miranda and Karen first met it
transpired that they also both lived, for their teenage years, in a village near
Witney (Oxford) but never knew each other.
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| Cheeky Saturday afternoon trip to the pub |
We left for Yorkshire late
morning and when we got home we found the flowers on the roof of the boat in a
bit of a state. We knew that storms
had been forecast for Friday night, so we automatically assumed there had been
high winds as well as heavy rain.
Talking to one of our neighbours it transpired that there hadn’t been a
lot of rain or wind but there had been one hailstorm that had involved really
large hailstones, so it seems they had been the culprit. Although they did say it had been a bit windy
on the Saturday night and it had blown over some of our sunflowers which our
lady neighbour had kindly righted 😊
After visiting my parents
on Monday morning, it was off to our weekly bridge session at Ilkley. We both felt we had made a couple of silly
mistakes so were really surprised that we ended up eighth of the North-South
pairs.
On the way home from
bridge we took a different route (on the never ceasing look out for Queen
Victoria post boxes) and were well rewarded with a rather nice example of a ‘Penfold’
hexagonal box complete with silver lettering.
Sorry to include this here but you have to admit it’s rather a splendid
looking box. They were designed by a guy
called Penfold and manufactured between 1866 and 1879; they are now Grade II listed buildings.
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| Hexagonal post box outside Ilkley cricket club entrance |
Next weekend sees our
annual family Yorkshire Dales camping weekend at Gordale Scar which is a mile
the other side of Malham. My eldest
daughter Sophie and her husband Yanos arrived on Monday as the advance
party. Karen and I did camp there a
couple of weekends ago, but we don’t really count that as a lot of the time was
spent with my mum who was taken into hospital that weekend after a fall.
Sophie and Yanos are
taking time out from their PhD studies and with the warm dry weather forecast
should have a pleasant week chilling out just reading and knitting by the beck
where they are camped. Not sure how they’re
going to achieve that as they spent Tuesday with us, they are going to York on
Wednesday, then on Thursday half the rest of the family arrive!
The four of us went for a
walk on the hills around Grassington. We
were looking for the northern brown argus; a small brown butterfly of the Blues
family that doesn’t occur in the UK south of Yorkshire. There were plenty of
ideal locations, but it was just too windy with too much cloud cover to see any
on the wing. It’s also the end of their
flight period so any specimens left would be fairly tatty by now.
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| Ideal habitat on the grassy banks below the woods |
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| Sophie & Yanos proving to their southern friends that the weather is different in Yorkshire (but hopefully only temporarily) |
The sun did come out
briefly at times and we saw quite a few whites and speckled woods. The speckled woods were very fresh and didn’t
hang around very long when they settled.
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| Speckled wood on Tuesday |
I said the four of us went
for a walk, but I should have said five – how could I forget Buddy 😊
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| Looking down on Grassington in the Wharfe valley on our way back down |
We are thinking of having
a cruise into Skipton on Wednesday and spending a night there before coming
back to Thorlby.
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