A watery post :)

Thankyou for all your positive comments on my last post about homeschooling. I have moments where I feel like I am floundering, but mainly I feel really good about it. I am constantly aware that we are in a very privileged position, with the school letting us work like this. Last week, Steve had a day off work, and he and the Wolf -Boy made a fabulous animation!

Aside from that we have had nothing but torrential rain for the last fortnight. No sign of drought here. The reservoirs are full to overflowing, and the roads have become raging torrents of water. My poor ponies are bedraggled and miserable, and STILL needing to be fed hay, despite it being almost May. 

Just before the weather deteriorated, my sister and I went off to Cornwall for a day. We wanted to visit a couple of holy wells and sacred sites near Boscastle. The first Holy Well, outside the church of St Piran, was a sadly neglected place. However, the tiny church, little more than a barn, was a treasure.

We then walked on down the valley to St Nectan's Kieve. I'm at a loss to know what to say about this place. It felt like a truly powerful place, and a very beautiful and peaceful place too, but also entirely alien to me. It is obviously a place of great spiritual importance for many people, judging by the clutter of offerings and gaudy trinkets covering every step of the path down, and most of the rockfaces surrounding the pool. The power of the water thundering through the keyhole is almost overwhelming, but for me, I just felt like an outsider. Almost homesick - I wanted to be beside my own beloved streams and rocks,  not these unfamiliar ones. Weird huh!?

Further down the valley towards the sea, are some remarkable labyrinth carvings on a stone cliff face. There is some confusion aver the origin of these. Bronze age carvings or 100 year old copies? I'm inclined to favour the theory that they are of a later date. Up the road, there is a Roman pillar, with a carved inscription, but the inscription is so worn, that it is almost impossible to read. If these labyrinth carvings are older, given that the automatic response is to trace the labyrinth with your fingers, surely they would be worn into obscurity from 4000 years of rubbing? 

However, 4000 years or 100 years old, they are beautiful pieces of work, hidden behind the ruins of a little mill and workers houses. Again, these are obviously a place of pilgrimage, and the tiny ruined houses are a fascinating view into the past. Sadly, the mill itself had a very unpleasant feel to it, and neither of us wanted to step over the threshold.

I can feel some labyrinth drawings brewing, but first I was inspired to do a quick sketch from Boscastle.

This is the entrance to Boscastle Harbour. Boscastle is probably best known for the catastrophic floods in 2004.  Restored after the damage, it is a place of magic, with a tidal harbour and a powerful sense of wild beauty. The twin headlands made me think of a dragon and a wolf, guarding the boats in the harbour.

 And finally, I have two lovely treasures to send you in search of this week! The first is a singer (the talented daughter of good friends of ours). Do check her out - we think she is going to be The Next Big Thing!

  Lillian Todd Jones

And the second is a delightfully rural blog which a friend of mine has just begun. She is an artist, and mother, and pony owner, and a keen observer of nature. Her blog is a lovely, lighthearted look at our tiny corner of Dartmoor.

Em's blog : Dartmoor Ramblings

A Tale Of Two Hounds and The Sea ( or A Soggy Dog Story)

How apt that I should finish this painting of Lunil and Bil for Freyalynn the day before I left to take my own two dogs to the ocean. But that wasn't quite the original plan......

Poor Magpie cut her leg open a couple of weeks ago, and had to have several stitches, which meant she was made to wear 'the cone of shame' for a whole fortnight while they healed. She was very sorry for herself, wondering what terrible offence she might have committed, to have been punished in this way. As the removal of her collar coincided with our plans to visit a (non-doggy) friends holiday cottage on the beach for a few days, we had a wonderful idea. Magpie (short - haired, impeccably well-behaved, and very much in need of feeling like an 'only' dog for a little bit) could come too, and Daisy (good-natured, but whichever way you look at it, a bouncy, exuberant, water-loving mud monster) could go visiting by herself for a few days!
We congratulated ourselves on our great plan, and gleefully prepared for our holiday. On the morning we were due to leave, I took Daisy for a walk and play with her great friend Teddy, a German Shepherd of the same age, to wear her out. They raced, and tumbled, and rolled, through the peat bog, and through the muddy wallows, and over the muck heap, and this was the resultant state of her!

Thinking I couldn't possibly leave her with someone else in this state, I dragged her into the bathroom and showered her. This is where I shot myself in the foot.
Daisy emerged, clean, sweet-smelling and wonderfully fluffed up ( but distinctly unimpressed!)
and we set off for Cornwall without her. Unfortunately, her bath meant that over the course of the day her coat began to moult in enormous handfuls, until the house was awash with fluff, and she was not a welcome visitor anywhere.
So Daisy was fetched, and to her great delight, joined us at the beach.

She drank seawater and made herself sick,

played in mermaid's pools,

and galloped up and down empty windswept beaches

chasing seagulls. In short she did everything the children did, and had an absolute whale of a time, as did they.

Pie glumly put up with being bounced on by a large wet and sandy Tigger.
Steve and I and my sister spent our waking hours hoovering floors and washing mud spatters from the walls to try and erase all traces of Daisy's exuberant presence. Lovely as it was to have a break, it's nice to be home where a bit of dog hair doesn't matter!

We went to the end of the Land.

This past weekend saw my family gathering in Cornwall to celebrate the life of my grandmother, at a memorial service at the church of St Piran, in Perranuthnoe.

In the clear, icy sunlight, small people braved the water.
And we scattered ashes, and said Goodbye, on the headland, with a perfect view of the castle in Mount's Bay.

Both the songs posted here are favourites of mine, and while rummaging around online, and choosing music for the weekend, both of these seemed appropriate, particularly as they had videos using old black and white footage, akin to the images we were using to make our own slideshow of my grandmother's life. The video for the British Sea Power song is from a 1934 film Man of Aran. Though Aran is in Ireland, life would have been little different for fisherfolk in this most westernmost part of the British Isles, where life was ruled by the sea.