In the Bleak Midwinter...

The icy nights have rendered the landscape breathtakingly beautiful. We woke this morning to a freezing fog just lifting. It is as if we lived inside a glass dome, which has suddenly and silently shattered into millions and millions of tiny shards, and softly rained down upon us.

I have been working away, making some new sets of ACEO limited edition prints . I hope to have them finished and ready to list tomorrow. The goats are done, but the new crow ones are delayed, as I ran out of best quality paper, and am awaiting a new delivery.

Rain, rain and more rain.

Bloody weather. We are awash with sleety rain at the moment. Outdoor chores are grim when you have to trudge through mud.

Still, there was a sudden, unexpected window in the clouds this afternoon, albeit brief, giving a clear view out to Cawsand Beacon. I took the opportunity to rush round the block with Red and Matt!

The perfect word.

Susurrate. I love the feel of the word. It's soft and powerful, all at the same time.

Yesterday was a bright, icy day, a perfect day to walk. The biting winds whistle over the bare, bleached bones of the hills. The only, lonely sound is the susurration of endless miles of bent and brittle grass.

Disaster Strikes!

Froggymeade Stone Circle

Do you ever have times when you feel like there is a cloud of bad luck hanging over you? We seem to have lurched from disaster to disaster this half term. It began on Monday, when we woke up and realised we hadn't seen our little cat Beetle ( short for Beetlejuice) at all the day before. This is unusual, as he is usually such a little homebody. He has a trace of siamese in him, which I hold responsible for the fact that he is quite vocal, and has an insatiable curiosity. If you open a cupboard, Beetle hops in to have a look,if I leave the car door open, Beetle makes himself at home in the car, if he hears a paper bag rustle, he comes running to see what is going on. There are days when I can't take a step without falling over him and swearing at him. Beetle not being there, particularly when the heavens have been throwing icy rain at us for the last few days, is just unheard of.
While reassuring the kids that he was bound to be tucked up in front of somebody else's fire, I secretly feared the worst, and rang all the vets in the area to see if he had been brought in over the weekend, and did a slow drive around the block in case there was a small body on the road. But nothing.

The same morning we found my eldest daughters pony hopping lame in the field, which means a couple of weeks of rest and recuperation for him. We have had one pony after another lame this summer. I go years without having a vet to visit, and then seem to be having to call them on a monthly basis at the moment. Thank goodness they are tolerant about having their bill paid in small dribs and drabs. I never seem to be able to reduce the size of it.
A series of small domestic disasters culminated yesterday in 'The Big One'. Middle daughter had just completed getting ready for a Halloween party. She was dressed as a vampire, and I made up her face to look like one of the undead - pale face, dark hollow eyes, and a dribble of blood running down her chin. Quite effective though I say so myself. In the usual scrum to leave the house, she swung a the carrier bag containing birthday present round her head, and clouted small son on HIS head. This resulted in a nasty cut, and copious amounts of blood, and meant that instead of going to the Halloween party, we had to go off to the surgery and have it cleaned up and stuck together. What a sight we must have looked in the waiting room. Small boy sitting on my lap, blood over him and me, small woebegone creature from the crypt sitting next to me, and my eldest daughter ( my anxious worrier) wringing her hands and looking tearful as she looked at the blood.
Still, it all turned out OK in the end - son cleaned up quite nicely, and got a lollipop from the nurse, the vampire only missed half an hour of her party, and now knows why I spend my time telling her to stop swinging things round her head, and best of all, Beetle turned up! He too, seems none the worse for his time away - he doesn't look as if he has been starving for 4 days,so who knows what he was up to?
I'm hoping for a less eventful end to the week!

On a slightly brighter note, I did manage to take poor Magpie out for a decent walk - there was even a brief break in the rain. I was reminded why Dartmoor is such a magical place - here are a couple of reasons why!

October brings the ponies down from the moor

I thought I would post a picture of the view from Middle Tor towards Frenchbeer, showing the moor at it's most welcoming, in July. Just to remind me that the sun does shine occasionally!

But for now, brrrr! The weather has definately turned here on the moor. The skies have darkened ,bringing icy rain in, and the air is full of the smell of woodsmoke , as stoves are lit in every house you pass. The bracken has died back, and is crispy underfoot when I walk Magpie over the back of Meldon. The hills are empty of ponies now, all rounded up over the past week, driven down the lanes to stone pens and crowded farmyards, to be sorted and checked, weaned and evaluated. Most of the suckers will be taken down to the sale in the town next week, and mares turned back onto the commons. Most of the ponies these days go for riding ponies, since the outlawing of the transport of horses for slaughter to the continent, and the concerted effort of commoners and supporters to improve the stock. This is Phoenix, my superstar , who sadly was lost to colic 3 years ago, aged 17. She was a hill pony mare, of a good Dartmoor type, though slightly overheight - closer to 13hh than 12.2hh. I bought her at pony sales for 45 guineas when I had just turned 15 and she was a wild 6 month old sucker . I had already chosen her earlier in the summer, as she was born to the herd that runs on the commons next to the town, and I, a pony mad teenager, watched eagerly for the first foals each spring. My friend and I had saved up the money from our Saturday jobs , and spent hours watching the ponies and deciding which foals we wanted. Phoenix proved the best choice I could have ever made.

Until a few years ago, when cattle grids were installed to protect peoples gardens, the ponies often came into Chagford for shelter in bad weather, or looking for food when pickings were short. It was a common sight to see them in the churchyard, or on the primary school playing field. I have a magical memory of waking up one cold, icy, moonlit night when I was about 9 and running to my bedroom window because I could hear hooves. I opened the window and looked out, and there, flying down the narrow street, led by the big grey stallion, were about 30 wild ponies, on a midnight dash through the town.

These ponies are still the same herd, and though the stallions are now changed fairly regularly ( every few years) the mares are nearly always retained and many of them now carry the stamp of the big grey that sired Phoenix. Every year I feel tempted to bring another one home from sales, but can't imagine how I would begin to justify it to my family!

And finally, my middle daughter , a passionate 6 year old artist, who finds it difficult to function without a pencil in her hand, has been badgering me incessantly to show you some of her work! So here is her latest drawing - a fairy princess being delivered a magic message while she admires the beautiful ring on her hand.