Tales of Home [6]

Long whites.

Beautiful few days here- sunshine, warm, blue skies, the flowers are coming into bloom, the birds are singing of love amidst the trees- bloody awful little bastards are just rubbing it in fortunately Ive spent the last few days getting very drunk and complaining loudly to everyone about the heat and all the noise the birds keep making

Home again after Budapest it was a great trip and we did lots of shit i didn't take a lot lf pictures, Huffjuff did. I cut my hair which was cheap !! Maybe ️i'll give a sumary tomorrow when i am not on my phone, i hate writing a lot on my phone...

Glad you had a great trip Norc.  Yes, please give us the details.

{{I'm going back to Snufkin in honor of your travels }}

Ive always liked that avatar David.
I took this on a stroll home late this afternoon.

azriel wrote:Ive always liked that avatar David.

Thanks Az! I guess I'll keep it for a while then.

Was a nice day.

As I went walking out one day,
Up the hill in the month of May.....
Actually, near me is a gorgeous little hamlet that is SO stuck in the past its heaven Its got a 40s/50s feel to it, there's an old fashioned vicarage, a tiny post office / village store. There's old fashioned flowers blooming & ivy clad cottages & any minute now you could imagine Miss Marple ( from Agatha Christie ) peddling by on a vintage bike, with a basket on the front & 'tring tring' bell
Anyhoo, They have a 'village' pump there & when I got close it looked like bones incorporated into the stone work ?







And yay verrily, it is ! It has old sheep bones in the stonework from when there was a butcher/ abbatoir in the village back in the early days..

I like that its remained the same for a hundred years, I love those old photos.

Azriel wrote:And yay verrily, it is ! It has old sheep bones in the stonework from when there was a butcher/ abbatoir in the village back in the early days..

Interesting!
The masonry is so tidy around the edges while the bones and stones are a bit of a jumble in the middle. It makes me wonder if maybe it was originally supposed to be plastered, and the bones were just a convenient filler?

Or on the other hand maybe the builder had just come back from an international tour of ossuaries and thought, "I'd like to give that a try, only they'll never let me dig up the church yard....Wait! I've got an idea! I'll just talk to the butcher down the street.... "

It makes you wonder.

Hi all- just a quick visit while I can and some pictures to enjoy.

Went to Benmore Botanical Gardens yesterday (about 6 miles out of town), was there for 3 and a half hours during which it was blue skies and blazing sunshine, overcast misty and rainy, windy and cold and finally a hail shower- even by Scotttish standards thats a lot of weather in 3 hours!!

Trees and plants and stuff-

Spoiler:

There are several cool old buildings dotted about the Gardens as well from the Victorian era and even the late 17th Century-

Spoiler:

There is something very surreal about lining up a shot of an old buildnig only for a giant squairrel to walk out of it-

Spoiler:

The setting for the Gardens is also very nice, quite dramatic-

Spoiler:

With fields surrounding it, which at this time of year have the new lambs in them-

Spoiler:

Hope someone is keeping Figgs suitably heated for my return.

Glad you were able to pop by, Petty! I hope all is well with you and yours. You live in such a gorgeous area, weather or not. I dunno if I've asked this before, but what sort of camera do you use for these?

NB when you get back, you ought to join in our Harry Potter re-read over in the A&E forum.

Hopefully be back soon Eldo- and I could do with venting some crabbit- HP is always good for that

The camera is a Canon powershot sx150is

http://www.canon.co.uk/for_home/product_finder/cameras/digital_camera/powershot/powershot_sx150_is/

Beautiful pictures Petty!
Do you happen to know what type of trees the big evergreens that flank the lane are?
They've got some features I recognize from here and some I don't.
I'm thinking they're the European cousins of ours.

petty!

gorgeous pics. that garden is enchanting

Lovely pics Petty ! very stunning

Just spent a week in Sydney, saw a great light show while there.

ANZ stadium 71'000 to see Tottenham v Sydney



Sydney Opera House.



Sydney Harbour Bridge.

nice!

Takes your breath away when you get a more street level view ! I like it, Still not tempted, to many 15 legged things wanting to kill you !

and the critters are pretty dangerous too

71 thousand! Thats a packed stadium Chris! Who won?

"Do you happen to know what type of trees the big evergreens that flank the lane are?" -David

The Gardens are a bit weird- they are owned and managed by the City of Edinburgh, as part of the National Botanical Gardens.
Everything in Benmore is from somewhere else.

The avenue trees are Seirra Redwoods, planted in 1862, given they can live to be 3,500 years old these ones are babies still.

But the Garden also contains the only part of the UK which technically qualifies as a rainforest. A Chilean rainforest to be more precise.

'All nine Chilean conifers are represented including Araucaria araucana (monkey puzzle), Austrocedrus chilensis, Fitzroya cupressoides, Saxegothaea conspicua and Podocarpus nubigenus, as are many Nothofagus (southern beech), including N. Antarctica, N. dombeyi and N. oblique. In addition, the striking Chilean bamboo Chusquea is planted here, along with Desfontainea spinosa and numerous myrtles.'

There is also 'Bhutanese Glade'-

' the Bhutanese Glade, situated on the south facing cliff of Benmore Hill and started in 1987, complements that work. The glade climbs 50m through five vegetation zones and includes plantings of rhododendron, Betula utilis, Sorbus thibetica, Abies densa and a summit vegetation of Juniperus pseudo-sabina and J. recurva scrub.
The second phase of planting the Bhutanese Glade took place in 2001, providing a second generation of trees and shrubs as well as herbaceous perennials on the woodland floor.'

and Tasmanian Ridge-

'Although rare in its native habitat, Athrotaxis laxifolia is the most widely planted Tasmanian cedar in cultivation and is represented here, as is A. selaginoides. The Tasmanian southern beech (Nothofagus cunninghamii) is also planted in this area on the southern slope of the Massan Arboretum.'

And there is a Victorian fernery too.

The names are a bit misleading- when they say Glade what they really mean is a sizeable chunk of the hillside.

An upshot of over 100 years of botanic experimentation is that gardens in the surrounding area can sport a surprising and suspicious variety of plants, carefully stolen as cuttings from the Gardens over a few generations of townsfolk

Pettytyrant101 wrote:"Do you happen to know what type of trees the big evergreens that flank the lane are?" -David

The Gardens are a bit weird- they are owned and managed by the City of Edinburgh, as part of the National Botanical Gardens.
Everything in Benmore is from somewhere else.

The avenue trees are Seirra Redwoods, planted in 1862, given they can live to be 3,500 years old these ones are babies still.

Giant Sequoias then!
They were reminding me of Coastal Redwoods, their nearest cousin, but I couldn't quite believe they could be found in Scotland....