Sunny Christmas

The weather on Christmas Day was exceptional, with bright sunny weather, unfortunately the temperatures remained low.

Here is Sue on Christmas Day with everything done and dusted for lunch.

Jane, Ron and Margaret joined us for lunch and we all had a great time.

The weather remained the same for Boxing Day so we took a picnic to the promenade at Bournemouth and ate our sarnies in the sunshine. There was a keen wind so it remained chilly. These are the beach huts at Branksome Dene Chine. Just around the corner someone was having a BBQ at a beach hut with lots of friends.

The beach at Branksome, it was very busy with most of Dorset and Hampshire promenading with their new bikes, scooters, roller skates and all things dangerous.

Another Christmas walk and another crop of photos. The next 2 photos were taken on Rockford Common just north of Ringwood.

Please note that this is the last post (sounds ominous) for this year's blog.

Next year's blog can be found at http://thebuchans2009.blogspot.com/

Winter Ramblings

This is the New Forest ramblers (shadow of) walking through Pennington Marshes.
This area was used for salt production many centuries ago. Pans were formed by building rudimentary sea walls on the mudflats and salt water was allowed in and left to partially evaporate. Complete drying was done in boiling vats. As this industry declined local farmers used the marsh area for grazing livestock.

This is a photo of the forest just north of Burley.

Winter is a good time to go to the coast, its possible to park the car without too much trouble. The structure is the new Boscombe Pier. One has to ask 'Is it finished?' It's very basic and I think they must have run out of money when buying the benches. Next year the new reef for surfing will be finished nearby.

Choose your beach hut. I think these might be the new design/colour that are available for sale.

The RNLI jetski - not a busy day.

There was no one on the beach and even fewer in the sea brrrrrrrr!

Sue and I were invited to join our Portsmouth friends help celebrate Christmas by joining them for ONE of their Christmas dinners.

This is me completing my 850th geocache. It was not in one of the best positions - next to the A338 spur road. That is the main road into Bournemouth.

Cirencester - November 2008

The Romans invaded England in 43 AD and built a fort on the site of Cirencester (Corinium). Soon a civilian settlement grew up nearby. The soldiers in the fort provided a ready market for goods made by the townspeople. The Roman fort was dismantled around 75 AD.

St John Baptist is one of the largest parish churches in England and has been a place of Christian worship for well over a thousand years.

The UK's tallest yew hedge. It costs £5,000 for a trim. Two workers will spend two days in a cherry picker cutting back six inches of growth from the 50ft high green giant at Lord Allen Apsley's 14,500 acre estate at Cirencester, Glos.
Nearly a tonne of clippings is produced and this is used as an ingredient in a cancer drug.

This sculpture of a Jacobs Sheep caused a stir when it was unveiled. Apparently the local residents would have preferred a sculpture of the local Cotswold Sheep, but the Jacobs looks better.


This is me doing an interesting geocache on the line of longitude, 2�W. It is the only line of longitude that coincides exactly with one of the lines of the Ordnance Survey National Grid. It's line 400000 of the National Grid, also known as the Central Meridian. It also runs the entire length of England: from just outside Berwick-upon-Tweed on the north-east coast to a couple of miles south-west of Swanage on the south coast - a total of 359 miles.

The cache is on this line.
Sue had an appointment at Salisbury Hospital so we drove down from Cirencester and had a few hours in the centre. This is 'Arundells' where Sir Edward Heath used to live.



Salisbury Cathedral - The cathedral has the tallest church spire in the United Kingdom (123m/404ft).

Bibury
The picturesque Arlington Row cottages were built in 1380 as a monastic wool store. This was converted into a row of weavers' cottages in the 17th century. The cloth produced there was sent to Arlington Mill on the other side of Rack Isle. The cloth was then hung on wooden timber frames on Rack Isle after being degreased at Arlington Mill. Rack Isle is a piece of land to the right of the photo.

New Geocachers? We met up with Jean and Graham Lee, Sue and I were at school with Graham (just a couple of years ago.....), for the day. We visited the Savernake Forest for some geocaching and to show Graham and Jean what it is all about.

Christmas Newsletter 2008

To read the pages hold down Ctrl and double click the page you wish to read. The page will open in a new window and the print will be a lot larger.

A wet start to November

Well it has been rather a wet start to November and a lot of the fireworks evenings have been postponed to even wetter evenings. All a bit of a damp squib really (couldn't resist that).
I have been waiting for a crown (dentist type crown - not the one on your head) for a while and the photo you see below is taken about 1 hour after having the preparation done so if I look a little lopsided it is because of the anesthetic.
The dentist is in Fordingbridge and as the weather forecast was very good we decided to have picnic on the Submarine Pens in the New Forest. I have a geocache there and all the bits and pieces around me are from the geocache drying out.

We also laid a new geocache up there and this is Sue putting it in its hidey hole. This is also the spoiler photo on the geocaching website.

I've been in the rambling diary to lead a few rambles recently and this is the turnout for one of them. Thirty minutes before the start of this ramble it was pouring with rain and so the turnout was impressive. There are usually 20 -30 ramblers. It didn't rain for the whole 2 hours we were out - miracles!

Talking about rambles, I had an email from Geoff Fryatt in Cyprus, some of you may know him. He has produced a book of rambles for Cyprus. Here is the gist of his email:

This is the first new book of walks in Cyprus for nearly 20 years and I am told that it is the only one in print at the moment. It has been very well received by the bookshops in Nicosia, Limassol and Pafos and is selling nicely.

The book costs €12 or Cy£7 and the flyer can be seen at www.ramblingaroundcyprus.info

Should any of your members be interested in buying a copy, they are very welcome to contact me on fryatt@spidernet.com.cy or 99 456714 or tel/fax 25932263 and I will ensure they get a copy as soon as possible. We also carry copies in our truck so do feel free to 'Stop Me And Buy One' at any time!

N.B. I am NOT on commission!

On Sunday we fancied a walk down by the sea so went to Mudeford. It was very bracing with the blustery wind. We had a hot drink at The Beach Hut Cafe, Friars Cliff. We also had a walk around the grounds of Highcliff Castle.

Highcliffe Castle is a Grade I listed building owned by Christchurch Borough Council. It was built between 1831 and 1835 by Lord Stuart de Rothesay. It has been described as "the most important remaining example of the Romantic and Picturesque style of architecture."The Castle was built on the site previously occupied by High Cliff, a Georgian mansion designed for the 3rd Earl of Bute (a founder of Kew Gardens), with grounds laid out by Capability Brown.

Next time we go we'll have the guided tour of the inside.

The Purbecks - October 2008

For our October break we travelled to the Purbecks, all of 20 miles.

We booked into Haycraft, The Caravan Club site at Harman's Cross which is between Corfe and Swanage.

The quay at Wareham, on the River Frome, which is close to Corfe.

Swanage, pictured here, became the focus of the local Purbeck Stone Industry after the English Civil War. Each year thousands of tons of stone was shipped out on a fleet of 70 sailing ships. almost anyone who was not a quarrier worked on the boats. Much of the stone ended up in London and in return unwanted monuments were used as ballast for the return journey and were re-erected in Swanage.

The Ionic Columns are of exactly the same design seen on the British museum. It is not known which part of London they came from.

 

The Wellington Clock Tower - from the southern end of Southwark Bridge.

Hyde Park Corner Archway - this came from beside Buckingham Palace.

There are many other bits and pieces of old London around Swanage, but some are well tucked away so it's best to get a walking guide at the tourist office.

 

Tyneham and Environs

In WWII, the British Army required a larger training area so they evacuated the occupants of the Tyneham Valley. In 1943, Winston Churchill's War Cabinet issued clearance notices to 106 properties in a 12 square mile area including Tyneham Village. They were given one month to leave. As their houses were the property of the Squire, most tenants were given only the value of the produce in their gardens as compensation.

Tyneham School closed (because of declining numbers) in 1932. The school has been maintained as it was then, the children's names are still on the pegs.

This is the remains of the laundry. These were the only properties to have running water.

This is an information plaque about the rectors of Tyneham. Christopher Wordsworth was the rector here at one time - is he relation of our friends David and Carol?

St. Mary's Church is a small cruciform-plan building with walls of limestone rubble. The North Transept and parts of the Nave are medieval, dating from the 13th century, while the South Transept was rebuilt in the mid-19th century by the Rev. William Bond.

Worbarrow Bay, is a 20 minute walk from Tyneham, it  is a large broad shallow bay and is part of the Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site.

 

If you wish to visit Tyneham check the website first. It is in the middle of a MOD firing range and is usually closed during the week.

Swanage Railway

The railway runs between Norden and Swanage and passes through Corfe, Harmans Cross and Herston Halt. The trip is not very long so we had a rover ticket for the day and went up and down the line twice getting off and on at various places.

The caravan site was at Harmans Cross so we wandered down to the station for 10 o'clock train.

En route to Norden the train passes Corfe Castle.

We spent 3 hours in Swanage doing the walking trails and this is one of the views we were treated to. Old Harry rocks can be seen in the distance.

Waiting for the off at Swanage.

 

The train coming in at Corfe for the last leg of our day out.

The Purbecks - Tailpiece

Kimmeridge Bay

The rocks here were once the floor of a deep, tropical sea rich in pre-historic life. They formed in the Jurassic period, 155 million years ago.

You don't have to look to hard to find fossils in the rocks. This photo was used to claim an Earthcache (for geocaching.com).

The fossil is an ammonite.

Lunchtime on Studland Beach.

In between Studland beach and Ferry Road there is the Little Sea, a fresh-water lake amongst the dunes which was cut off from the sea by the development of the dunes. The lake is a haven for birds and other wildlife.

This is a quarr (quarr is correct) where the Purbeck Stone was quarried. These shafts were sunk into the ground and a donkey was used to pull up the trucks. Looking at an Ordnance map of this area there are the remains of many of these quarrs.

The Great Globe at Durlston is the largest sculpture created by George Burt at what is now Durlston Country Park. It is three metres in diameter and weighs about 40 tonnes and is made from local Portland Limestone.

We ended our trip away a day earlier because of the poor weather forecast. Needless to say they were wrong and the Friday was warm and sunny.