Gold in tham thar hills.....

There are a series of ancient castles scattered around Asturias and Galicia. These are not castles as we know them from our Norman history but pre-Roman fortified villages or settlements. They date from three or four hundred years before Rome arrived. We saw two yesterday (at Boal and Coana), with their squat tub-like stone walls huddled close together inside containing walls or moats. These moats, by the way, were hewn out of solid rock, though now filled with soil and vegetation and not easy to see. The villages or castles are built on top of natural acropolis formations and certainly look very protected, with pastures below and the forests rising on the valley walls around them. The dwellings and store-houses are mostly roughly circular, or if more rectilinear then their corners are rounded. Some have common walls, some have narrow alleys or paths between, and some are so close together it’s hard to see how they built them. 

 

These structures were variously roofed with stone, thatch or tiles, and some had fires. Some had inbuilt shelves or seating. They have been enthusiastically excavated and examined for 200 years and it’s impossible for a casual visitor to say which are original and which are archaeological rebuilds. Nor could I discover whether the societies who dwelt so fearfully inside their stockades were matriarchal or patriarchal. They did howver, have saunas or hot baths, and it may be that the Romans got the idea of hot baths from Asturia. The idea had to come from somewhere. They were apparently heated with hot stones rather than using warm water from the granitic rocks beneath. In this part of Spain it really is impossible not to be aware of the plain facts of geology.

The Romans certainly had an eye for rocks, in particular the ones bearing flecks of gold. They had a gold mine just over the mountain from here at a place now called Andía, and again, because vegetation has now taken over from the scorching industrial activity, it’s not immediately obvious that you are looking at man-made features in the landscape. So we gathered in a small group of about 25 in a pleasant picnic area by the forest, and a lady who spoke no English was the tour guide. She gave us a typed sheet with basic information and then led everyone into the old gold mine. This is all inside a deepish cleft in the rocks, so open to the sky and with cliffs and slopes of various degrees and heights. Because the area is protected from the wind, it has a very special microclimate and an unusual collection of trees and plants. The combination of historic gold mining and the vegetation prompted this tiny valley to be labelled a Natural Monument and given very special protection. The light is greenish, and the air very still and cool. We picked our way down the slopes – no problem to start with, and she stopped at various points to show us the flora and fauna, the rock formations and so on. There was evidently a lot to say, and we picked out the odd word and watched as the others nodded and smiled.

The rocks at this point are revealed as partly karstone, partly metamorphic and partly granitic, and this may have drawn the attention of the Romans. In the first and second centuries, they used to set fires under the rocks to heat them up, and then pour tanks of cold water onto it all, and the thermal shock would bring the cliff face cracking down so it could be further crushed and then panned. I think the percentage of gold in the rock was less than 1% so a huge amount of material was processed to garner a tiny amount of precious metal. So, the rockfaces are a twisting and very odd shape, with pathways created from place to place, and our tourguide led us all around.

The trouble was that about a quarter of the visitors in our group were well over 70, and some were well over 80. One old gentleman looked very spruce and proper but was not very steady on his pins and actually also had dementia so he didn’t much understand what was going on. We clambered up and down the steps and slopes, looking all around, up and down, listening to the guide. The pathways got steeper and narrower.

At some points we were crouching down under great swoops of rock, bent over like circus characters. Then we had to slither down rocky slopes with the occasional hand-hold or length of rope. Everyone was trying to grab this at the same time, so it wavered wildly and jerked this way and that, offering less support than everyone hoped. It was all more or less ok while the ground remained dry, but where rock-water spilled out onto the surface, it became quite alarmingly slithery – there was nowhere reliable to step. The one child among us, a sturdy blond boy who took photos of absolutely everything, managed to fall over amid cries of ‘Oh la!’ and ‘Whoop!’ This had the general effect of cementing our esprit de corps, so that we became more of a single body instead of slightly competing one against the other.

It began to remind me of that scene in the film ‘The Poseidon Adventure’ when doomed groups of people try to make their way in the dark through the overturned liner to reach safety….. It was difficult to avoid thinking of The End of Days, Doom, Death, Hell, etc. We were in single file, picking our way through the darkish paths, down and down in this case, into an extremely narrow enfilade. There was barely enough width to place your foot, and the rocks on either side scraped at us as we pushed through. Down and down, wetter and wetter. The guide remained cheerful and upbeat, the Spanish looked grim, and we thought, ‘In England, ‘elf and safety would never allow it….’

Amazingly, with a lot of pulling and pushing, the strongest men helping everyone along, up and down over the yomping obstacles, we all got through. We were not allowed the satisfaction of self-congratulation because the guide kept on with her very detailed explanation of further items along the way – the lime-burning kiln, the rare birch tree, the crows’ nest, etc etc. She asked at the end whether we thought all the efforts of the Romans was worth it…. There was a kind of silence.

The high price of precious metals has prompted ideas of opening a new goldmine in this area. We saw posters everywhere: ORO NO.  It seems the idea has been rejected on environmental grounds. It would have been opencast. The farmers all objected.

Spanish rocks

Aldea de Trasgo is a modern courtyard style hotel, in very confident bright soup-and-mustard colours, and a tinkling Moorish fountain in the centre providing a soothing (or loo-inspiring) sound day and night. La Senora makes a selection of really delicious marmalades, curds and pates to adorn the breakfast table, and croissants so spectacular you wouldn’t be surprised to see them on sale in a Viennese boulevard. She was very taken with my Bernie Mev elastic sandals (and in fact I forgot to give her the details of them, and had to go back later. She was especially thrilled with the idea that you can put them through the wash).

Pilgrims plodded their way with sticks and backpacks along the Feve railway right beside the hotel.

We followed signs for a medieval bridge which we never found, but wended our way through tiny cliff-edged valleys filled with cider-apple orchards and small farms. Eventually we came out to the cliff top on the west side of the sea-spout bay which we went to the night before, so we could see the shapes and scale of the caves at the water’s edge where the tide and wind force their way up into the vertical sink holes to produce the stupendous geysers and organ-noises under the right conditions. Even with still waters and calm, the booming and buffeting sounds are tremendous. And the rocky clifftop plateau where we were standing was itself another marvel of landscape – more sink-holes, vast extents of craggy sills and crevasses, vertiginous cliffs, masses of small but brilliant wild flowers, terrifying descents, glimpses of blue sea between swirling cliff edges, and in the distance, two goats almost totally hidden on the horizon. The scale of everything is very deceptive – it looks small and close but is often very large and much more distant. Our shadows on the lower towers of rock were tiny.

After we stopped to give Madame the Bernie Mev information, and took advantage of her exemplary wifi set-up – strong free signal even in the carpark at the back of the building – we set off west. I wanted to buy some better watercolour paper so we went back into Ribadesella – but the shop was closed almost every hour of the week, so we grabbed a cortado and empanada and then set off to to Cuevona Caves, which the little boy at Aldea de Trasgo had told us about – a road going through a real cave with stalactites.

Over the bridge towards the Tito Bustillo, then keep going. The landscape becomes almost Kentish up on the plateau, and then we arrive at the mouth of the tunnel – huge like a cathedral, and about 300m long, winding and dark, echoing and sinous, with the road down the middle. Pedestrians cower at the side of the roadway and it’s a tight squeeze with cars passing each way…. The other end opens into a pretty village with a level crossing and lots of small houses. A bold pair of information boards explains everything and also describes the Camino des Molinas – taking you to see the little water-powered vertical mills established to grind grain, including the maize which came from America from 16thC onwards.

Back we came, turning west – but getting lost again and deciding on lunch by the beach, so we found (yet another place called ) la Vega which means rich fertile lowland… and boldly parked outside the carpark and took a light meal on a terrace overlooking a huge sandy bay…. I did a pencil sketch, trying to capture the colours – brilliant aquamarine, dark blue, white breakers, distant misty purple-brown-black hills……

Then up and onto the motorway, occasionally giving our satnav heart-attacks when the new stretches of road divert from the old ways….. And we arrived at Navia (with the paper plant which chomps up all the eucalyptus in a foul-smelling process), and turned up again into the mountains. Coming back to la Palacio de Prelo is extraordinary – the antiquity and simplicty and awkwardness of the building, the luxury and quiet.

Antonio suggests tea on the terrace under the trees away from the heat (thirty degrees), and stands over us talking about ‘everything’ for an hour or so.

All the troubles faced by post-Brexit Britain are mirrored in Spain – with the new regionalisation giving control of education and police to various governments headed by crackpots. In Catalonia, the health service budget has been smashed to pay for foreign embassies all around the world. ‘Don’t get sick in Catalonia. You will die’. There are so many dialects in Spain that the revival of local languages is a popular objective – Bable in Asturia, for instance – but no dialect is extensive enough to cover any one region, so completely new amalgamated local languages are being invented and imposed in the schools alongside Spanish, pushing English out. These languages are completely useless outside the regions and pretty well useless inside them, with publicly funded TV stations using them, but no-one able to understand them. The dialects often require different spelling for place-names: Boal becomes Bual, for instance… so local tourist attractions suddenly disappear from the google searches, and incomes are plummeting as a result. You might not ‘hear’ the difference if the placename is spoken but signposts and online information get more and more confusing.

Our salon during this conversation is on a little terrace at the back of the house, giving onto a marvellous view of fields, forests and mountains. We sit under a row of limes planted about ten feet from the house, in a secluded cell of glittering shadows and murmuring bright green light. Upstairs, the rooms are polished, hushed. He has given us a suite…. The bathroom is black slate and shining wood. Later we have supper – Alicia’s home-made aubergine quiche and salad, and then some cheese flan. Nothing could be nicer.

We walk up the lane to the pile of huge rocks (tiny from the terrace but each as big as a mini when you get close up) to see how they are arranged. This cairn of granite is as big as the house beside it. We meet a dog, and two horses in a field who look thirsty, and look at a little farmstead which someone has started to repair… beautiful new hand-cut slates on part of the roof, tiny windows with massive stone coins and lintels. Antonio says, there is another huge granite boulder somewhere in the village, which at one small point can be rocked with one finger. He challenges anyone – if you can find the point which rocks the stone, you can stay for a week for free in the Palacio.

Vaginas and Blow-Holes

Writing this blog is always done in a hurry, and I apologise to my readers for the messy style – the plan is to combine it into a book one day, when it will all be edited down and made more readable.

Yesterday’s highlights (following the discovery of the hotel key) were that we passed Poo (a small hamlet on the main road), where a tiny high-arched medieval bridge showed how – until very recently – people travelled: on mule or donkey. Later we saw a nice statue in another village of a woman riding side-saddle on a donkey. I should think this is all within living memory, so swift has been the transformation of remote rural Spanish places with the influx of European money, roads, visitors, etc. etc.

This was where we lunched – another nondescript little place, really – and it is noticeable how (compared to England where every village and town knows its place in the social hierarchy) each place here is perfectly content with itself. So Benia has the new main road, and a marvellous little messy trout-river at the back, and some spectacularly collapsing medieval houses which once faced the water but are now just in a back-alley as newer buildings intruded onto their useful access, and an iron-works (scrap-yard + weldery), and a few restaurants to snaffle passers-by, and that’s about it. We had a coffee, and then wandered, and then went back for lunch, serenaded by the vast repertoire of a caged grey parrot.

We called then to the cave at Cavadonga – oh dear! A honeypot for tourists and devout Catholics, with vast bus carparks, dozens of tat stalls, and the quite interesting big shallow cave-over-a-waterfall transformed into a church or basilica. Incense, chanting, brasswork, candles, pews, images, shrines, polished marble steps…. Not our sort of thing and a stark contrast to the quiet and untouched feel of Sotres. We fled.

Down we went to Ribadesella, where a smart little tat market lines part of the huge natural harbour or estuary. We walked over the bridge to the cave at Tito Bustillo – and this too has been exploited but in a different way. The whole complex is about 3km in extent under the lowish limestone cliffs and plateau on the other side of the estuary, and was only discovered in the 70s. There in the most inaccessible places they have found masses of Paleolithic paintings – all sorts of animals and anthropomorphic figures, many superimposed, and almost impossible to make out. For me, the draw is the very very rare (unique?) slabs which show vaginas… ovals with slits, made in red. They are joyous. I have to admit – since access to the real thing is very very difficult (you have to be a climber, really), and damaging (human breath spoils things), and with a 2-week waiting list for a ticket – we only saw the reproductions in the museum beside the cave entrance, but it was enough for me. It all just takes your breath away. Stupdendous.

Our hotel is in the countryside near Ribadesella...a slightly luridly coloured family-run place where the bedroom is spacious but a tiny bit damp…. But the people are so hospitable. Their son who must be about 11 speaks pretty good English and translated everything for us when we arrived. He and his mother recommended we go and see the sea blowholes on the cliffs nearby, so after our delicious supper of salad and baby squid at the pub down the road (100% recommended, thank you Casa Anton), we drove down a completely un-developed track, past jolly little holiday bars and groups of laughing youngsters, past a river/sea bay where everyone was rushing in and out of the water on the white sands, and out to the cliff top where the rocks are worn into hundreds, thousands of ankle-breaking low sculptures and formations set into red sand. There are the blowholes – quiet last night with the tide out – looking dangerous and deep, with booming pressure-noises and whooshing sounds coming from far beneath them. It was really magic. This place is called Bufones de Lllames and there are lots of films of it on YouTube.

Now we’re off to our luxy hotel in the western mountains, at Boal – the Palacio de Prelo.

Away from the amazing flat calm of the Bay of the Basques, with its hidden deeps full of squids and whales, we headed into the land of wonders with only some trepidation about battery-life for the iPhone onto which I had loaded the entire roadmap of Spain on an app which does not need data to work.

These days, all my admiration and pleasure in things Apple is evaporating as they turn the screws. I cannot load my photos from my phone onto my laptop because (due to ignorance and the needs of a moment long ago) I have two Apple IDs which cannot be merged, and while the phone is on one system, the laptop is on another and the computer will not, will NOT, see the phone.

I take a lot of photos, and the uploading to iCloud or Dropbox takes too long. They don’t really want you to have any private archive whatsoever – everything must be on their cloud. Microsoft are doing the same. On my last computer, the MS Office software allowed me to keep it all on land, in my office, on my machine, the same as in my own filing cabinet – but the most recent upgrade insists it must all be stored up there in the sky. I hate it. I don’t really trust it. I have had to find a different kind of document-creator to use, stepping backwards to what I know, rather than joyously leaping into a future where they hold all the cards…..

Anyway, the upshot is that I cannot access all my miraculous images to look at them properly on a bigger screen, and then weed them out.

And the battery on the phone – no change here, but still deeply frustrating and increasingly worrying – gradually loses capacity and we get just half a day, and then a couple of hours, and then an hour, and then half an hour of operation…. Why? So they force us to upgrade and get another one…. It cannot be beyond the wit of man to provide a means of replacing the battery when it wears out. They are just screwing us.

We know that too, because yesterday the news was all about the European Court making a pronouncement that Apple (and the Republic of Ireland) have been quite wrong to allow Apple to pay no tax these last few years and they must now repay £11bn. They squeal that this will prevent new research and development, but I am willing to bet all my knickers that this would not be research into replaceable batteries.

Still, with the aid of a REAL MAP (thank you messieurs Michelin), we navigated west along the northern edge of Spain… looking first of all for lunch. Off the motorway we found a ramshackle place surrounded by lorries, and a little way off, a view out to sea and a man supervising a wide chalky-white parking area. Where lorry drivers eat, there we like to eat also….. He pointed at a place for us to stop, but as we walked towards the restaurant, he came and told us it was more than likely that a driver would smash into our car in that area, and we could go and get lunch at a place just a little further down the hill. He pointed to another car park and nodded vigorously.

Not wanting to see our car wrecked and not absolutely wedded to the idea of the lorrydrivers’ cafe, we set off again, to find the other carpark more or less empty and the second restaurant totally closed, shut, dark, empty and nbg.

‘Rats! Conniving bastard. What lengths will these Spaniards go to to stop honest English tourists eating their bean stew?’

We set off again, still on the old road, and wound down into a funny little town (Moino?) with an old steam engine on display and some very small mining-wagons laid out as flowerbeds. Here we found a little lunch, succumbing to the machine-gun rattle of the waitress’s suggestions and thus confronted with mounds of Russian salad topped with olives, a plate of (delicious) meats and sausage, and then two huge platters of burned meat, the identity of which was impossible. Possibly lamb? Beef?

French female pilgrims settled beside us and took a more combative tone with the waitress and were given pasta instead.

Our trusty map (paper, 3-D, flexible, comprehensive, detailed) led us westwards, giving the ancient and out-of-date satnav which lives in Andrew’s car palpitations as we headed off piste and across bare naked countryside. The sun was replaced by clouds as, two hours later, we started to climb up towards the Picos de Europa. As this mountain range was one of the main reasons for coming here, it was disappointing to see the cloud – as thick as phlegm – utterly blanketing the peaks.

We pressed on, beside clear rushing rivers, winding on and up, with the cliffs and gorges rearing up beside us. The limestone karst rock is grey or white depending on the light, and forms itself into unbelievable points and crags. From time to time an eagle wafts round the tops. The villages huddle down by the rivers. Unlike Crete or Cyprus where goats have been encouraged to pasture, or even Wales with its sheep, here nothing has grazed and so trees lock on wherever they can, fading out to nothing on the tops. The landscape is basically vertical. To our delight the cloud seemed to fade away as we climbed and so we had all the drama of bright sunlight, deep shadows, with distant views softened with a kind of mist, and these colossal unrepentant curtains and walls of hard hard rock to gaze on. The tops are completely spellbinding, they are so craggy and twisted and resilient. Spikes and towers and points and gnarled fingers, forming into towers and castellations and huge clefts and ravines splitting everything apart. 

We headed up and up… the last 30 kilometres took us over an hour as we wound round and round. There are a few stopping places – some with cars parked and people staring, some empty. The odd lorry hurtled along. It’s a very long way between villages. There are few if any solitary houses.

Eventually, we arrived at our destination – Sotres – the highest village in the mountains. There were a lot of people about… some tourists like ourselves, quite a lot of old folk, and a few young families. Our hotel is dark and small, made of stone. How old is the building? The girl asked her grandmother. ‘At least 84 years old’. The original part looks mid-19^th century, with low ceilings, heavy wooden beams, unplastered stone walls, steep steps. The hotel as such was built on the side in 2002.

We settle in, get a few emails sorted, plug things in to charge up (bloody phone). Go out for a walk, plonking the huge hotel key onto the reception desk. 

We meet an old lady knitting beside her house… She indicates we must wait, rushes away, comes back with a pair of horrible bright pale green knitted bedsocks which she wants us to buy. ‘No, no! Thank you!’ She retreats looking very cross. Up a steep alley onto the mountain, where I find a neat bench and sit to make some paintings and Andrew goes for a walk.

We can hear cowbells from far across the valley. The sun is pouring down onto the valley – where (almost inexplicably) a glacier has swiped some of the points and crags away into a delectable smooth green pastured fields, leaving a ring of venomous points all round the edge.

The gorges and deeps out to the west are filled with misty light, the contours of the cliffs quite impossible to trace against the light. As the sun goes down, these great ruffians of rock reveal themselves – cliffs, shoulders, horizons one after another, all hard and scribbled, and indefatigable.

After a couple of hours staring at all these wonders, we come back (avoiding the bedsock centre of the village by picking round lots of dilapidated and picturesque houses) and ask for the key.    

It has vanished and this leads to an incessant conversation with the hotelier about whether we left it in the car… He refuses to believe we put it on the counter. All through supper, and then breakfast, he asks us in his dialectical Spanish (which we don’t understand, and he certainly speaks no English, and we all resort to sign-language)… 

Did we put the key in the car? Did we put it in the pocket? Did it drop somewhere? Did it slip out of our hand? Where is the key? Have we checked our bags? He is inconsolable, angry, suspicious. Really he harangues us at every possible opportunity.

We say, over and again, we do not have the key. The only possibility is that someone else has picked it up, another guest. He won’t hear of it.  He even came to us with a torch in his hand, demanding we search our car to look for the key.

We say – No, we left it on the counter. It was too big to carry anywhere (the hand-carved wooden fob). He comes back again and again, and we also go and look behind the reception – it is nowhere to be seen. A mystery. We have our tapas, water and wine. He comes to ask us again.   But we go to bed. We have no key.

Now we have had breakfast - ‘toasted’ bread, sachets of sweet jams and butter, a little dish of serrano ham, some utterly delicious bananas, and bitter coffee, and although the wifi ought to be working, it isn’t.   So I have written this now and will post it when we get back down to the next place which might, might have a more reliable signal.    We are heading for Cuerres, which Andrew tells me is east of Ribadesella or something. Some Americans we met last night are laughing, having a nice time. They are from Boston. It’s his first time ‘out of the country’ and he is partly enthralled, partly terrified, being in foreign lands. Rather like me.

The Sequel

After breakfast, and maybe harried on by the concierge who was filled with rage and anxiety about the lost key, and for the first time ever in all our travelling, the maids keep knocking on the door for us to leave our room so they can clean it. This is well before 10am, when the departure time is 11am.

Eventually I follow Andrew down, having done my last ablutions…. He is in conversation with Nick, the American.

Now get this.

Our concierge came to Andrew a few minutes ago, shame-faced, apologetic. He dangled the lost key in his hand. ‘Los Americanos’ had the key. It was their fault.

But Nick himself says it was the man, the concierge who gave them the key… He actually handed over two keys – the right one for their room, and another, and they had no idea that two was too many, and one was quite wrong……

The concierge is now all over us, kisses me on each cheek, has given Andrew a bottle of local cider as an apology, gives us two postcards showing the amazing mountaintops…. Is all smiles and friendship.

It really is very funny, a little hotel farce.

Nick’s name is Bryson, but he has never heard of Bill Bryson, as most Americans have not. We feel Bill would appreciate all of this.

The timewarp which is the world of bed and breakfast

Old-fashioned ways of doing things hang over the bed-and-breakfast sector of the market like a stale black pudding.

Admittedly, booking your accommodation is now so streamlined through the internet it’s almost impossible to remember how we did it just a few years ago. You had to pitch up in a town before the Tourist Office closed, and a pretty girl would ring round a few places and then give you a map with hastily scrawled directions written all over it. Or you’d look through the small ads of some publication or other – the Sunday Times, or Practical Somethingorother, to find a reassuringly familiar litany saying Mrs Bloggins Private Accommodation was still available. I think my parents used to write off to get a list of places, and then do a laborious ringing-up exercise…. All that has been swept away by booking.com or TripAdvisor or AirBnB.

But there are perils, as we found out in Ireland last year, when a sneaky old-fashioned phone-booking from someone using the old ways trumped our online reservation and we arrived to find there was no room at the inn, and the unrepentant owner sent us on to somewhere else (which we later decided was greatly superior anyway).

Our man here in Hampshire says Booking.com charges him 15% which seems a lot but it pretty well guarantees him full bookings through the season.

But – and here I think things have to change – what you get for your money is still locked into a 1970s dream of luxury and indulgence…. For instance, as I logged when we arrived, the wifi in such places can be pretty dire.

And the breakfast is a resplendent dream of fat, cheap meat, fried everything, excess and inertia. We don’t eat a fried breakfast at home but it seems we have to pay for it whether we eat it or not. Why can’t we choose a health-breakfast in advance, and pay less? For health reasons I avoid cows’ milk and butter, and prefer goats’ dairy products, but asking for these in the b&b is like asking for some obscure and ghastly poison.

All the cereals are laced with sugar. All the yoghurts are sweetened.

The menu is fried, fried and more fried – bread, waffles, tomatoes, bacon, sausages, hash-browns, eggs, mushrooms…. And all this is offered like the most prized, the most luxurious thing you could imagine.

We brought with us a mango, a rare and special thing like an Alfonso, yellow and sweet, and wanted a knife to cut it, but you would have thought we were suggesting violent revolution on the streets…. I am not sure whether that was because we had brought something of our own into their dining room, or whether we wanted a different utensil from the spread already laid on the spotted plastic tablecloth.

The man is not nasty or rude, but just surprised….. He himself is a divorcé, has a successful racing-driver son, gave his furniture business to his ex-wife, and now runs this 8-unit b&b in a sort of time-bubble of service and cleanliness and routine and disconnectedness.

Green mud

For supper we left the be-cabined b&b and headed a couple of miles south to Emsworth to find supper. There the wide expanse of green-clad mud stretches out and away towards the distant sea, and dozens of smallish boats lie chained up in a random scatter across the brilliant weed. A great long pond filled with murky water sits as a reservoir along one side of the bay, a remnant of the oyster-processing industry which once sustained this charming little town, and there is a sturdy walkway along its dam-walls, where you can progress in quiet conversation, with the tidal mud to your left and distant low hills beyond, and the lapping water of the basin to your right.  

We strolled along, reading about the the famous oyster-boat the Terror which has been restored as a heritage boat, and the floating fishtank installed by a local fish-merchant grandee who seems to have come a cropper in 1902 after a notorious food-poisoning incident.

Behind us somewhere inland, a series of hot-air balloons drifted up into the sky, five of them. Montgolfier's hobby alive and well.

The walkway curves back round to the shore, with more creeks and meanders to gaze at as you turn more to the west, and there you find some old cottages, pretty relics of that workaday age. One is for sale through a very important estate-agent. It is semi-detached, with a little garden sitting behind a low wall, and space enough for a couple of cars and a boat or two. The roof is slated and pleasantly higgledy-piggledy. (Later we found out this has 3 bedrooms, a downstairs bathroom, and is on the market for £620,000).

There are quite a few houses for sale in Emsworth. One is brand new, with stap-me bravado and balconies - £2,200,000. A car in its driveway had the registration CH 1LL 1N, or something like that.  One is an old schoolroom beside another branch of the great pond, one bedroom, and in need of modernisation, and that is £395,950.  It must be quite difficult to be an ordinary person trying to live there, when the millionaires have pushed all the prices up. But the beauty and charm of the whole place has made such conflicts inevitable.  We passed another very shiny car whose numberplate was FEIICES.

We decided to eat an Indian meal for supper and chose the Spice Village, installed in a classic 1930s Tudorbethan pub, with great styling inside - red cinema curtains draped in multiple shiny curves and sinuous wiggles, gleaming metal protectors on every plasterwork corner, pink and red lighting, chrome handrails guarding the unnecessary but diverting raised platform taking up part of the floor.  The guy who took our order was Indian. The guy who brought it was Romanian.  The food was very nice - absolutely identical to a meal I had last week in Faversham. I am more and more sure now that all these meals are made in some super-kitchen somewhere and just heated in the so-called kitchens of the restaurants....  There is presumably a chef there to make the rotis and chapatis, add the trim of fresh tomato slices and parsley, make sure everything meets the health and safety requirements.  But the long wait between ordering and seeing the food on the table is not occupied with frantic chopping and stirring, blending of spices.....   Anyway, it was very nice food and sharing one biriani was enough for us, and we drove away through the magic quiet lanes and fields, back to the electric gates and daddylonglegs of our bedroom in a garage.

I had a long and anxious dream as I woke up this morning - seeing someone fall from a cliff, seeing a very tall friend (Sarah? Joanna?) wearing a gorgeous evening gown demonstrate a straight fall to the ground and sustaining a horrible bruise to her shoulder.  In trying to get some arnica for her, I had to go back into a room in a seaside complex where we had previously been having a party with some grandees - royalty, even. But now they were in private session and an equerry refused me entry. Eventually when their private party was over, someone brought me some arnica - not the little tube I wanted but a display bottle from a pharmacy downstairs somewhere - flat but circular with a coloured glass panel in the middle.  I saw various friends mingling with Prince Harry, and went off to rub the oil of arnica (is there such a thing?) into my bruised friend's shoulder. Some Romanian tumblers and acrobats did impossible things flying through the air, and in the distance, finally, someone else noticed that a young woman had fallen off the distant cliff and rescue operations began.  Even though this was just 30 minutes ago, the details have already begun to shift and slide......

One of the nicest things yesterday was our drive close in along the north side of the South Downs - avoiding large roads we wound our way through quiet pastures and mown fields, with the horizon high to our left and shadows draping down the smooth green sides of the hill where each small tree or bush clung to the steep.  A glorious, precious, perhaps almost timeless sight.  As the ice retreated 10,000 years ago, and trees slowly spread north again, including (eventually) those yews, and then people came and started to let their cattle and sheep graze, long before fences and hedges and ownership... that is when the Downs took on this clothing - the smooth green grass and a few shrubs on the thin soil.  And the sun massages them every day.  It is utterly beautiful. But today we will sail away to Spain.  More when I can.

It's all about yew....

Kingley Vale just north of Chichester is an ancient woodland threading up through a chalk valley with golden fields and hawthorn hedges on either side. There's a pleasant walk from a quiet carpark, through a kissing gate, and then gently up towards the hills.

You see lovely ash trees, oak, field maple, hazel, birch, alder, all that..... and then you get to a smallish patch with the most remarkable dark and contorted yew trees, huge and ruddy red and purple, their bark almost worn away by countless hands, their black coverings overhead making silhouettes against the dappled light under their deciduous neighbours.

Somehow they survived the depredations of the medieval demand for bows and arrows... so they stand or lurch or twist or bend, and some are hollow, and some are bulbous, and they are pretty awe-inspiring.  Some of these are more than 2000 years old.

We drove across the south of England - green all the way, sunny, quiet, tiny lanes, little villages.  It's a striking contrast to the impression you'd get from 'the media' that we're overrun with immigrants.
Anyway, tomorrow we catch a ferry at Portsmouth and sail across the Bay of the Basques to Bilbao. Our daughter who is in Tarragon at the moment says it's grey and cloudy there - poor her.
We passed this morning from the heat and sun of the North Downs down into a marvellous misty pink fog over the Weald, but that burned away in due course and we've had a glorious day today all day.
I apologise for the weird layout of this post but the B&B has very intermittent wifi.   Almost as frustrating as the place we stopped for lunch today - called the Rainbow. Our modest order of sandwiches took nearly 45 minutes to arrive - but at least we did get something in the end. The people arriving after us - one car load after another - parked, arranged themselves, sauntered in, and then stumbled back out again. There was no food.  Their deliveries had not arrived following a busy Bank Holiday weekend and they had made no provision - had no provisions.
The ad for this accommodation says it has wifi but to type this I have to go into the garden, on the terrace behind the main house, and sit in the slightly chilly shade.  So they 'do' have internet, but it's really set up for garden gnomes, not guests.  And being in a valley, there's no ordinary signal.  Such a first-world problem.  Sigh.