HOME AGAIN, HOME AGAIN...

Been away for a week exploring the highways and byways of north Devon.   It`s an area we haven`t visited for a long time, so it was good to re-visit some places and find some new ones.   Probably the most `enjoyable` was the discovery of Selworthy which is just over the border into the part of Exmoor which lies in Somerset.   I had read about Selworthy over the years and seen pictures of what seemed to be an idyllic village, so I was keen to go there and see if it lived up to its billing as `one of the loveliest villages in England.`

I was not disappointed.   As my photo above shows, it sits on its hillside overlooking a patchwork valley with the great looming presence of Dunkery Beacon beyond.   The village itself, clustered around a verdant village green, consists of just seven old cottages with thatched roofs, latticed windows and gabled porches and was built in 1828 by Sir Thomas Acland as something of a model village to provide housing for the elderly and infirm of his Holnicote Estate.   We were fortunate to be there on a late summer evening with very few people around - a situation that might be quite unusual.

We struggled up through the nearby woods and out onto the open moor to reach Selworthy Beacon and enjoy spectacular views across to the Welsh coast.   If there was a downside to our week, it might have been the stress caused to this hapless driver in negotiating the perilous coastal single track lanes around Woody Bay with a 400 foot drop on one side guarded only by a flimsy fence; and also chancing my arm driving across a very narrow packhorse bridge at Brendon, which I thought halfway across I shouldn`t be attempting, but rather I should be using the adjoining ford.  You live and learn.

Anyway, it`s good to be home again and I suspect that my re-entry from the kind of escapism that last week brought will make it difficult to get back to my `usual` hard edged blogging.   Just give me a day or two to get back in to the `real world.`  It is real, isn`t it?