Cats in the Kitchen, Flora in the Garden

The quieter you become, the more you can hear. - Baba Ram Dass


Here we are another month, another week, time really seems to be flying by this summer. The temperature has done an about turn here, and it is flying upwards, not hot by some of your standards but hot by mine. I've got a busy week as well, so household chores will be moved to the cool of the early morning and the early evening. My daughter arrives, to stay for four days, on Wednesday, and I have just found out that my son will be paying a short flying visit too. What fun!

Time to show another postcard of my windows collection, this one is 'Open Window' by Matisse. A lovely summer scene of the South of France with lovely pots of flowers on the veranda and a view of yachts bobbing in the water. Before I go any further, I must mention the 'GODDESS SWAP' that ms* robyn is organising if any of you are interested, I think there is still just time to sign up for it, check out her blog 'simply~ being in this life'.

I had my husband out yesterday taking photographs, in the garden, as there is a lot happening there and I want some photos I can upload now a lot more plants are maturing and blooming. I have the next meeting of my Local History Group, on Thursday evening, and I am busy putting an agenda together for that. The taster sessions are over and it is now on an official footing and I have signed to hire the hall once a month for it. I want to keep it pretty fluid, but after chatting with various people realise I am going to have to put some rules of the group together. That sounds draconian, it won't be, thats not my style, but having run groups for different subjects in the past, I've found its always useful having some basic ground rules.


Speaking of my Local History Group, this is an ideal opportunity to show you some photographs of my village. The photograph to the left is of the allotments in front of the old mill cottages. At the top end of my village if you go down a lonning, you come to a millstream and an old mill [now broken up into small business units]it was in the early 1800's a large cotton mill, and the family that ran it, had the calendar house built, that I showed you in a previous posting. The mill did well for the family until the American Civil War, when they could not get cotton over from America and consequently, that led to eventual bankruptcy. They did manage to acquire some Egyptian cotton at that time but unfortunately, it brought cholera with it, and the owner of the mill, who actually caught cholera himself, declared that any mill workers with cholera had to be cast out of their homes and the village, harsh times indeed for the poor workers. The owner went to the South of France to recouperate. The local bishop, apparently gave a blistering sermon against his behaviour on the lines of 'it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to get into heaven'. The owner of the mill appeased the local clergy by building them a parish church. An interesting piece of history isn't it? The photo below is also of the mill cottages.



The next set of photographs show the main road through the village, sorry that some seem a little dark. Two of them were taken quite late in the evening.



If you can see the white cottage at the left hand side of the photograph, it has black railing around it. It is a style of architecture called a Cumbrian Long House, which basically means that all the rooms run into one another. It used to have a thatched roof, which you can tell from the height of the chimnies, but now has a conventional roof. This is a very interesting house, the actual long house has been added to at the back, but there is a secret cupboard hiding place inside one room and there is a small beck that runs through the cellar. There is also a room which was used as a chapel, where in banned times catholic priests would come secretly to say a mass. It belonged to a local family that owned a castle and bears their arms on the end gable.



Another view of the main road, showing some more of the houses and cottages. The last photograph, below is of the old corn mill which is opposite my house, it is unused now but still has all its workings inside. The millstream runs along side it.



I'll leave the photographs and their stories for now, but I'll post some more another time, and tell you more about my village.