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22 July 2008

DARTMOOR JOTTINGS

Mick, Gayle & Martin on High Willhays

View west from Great Nodden

The previous posts about the Bloggers' Meet on Dartmoor were all done from my little Nokia E90-1 Communicator (that's a mobile phone) from the pub and from our wild camp on Longstone Hill, so I thought I would also add a few more pictures from the camera, so you can get a flavour of the place and the people.
You cannot get a flavour of the bogs from a mere description. I adore boggy terrain - it is fascinating - and these Dartmoor Bogs are first class indeed! Long, almost silky, lush green grasses that come up to your thighs. Wonderfully slushy oozing springs leaking in great patches on the hill sides with short bright green bracken clinging to the steep hillsides between the boulders.
Layered dark grey rocky tors on the sides of the hill-tops add to the scale of the place. Short sharp showers coming in, hanging like curtains beneath black clouds, sweeping across the moorland to speed up your hunt for your gloves and hat. It seems like an ancient place that has been abandoned to nature and, of course, the 2nd Battalion of the Irish Guards, who woke us from our peaceful slumbers on Monday morning around three o'clock with a bit of a fire-fight and a lot of shouting.
I bet they were glad they were doing it here, on friendly Dartmoor, rather than in Afghanistan or Iraq.

12 comments:

  1. I wish I had written that Alan very Hughesesq. It was nice to meet you and the rest of the folks on Saturday night... Now where were we? oh yes, and another thing!

    I at least seem to have found 1 or 2 of these blogs now.

    Shamus

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi Shamus

    Great to meet you; have you had the first blogging lecture from our Duncan yet?

    Dig out that old typewriter with the telly attached to it and start blogging, fella. You must have hundreds of tales to share, especially of Dartmoor.

    Really looking forward to reading your up-coming blog.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Good to see you again, Alan.

    I was in touch with FB on Tuesday morning.

    Keep an eye on his blog, it's been changing throughout the day.

    ReplyDelete
  4. It has already.

    Alan - I didnt realise I could change the url... So I have changed it to something more memorable like www.walk-dartmoor.blogspot.com. If you change this in your blogroll I promise I wont fiddle with it again. Is this amount of fiddling normal? Sorry. :')

    ReplyDelete
  5. No problem shamus - adjusted accordingly. You are bound to change a whole lot of stuff in the early days as you find thing and ways you like to do things better.

    Having said that, if you follow Duncan's blog you will realise he changes sttuff two or three times a day!

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  6. Oi!

    Oh, he speaks the truth ;-)

    New tech always available, and new uses for it.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Duncan you'll give us all a headache trying to keep pace with your blog - I'm getting a tech book to understand my HTML from my URL and all that....Good pic there Alan and good time all round...I'm off to the North in the morning so see you all later.

    ReplyDelete
  8. http://www.w3schools.com/ is good for HTML tutorials. Confusingly, Blogger's online editor doesn't use true HTML (for example, carriage returns are recognised without the need for 'tags').

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  9. Whooooooooosh.... That was Duncan just going right over my head.

    ;-)))

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  10. Duncan is like the modern fishing industry - constantly looking for ways to make it happen!

    Me, I am like the seagulls; picking up the scraps behind his boat!

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  11. I hate to think what that makes some of us others
    Ahem

    ReplyDelete

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