To continue with out trip to Welshpool with Chuck and Hazel. ..... We also visited Powys Castle. The view on the left is of the castle as it stands on a high south facing bank. The bank is landscaped in terraces which are loaded with wonderful flowers. On our long summer days these flowers get the full force of the sunshine from early in the morning till late in the evening and they really thrive.If you click on the photo you can see more detail and you'll be able to see the buildings set into the terraces. One of these is an orangery where citrus fruits wintered over (they would spend the summer outside in pots. Above it is a cool brick lined fernery. We revisited this castle later in the month when Ric and Jan came to stay with us. John and I snoozed and sketched amongst the ferns while Ric and Jan explored the castle.
Inside the castle was renovated in Victorian and Edwardian times. It is quite "modern" with comfortable rooms and plenty of luxurious furnishings. I particularly liked the bathroom with a lovely soaking bath - something I could use right now after a day of gardening!
Another feature of Chuck and Hazel's visit was the food fayre and ale trail in Church Stretton. These took place over a weekend and included other non-food entertainments like Morris dancing in the market square and a dog agility demo. in Russell's Meadow.In the photo to the left you can see some lady folk dancers who are being introduced by the Shrewsbury Town Crier. This man must be at least 7 feet tall and he's well built to boot! He has a voice to match, too! He came to open a market here a few months ago and I could hear him from our road almost a quarter of a mile away!
The ale trail was fun. There were 12 pubs around the Strettons and surrounding villages and you had to get your "Passport" stamped in each of them to get your certificate of participation and your specially decorated pint glass. Busses were laid on to take revellers from pub to pub so there was no danger from drunk driving. The event lasted for two days. Some chose to do it quicker, but we did 6 pubs each day and tried lots of different beers on the way round. Chuck made careful notes on all the beers he tried. We also found some we liked, but were even more interested in trying out the various pubs. We now have a few more that we can take visitors to when they come here! In fact, we did just that for Ric and Jan later in the month.
And here we are with Rick and Jan! I'm sorry that Ric's face is shaded, but it was a hot and sunny day so everyone except me was wearing a hat. I'm so glad to have hair these days that I don't usually bother, although I do wear sun-block.We're standing at Pole Bank at the highest point on the Long Mynd. From there you can see a long, long way in every direction. Mid-Wales is behind us and to the south you can see all the way to the Malverns and the Brecon Beacons. To the north and east there are good views over the Severn Valley and you can usually pick out the steam rising from the cooling towers at Buildwas power station in the IronBridge Gorge.
We went to IronBridge with both sets of visitors last month. This photo is of some wagons in the Blists Hill Victorian Village. It's good to have the village and the museums there because the gorge is now a beautiful bucolic valley, with wooded trails and the clear rushing waters of the Severn River. It's hard to imagine that 200 years ago the place was a hellish inferno of iron smelters, clay and china works, mines, etc. Boats plied the river with loads of coal, limestone, tiles, crockery, etc. and the air was full of smoke and fumes. It was here in the mid-1700s that Abraham Darby discovered how to use coke to smelt iron and the Industrial Revolution was born. The symbol of it is the Iron Bridge itself. The first one ever built and a thing of great beauty. The area is now a World Heritage Site and home to several museums and places of interest.We did quite a bit of walking with Jan and Ric. Apart from climbing to the top of the Mynd (and then returning via Sunday Lunch at the Green Dragon in Little Stretton), we also walked a small part (about 5 miles) of the Offa's Dyke path which runs along the English/Welsh border from Chepstow on the Bristol Channel to Prestatyn on the North Welsh coast, climbed Caer Caradoc on the east side of the Stretton Valley (about 5 or 6 miles) and did a walk in Snowdonia National Park.
While the Aussies were here it continued to be hot and dry. The lawns dried up and died in places, plants began to wilt and most of the flowers faded off. However the summer roses were beautiful and there look to be good crops of grain in the fields.
I guess that's all for July. I still have some early August garden pictures to show you all, so I'll continue with another posting tomorrow. Now it's time for bed so we can get an early start on Museum work tomorrow.
