To be exact, that should be one thousand, one hundred and twenty four miles, but that makes for a bit of a mouthful as a title… and that’s without the other few hundred miles Stuart had to travel between his home in the north and our starting point at mine.
Don’t let the map fool you either. The roads we took were nowhere near as straightforward as they look, but Google Maps can only handle a few places at a time. It would probably explode if I asked it to show all the detours, going-round-in-circles-looking-for-obscure-sites and strange, convoluted routes we chose.
According to my navigator, half the roads are not even marked on the proper paper map we use, and we are pretty certain that many of them exist only as sunbathing spots for the local ovine, bovine and equine population.
All of which, as you might have gathered, means we had a wonderful time, regardless of the thoroughly English weather we encountered .
We began with a couple of places we wanted to see en route to Dorchester, where we were to collect Helen from the railway station for the Silent Eye workshop. Over the course of that weekend, we visited twelve historic sites spanning several thousand years. The next day we headed west with Alethea and Larissa for moorlands, stone circles and a rather special church.
And then we headed down to Cornwall and, with sacred and ancient sites around pretty much every corner, a misty, turquoise sea beneath fabulous cliffs and wildflowers everywhere, we were in our element.
Without the record provided by the camera, I would have no chance of remembering all the places we visited in any semblance of order!
As it is, I came back with a couple of thousand photos, fair buzzing at the incredible places we had been… and even the long drive home held surprises.
It seems incredible that we could see so much, and all without rushing either. “You’ve been stretching time again,” said Helen after the workshop… and it certainly feels that way.
Perhaps it was the mists… or perhaps the green wormholes through which we walked and drove that exploited a loophole in the space-time continuum…
…but whatever the cause, I came home a very happy hobbit. And with so many places to write about…
France & Vincent 