The Devil's Cauldron

It's impossible to capture the power, the cacophony, the all pervasive wet in one wee photo, but Lydford Gorge's Devil's Cauldron is quite something. Some gentle pasture, a mild mannered woodland, and then boom! The cracked rock is full of tumbling, roaring, endless water moving at incredible velocity, gushing into the potholes below.
The path is very much single track; no holding hands in holiday mood or chatting companionably side by side. You go down, down towards the mayhem and between the fissured stone into the depths of the gorge, secured either side by hand rails. Then a little swing gate and if you can brave the sudden lack of an outer handrail, soaked and slippy slate steps take you into the heart of the thing, where you stand on a platform right over the cauldron and imagine what it might have been like to be the first to discover this force of nature without a handhold to steady your body or spirit. I baulked and then set my jaw and completed the walk, strangely unaffected by vertigo, probably because everything is so contained and claustrophobic, quite unlike looking out from a high bridge or cliff into a world of scary nothing.
On the gentler parts of the walk, water constantly oozes and trickles, drips and splashes, spurts and springs through the ferns and mosses. Trees grow incredibly tall and straight seeking the light, and the undergrowth is an emerald and jade jungle - a cartel of chlorophyll. It's impossible to imagine going thirsty here; the antithesis of desert
The White Lady waterfall at the other end of the gorge is also beautiful if not so nervily dramatic, but the National Trust rather overdo the walker warnings calling it arduous, treacherous and goodness knows what else. You need stout shoes and a concentrating eye, and the dogs were left at home to avoid tipping anyone into the deadly depths, but although it's fairly steep, it's a short trot, and you couldn't compare it to climbing Everest.

Let there be light

Yesterday the scaffolders came and removed all the internal scaffolding in the barn which was starting to get in the way of the roof works and the patching of the walls. Wow.

Today is the first day of the rest of your life

I have never been one for calendars with daily homilies; intemperate reactions to that kind of stuff would mean expensive bills or hours of my life spent with polyfilla or linseed oil putty. I would never subscribe to services that send you a new word a day, or otherwise attempt to improve your vocabulary and by inference, your life. But there are some days that are momentous not for themselves but for what they will bring, and today is probably one of those days.
This morning there should be signatures added to much discussed contracts. I will take a good look at the derelict barns and hold my breath and try and make the major mental adjustment needed for when a troupe of people previously unfamiliar, are about to enter one's daily life for 18 months.
As excited as I am about the outcome, I cannot say I am looking forward to the constant round of noise, dirt, and sheer physicality of the whole process. I like a quiet life.
The farmyard already looks like a building site: much in-house activity has been taking place in preparation for the arrival of the pros, with electricity cabling trenched underground, a site hut area levelled, tin lean-tos demolished, elm boarding taken down and stored for re-use, self seeded ash saplings torn up to enable access to walls. The digger has come into its own. I have splinters from sifting the rubbish for fire-wood. My boots are constantly muddy as the scalpings that kept feet dry in the yard have been pressed more deeply into clay with the comings and goings of heavy machinery.
Things will look much worse before they start to look better; dodgy walls will be taken down, rotten timbers removed, last suggestions of roofs removed. But then the craftsmanship will kick in and my admiration will bloom.
Restoring cob buildings takes time - the material requires it and it is truly manual labour. I suspect much of the good works will be hidden behind scaffolding for many months, and I must be patient.

Grand designs

Once or twice I've hinted at the dereliction of the farm buildings surrounding the farmyard. That the decay is the first thing I see as I fling open the curtains. That the sound of crashing timbers and slates wakes you up on a stormy night. That the cob melts after the rain as surely as if it were gingerbread.
The process of restoration is more than slow; it creeps unwillingly in some kind of direction, often backwards. Two years on and we are still at the planning stages. Listed building permission is being sought and there are just a few days left before builders have to put in their tenders. They have swarmed over the site, detailed work specifications in hand, gingerly poking at the realities, hard hatted and serious. They all love the site - it's peaceful, it has adequate access, and there are large dogs to play with. It's a proper job too. There will have to be a site hut, a shipping container for equipment, a new electrical circuit to feed their whizzy bits and a portaloo or two. Big machinery and scaffolding en masse will sit heavily on the ground and change my morning view. There will be brickies (making cob blocks), sparks, thatchers, roofers, chippies, plumbers. There will be all kinds of folks doing all kinds of noisy things.
None of this is for B&B or holiday homes or new houses. The barns are to be restored back to agricultural use: a proper farm workshop; somewhere to keep convalescing livestock; a place to rear poultry; somewhere enclosed to keep feedstuffs and more; a stable for a big, slow horse; a cow pen for milking the dreamed of Dexters and a farrowing pen for a Berkshire sow and a litter of piglets.
When the quotes come in I will close my eyes and be as nervous as a teenager with A-level results in hand.

The photo is of the west side of the courtyard, one of the two larger barns....I truly hope this is a "before" shot that will have a future "after" shot for comparison.

Agatha Christie needs charity?

I hugely admire the National Trust. Most of the time. The audacity of taking on properties and places in perpetuity for the benefit of us all. Who else would do it? Who could even face the budgeting for supplying dusters to a stately home for ten years let alone for ministering to its every need forever? It puts the concept of long term planning into perspective. This whole 'til the end of time thing does mean you have to make your decisions on what to take on and what to put aside very carefully indeed. As an ex National Trust regional committee member (an interesting but strange experience that made me feel very odd-one-out) I have appreciated what making these decisions mean and how rigorously endowments need to be considered before taking on new holdings of land or property.
Last month I received a letter from the Trust asking for a contribution towards the major restoration of Greenway, the only surviving home of Agatha Christie. Given to the Trust by Christie's family in 2000 its gardens have been open to the public for the last 6 years and now Christie's daughter and son-in-law have died, the house also belongs to the Trust. The repairs are estimated at £3.5million, with cataloguing and conserving adding a further £600,000.
If you were to ask me for a bit of dosh to save a piece of coast, or for an ancient forest I would cough up and be glad that the Trust can be counted on to do a job that no-one else will. But Agatha Christie's house? When Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot are household icons and murder mysteries are everyone's favourite bank holiday fare? Perhaps a commercial company such as Tussauds, owners of Warwick Castle, Alton Towers and the London Eye to name a few attractions, would be better placed to take on a project like this. But as it sits with the Trust, I would suggest that the commercial exploitation potential for the property must be huge; shouldn't the Trust be generating funding for this from the private sector and creating a surplus to contribute to other less immediately attractive projects? Humphh.