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While the sun shines
Aug. 30th, 2008 10:42 pmWe persuaded the sun to shine a little yesterday by making homemade lemonade and sitting out on the steps, sipping it from tall glasses while Pico basked alongside.
We all went out to the New Forest, and visited the strange place that is the Submarine Pen. In the Second World War, the Germans kept their submarines in concrete pens, and so a replica was built in the middle of the New Forest for testing purposes, a huge slab of reinforced concrete. They dropped many bombs to try to destroy it, including the huge Grand Slam bomb, but evidently failed, and then after the war, when it still proved indestructible, they buried it. It is now marked as a tumulus on the OS maps, but if you climb the little hill through the gorse and brambles, you can find bits of reinforced concrete sticking out. Some of the surrounding bomb craters are mostly filled in, but one is a perfectly round pond.
We did three geocaches while in the New Forest: from the first we took a small tin model of a VW camper van; we left the van in the second cache and took a book called "Tigger comes to breakfast" (I think my favourite A. A. Milne story); the book was deposited in the third cache, and we took a vegetable peeler which we took back to the first cache on the way home. We ate sour apples from a tree in the forest, and came across some tame archeologists, who showed us wheel ruts they had just excavated from a Roman road.
Today we made more lemonade to ensure some more sunshine, and headed out to Stonehenge in the afternoon. We visited Woodhenge first, which was an odd place, though not in a way that is easy to in down. We went on to Stonehenge, walked right out along the cursus, then back again, along the ridge where the King's Barrows are, and back down the avenue. It was very windy, as it always is on Salisbury Plain.
Seeing unharvested wheat fields rippling in the sunshine today makes me feel it is still summer.
We all went out to the New Forest, and visited the strange place that is the Submarine Pen. In the Second World War, the Germans kept their submarines in concrete pens, and so a replica was built in the middle of the New Forest for testing purposes, a huge slab of reinforced concrete. They dropped many bombs to try to destroy it, including the huge Grand Slam bomb, but evidently failed, and then after the war, when it still proved indestructible, they buried it. It is now marked as a tumulus on the OS maps, but if you climb the little hill through the gorse and brambles, you can find bits of reinforced concrete sticking out. Some of the surrounding bomb craters are mostly filled in, but one is a perfectly round pond.
We did three geocaches while in the New Forest: from the first we took a small tin model of a VW camper van; we left the van in the second cache and took a book called "Tigger comes to breakfast" (I think my favourite A. A. Milne story); the book was deposited in the third cache, and we took a vegetable peeler which we took back to the first cache on the way home. We ate sour apples from a tree in the forest, and came across some tame archeologists, who showed us wheel ruts they had just excavated from a Roman road.
Today we made more lemonade to ensure some more sunshine, and headed out to Stonehenge in the afternoon. We visited Woodhenge first, which was an odd place, though not in a way that is easy to in down. We went on to Stonehenge, walked right out along the cursus, then back again, along the ridge where the King's Barrows are, and back down the avenue. It was very windy, as it always is on Salisbury Plain.
Seeing unharvested wheat fields rippling in the sunshine today makes me feel it is still summer.
