Cliff walk at Dunscombe to see the Elder

A walk along the clifftops today, seeing as it's summer and the view is good. One of the reasons for walking about in June is to see the Elders in flower, as this is the time that they make themselves visible and we can play spot the Elderflower. Elderflower makes good wine and later on there will be Elderberries too. Pick them while the sun is shining.

This walk is partly along the South West Coast Path, which you can walk along for about 630 miles if you have the time. This particular stretch is graded as severe to strenuous and the ground can be very flinty so this walk is not for the faint of heart. One of the things that I like about the path is that in these days of over enthusiastic health and safety (unless you are a large corporation in which case no law seems to apply) the path brings you within a foot or two of the edge of the cliff in some places, so you have to be pretty careful around here and watch for sudden gusts of wind or wet and slippery ground. People do fall off these cliffs on a fairly regular basis and depending on where you fall you either end up very quickly down on the beach about 500 feet below, or you get stuck in a tree or bush and you might get rescued. These parts of the walk always give me the heebie-jeebies anyway.

The days are long here now, with it starting to get light after 3:30 and getting properly dark at around 10. In the winter it gets light after 8 in the morning and will be dark again just after 5, so lots of daylight to enjoy at the moment. In the next part of this walk we will get to Salcombe church, which is very nice indeed if you enjoy that sort of thing. It's certainly peaceful there, as there is hardly any traffic on any of the lanes. There is a bench in the first photo where we can take a rest and enjoy the view for now.

timelapse

The time is out of joint; a bone slipped from its socket. The radioactive decay of some elements sitting quietly in laboratories on Earth seemed to be influenced by activities inside the sun, 93 million miles away. Constants are found inconstant and the scientist arrives at the top of the mountain to find the philosopher, again. The temper, like the time, is fugitive, as bright colours flee from the sun. Serius est quam cogitas


Could this alter our perception of time? Other timeless states seem to exist.
The effect is of a vaporous, time-forgetting absorption in the appearance of things - as if, in gazing at leaves rustling in a tree, Drake might have seen them in slow-motion, a shade uncanny and perhaps preternaturally beautiful. Such sensitive "slow vision" would account for much in the mood and substance of his work.


May turns into June.


Something slightly different and some good news for you today in that the pictures can now move to become movies, or films as we know them here, unless you go to the cinema in which case you go to the pictures. To my mind films can be good when they are short. One of the many reasons I don't go to the cinema is because many films are too long, or epic, as they are possibly known. I used to like a nice tightly edited 90 minutes and then off to the pub. There are exceptions of course, Tarkovsky being one of them, even though his name does roughly translate as bumflattener in most languages.

In other late medieval news we have decided that the descriptions of the old giant worms, not The Lambton Worm but other smaller forest dwelling types could well have been a large form of slug. Not that it matters much anymore.

If the above films don't work for some reason I can save you time and tell you that it's a lot of whizzy clouds. More static pictures coming soon. And more timelapses coming as and when they occur. Hope you enjoy, good friends!