It Is a Very Scilly Place...

[bunn]

We went on holiday! To the Scilly Isles, which technically are, yes, in the same county we live in.

Comments

[bunn]

I think they were my favorite bits too! The trove of 300 Roman brooches (mostly enamelled) were quite a thing in an area that didn't have any other high-status Roman stuff.

Although, of course, there was probably more land then, and some of the islands joined together, so it's impossible to tell what may have been washed away by the sea. I rather like the idea of a Lost Land Roman villa...

[rustica]

Wow, those are very atmospheric pictures!

Where is that "O small cold hearths, so old, so old" quote from? I've googled it, and got The Ballad of Reading Gaol, some links about George Washington and Hans Christian Anderson, various companies selling fireplaces, and a Daily Fail article about a child with a heart murmer (??). Google, you have failed me in my hour of need!

Also thank you for identifying some flowers we have in our garden.

[bunn]

It's from a very thin and obscure book of poetry by Ursula Le Guin - some extracts are here : http://bunn.livejournal.com/325451.html - and I suspect that the only places on t'Internet you would find it would be places where I put some extracts!

[wellinghall]

I know what you mean about "technically the same count(r)y" and "feels like going a long way", especially since the time we went to Shetland by train and ferry.

[bunn]

I'd kind of vaguely expected it to be like travelling to the Shetlands - but in fact, it's much harder. There is one ferry a day from the mainland, in the summer. You can fly from Lands End - if it isn't foggy, which causes the flights to be cancelled (on the ferry on the way home, we met a bloke who had planned to fly out for four days: flight cancellations meant that he arrived three days late, and had to take the ferry home.)

There's no roll-on, roll-off - cars are winched on and off the Scillonian, for those people who live there - and it costs forty quid as a foot passenger!

I'm kind of surprised that they get as many tourists as they do...

[wellinghall]

Shetland only has one ferry a day, but it is a roro, and it has flights from four airports in Scotland ( and Kirkwall, and sometimes Bergen).

We were at Kirkwall airport once when flights were being delayed by fog. Announcements for the inter-island flights were made, not by tannoy, but by an airport employee sticking his head out of the office door and talking to us. Kirkwall is my kind of airport. Unfortunately, the next two airports I use will be LHR snd LAX.

[bunn]

Urg. I really loathe flying from large airports. Bristol is about the biggest I want to cope with. I'm so unadventurous. If you can't get there by car, boat or train, then I'm not sure I really want to go!

[puddleshark]

Oh wow, that looks and sounds fabulous! Misty isles and sea shanties and Bronze Age burials...

And it looks quite dog-friendly, too.

[bunn]

Very dog-friendly - there were a couple of beaches that were no-dogs-in-summer, a couple of paths with sheep, and several eeek-put-them-on-the-lead! cliffs, but apart from that, few roads and dogs welcome most places.

I had wondered if we would need to keep Brythen on lead all week, but in fact he was mostly pretty good (we will pass over the time when we were nearer to the airport than we thought, and he wandered over in that direction and refused to come back for a hair-raising minute or so. Although I don't *think* he actually went out of the heather onto the grassy bit around the airstrip!)

[wellinghall]

The perils of relying on Apple maps ...
http://www.boston.com/business/technology/2013/09/27/faulty-app-directions-alaska-runway-disabled/WmV251ZKSlXYNc3Rwa1XoK/story.html

I am also reminded of the airport on Heimaey. The road out has a cattle grid ...

[ladyofastolat]

That looks lovely! Yet another place to put on the "Must Visit One Day" list. If only we could fly there from our own not-so-little island!

I keep reading the boat as Scillonian Ill, which seems appropriate given the seasickness.

Memorial plaques on benches are definitely Probably Ritual.

Silly misguided folksong purists. The Sloop John B was a traditional song long before the Beach Boys recorded it.

[bunn]

We did spot one bench that had no plaque, and had a definite air of menace about it - it was very obviously waiting for someone to die so that it could be plaque-d up! :-oooo