Observations from a Hill

  We decided to drive over to see a site we've visited before, as we we're staying only a few miles distant, and Carol & Kev hadn't heard of or seen the place before. I discovered it back when I was working in the area eight years ago, and Jane, James & I revisited it that year together. This rather striking ruin is the Ynys-Y-Pandy slate-slab mill in the hills above Garndolbenmaen, Pen Lleyn. Built between 1856 and 1857, it was producing over 2,000 tons of slate per year by 1860, but within seven years, the output of decent quality material was down to a mere 25 tons, with the company going into liquidation in 1871. Pictured to the right is the retaining wall for the one of the tramways which brought the slate down from the Gorseddau quarry beyond for processing. I'll try and post in a bit more detail about the place at some point, but we're off down the pub shortly for a bite to eat and a pint. Talk later. Hwyl!

We revisited the tiny church of St. Maelrhys, near Porth Ysgo; the interior of which is pictured. The pews featured are Georgian in date, but the nave in which they sit dates to the 13th. Century, the oldest part of the church. The chancel was added some centuries later and the west end of the church with the now sole entrance, is Victorian. The original medieval doors to the north and south are long filled in. The pews in the picture illustrate the demarcation lines of the class structure of the time: land-owning family box pews with benches for estate workers: servants and labourers alike. All men equal before God, eh? Still, the place is a lovely building in its simplicity and in its setting. I wrote briefly about my first visit there a couple of years ago. Hwyl!  

Looking towards Ynys Enlli [on the left of the picture] when we got back from a Fathers' Day lunch [we didn't really need the excuse as the boys would have visited for the day and a meal out anyway], and a short walk with the dog over at Mynydd Rhiw. The gloom has cleared back from the sea and the sky is showing hints of the sunny days ahead that the weather forecast promises. We'll see as the week ahead progresses, eh? Ever the optimist, I contend it will be a corker, so there! Not sure whether we've any particular plans for tomorrow, but as usual I'll go with the flow anyway. Keep you posted... Hwyl!

  Down at Porth Neigwl, Pen Lleyn for a few days on one of our regular annual visits here [blog posts passim]. Pictured, the view towards Llanengan from the cottage, with the old lead mine chimney on the hill above the village, built circa 1878. Tomorrow the boys are coming down from Ynys Môn to meet us for lunch at The Sun Inn there. Posts this week will focus on the visit, as usual. Hwyl!

OK - two things, both flagged in The New Scientist this week: I'll take the second piece first. Apparently, the Moon is stocked with platinum and other precious metals to the approximate value of $1trn, and that it is therefore ripe for for exploitation from a commercial point of view. The second piece relates to the emission of ancient sequestered carbon from rivers. Apparently a gigatonne of carbon is being released annually from peat bogs and wetlands by the rivers they ultimately feed. This could, and probably is being accelerated by climate change and the actions of mankind [surprise?], alluding to our having disturbed these millennia-long carbon stores directly or indirectly, but definitely by our own hand. There are two thoughts on these reports going through my mind: one is that we have successfully demonstrated that we are incapable as species of respecting and working with our environment to its and our own long term benefit; choosing instead to value short term economic ...

Nineteen-ninety-five. Thirty years have since passed, and the technological seeds of the world in which we currently live were but nascent potential then, awaiting release into the wild. Five years previously, the Internet [it was capitalised in those days] was mostly just a military/academic/geek network with much connectivity but little structure. But one year into the Nineties, Tim Berners-Lee changed the whole ballgame by inventing the World Wide Web, whose nomenclature survives in vestigial form in the still-used 'web-page', although few younger than my now advanced age would ever refer to  even 'the Web' these days, so commoditised has the Gargantua that most now characterise as simply 'my internet', become. Similarly, our attitudes to, and usage of, digital photography have mutated from niche activity to quotidian normalcy over the period; to a point where now, there are no boundaries between human activity itself and the recording of it as merely normal;...