New

 You can tell by the picture that the snow has gone.
Also, this weekend was quite warm, the sun shone and the sky was blue, there is a fresh watered greenery to the grass as it shakes off the layer of snow and drinks what remains. The river seems to be carrying a snowy sparkle to it too as most of the melt water washes in and gets carried away to the sea.

Everything has a twinkle of newness today and for the first time the village had a few cars parked with people stopping to eat picnics on the village green.
Unlike the first bird of spring, the first bee, the first bud we watch out for the first bread packet. The tell tale wrapper of bread that shows that tourists have been here eating sandwiches, admiring how wonderful and clean the place is, wishing that they lived in a place as nice as this and then leaving their crap to make our village green look as welcoming as Sunderland city

centre.
 
I like people coming here, it's nice to see lots of people in the village and having them wander round and look through your living room window for a nose.
I like that people come in their cars just to sit for a few minutes and listen to the sound of nothing going on and then head back to a place of street lights and sirens with a memory of the serenity of silence in their minds.
I'm quite bad, so I also like the look of jealousy when you come out of the door and they realise that there are some people lucky enough to live in this beautiful place and I like it even more when they take their bread wrappers away with them.

As mentioned in the last blog, I have been away for a week in Milton Keynes, the NEW city of wonder designed by modern people for the modern lifestyle and providing everything anyone could need. Whatever you could want by way of food, shopping entertainment, it was all in the wonder that is Milton Keynes.

We managed to go out for valentines night

 and we had a lovely time in a place of concrete valleys, well lit streets, strange smells like there was always something too hot or melting and lots plastic blowing around our feet.
It was ok for a visit, but I can't understand why anyone would want to live there. I know that the designers of Milton Keynes have heard of tree's as there are lots of them and they are in nice straight rows down every street and at every side of every street and all the buildings look the same and it is gray and lifeless and has no soul at all.

I'm happy to be out in the Arse End of Nowhere, and I think the dogs like a place where they can jump too.

I'm not sure if the guy that made these has ever seen a cow!

In A Different Land

This week I am in a new Arse End Of Nowhere. I have to work in Milton Keynes, the new town of concrete cows and attempted greenery.

Rather than stay in the concrete I found a cottage to rent for a week that is just a few miles out of MK and actually when purchased for the week it works out cheaper than a hotel.

It's on a farm and not far from the rolling hills of somewhere not far from London and right now covered in snow.
On the whole I don't mind snow, I have lots of lovely warm snow gear thanks to the girlfriend and christmas combined so the white stuff isn't a problem....well not until I have to drive in it!

In the end it was using her Land Rover again and hope that I get there.

 The snow combined with a wind in one direction has produced some fantastic snow patterns on trees, lamp posts, even stone columns but I loved the way the snow on this tree seemed to separate the wood from the reality of the grey white background. It doesn't look as eerie in the photo as it did standing beside it. I wouldn't be surprised if this look ends up in a painting.

Clues!

There are times when something just doesn't seem right. These things play on your mind and in many cases they are the mother of invention or discovery.
I imagine that once upon a time Marie & Pierre Curie thought to themselves that there was a missing 'thing' and then after looking for a while radium appears, which just goes to show that if you look for something long enough you will find it eventually.

I have had such a thing playing on my mind for about 6 months. It hasn't led to a new element (yet) but it has at last come to a resolution that I am happy about.

In the picture to the left is the view from the road  we walk down with the dogs. The view is across the river to a gate.
If you enlarge it you can clearly see the gate, I have walked through it and onto the riverside bridleway many times over the last 6 months. To get to the gate you walk 200m further down said road, across a bridge, through another gate into a field and then through gate in above picture.
Every time I walk past and I see the gate in the picture there is a thing that niggles in the back of my mind. Then about a week ago I realised what it was that had been bothering me.

It's the river bank....do you see it....
Yes, it's man made, supported, not natural, so to me that meant that there used to be a bridge there, a bridge that led from the road across the river and through that gate. At last, all of those years watching Time Team were starting to pay off.

This morning after the dog walk I decided that if there had ever been a bridge that someone would have photographed it at some point and that if that were the case then it would be somewhere on the internet.

This led to a Google hunt that eventually led to a page on flickr that was full of pictures of old Garrigill ( www.flickr.com/photos/alstonmoor if you want to have a look) and then a further search (once we had a name) to find the image on a page where it wasn't copyrighted...oh thank you interweb...

So here it is, proof that my niggle in my head every time I walked past this gap was for real, a long lost picture of....wait for it....the original Tyne Bridge in Garrigill.

And how it looks today.