The Glorious Twelfth

[shewhomust]

• Today would have been the seventieth birthday of David Munrow. Looking at him now on YouTube, I'm shocked how young he was. There are plenty of clips, though no trace of the Lyke Wake Dirge, which I saw the Early Music Consort perform, with the explanation that they'd learnt it from Pentangle.



• If I kept more up to date with the baking blog, I might know why there was so much rye flour in the first of the walnut loaves; I suspect it was an accident, but I don't now remember. I loved the sour chewiness, but the chestnut flour was undetectable behind it.
  
  Next came a baba au rhum: like so much of my baking, good flavour but too dense. People were polite - no, more than polite, they ate it - but it wasn't right. If I hadn't wimped out of adding all six of the eggs specified by Elizabeth DAvid, would it have been lighter, or would all that egginess have been even more solid? Perhaps I should have let it rise for longer...
  
  All the remaining chestnut flour went - with a handful of sultanas, which was a good idea - into the second walnut loaf, which gave it a distinct flavour, but too little cohesion. I made some rolls, which we ate very fresh, as cheese sandwiches, and that worked; for the first couple of days the loaf sliced, and with gentle handling made excellent toast, but this morning it was disintegrating. There may be bread puddig in the near future.



• We walked today on the moors above Blanchland, a variation on this route: up from Baybridge, and further up, a long climb through the settlement at Newbiggin and up again, with a view back across the Derwent to the village of Hunstanworth in County Durham:
  
  
  
  
  
  We left the track to climb up again through the field, through another patch of woodland and out at the top near the shooting hut, where we ate our sandwiches. From here our route followed the carriers' way to Slaley forest, and back out onto open moorland on landrover tracks, easy to follow but hard on the feet, and down to Pennypie House. At this point we could have looped on to Blanchland and followed the river back to Baybridge, but we were weary and the sky was threatening, so we took the more direct route down. In fact it was so steeply down, and hammered my knees so, it might have been easier to take the longer route.



• Not so glorious: although the shooting season starts on August 12th, it falls this year on a Sunday, so there's no shooting until tomorrow. The grouse seemed to be partying. The heather is just beginning to come into bloom, but it's not there yet.
  
  Also, the weather forecast was for glorious weather, but the cloudy skies did not, as promised, clear. It was blowy enough that the sun did emerge occasionally, though, and it never quite rained on us.
  
  The car made unhappy noises all the way home.



• New species discovered on Flickr.

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

What a gorgeous photo!

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Thank you.

[gillpolack.livejournal.com]

I had a big crush on Munrow as a teen. He's one of the reasons I eventually plumped for the Middle Ages. My sister couldn't understand me. "Why not Bay City Rollers?" she asked, often and plaintively.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Whereas I had a crush on the middle ages first, and the music followed.

[weegoddess.livejournal.com]

::sighs for the wonderful photo:: It's just so much of the Beauty of the English vista. I miss it so much sometimes.

By the way, I had an interesting dream last night. Somehow, there was a place distortion in that from standing at my open front window, I could hear you and R chatting and going about housely business. As if you guys lived on the floor directly above us. And you could hear us too. We could converse with each other from our front windows.

In the dream, we all knew that this made no sense, that you were over there and we were over here, but being a dream, we all accepted it. It was nice to have you as upstairs neighbours. ;-)

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

It's about time they invented the wormhole in space, isn't it?

[durham-rambler.livejournal.com]

Reading that link I discovered that Hunstanworth was a Thankful Village - it lost no men in the First World War.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

There are also clues to why the architecture is so - distinctive.