Sunday PicSpam.
9 May 2010 07:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
curiouswombatFirst - Happy Mothers' Day to all those on my FList who celebrate it today. Here are some flowers for you all -
Yes - the primroses are out.
Mostly this week it seemed to be flowers in hedgerows that caught my eye - apart from a side-trip to Maughold Church to take some pictures. However, the batteries started to go on the camera, before I had taken many, apart from some of the 'Cross house'.
So there is a mixture of flowers and bits of Celtic history, oh, and a millennium cross, too
Apart from the primroses, the bluebells are now coming into bloom in the hedgerows, and violets seem to be doing well this year too.
Here are some violets -
And one with the violet and primrose together -
Our hedges are mainly sod banks, sometimes with gorse, hawthorn, or something else growing on top, sometimes just the sod bank. So a lot of our wild-flowers grow on the sides of the hedges. Here are bluebells doing exactly that -
Here is a close up of some a few feet away -
I just rather like the way they have a bit of hawthorn growing in between them so that they seem to be thorny bluebells, and the way the colour of the thorns compliments the flowers.
There are usually white bluebells around, but my particular favourites are the pale, almost pink, ones - again taken about 4 or 5 feet away from the other two bluebell pictures -
I took this by just turning around where I took the bluebells -
So you can see they are growing very close to the sea. Closer to the sea than they used to be, in reality - where you see the edge of the green bit there, the rest of the field has fallen away, onto the shore below, and so that is now the edge... about 5 yards/metres from the road.
Also - it's another of those weird gates with a large blank space beside it so that you really never need to open the gate!
......................
And now, as they say, for something completely different - Maughold church dates from the eleventh or twelfth century - although there were other tiny chapels (keeils) on the site before. The church was updated a bit in the thirteenth century, the fourteenth century, and the nineteenth, but is still, mainly, the eleventh century structure.
It's not terribly exciting though. I will go back and do some inside pictures, a few of the remains of at least one keeil, and some of the more interesting grave stones sometime when I have spare batteries with me! But the one thing Maughold has in abundance is stone cross slabs and Norse carving - so many bits of over 1,000 year old carved stone that they don't keep them in the church - there is a shelter built at the side of the church yard, known as the Cross house, for them.
This is just to give you an idea...
I'll post a couple of close-ups sometime!
For many years the fourteenth century village cross stood on a plinth in the churchyard - it made for a good focus for wedding pictures - that's a link to my sister's wedding. We have a similar one taken at our own church blessing, but that's upstairs and needs scanning in!
But they decided the cross needed a bit of protection, and rather than put it in the cross house with the older ones, they moved it into the church. Which left an empty plinth for most of the 1990s. However, every parish got a Millennium Cross in 2000 - they are dotted all over the place - and Maughold put theirs on the plinth in the church yard -
Although, personally, I preferred the older one...
Finally, I have just been watching Time Team, where they said, themselves, that they were basically excavating Meduseld, and drank a toast to Tolkien.
Then there was the weather forecast and I thought perhaps they'd accidentally shown an old one, from February or so. I mean 'Cold winds, frosts, and snow showers in Scotland really doesn't sound like the second week of May, does it? Good Grief. It's probably my fault; I reset the timing on the central heating last night so that is on for less than half the time it has been...
Yes - the primroses are out.
Mostly this week it seemed to be flowers in hedgerows that caught my eye - apart from a side-trip to Maughold Church to take some pictures. However, the batteries started to go on the camera, before I had taken many, apart from some of the 'Cross house'.
So there is a mixture of flowers and bits of Celtic history, oh, and a millennium cross, too
Apart from the primroses, the bluebells are now coming into bloom in the hedgerows, and violets seem to be doing well this year too.
Here are some violets -
And one with the violet and primrose together -
Our hedges are mainly sod banks, sometimes with gorse, hawthorn, or something else growing on top, sometimes just the sod bank. So a lot of our wild-flowers grow on the sides of the hedges. Here are bluebells doing exactly that -
Here is a close up of some a few feet away -
I just rather like the way they have a bit of hawthorn growing in between them so that they seem to be thorny bluebells, and the way the colour of the thorns compliments the flowers.
There are usually white bluebells around, but my particular favourites are the pale, almost pink, ones - again taken about 4 or 5 feet away from the other two bluebell pictures -
I took this by just turning around where I took the bluebells -
So you can see they are growing very close to the sea. Closer to the sea than they used to be, in reality - where you see the edge of the green bit there, the rest of the field has fallen away, onto the shore below, and so that is now the edge... about 5 yards/metres from the road.
Also - it's another of those weird gates with a large blank space beside it so that you really never need to open the gate!
......................
And now, as they say, for something completely different - Maughold church dates from the eleventh or twelfth century - although there were other tiny chapels (keeils) on the site before. The church was updated a bit in the thirteenth century, the fourteenth century, and the nineteenth, but is still, mainly, the eleventh century structure.
It's not terribly exciting though. I will go back and do some inside pictures, a few of the remains of at least one keeil, and some of the more interesting grave stones sometime when I have spare batteries with me! But the one thing Maughold has in abundance is stone cross slabs and Norse carving - so many bits of over 1,000 year old carved stone that they don't keep them in the church - there is a shelter built at the side of the church yard, known as the Cross house, for them.
This is just to give you an idea...
I'll post a couple of close-ups sometime!
For many years the fourteenth century village cross stood on a plinth in the churchyard - it made for a good focus for wedding pictures - that's a link to my sister's wedding. We have a similar one taken at our own church blessing, but that's upstairs and needs scanning in!
But they decided the cross needed a bit of protection, and rather than put it in the cross house with the older ones, they moved it into the church. Which left an empty plinth for most of the 1990s. However, every parish got a Millennium Cross in 2000 - they are dotted all over the place - and Maughold put theirs on the plinth in the church yard -
Although, personally, I preferred the older one...
Finally, I have just been watching Time Team, where they said, themselves, that they were basically excavating Meduseld, and drank a toast to Tolkien.
Then there was the weather forecast and I thought perhaps they'd accidentally shown an old one, from February or so. I mean 'Cold winds, frosts, and snow showers in Scotland really doesn't sound like the second week of May, does it? Good Grief. It's probably my fault; I reset the timing on the central heating last night so that is on for less than half the time it has been...
