A Lamb Amongst the Bluebells

I have just spent a week in County Durham with Malcolm, my Partner, visiting his father.  We had a couple of good walks before the weather turned very cold and wet.   One of our walks was at Balderhead Reservoir where there were a few swathes of Bluebells and the sheep were grazing around them. 

 

I have been going up North, County Durham with Malcolm at least twice a year to see Malcolm's father for twenty years now, usually we stay with him for a week.  But Malcolm's father, who will be ninety this year, wants to move down South, here in Dorset.  So it looks like my visits to the North of England may come to a close, depending on if Malcolm's father does sell his house and finds a place here in the South, possibly a flat.  We would like him to move to the South because he is on his own (Malcolm's mother passed away in 2001) and he can no longer drive a car due to poor eye sight.  Malcolm's father used to play golf but now that he is unable to drive, he no longer plays golf.  We hope it will be possible for him to move nearer to us.

 

 

 

 

Thrift and the Press Gang

 

 

We went to Chesil beach and Portland today.  At Chesil beach there are great swathes of Thrift, lovely pink carpets of them.   We went onto Portland, we stopped to visit the church, St George.  It has a fantastic graveyard which is being managed for wildlife.  We wandered around, I was reading some of the graves which can be interesting.  I found one grave, the grave of a twenty-one year old girl, Mary Way, who was shot by a Press gang in 1803.  Apparently the Press gang came to Portland to try and capture some men for their ship but the village (There was no road at the time between Portland and Weymouth, Portland was an isolated village) fought to stop men being taken and a gun was fired, two people were shot.  Mary Way was shot in the back and as you can see on her grave she died of her wound a few weeks later.   Very sad, I have tried to read the inscription at the bottom, quite moving.

 

Mary Way's grave.  I think the inscription reads:

Here immortality with beauty lies
Confind from Earth to kindred skys
Her life was short her Death severe
Stop Reader think and shed a tear