Boat

We drove back from Exeter last evening - four and a half hours in the summer heat with a halt for dinner in "The Swan" at Whittington near Worcester. I still need to blog about my rambling on Dartmoor but this morning, having just got up,  I must get on and do things like have a shower and water the garden which is also crying out for rehydration. In the meantime, I forgot to include the following picture in my last post. It was taken close to Turf Lock where the Exeter Canal meets The River Exe. It was the best photograph I took on my hike from Starcross to Exeter. This composition would not have been half as effective if the sky had been blue and clear. I am rather proud of it:-

Please click picture to enlarge.

Exeter

Holland Hall, University of Exeter

 Now we are down in Exeter, Devon in the south west of England. Shirley is attending a conference here on student health as she deals with a lot of university students at her health centre. We are staying in The University of Exeter's Holland Hall, overlooking the valley of The River Exe. It seems that students even have double beds these days and en suite bathrooms. It was never like that in my day. We slept in cells and shared bathrooms. Why did I never have a dressing gown back then?

I have just got back to our pad from a hearty breakfast. The view from that breakfast room is fabulous. One hundred and eighty degrees of the verdant Exe Valley. Marvellous.

I had a long walk yesterday and I am planning another for today. Yesterday I caught the 10.13 train to Exmouth where I slouched around in grey drizzle before catching the 11.40 ferry to the village of Starcross on  the other side of the estuary. I was the only passenger and felt like Richard Branson or Donald Trump must feel as they board their exclusive transport. But I haven't got Trump's golden hair or Branson's inane grin.

At Starcross the weather was brightening and it got better as I plodded the twelve miles back to Exwick - mostly by The Exeter Canal which runs parallel to the tidal and temperamental Exe. It was a delightful walk and I saw many wonderful things along the way. Some photographic evidence of which follows but now I must get ready to drive up onto Dartmoor for my next long walk.

My private ferry to Starcross

Cove near The Point in Exmouth

"The Double Locks Inn" by The Exeter Canal

Swan with cygnets

On The Exe in Exeter

Exeter is nothing like Las Vegas -  apart from the bouncers outside the city's  pubs

Hirta

Some forty five miles west of The Isle of Lewis, exposed to the worst and the best  that The Atlantic Ocean can deliver. lies the rocky archipelago of St Kilda. The main island is called Hirta and once it was populated by genuine St Kildans. Nowadays, the only people who stay there are bird watchers, National Trust workers, occasional trawlermen, scientists and military personnel. I have blogged about St Kilda before. It's the kind of place that fires one's emotions and one's imaginings.

While on holiday in Crete I read an excellent book about Hirta called "The Life and Death of St Kilda" by Tom Steel. It was written with passionate interest, after painstaking research and though it was a very different and more demanding book than "The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry" I ate up every word.

Long before Christian religion appeared on Hirta, before formal education, before paternalistic lairds from the Hebridean islands, before Spanish trawlermen or the Ministry of Defence, long before that the people of St Kilda were self-sufficient and had very little contact with the outer world. The population was never large - two hundred at most but usually more like one hundred to one hundred and fifty. Even today nobody knows how people first arrived at this lonely place, where they came from and why.

They had songs, they danced and they shared stories but that was a couple of centuries before the sorrowful evacuation that happened in August 1930 - taking the remaining thirty six St Kildans to new lives in Scotland. Even by then the old songs were forgotten, hidden by the passage of time and puritan religion that interfered with their everyday quest for survival.

Stuck out in the Atlantic, the islands were so attractive to seabirds that they came in their millions - gannets, puffins, guillemots, terns and the fulmar petrel which was greatly prized by St Kildans throughout their long occupation. Though treeless Hirta and its sister islets have plentiful fish supplies, the islanders mainly survived on seabirds. They ate their eggs and plucked their feathers. Each summer they preserved thousands of them ready for the harsh winter that was bound to follow.

The oil from the fulmar petrel's belly had many uses - including lighting the islanders' humble "black houses" that had thick stone walls and turf roofs - strong enough to endure Atlantic gales that frequently blew at over 100 mph for days on end. They also had oats, seaweed and primitive Soay sheep. It must have been some time in the eighteenth century that potatoes were first introduced but they never grew well on Hirta.

This blogpost is threatening to grow as long as a length of Hirta tweed. So much of what Tom Steel wrote is still in my head and under my skin. I am reminded of other islands and fatal impacts - including Australia, Mauritius, Tristan da Cunha and of course Rapa Nui (Easter Island). So  many precious things are lost when the first contact is made and then there is no going back.

The end of the St Kildan civilisation was sadly inevitable. Those resourceful people could never have lived in a bubble, removed from the voracious modern world. Though they are gone, tantalising evidence of their long existence in the archipelago remains. New things are discovered every year and more things will  be discovered in the future but as at Easter Island, some secrets will remain hidden forever.

Is it so wrong of me to want to go there? Perhaps one day I shall, if the sea is calm enough to disembark in Village Bay where the main street of Victorian cottages has been largely restored by The National Trust. Much of the original village of black houses was bulldozed away by the army in the 1950's when they built a missile tracking station there. Imagine that - tracking missiles where once young men tied themselves to rocks and descended perpendicular cliffs to retrieve young fulmars every springtime.  The contrast is so vivid it is almost unspeakable.

Lasithi

High in the eastern mountains of Crete there is a verdant plateau. You arrive there after a winding twenty mile climb from the sleepy town of Neapoli. Up through barren hills where the precipitous road threatens to plunge your car down into dry riverbeds far below. A place where mountain goats wear bells round their necks and feed on spiky bushes.

Then there’s a honey seller at the roadside. Grey-haired and eager to trade , she beckons you to pull in but you keep on going, up into the clouds and the cobalt blue sky. You imagine you are nearly there but you are not there until finally it appears spread out before you like a huge green quilt – The Lasithi Plateau. A secret world.

Around the fertile plateau are maybe eight discrete villages. For many centuries their very existence has depended upon the fields and groves they overlook. The arable land stretches for three or four miles, watered by mountain streams and underground reserves. Here antique tractors and battered Toyota pick up trucks are de rigeur though I guess that in previous times there was only the donkey to ease the human burden

We headed for a village called Psycro and parked under an olive tree before climbing up a paved path to the Dikteon Cave where legend says that Zeus was born. We were not alone. There were plenty of Russians from tour buses. They are the new discoverers of Mediterranean lands with their pockets bulging with roubles and their manners left at home. Everywhere they go they snap pictures of themselves with different backdrops. I believe the men are all called Ivan – a terrible name. Some of the women paid ten euros to ride on donkeys to the top. One or two of these poor beasts shat themselves in protest.

It cost four euros each to descend into the cave and in spite of the Russians we were not unhappy with the experience. I would have like to stay much longer on the Lasithi Plateau, perhaps walking in the heat up to the ancient Minoan site of Karfi but you can’t do everything in seven days – unless you are God – or maybe Zeus. But I was glad to have seen this secret plateau, high in the mountains, after which Crete’s most eastern province is named.

Home tomorrow evening... We have enjoyed our little trip to Crete. Probably more will be written later on. I bet you can’t wait!

Spinalonga

Spinalonga has become one of the main magnets for tourists in eastern Crete. Some of its popularity is no doubt down to the success of Victoria Hislop’s novel “The Island” which used the rocky islet as an enchanting backdrop to fictional events. Shirley said that she very much enjoyed the book though I haven’t read it myself. No doubt the majority of its fans have been of the female persuasion -whereas I am of course a rough-tough-machoman who prefers swashbuckling tales of piracy, sporting achievement and warfare.

In our little Nissan Pixo hire car we headed up to the main highway and then twenty miles east to the outskirts of Aghios Nikolaus. The Grecian road signs were like a puzzle in The Krypton Factor but after turning round we mnaged to find the road to Elounda. Thence to the tiny port of Plaka where we parked and purchased boat tickets to the island. Eight euros each.

Aboard a converted fishing boat, accompanied by an array of other curious tourists, we headed out across the water and twenty minutes later we arrived at Spinalonga’s little wharf where there is a bronze statue to Captain Adrian the English mariner who, during a terrible storm, towed the diveboat there during the wharf’s construction in the late 1950’s. It was an act of unbridled heroism.

Spinalonga has a very long history – as an ancient fortress and as a refuge for Muslims. Then in 1903 it became a leper colony which accommodated lepers from every corner of Crete. That colony existed right up until 1957 when modern medical practice had largely eradicated the disease. The way in which Crete’s lepers were treated in the first half of the twentieth century is a testament to ignorance and irrational fear. They were plonked on Spinalonga far from their families and community support – just like prisoners – but the unfortunate lepers had done nothing wrong.

Baking in the sun, the little island is in a ruinous state. We wandered up to the crest of it and then circumnavigated it in less than fifteen minutes. If it could sing, it would sing a bitter-sweet lament – not just for the mistreated lepers but for the Muslim families who were expelled from Crete at the back end of the nineteenth century and no doubt – travelling way back in time there would be other deserving recipients of that sad song.

Pilgrims

“The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry” is a novel by Rachel Joyce. I read it in just two days – 357 pages.

The retired and ailing lower middle class hero of the novel sets off on a journey that he hadn’t intended or planned. Beginning on the south coast of Devon, he heads vaguely northwards, aiming for Berwick upon Tweed - some four hundred miles away. That is where a former work colleague is languishing in a hospice – victimised by cancer.

Harold Fry is in his yachting shoes when he sets off. He has his wallet and a letter from the hospice but little else.

Pilgrimages of the past were about plodding out the miles, meeting strangers along the way, mulling over life experiences, thoughts and feelings as much as they were about getting to the eventual destination. Not all pilgrimages were Christian. Stonehenge, for example, was certainly a place of pilgrimage many centuries before a Christian God came on the scene.

Rachel Joyce’s novel connects with those countless pilgrimages of yesteryear and as well as reaching the hospice in Berwick, Harold Fry is also unravelling and examining who he is, what is important to him and how he has been shaped by his past.

A great deal of his thinking surrounds his wife of forty six years – Maureen. When he set off, she had no idea that he was leaving but his departure causes her to scrutinise her own feelings and painful truths she buried years before.

“The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry” is quite a light read. It is easy to gobble up the pages – especially when one is on holiday. The book has its flaws but ultimately it is unashamedly humane, singing out with kind affection for those who live unremarkable lives. Like the people Harold meets along the way, everybody is different . You might say that behind our public facades, we are all like Harold Fry - trying to get by and generally failing to make much sense of our lives.

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Meanwhile, a couple of pictures taken yesterday here in Crete:-

Old friends at the Taverna To Sokakai in Epano Sissi - a small inland village

The harbour at Sissi

Postcard

Dear All,

This is the view from our hotel at Sissi on the north coast of Crete. I took the picture last evening . The island on the horizon is Dhia but we won't be going there. I am typing this near the hotel reception where the wi-fi connection is okay but now it is time to go for another swim and to see if Shirley has fried to a crisp on her sunbed. Perhaps a cold "Mythos" beer from the fridge is also in order. Life can be so hard sometimes. 

Best wishes, 

Yorkshire Pudding