Dafad's-Days: TAKING A BREAK

Today was a mixed day in many ways. It started off slowly after a very noisy night with the wind and rain battering the house again. The body was reluctant to get into gear this morning and it was nearly midday before the patient pooch got to prounce around out on the mountain whilst I mainly stayed still and let him run free. Today, I heard my first cuckoo, late for this area, I normally hear them in April. We did stop by to watch a local farmer sorting out his new lambs, gathering them in for sorting out, with the males getting castrating rings and all getting ear marked with that farmers unique signature. It makes each sheep easy to identify from just yards away, even if one cannot get close enough to read the ear tags. When he'd done, we got talking about how changed the landscape has become since his youth on this mountain. Coal mining of course altered the face of the land dramatically and although now nature has healed over a lot of those deep dark scars, there are still signs, such as the slim, blackness of the bare areas that is not just peat.

Also there are other indications, take the above. This line that you can see is the edge of the extreme of the coal seam and forms what is locally called " a break". In just the last five years that I've had the dog, this break has grown bigger with subsidence and is a danger to those who do not intimately know the landscape. Luckily, some innate sense that Ffin has, he avoids this line, but I worry about others walking their dogs in this area.

Just a few years ago a walker lost his terrier down just such a break. Mining rescue were called out and worked all night but sadly the little dog had fallen so deeply into a cavernous void that all the rescue efforts were hopeless. A sad day for the owner.

But ... on a lighter note ... this afternoon having been to the bank, we stopped off for a short walk in another old mining area and one that is much safer for us to explore.