DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES.

Each day begins with a metaphorical question mark ... "What will the day bring?" In this case it was a rather apt, first photo of the day.  Overnight the wind had noisily battered the house and the trees behind it.

Now that the leaves have fallen, the jackdaws have taken roost again, but even they were surprisingly quiet last night.. Either that or they were drowned out by the noise of the winds, which had died down by the time we headed off up the mountain but even then as we parked up, the winds though less than last night, were biting and bitter. So, we headed off into the shelter of the colour changing beech trees.

This year the colours are changing rapidly and falling as fast as they have turned. Usually we have a lovely, slow, long lasting feast of autumnal hues & crispy, dry, drifts of leaves.

A surprising. almost star-bright  highlight was the tips of these Scots Pine trees.

And then to my surprise, I had the smell of smoke in my nostrils, but the source?

It turned out to be a pile of still slightly smouldering "fly tipped" tyres.

Who does this kind of thing, and in what is a fairly isolated sort of place?

We moved on  to site we last visited on the  2nd of October when Ffin lost his ball in a freely running stream flowing off the mountain into the woods below.

Today ... the then newly created waterfall was dry ...

though the dog searched high and low for his lost ball, but all to no avail. It is amazing to think that despite some ... current views that dogs have no memory, that two weeks on and the dog knew that in this area he had lost his ball. No amount of searching found it, but to give you an idea of the strength of even a comparatively  small flow of water, combined with gravity can move things ... the amount of water (fairly small) that had moved stone and other things against the boundary fence was quite incredible. It wasn't like this last time we saw it.

We finally reached the rough track of a road that led back to where the car was parked and looked back down the view across the valley of two other old pit working sites.

The Llanerch colliery  suffered a major disaster in February 189o, resulting in the loss of 176 lives, that pit closed in 1947 and Blaen Serchan Colliery closed in 1985. Both pits are now remembered by plaques dedicated to those who served to in spite of desperate conditions to bring coal to the surface. A wander around this valley today and it is still deeply scarred and ... with no "regeneration" projects it is slowly succumbing to nature to cover over the old scars accrued over almost two hundred years of mining activity.

Today there is another problem ... yes folks I'm back to a bugbear of my life ... fly tipping!
But there is something about this particular site that "slightly" amuses me. This dumping of cable was recently stripped by someone I know who took out all the steel and weighed it in at the scrappies. Let me just say simply this, they did O.K out of the deal. There's an old Yorkshire saying ... "Where there's much there's brass!" Well in this case there were modern pounds exchanged for another fly tippers dumping. Good luck to the guy that made the money! Though it still leaves the almost intestinal seeming remains of the rubber left behind. And talking of left behind ... down at the weir site there is just a few heaps of earth remaining as the last re landscaping of the area reaches a conclusion Within a few days the site will be clear of the last months of heavy plant!