Back from Little Langdale

Slaters Bridge (4B pencil, sketchbook)

This is the first drawing I made, in the first flush of enthusiasm for Little Langdale. My enthusiasm for the place never waned (indeed we've already made a provisional booking for next year), but as is often the case, I found it increasingly difficult to find things in the countryside I wanted to deal with.

Nevertheless, Slaters Bridge did get me back to draw one end of it.

Slaters Bridge (end) (Pentel Brushpen & watercolour, sketchbook)

And as always, there were collapsed and rotting trees everywhere.

Tree Form (Pilot disposable fountain pen, sketchbook)

Given that the weather was outstandingly good, with temperatures up to 21C each day and clear blue skies, I found myself wanting to walk more than in previous years. My planta fasciitis seems to have improved, leaving only a little numbness in my big toes, and it was a joy to get out on the fells; unencumbered by heavy weather-proof clothing, the walks reminded me of past holidays walking in Crete and France.

The food was especially good this year. The Three Shires Inn was only 100 yards away and served us well with steak & ale pie, game pie, Cumberland sausage studded with black pudding, and pints of Hawkshead Red and Coniston Old Man. In between, the Mad Doctor made his chilli and his flapjacks, Tall Tony his five spice chicken and I my chicken curry. Plastic Man just ate it all and entertained us with his illiberal remarks. And Raymondo? Well, he's from Sunderland.

Every year these trips seem to involve one or more detours to art suppliers to see what might tempt us to part with money. This year I bought a bottle of Indian ink, because I remembered I had a dip pen with me, but never got round to using it. Last year, I bought a tin of Derwent Inktense Pencils and didn't use them, but as I'd brought them along this time, I thought I'd give them a go.

Finding myself on one of many wrong paths, I stopped for a while to draw these rocks and decided to add some colour with the Inktense Pencils. I think the drawing was probably better before I added the colour, but you have to make mistakes to learn.

Rocks by The Dubs (6B pencil, Inktense Pencils, sketchbook)

The pencils are interesting, despite their limited success this time, because once you've added water to them they become insoluble. You could then work over them with other media, like pastel or oil pastel, which could be worth investigating in the future.

I put this on the Things To Do mental pile.

"Last night I dreamt I went to Manderlay again..."

There's a lot of archaeology in Cornwall. In a day driving round only a small part of the peninsula, we looked at ancient standing stones, a standing stone put up around 500AD to commemorate a fallen warrior, and the ruins of the tin mining industry.

All very much to my taste.

While it might have been more comfortable to have done all of this in sunshine, much of our sightseeing was done in a gently blowing mist. But this certainly gave the distinctly Romantic remains of a tin mine, with its nearby chimney , a charming ghostly quality as it loomed over us out of the mist.

Later, parking by the road, we walked up a country track then out onto the moor to find Men-an-Tol. This is the relic which looks like 101 - three standing stones in a line, the two end ones straight upright, the middle one round, with a round hole in it.

The very worthy and interested Victorians messed around with these stones, as they did with many others, so it's unclear whether there was any astronomical alignment. It did cross my mind that it might be digital machine code, but the vision of Erich Von Daniken leered at me and I dropped the idea.

Legend has it that a sick person passed entirely through the hole will be cured. Both Buddy K and I stuck our feet through but I'm here to tell you that it didn't work. This is not a cure for planta fasciitis. But then we didn't actually pass bodily through the hole, so who knows...

Further up the track and in another field, is Men Scryfa. It's an eerie feeling standing in the middle of a field in a dense fog, with nothing but each other and a tall inscribed stone for company.

The stone is said to be the height of the fallen warrior whose death it commemorates, but considering some of it is below ground such that the inscription is partly hidden, he must have been quite a giant. Buddy K and I are about 5 ft 9 and the stone rose almost a foot above us.

Back on the road, there was another site not too far away. The probably very famous Lanyon Quoit. The Victorians stood these up too, and one was broken, so the monument is no longer as tall as it once was. But it's still a very impressive construction.