More guests’ photos, and one from John

Leanne and Patrick, who stayed in Tom’s Barn earlier this month  with their beautiful dog, Bailey,  have just sent us a batch of five photos which can now be seen in the ‘Your Photos’ gallery. (I couldn’t resist sneaking in this beautiful water lily that John took this morning- it is the most lovely pink!)

Patrick and Leanne really made the very best use of their time here – including a 12 1/2 mile  hike round Carsington which is steeper and more tiring and indeed feels longer than many people realise before they set out…

They loved Dovedale and she writes: “We all had a wonderful time and can’t wait to come back next May!”

Meanwhile, in their photo you can spot the newly ‘repaired’  stepping stones.  The rumpus about this still rages on. Whatever the rights and wrongs the repair work has certainly been shoddily done and the poor National Trust, which does so much good work quietly and unseen  to help keep the banks of the Dove safe and pleasantly walkable for us all finds itself under sustained attack.

Mary’s Meals

Many of you will know that John and I support, in a very little way  – including donating the tiny commission we receive at the end of the year from those of you who have taken out holiday cancellation insurance with Pavey’s – a charity called Mary’s Meals.

We think it  is an inspired idea. It is a charity which  sets  up school feeding projects in third world communities where poverty and hunger would otherwise prevent children from gaining an education…

We have just received this email with a video link which we thought might interest others (turn off after the short video is over when something else starts!

Dear Mary’s Meals Supporter

I wanted to let you know about some very good news!

Last week I returned from America after a whirlwind visit, looking forward to a quiet spell at home, to find a film crew from CNN wanting to interview me. It turned out that a volunteer had nominated me for the CNN Heroes Show. We have just heard that the 3 minute film they made is going to be broadcast regularly on CNN today and over the weekend. You will also be able to see it online at http://bit.ly/atsjQb

I never cease to marvel at the ways doors seem to open for Mary’s Meals. I also never cease to cringe at having to do things like appear as a ‘hero’ on TV. I know lots of heroes and I am not one of them. However I realise this is the most amazing chance to tell more people than ever about Mary’s Meals.

While I was in America I was able to visit our projects in Haiti and see the wonderful progress that has been made there since my last visit just after the earthquake. It was great to see kids in temporary classrooms, tucking happily in to their plates of beans and rice while their old schools are being rebuilt and repaired. Fr Tom Hagan and Doug Campbell who lead our projects in Haiti are doing an unbelievable job there. Because most people are still sleeping under canvas, Fr Tom chooses to do the same and still sleeps on pallets (to keep him above the rain water) in a little one man tent. He is certainly a hero as are all those Haitian people who are working to rebuild their communities in Cite Soleil.

Thank you again for your generous support that enables us to do this work.

Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow

Mary’s Meals

The Dovedale Stepping Stones Saga…

The ‘issue’ is showing little sign of slowing down yet,  a week since the Stunner broke the news (so our blog readers were among the first to know – I hadn’t appreciated how up to the minute with the news we were!).

It has since apparently been in most of the national papers and Simon Hoggart of the Guardian is quoted as saying “The slabs and the cement that hold them in place now make the glorious setting look like a botched DIY job”. Too true, as the rather hazy photo in the previous post shows.

Now apparently there has been a Facebook campaign launched to restore the stones to their original state! I don’t suppose that will happen, it is only a pity that if the work had to be done it wasn’t better dealt with although a Derbyshire County Council spokesman claims to have had many positive comments about the council’s  repair work, which he must be glad about.

On a lighter note, we were amused to see the local paper’s headline today claiming “Ancestor of former stepping stones owner speaks out over remedial work.” It is with relief that we can assure you with confidence that Sir Richard FitzHerbert is alive and well, and not speaking from beyond the grave.

He was referring to his uncle, Sir John FitzHerbert, from whom he inherited the Tissington Estate and who in 1973 had sold the stepping stones and the fields that surround the Dove at that point to the National Trust. He said he felt his uncle would have been very disappointed to see the stones replaced with what look like Jammie Dodgers’.

It’s not a health and safety ‘ishoo’

We wouldn’t normal accept an email from an ‘anonymous’ Hotmail type address from a member of the public without the author having the courage or confidence to supply their name (which of course we would never publish). You know who we are so it would seem to us  a common courtesy to say who you are.

However, Nathan P who commented on the previous post about the Stepping Stones obviously feels very strongly that I (and the Times and various national dailies, not to forget the Stunner from where we first heard the news) have entirely missed the point.

And maybe we have. But what a luxury it is to live in a country where we can all get heated about by what has happened to some some stepping stones… In some parts of the world we’d have  massacres and destruction on our minds.

Anyway, we did go to Dovedale with our friends  Sheila and Mark on Saturday as promised and I took a snap with my Blackberry so you can perhaps see for yourselves what the stones look like. No doubt they will soon become nicely weathered and we will all have forgotten about the old stones  under the smoothly cemented brand new slabs.

And no doubt by then we’ll have something else to get happily worked up about.

Dovedale Stepping Stones – there’ll be a handrail next

…or perhaps a conveyor belt?

We haven’t seen yet with our own eyes, but are taking some friends to walk up from Dovedale at the weekend so will be able to report back.

According to the latest Ashbourne News Telegraph, the ‘Stunner’ as it is known locally, once again Health and Safety has gone mad. The much-loved, uneven, slippery Stepping Stones over the Dove have been ‘levelled and brought up to a consistent height’ by bonding new stone on the top. It is Derbyshire limestone, which appears to make it all right…

It does seem a shame but we’ll refrain from being too quick to judge  until we’ve seen for ourselves. It’s not as if the Stepping Stones are the only way to cross the river:  there is a footbridge across the river earlier on, that cautious souls always use and which everyone has to when the level of water is too high or  too cold to risk a soaking.

Meanwhile, the challenge of crossing the stones has been a source of constant fun and entertainment to all. It may lose some of the drama when we all have to don hard hats and safety harnesses and sign disclaimers before stepping off.

A rare opportunity to see J & MF-S on stage

The two big DRCS fundraising events I mentioned in the previous post are planned for later in the year. You can find out a bit more about them  if your click the link to DRCS above; both events will really be very well worth attending if you are anywhere in the area. (For those many of you that aren’t I am sorry to tantalize you – maybe better luck next year.)

Firstly there is our annual DRCS Shopping Fair on Wed 6th and Thursday 7th October at the Maynard Hotel, Grindleford. Last year I did my entire Christmas shopping in October, in very congenial surroundings, buying most unusual and very attractive presents that one wouldn’t normally be able to find at all. Even more to the point,  I spent rather less money than I usually end up doing when panicking into buying unsuitable gifts at the last moment (although of course as a member of the fundraising committee I should be encouraging not economy but massive overspending!).

The second event is the DRCS Comic Revue.  There will be two showings: the first on Saturday 13th November, at the Medway in Bakewell and the second on Friday 26th November at Ashover Village Hall. This no doubt will be another sell-out. When we did the last one several years ago tickets were like gold dust, and we ended up having to put on another evening as so many people were disappointed. The revue is a very jolly evening with a large cast singing, ‘dancing’ and doing skits; it is very skilfully produced by Val Kenning, a member of the DRCS Fundraising team, who runs her own drama school and is a genius at extracting previously unsuspected and untapped acting ‘ability’  from all sorts of unlikely characters including John and me…

John has established he cannot learn lines, so has to have a part which involves speaking entirely from behind a newspaper. He also is lined up for one other major non-speaking role, more to be divulged later. My role is very much the side-kick, the foil who – when there are only two people on the stage at the time – is not granted the luxury of hiding behind a newspaper, but in fact has just as much difficulty as John with memorising words.

Catching up

Another busy week in the Orchard Farm household, but the business mainly very pleasurable.

Friday is usually a very full day here, with the changeovers, and getting anything else done that needs to be done in the way of repairs and maintenance in the five hours that we have. It was as full as any yesterday but John held the fort with Janet and Carol  and everything went so smoothly I begin to wonder whether perhaps I should plan more Fridays away.

Anyway, I hardly spent the day relaxing but was equally  busy but in a very different way and not returning home until quarter to 8 in the evening. I was interviewing (with four others) four of the five short-listed candidates for the new manager for DRCS, the Derwent Rural Counselling Service, the Bakewell-based charity that I was manager of for ten years and am still heavily committed to as a trustee and as a member of the Friends Fundraising Committee.

Advance warning about two great DRCS fundraising events John and I are involved in.

More about the latter later – I suddenly realised I should make public for local readers and our guests who may be staying here then the two big events we are planning for later in the year and which are taking up some time at the moment, and which I can unashamedly say should be well worth coming to. You’ll have to read the next blog entry for that but the basic facts and details can be found on the DRCS website link above.

The Dowager Duchess and the last day of the 2010 Buxton Festival

Another Buxton Festival has come to an end. It was unfortunate for us that our Cornish/Devon trip took a whole week out of the programme but we ended well.

Yesterday, Roy Hattersley, who had done so much as chairman earlier on to develop the festival by attracting excellent speakers and events spoke movingly and very entertainingly  about his view of England (as against Britain), and being English. He is not blindly patriotic or claiming being English confers any sense of superiority; rather he is  just quietly proud to be English, admiring Shakespeare’s  ‘modest stillness’, the emotional reticence which he feels is the defining English characteristic.

The fitting grande finale of the festival for many was the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire in conversation with David Blunkett this morning. A possibly unlikely duo but they are actually good friends with amongst other shared experiences so we were told,  that of both having been brought up in estates – he in a council estate in Sheffield and ‘Debo’  – the last of the Mitford sisters – in an estate even if a rather different one – in Oxfordshire!

At 90 the Dowager Duchess is still full of life, quick-witted, warm and amusing but always self-deprecating, never flamboyant or boastful – perhaps a perfect example of  the natural reserve that Roy Hattersley had described yesterday.

Your Roving Reporters in the West Country

Holiday cottages in Cornwall – there’s hardly any limit to the lengths one will go to undertake market research. We were enticed by a delightful invitation from Ruthie and Nick, our English young – which  sadly because of the distance could not include the Autralian contingent-  to celebrate our recent significant but unmentionable  birthdays in a holiday cottage they had selected for the purpose, in Cornwall.

Well, we did enjoy being guests, both of our offspring and of the holiday cottage. The Cornish property sleeps six, and is in Polperro, an old-fashioned,  quite charming little harbour town on the south coast, which in the past was an important smugglers’ headquarters.

The differences between this cottage and our two barns could hardly be more marked – our Cornish retreat is all white painted wood and seaside-y, with a little courtyard terrace behind and the sound of the River Pol and the sea in front; seagulls cry mournfully overhead (when they are  not snatching ice cream cones or chips out of poor unsuspecting holiday makers’ hand). ..

We were promised parking for one, which we naively assumed beforehand would be beside the cottage. No such luck! The parking spot was in the town car park, a brisk ten minutes walk away, and our luggage had to be transported by a buggy and trailer down the narrow and twisting alleyways. Actually, it was rather delightful after we had got over the shock.

In terms of market research it would not be fair to compare our cottage with Tom’s and Douglas’s Barns. Our Cornish one was was for six on a seaside holiday;  it was run by an agent, so “little extras” there were none, not even a teabag; fortunately, we had prepared ourselves for such an eventuality.

There is Sky TV (but only three logs for our use on the logburner – and no suggestions where on earth one might buy more – but fortunately the weather was so warm we didn’t even need one log…!). The kitchen however was  extremely well equipped and in every other way everything was perfect for our needs.

Also,  a few yards from the door are innumerable little eating places, so we even had a bacon buttie for breakfast one morning, and of course an obligatory Cornish pasty – and a cream tea.

After all this indlugence I must add we did a 6 and 3/4 mile stint of the the South West Coastal Path, from Polperro to Polruan. The entire  ‘walk’ was toiling up rough, at times quite slithery, vertical slopes, and then plunging all the way down again only to have immediately to start once more on the uward trail.

We felt exhausted but tremendous when we finally reached Polruan – even the superfit young reckoned it to be quite a triumph generally  but I couldn’t resist marvelling that six months go I was hobbling along on crutches with a broken fibula so I gave a quiet thanks to the French doctor in the Alps and the NHS who obviously did all the right things.

Bald as a Coot

We were strolling round Tissington the other day, daughter Ruthie  having bought us some wedding anniversary plants from the nursery there, when we were charmed to see this mummy coot,  nesting on a very precarious looking bunch of weeds in the big pond. (We also felt rather proud that we had spotted the scene, before John – he has such sharp eyes and is normally so quick to spot anything  interesting, amusing or  unusual in the bird world.)

At fairly frequent intervals, the father coot swam up with some delicious morsel in  his mouth which he transferred to the mother’s beak;  she promptly fed the two babies while he paddled off again to find some more for them.