Stop, look, listen

As I was settling down to sleep last night I heard the whine of a mosquito nearby. Both Clare and I have been bitten, but neither seen or heard evidence of the offender(s). This time the insect was inside the lamp shade on the bedside, unable to find its way out, or maybe too tire or sick to fly up or down and escape. It was easy prey, retribution for all the itching misery we've both endured. I'm unrepentant of taking its life!

I woke up at seven with the sun's early light dimmed by high level cloud turning into haze again and it was humid. A morning to endure patiently, put finishing touches to my end of stay report and Sunday sermon. I go over things time and time again looking for better ways to express what I want to be heard.

At half past one, Adrian called to give me a lift to the Chinese restaurant where John and Judy took me on my first evening here. We were joined by Judith, another church council member for a meal to say thank you for my ministry to them. How kind of them! I had Tai Chicken salad for a starter - small slices of meat on a bed of lettuce made soggy by an overdose of salad dressing which was like mayonnaise thinned out with a little lemon juice. Nothing to suggest South East Asia about it. 

I followed this with something called 'Fuzhi' I think, a mixture of pork, beef, fish and chunks of king prawn with a few bean sprouts and other unrecognisable leaves on a bed of rice. This was served in a savoury brown sauce in an oven hot cast iron pot. Chinese hotpot I guess. It contained more protein than starch, went down comfortably and stayed down. Not a dish I would choose to eat again. Nevertheless, the company was enjoyable and conversation interesting. I was surprised that the house wine was labelled almost entirely in Chinese, apart from one tiny corner which read 'Rioja'. Quite a good one too,

It was four by the time we parted company. I returned to Church House on foot to be sure of getting most of my daily exercise quota, and get my digestion working. Walking alongside the N340 I noticed for the first time the avocado bushes in the orchards either side of the road starting to bear fruit, albeit numerous and still tiny. I'd love to be here long enough to learn how the bushes are managed by the fruit farmers. They had multiple headed flower stems early on when I was here. Where the fruiting is really prodigious, branches must get very heavy. I wonder if some of the fruit fail to develop if packed close together, or if some fruit are harvested early and sold. In the shops they often come in a variety of sizes. Spending time in a place where small scale commercial horticulture is part of everyday life arouses curiosity. There's so much I'd like to know.

The slopes of hills and valleys all along this coast from shore to summit are covered with dry stone wall terraces. Some of the lower ones are given over to cultivating avocado, if not aubergine, carob, citrus or almond. But there are many more higher terraces which are empty, overgrown, abandoned. I wondered if these were the relic of some sort of water catchment scheme to supply the lower levels, or stabilise the ground. 

Then I came across a simpler explanation, in an article about coast path walking trails in this area. Vineyards. Large scale vine cultivation from the 18th century onwards. But no longer it seems, although the terrain is harsh enough to suit many varieties. Was it phylloxera that killed off the industry in the l9th century? Or the economics of transporting the finished product to market? Or not profitable enough to sustain commercially in an impoverished region? I'd love to find out why.

Oh dear, here I go again. Fascination with the environment in places where I sojourn, leading me to look for the relics of past industry. In Mojacar it was minerals transported by rail from the sierras to the sea. Same in Watchet Somerset too. When first in Nerja, discovering relics of the sugar cane industry. Then in Rincon de la Victoria and in Malaga the coastal railway (now a walking path), which transported cane sugar to port. How a landscape and its ecosystems tell you a story, if you stop, look and listen.

When I was eleven years old, one of my birthday presents was an autograph book. My Dad wrote inside the front cover those three words 'Stop, look, listen' - his lifetime advice to me. It took me half a lifetime to realise these words can be found on panels alongside railway tracks, especially at junctions. His job in the coal mine was running the underground transport system, and ensuring its safety. 'Stop, look and listen' was what he made sure everyone did in order to stay alive in a dangerous environment. My life and context are utterly different from his, but his words of advice apply to me equally six decades later.

After a generous lunch I didn't feel much like an evening meal. I settled for a couple of ripe peaches and a handful of black olives with a glass of white wine. Then a walk up the hill and back, and then bed. 

Discovering Pembrey's former harbour

A return to cloudless skies and gentle warmth today, and after breakfast a walk southwards on the beach as far as Pembrey's 19th century harbour wall. A vast expanse of fine sandy beach with a tide formed fringe of multi-coloured textured pebbles below the sand dunes. I was disturbed to see how much litter had been dropped, in the dunes more than the beach. As Clare had a free degradable plastic bag from the Co-op, I was able to start collecting rubbish. Most of it came from one campfire picnic site. Altogether I collected eighteen cans, seven plastic bottles, two plastic disposable lighters and large fragments of a couple of broken bottles, in twenty minutes. I parked the bag in a place I could remember and took it to the nearest bin a quarter of a mile away, when we returned.

Just off the beach edge there's an enormous bank of sand, deposited there in recent decades due to coastal erosion. Shallow waters separate beach from sand bank. The tide comes in stealthily at speed making a return to shore difficult and dangerous. Warning signs are posted everywhere but rescue emergencies still occur. Just as well Burry Port has its of lifeboat station nearby.

Why there should be a huge flat tidal plain area about a quarter of a mile square in dimensions adjacent to the old port wall, with a tidal watercourse snaking across it, was a puzzle. We returned to the harbour in Burry Port, and had a sandwich lunch in the delightful and traditional Harbour View tea room. It was very well appointed with paintings and art photography pictures on the walls. The toilet walls with decorated with a framed compendium of photos taken by our host on her youthful travels in North America and Australia. A lovely homely touch.

After a siesta back at the house, Clare went down to Burry Port harbour, and I returned by a different route to explore the Pembrey Harbour entrance, to try and identify what purpose was served by the remains of nineteenth century maritime trade. I found a history board which stated that the quarter mile flat area next to Pembrey's port wall was a tidal pond with gates, built early in the 19th century. Its waters were fed though channels in the harbour wall to flush encroaching estuary silt from the harbour mouth to keep it free for navigation. 

The tidal gates, lighthouse and buildings on the harbour wall are long gone. The flushing pond is now a tidal water meadow. The watercourse snaking over it seems to have been created by a freshwater stream entering at the pond's inland extremity. The pond's semi saline waters help create a localised eco-system. It must be very interesting for any environmentalist to study.

On returning to the house along the edge of the dunes, a skylark rose from cover and ascended thirty anf then fifty feet, singing loudly. I got a couple of photos of the bird singing loudly. They weren't much good, as my Olympus long zoom lens was at the limit of its reach, but it's a moment I'll treasure anyway.

I cooked supper for us, then enjoyed looking at uploaded photos, confirming as far as possible without recourse to the written historical record what I'd deduced from observation. What a stimulating day!

 

Armistice Day on Parade, then underground

I drove to Aljambra again this morning earlier to preach at an Armistice Day service with the Royal British Legion Albox branch, one of several in the region, indicative of the strength of the population of expatriates, and Armed Service veterans among them. There were forty present, but I was told this was half the number attending just two years ago, and that was a disappointment to the church team that had turned out to welcome them. There are all sorts of possible reasons for the change. Sickness, infirmity, holiday absence, or return to the UK among them, the branch itself has been less active until recently. One thing is certain, military veterans wherever they are stay loyal to their annual remembrance-tide commitment, and that is most honourable.

After the service, I was invited to lunch at John and Ann's house, together with Duncan and Jean, the other side of the Almanzora Valley from Albox, in a hamlet not far from the village that gives its name to the river and valley. Their house has to be reached by driving on a rough track across the dry river bed where the Arroyo Albánchez joins the rio Almanzora. The house stands above the arroyo itself, which is covered with almond and citrous trees. It's a deeply rural area where shepherds still walk their flocks or sheep or goats out to pasture on the steep slopes above the valley floor. 

It also has history of mining, like the villages in the Sierra Bédar, though not on a huge industrial scale. The ruins of the building from which the work was managed can still be glimpsed at the base of a ravine, near the valley road, but the iron-rich hillside above present no obvious sign of industry. There are dry stone terraces, and these have supported orchards. Some may be very ancient, local hearsay reckons they go back to Roman times. Some of those terraces are where mine working entrances can be found, not they are not visible from down below. 

We had a splendid lunch, preceded by a drink on the patio in full sunshine. Too hot to eat outdoors on November 11th! This is a steep sided valley, running south to north, so the sun rises late and sets early. Temperatures change dramatically once the house goes into shade. It was a peasant farmer's house, with door arches wide enough for a pannier laden donkey to be brought indoors with produce for unloading. The outside door wasn't hung on hinges but pivoted around a pole. A narrower entrance was called for during renovation. Using the ornate wrought iron attachments from the old one, John made a substantial door to fit the new space. The quality of the ironwork which he restored has him wondering about their origin, as they seem seem rather sophisticated for such an originally humble dwelling.

After a brief post-prandial pause we drove up the mountain road to spot where it was possible to park and then scramble down the upper reaches of the ravine from where several jagged rocky apertures about a metre and a half across could be seen on the slope opposite. We reached a terrace which had an entrance tunnel to the workings, driven through the hard iron bearing rock. It was obstructed by a heap of stones a metre high, possibly from a collapsed section of terrace above. There was enough clearance for us to climb over and into the entrance tunnel without difficulty. 

After about fifteen metres, the tunnel opened out into a cavern. It wasn't dark at all, but illuminated by sunlight, pouring in from the holes in the roof above and to the side. On closer inspection these other holes glimpsed from the outside showed signs of being man made, or a widening of natural fissures. In parts of the cavern, columns of stone had been left in place as roof supports, and there were signs that other tunnels had been started, following seams of minerals wherever they went. There was a great mound of rubble below these tunnels, suggesting a work in progress had been abandoned.

We found remains of boreholes in a few rocky surfaces made by the drills of shot-firers, as the teams of explosives experts were called when I was a boy. I can remember seeing holes like this in large slabs of coal delivered to our house, and in shale rocks on the spoil heap where I used to play and hunt for carboniferous fossils. This was the only visible evidence of 19th-20th century mining as there were no remnants of equipment or fixations anchoring equipment into the rock. The cavern, like the external terrace, was so lacking in evidence of recent industry, that we could have been standing in mine workings a thousand or two thousand years ago, as basic mining technique used was the same. 

Only the ruined building at the bottom of the ravine spoke of the existence of mining in this area in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, right into the civil war era. I wondered if this was a modest kind of cottage industry, using traditional techniques in an area deemed unfit or too expensive for expansion or modernisation. There's so much to learn.

Rather than go straight back to the house, we drove on over the top of the mountain and down into the next valley and paid a brief visit to the small valley town of Cantoria. The Moors had established a fortress and a hill village on a high rocky promontory to the south west of the town, and after the Moors' sixteenth century insurrection both were demolished and the sites left bare, A new town was built on the valley floor next to the rio Almanzora. It's one of a few towns of this period laid out in a classical grid pattern, such as the Romans used, and Napoleon revived later.

We re-traced our steps from here back to the house, following the rather rough track of the railway line which ran through this region to the coast, which closed in the early sixties. Quite apart from offering an interesting perspective of the valley and a few tantalising glimpses of birds I couldn't recognise, John took us back this way, to show the approximately 10km detour which must be taken from home to Albox when there's there a mighty deluge of rainwater that fills all the dry river beds to overflowing, and makes them impassible. It only happens sporadically, and who knows what will happen in future as extreme weather events get harder to predict, and likewise their impact.

I was most annoyed with myself, to have left both cameras behind, with so many sight to photograph, but Ann came to the rescue with a Sony point 'n shoot, of the same kind that I used to document the city centre redevelopment work when I was at St John's. The card slot on neither of my computers will take a Sony Memory Stick, but the connecting cables were still available. I was able to take fifty photos, transfer them to my computer, edit and upload them to the web for sharing with great ease. I was most disconcerted when I started getting notifications that people were viewing them, but I couldn't get them to display on any device. 

After a while the penny dropped. I hunted down the array of albums stored, and found them hidden at the bottom, filed in date order. The camera's operating system was still at its default date setting, 1st Jan 2008. I sorted that out, and then went through the uploaded photos altering the metadata file for each to show the proper date and time. Picasa wouldn't let me do this on originals, but Google Photos editor makes this easy and convenient. Normally I don't have a good word to say about this Picasaweb usurper, but this is one undeniable positive. All that now needs to be done is to find a simple app which will do the same on the originals on the PC. But not tonight.