Walking the Jurassic Coast

Having a long weekend is a good excuse for a stretch of the legs.  Luck was with us- aside from a little rain in the forecast, we had brilliant early spring weather.  

We chose a section of the Jurassic Coast on the South West Coast Path.  Our walk started in Exmouth and finished at the train station almost 70 miles away in Weymouth.  Ambitious, yes, but a good distance over 4 days.  

Accommodation, as always, was scarce, so our first day would be quite a long one, as the first spot on the trail where we could lay our heads in something other than sand and mud would end up being near 20 miles along.  

Exmouth was a pretty little town- I would go back and explore anytime.  It's very sleepy Victorian seaside village surrounded by red sand beaches along the ocean and the Exe river estuary.  They have a lovely marina and a beautiful new rescue lifeboat and a boardwalk that I'm sure is just a treat in summer. 

Soon, we were on the beach and walking along the red sandstone cliffs.  These were once brutally hot and dry desert sands.

Worn smooth by time and tide, they made for an impressive sculpture park.

Three miles in and we hit our first caravan park.  These would become a feature of our walk- huge, sprawling chinzy real estate on former farmland.  This set off many a debate.  Affordable seaside getaway cottage or eyesore?  I understood their appeal- who wouldn't want to have a place near the sea?- but I couldn't get over how awful they looked.  Although, they seem to be much tidier than the trailer parks that I knew from home.

We didn't let that ruin us- it was really some gorgeous seaside walking.  The cliffs are important seabird nesting areas, and many of the beaches are completely cut off unless you are very brave or very stupid.

We did pass a woman walking her dog on the trail with the cat in tow.  I don't think I've seen someone out walking their cat before.

We hit Budleigh Salterton, our first village on the trail.  We soon realized the benefits of coastal walking in this area- no need to pack a lunch as we sat down on a seaside bench and shared a crab sandwich purchased seaside.  You couldn't walk more than a few hours without encountering an ice cream stand either.

Northern Wheatear

As we went around the river Otter, the skies opened up.  I spied a flash of blue as a kingfisher flew by, but kept trucking down the trail.

We rounded a bend and it became clear that the last 7 miles of our day were going to be tough.

One thing I love about hiking in the UK is that any place where you might want to sit and admire the view, someone has thought to put a bench there.  It's quite good.

We rolled through the town of Sidmouth, which was bustling.  Someone really likes Goldens....

The other thing that was nice about this seaside trail is that every town we came to had public toilets on the boardwalk.  This was a lovely thing for me- these vast expanses of cliffs had very little cover.  While I couldn't quite make it in between public toilets, it was nice to not have to scramble in the thistles and brambles every time I needed to wee.

From here, the trail did get steep and rough.  We had three big climbs and descents to tackle over a series of steep cliffs, and they were not easy.  

Still, this was my favorite part of the hike.  It was getting late enough in the day where everyone else had gone home, the trail was remote enough to be quiet and peaceful, the sun was out, and I was getting loopy with exhaustion.

The Coast Path is really well marked, but I had sworn we only had 2 miles to go to Branscombe many miles back.

Down the muddy downs to Branscombe, finally!  It's an adorable little village, tucked into an isolated valley near the sea, with the Nation Trust running an iron forge and maintaining a bunch of the thatched-roofed cottages there.  Cows grazed the steep hillsides.  It was so perfect.

We would our way through the narrow charming streets to our pub accommodation for the night.  The best thing about staying at pubs is you don't have to go far at all for dinner.  Although I do quite like a post-dinner walk, I was quite alright with walking from pub to bed after 20 miles.  Plus, our room was an adorable thatched-roof outbuilding.

We were the only walkers in town it seemed, and everyone else in the pub were dressed quite posh.  We arrived post-shower in our clean hiking clothes and flip-flops, famished and so tired that we turned down desert in favor of getting to bed by 9:30.

Perhaps doing a massively hilly long walk as your first day out was a bit mad.  It felt really good to be out walking again after a lazy winter.

Thank you, Hawk

Fair warning:  a bit of gore ahead.  

Last weekend was a bank holiday, meaning in the EU and UK we got a 4 day weekend to encompass Good Friday and Easter Monday.  My standard response "every Friday is a good Friday" never flies.  Just like this pigeon!  

We took the opportunity of the free days to head out for a walk along the Jurassic Coast, a stretch of dramatic red sandstone and limestone cliffs in East Devon and Dorset.  The train dropped us off in the seaside town of Exmouth and we were making our way to our lodging for the night when I noticed total pandemonium break out with the roosting gulls and pigeons.  For good reason: this handsome sparrow hawk had just made a kill right before us.

My camera had been in my pack, so it took me a few minutes to pull it out and get set up, but at this point, the hawk was plucking feathers on a still-struggling bird.

The hawk would pause and look around from time to time, the pigeon would take the opportunity and hop about a bit and the hawk would act like it's no big deal to be surfing a pigeon.

I don't think the sparrowhawk meant to bring it down in the middle of an intersection, so  I directed traffic around the scene and the few cars that came by seemed pretty keen to rubberneck the bloody drama playing out on the village streets.  A few bystanders took photos and explained to their kids what was going on.

 Yes, it was brutal to witness.  However, I am a hater of pigeons (they are currently busy shitting on my drying laundry and picnic table out on the balcony) and I always root for the hawk in this situation.

 Finally, the pigeon ceased to struggle, and the hawk went to work ripping out the feathers with glee.

 

 Bry kept uttering "ew...ugh, ew" with each rip, and a local recording it on his iphone said, "Brilliant!".  Which is my favorite word to describe this entire scene.  

The hawk didn't seem to mind the small crowd that had gathered to watch, but eventually he either got tired of being so exposed or the paparazzi just got to him, and with a huge effort, he took his dinner in the talons and flew off awkwardly to a nearby tree.

It looked like a pillowfight had gone down in the street.

I felt really fortunate to witness this- I've always been a fan of raptors and this is the first time I saw one take down prey up close.  When I got back to London, I noticed an eviscerated pigeon and a load of feathers blowing around on the rooftop below my flat, so I know there is something in the neighborhood that is hungry.  I just wish he would eat more.  

Quilt

Well now.  I made a patchy-work quilt!  It's not a traditional one, with fantastically precise geometry, but kind of a wildly modern one of mismatched and layered patches.  Gee's Bend is not where I live, obviously. 

In the process, I've learned quite a lot.   

Firstly, I love fabric.  I love pattern.  I love color.  Really, I do!  No matter that I strive to have 100% black and monochrome wardrobe.  What is available to you now at any well-stocked fabric store is amazing, and these designers always release collections that work so eccentrically well together.  This was a collection of fat quarters I had picked up here and there for the past year, almost always heavily discounted as last year's pattern collection.  Liberty, Westminster Fabrics, Rowan, Amy Butler.  I went for blues-greens-yellows in various electric shades and amassed enough to start thinking about a project that would take up more fabric than a tote bag.  Originally, I had no real desire to quilt, as it seemed like a process that would be taking me down quite the rabbit hole.  Whatever, I did it anyway.  It's not like I'm going to be sitting by the fire and hand-stitching this.

The original pile of scraps

I chose a pattern for the quilt top in Amy Butler's In Stitches book and roughly followed it.  She called for bigger chunks of fabric; I pieced together fat quarter pieces until I got the patch dimensions right, sometimes sewing together several lengths of scraps to get where I needed to.

Stitched-together quilt top

I don't have a long-arm sewing machine, so I figured a full-sized quilt top would be easiest to deal with since feeding the entire quilt through the tiny gap allowance on my Singer was anxiety-inducing.

Rather weirdly, in the Amy Butler pattern, she has you sew the quilt top pieces onto muslin backing.   From everything else I read about quilts, I found nothing about doing that technique, and I just sewed the quilt top together.  That ended up being the easiest step.

Once I had that done, I found 4.5 meters of fantastically contrasting fabric for the backing- a geometric print in similar blue-greens from Westminster called "Summer Tweed", and some lightweight cotton-poly blend quilt batting.  Or wadding, as they call it in the UK.  

So the basic quilting 101 theory is this (in case you are a complete amateur like me):  you need to make a sandwich with the backing, the batting and the quilt top.  You pin it all together (or you can sew about a thousand tailor's tacks to hold it together).  Preferably with safety pins if you choose to pin.  I did not.  Feeding a quilt with a hundred pins holding it together through the machine led to blood.  It was mine.  I pricked my hands constantly before I wised up to why the instructions specified safety pins at this point.    

et voila!  a finished quilt

 With your layers sandwiched together, you sew around all your patches.  Once it's secured, you can figure out your quilting lines- the decorative stitching on top that will secure the batting in place so you don't end up with it bunched up in every corner, and to add interest to the quilt top.

This was the hardest part for me.    There was much rolling and turning and pushing and pulling to get all the quilt lines down.  I tried to start in the centre and work my way out, and just did alternating sections of vertical and horizontal stripes either 1" or 2" apart.  This step took days, and a few days more of the quilt being in time-out as I learned to walk away.

My biggest problem was the thread.  I chose, after much deliberation, a light weight cream thread in 100% poly.  At first, I thought an acid lime green would be just wonderful, but after realizing my quilting lines might be quite imperfect, I decided to go with the subtle.

However.

I had so many problems with this thread and tension.  It was maddening.  Next time, I'll choose a thicker thread.  Almost every time I stopped the machine, or even paused, the thread would manage to wind around the bottom bobbin and I'd have to stop, clip the threads, untangle and re-thread every single time.  It just wasn't right.  I also ended up ripping back quite a lot once it was done to fix spots where the tension was wonky enough to make it look sloppy.

The other thing I really struggled with was the bias tape.  I hate picky-picky work like that (I normally just go out and BUY the stuff, pre-folded), but I used the leftover meterage from the quilt back to tie the edges together with homemade bias tape.  It went...a bit sloppy.  I had to go around the entire quilt a second time as the front and back of the tape ended up not always keenly matching up.

So yes, this did cause me a bit of pain and suffering.  No, it's not quite big enough to cover a queen-sized bed, and it won't be winning any prizes at the county fair, unless the county population is exactly 1.  But look- it's all my favorite scraps of fabric, all haphazardly stitched together in a nice summer-weight blanket.  It's functional, I swear it!  I don't know if I'm jumping on the quilting bandwagon any time soon, but it was a really nice way to teach myself and understand the technique, and a good excuse to start hoarding more fabric scraps.

I love it despite its imperfections.