Home again

after an enjoyable holiday in [you’ve guessed it] Yorkshire. We were very lucky with the weather apart from one very wet day when this -the River Skirfare in April -

 

 

looked like this.

The river bed is usually dry, due to a sink hole upstream, so for it to get this high there must have been a lot of rain. Not that it worried the sheep.

 

However, as it was so wet, I persuaded Wensleydale that we needed to go somewhere with a roof. Like Gawthorpe Hall, home of the Rachel Kay-Shuttleworth collection of textiles – not that that influenced my desire to visit it, of course.  :-^)

It is a lovely house in its own right – I could imagine living there quite happily. And the exhibition is lovely – very useful for C&G students researching either the history of embroidery or foreign embroidery – if you still have to do that in the new version of the course.

We also explored Nidderdale,  because we had discovered that Wensleydale’s great grandfather had been born there - or rather                     here.

Not that the family owned it – neither of us come from families with that sort of money!

Yesterday we were intending to go up to the Royal Parks to cheer on Babybel’s mum, who was running a half marathon. Unfortunately we didn’t quite make it, but we were able to catch up with the successful athlete later – 1 minute inside her predicted time, despite suffering from the after-effects of gastro-enteritis, seems very impressive to me!

Despite his apparent exhaustion, the dog didn’t run the marathon with her.

And Babybel seemed to be thinking about stepping into her daddy’s shoes – although she’ll have to grow a bit before they fit.