We weren’t disappointed.

Before (picture from the web)

After

The Eden Project was built in 2000 in an old china clay mine pit.  Cornwall was the centre of clay mining for the china industry during the industrial age, but now most of the mines have closed and left huge ugly holes in the landscape.  The people behind the project decided to try an experiment and not just rehabilitate one of these mines, but create an amazing centre to show and celebrate how the world – especially plants – supports us.  Think economic botany writ large, but also made fun.  In addition, the Eden Project is a cultural centre for art and performance, and an education centre for environmental ideas.

Not surprisingly, we spent a lot of our time in the Rainforest Biome, visiting some old green friends of mine, and making some new ones.  The displays included all sorts of information about products we use from tropical regions, and the impacts this has on the environment and the people that depend on the trade of these products.  They also raised questions about issues like fair trade, biofuels, subsistence farming, soil depletion and others – it was all done extremely well.  I’ll forgive them for getting the date for the first cultivation of manioc wrong…

50 m above in the Rainforest Biome. The white blob is a "balloon" that curators use to prune the canopy.

We went up the suspended platform (swaying gently) 50 meters above ground in the largest central dome to get a bird’s eye view.

Scarlet pods and blue seeds of Sterculia mexicana.

mmmmmm, ants...

Unfortunately the biome had been invaded by tiny black ants, millions of them, from a failure of the quarantine system on some plants.  We managed to spot one of the small lizards brought in to help control the problem.  However, there is no plan to make the place into any sort of zoo!  The focus is all on the plants.

We toured around the Mediterranean Biome as well, pleasantly cool, dry, and aromatic.  Art is integrated throughout the displays, along with information.  We also toured around some of the exhibits in the Core building, including the world’s largest (and most complicated) nut-cracker, that would have made Rube Goldberg proud.

Crank the handle for 10 minutes or so, and you can crack a hazelnut (but you can't get it to eat).

The huge expanse of outdoor gardens was in stunning display, but unfortunately we ran out of time to see everything.

Hectares of gardens outside as well

We attended a game between two rival county teams, the Gloucester Gladiators hosting the Somerset Cricket Club, with a group of friends from the Archaeology department.  Thankfully, a couple of knowledgeable colleagues patiently answered all our questions, and attempted to explain the complexities of the game.  Between overs, bowlers, batters, stumps, bails, popping creases, and wides, I think I managed to get a general grasp of what was happening.  Sort of.

Bowler (NOT a pitcher), and apparently one of the best.

Batter, protecting the wicket, and trying to score runs.

It was a fantastic summer evening, watching a game in the setting sun, eating a sausage on a bun and enjoying a cool drink.  A few hot air balloons floated by in the distance.   A perfect summer ritual.  And the home team won as well. It doesn’t get much better.

SpongeBob lends name to new mushroom species

A new species of mushroom has been named by its discoverers after the cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants.

The fungus, named Spongiforma squarepantsii by the researchers at San Francisco State University (SFSU), was found during an expedition to the forests of Borneo.

Rest of the story here.

After catching a rattling train to Okehampton, we switched to the Dartmoor Railway, a slightly elderly and slow tourist train to nearby Meldon Quarry.  The train is run mostly by volunteers, and I felt sad that they didn’t have more customers.  We were glad it was running, so that we were saved an extra few kilometres of walking to our start point.

We got off and were presented with a stunning vista of green.

Meldon has been the site of several quarries over the centuries; including lime works, Meldon aplite, and crushed rock for railway ballast.  There is also a large dam on the West Okement River, I assume for water control.

Meldon dam. The foxglove were blooming everywhere.

We set off towards the dam, and around the reservoir.  Soltech enjoyed trying to communicate with the sheep.  At the end of the reservoir, we followed the West Okement River up into the moors, as it crashed down over boulders among oaks and beech in a small gorge.

Foot bridge at Vellake Corner, at the end of the Meldon Reservoir.

As we emerged out of the gorge, we came upon some Dartmoor ponies – mares and their foals.  Most of the foals were sleeping on the soft turf near the river, while their mothers munched grass nearby.  They didn’t seem to care at all that we were there.

Dartmoor ponies below Black Tor.

We continued on up to Black-a-Tor Copse, an utterly magical place.  Twisted and small ancient oaks grew in the protected valley, scattered in amongst the numerous moss-covered boulders.  I kept expecting to see an elf sitting on one of the rocks, or a tiny pixie laughing from a tree limb.

Where are the faerie folk?

The copse is quite small, but still amazing.  It represents a remnant of the highland forests that used to cover much of the moors, before they were cut down by Bronze-aged farmers and later groups.  Removal of the forests caused erosion, and the thin soils became acidic, supporting only grassland, heath, and blanket bogs.  Unlike the fir-tree plantation at Fernworthy that we saw last time, this is the real deal, the native forest.

Black Tor, looking northwest.

We left the copse, and headed up the steep, boulder-strewn hill to Black Tor, the granite outcrop that towers above the copse and gives it its name.  Some of the precariously balanced rocks looked like they were ready to tumble at any moment.  The view was amazing, but was to get even better as we set up across the grassland to the two highest Tors in Dartmoor, Yes Tor (619 m) and the High Willhays (621 m).

Tiny lousewort flowers, in amongst the grass.

To get there, we crossed into the Okehampton military range, marked by a series of striped poles.  The public are welcome to be in the area, as long as the military isn’t practicing live fire exercises (for obvious reasons).  This is indicated by flags, or lights at night, raised on a pole at Yes Tor.  The schedule is also posted online, so I knew we were perfectly safe.

Sundew. If you look close at the bottom left leaf, you'll see breakfast leftovers. It is also about to bloom.

As we hiked, we squelched through patches of wet terrain – blanket bog.  These areas are a product of millennia of soil depletion, coupled with poor drainage from the underlying bedrock.  However, the bogs are now recognized as critical habitat in their own right, supporting a number of rare or unique species.  One of the highlights for me was seeing carnivorous sundew plants growing in the wild for the first time. Despite the time I spent working up in the muskeg of northern Alberta, I had never seen any there.

They were remarkably tiny plants, growing in amongst the sphagnum moss, only about 3 cm in diameter.  Some of them were just about to bloom.  On a few, I saw the remnants of past meals still stuck in the leaves.  I was giddy with excitement.  What can I say?  I’m a geek.

We reached the high Tors, and surveyed the world in 360 degrees of stunning panorama.  Yes Tor and the High Willhays are rightly called the rooftop of Devon.  We could see for miles.

View towards Yes Tor from the High Willhays. The pole is used to signal military activity. North Devon beyond.

View south east from Yes Tor, across the rest of Dartmoor.

View from Yes Tor. The red roof is a military storage shed. Just beyond the brown quarry area mid-picture is the Meldon train station where we started from.

The sun came out, and we began a leisurely walk back down to the station to catch the train back to Okehampton to meet our connection home to Exeter.  On the train ride, we caught a glimpse through the trees of Okehampton Castle, originally built by the Normans.  Perhaps a trip for another day…

Okehampton Castle from the Dartmoor Railway.

We also walked around the chaos of of streets that makes up downtown London, visited many famous landmarks, including Trafalgar Square, Hyde Park to commune with the waterfowl, and Buckingham Palace to say hi to Liz. We stumbled upon the Canada Gate and the Canada Memorial beside the palace in Green Park (I didn’t know they existed, until I noticed the inscription on the gate while trying to take a picture of the palace). We also did the super-tourist-geek thing and went up in the London Eye and took a boat cruise up the Thames. Lots and lots of old, very cool buildings, and lots of new shiny ones too. But it did help us plan our next adventures to the big city: highest on the list are the Natural History Museum, Kew Gardens, the Tower of London, and attending a production in the recreated Globe Theatre, in the pit area, of course, where you can heckle, get rained on, and experience Shakespeare the way is was meant to be.

Pictures here.

As wild and open as it might look, the park is actually one giant culturally modified landscape.  You basically can’t spit without hitting something archaeological (although I wouldn’t recommend it with the winds that blow up there).  Everything from Bronze Age menhirs (standing stones), circles, stone rows, and stone hut circles, to Iron Age settlements and field boundaries, abandoned medieval villages and bridges, evidence of tin mining from all periods, and historic remains.  We were spoiled for choice, so I chose a walk off the internet that looked like it hit a lot of interesting (and atmospheric) sites.

We got off the bus at Warren House Inn, a pub quite literally in the middle of no-where.

Middle of nowhere (for southern England, at least)

The morning was quite blustery with some drizzle, but we had come prepared.  The drizzle drizzled out (although the wind kept up), and the sun occasionally broke through the clouds.  We hiked up to our first goal, a large cairn, called King’s Oven, a name derived from the proposed remains of a tin smelting hut.

From here we set out northeast, in order to find our next goal, a supposedly very well-preserved double stone row, with a large standing stone at the end.  Well, I thought we set out in the right direction.  I did have my compass in my backpack, but I figured: “How hard can it be to miss a line of rocks in a big, open grassland?”  Obviously, not that hard.  I blame it on the fact that I was distracted.  First, by the overwhelming joy of being in such a huge, open, space again, with a big sky overhead, and not another human in sight (well, except for the other members of our group).  I was having serious flashbacks – rolling hills of grass and scrub, stone circles (okay, a bit different than North American stone circles), clouds scudding across a big sky, leading a group of people in search of sites.  It all seemed vaguely familiar.

Second, I was also distracted by the floofy sheep, scattered around the heath with their cute little lambs.  (Yes, I know I’ve been in Britain over a year, where there are more sheep than people.  But they are still novel.  I don’t get out much, ok?)

Mama sheep and her new spring lamb in the heath

Did you know that from a distance, grazing sheep have an uncanny resemblance to squat standing stones?  By the time I got to what I thought was the stone line, it had ambled away.  Looking at my map, I realized that we had somehow missed the line, and it was too late to go back and try to find it.  (The bus schedule to Dartmoor was rather limited:  one bus into the Park in the morning, and only one bus back at 4:30 in the afternoon.  If we missed that bus…)

I have to admit I was rather disappointed.   From then on I carried my compass in my pocket.  But my glumness was short-lived.   We came upon a small herd of Dartmoor ponies.  These tough little horses are iconic of the Park.  They are the descendents of the ponies used in medieval tin mining and possibly even earlier periods.  Today they live in a semi-wild state, ranging across the Park.  However, they are not shy, as this curious one demonstrated.  They are their own recognized breed (although to be registered, the pedigree has to be known).  They do have owners, and during an annual round-up, called a “drift”, owners check their health and herd status, and select out animals to sell.

Curious Dartmoor pony

The trees that you see behind the ponies was Fernworthy Forest, our next goal.  The term “forest” is a bit of a misnomer – a better description would be conifer plantation.   It was created in the 1930s, when England was worried about running out of resources.  When I first saw it on Google Earth during my research for the walk, my initial reaction was “what a terrible blot on the natural grassland landscape!”  But it is just part of a very, very long history of human management and alteration of the landscape.  The “natural grassland landscape” is, in fact, not natural at all.  Like the “forest”, it is also an artifact of humans mucking about.   Archaeobotanists (my tribe!) and paleoecologists have determined from pollen cores that much of Dartmoor was originally covered by highland oak and hazel woodland.  This woodland began to be cleared by Bronze Age farmers for pasture.  Clearing continued throughout prehistory.  There are two or three tiny patches of the original oak forest left, and I hope to visit one of them in the near future.  In the pictures I have seen, they look like something straight out of Tolkien.  As I mentioned earlier, what appears as a wild and windswept wilderness is actually what we would call a “cultural landscape” in anthropologist/archaeologist-speak, created by millennia of repeated human occupation.

The forest/tree plantation wasn’t nearly as sterile as I anticipated, and although the trees were all the same age, there was still a nice tranquility in the moss-covered floor.

As we proceeded, this tranquility gradually broke down a bit, as we discovered yet another (contemporary) cultural use of the landscape – a weekend rave in the middle of the forest.  We didn’t actually see the rave, but the small clusters of exhausted looking teenagers walking towards us (some with face paint), the ambulance and police presence, and the distant thumping music were all pretty good indicators.

We made our way to the Fernworthy Stone Circle (aka Froggymead) in the middle of the forest.  Thankfully they hadn’t planted trees on top of the monument, and by all accounts, the stones are still in their original positions.  We enjoyed some lunch, listening the sound of the wind blowing through the spruce trees, tempered by the sound of the distant thump-thump-thump of the rave – the modern version of what people were probably doing in and around the stone circle 3000 years ago.  Excavations at the circle found a large amount of charcoal in the centre of the circle.  Bonfire, anyone?

Lunch at Fernworthy stone circle

We continued on, out of the forest and back into the grassland.  Parts of the moor were crossed by old stone walls called reaves, that seemed to go on for infinity.  The people who built them certainly didn’t lack for raw materials; there were outcroppings of weatherworn granite everywhere.

Our next stop was the Grey Wethers double stone circles.   The centre points of these two stone circles are only 3 degrees off a perfect north-south axis, and this might be the result of them having been restored by well-meaning Victorian amateur archaeologists in the late 1800s.

A legend says that the name comes from a prank played on a boastful new farmer who was drinking at the Warren Inn pub one day.  He made it clear he wanted to become the most prosperous farmer on the moors, but was disappointed at the quality of sheep he had seen at the market.  A local man offered to sell him a high quality flock grazing nearby.  Being suspicious after his experience at the market, the inebriated farmer wanted to see them first.  So the seller led him out on the cold and foggy moors, and from the ridge, the farmer could see a fine flock grazing in the mist.  But it was cold, the inn was warm, and the cider tasty.  The farmer paid the man, and went back to celebrate his purchase.  But the next day when he went to collect his new flock he discovered that what he had seen in the mist of the moor (or more likely the mist of cider) was two circles of stone.  Wethers is another name for sheep.  See?!?  I’m not the only one!

Tiny (less than 1 cm long) blue flowers of Heath Milkwort

We continued on, past some Bronze Age hut circles which I completely missed (How could I miss them?  They are much more substantial than tipi rings…), and along a tributary of the East Dart river.  Along the path I heard a cuckoo (my first!), but unfortunately couldn’t determine where it was.   At the confluence with the main river was this small beehive hut (missing its roof).   I don’t know the age of this structure, but it may have served as a temporary shelter for a shepherd, a tinner (tin miner), or a peat cutter sometime in the past.

Beehive hut

Many of the hills of the moors are capped with large, weather-beaten granite outcrops called tors.  Some, like Haytor, are large enough to attract weekend-warrior rock climbers.  They are quite evocative and iconic of “wildness” of the moor landscape.  Hartland Tor above the hamlet of Postbridge is one of the smaller ones, but still commands stunning views.  It is hard to show in a picture the gale-force wind that was trying to blow us off the top of this ragged cluster of rocks, but it was wild and wonderful.

Hartland Tor

We ended our walk in Postbridge, with enough time to stop at the shop for an ice cream, and have a look at the old clapper bridge before the bus came.  These bridges were built during medieval times, formed by placing large slabs of stone on stone piers.  Only a few survive today.

Clapper bridge at Postbridge

It was a fantastic day, other than feeling a bit rushed because of the rotten bus schedule.  But the buses have now changed over to the summer schedule, which means there will be a few more options.  I look forward to going back and poking around all the other sites along the way we just didn’t have time to see.  And exploring the rest of Dartmoor.  Rest assured, we’ll keep doing bits of the coast as well.  And then there is the entire north coast of Devon, and Cornwall, and the Brecon Beacons, and the Lake District, and…

So much to see…

I went to visit a friend up in Oxford.  The weather was somewhat dreary, so we decided to stay in and drink copious amounts of tea, entertain the cats, and entertain ourselves with several games of Scrabble.

During the second game, my friend was having bad luck with letters, growing more and more frustrated.  I tried to help by opening up several triple word scores, but unfortunately she was unable to use any of them.  Until….

With a small happy sound she laid down the highest scoring word I have ever seen in Scrabble.  “FREQUENT.”  “Q” on a double letter score, the word snagging not one, but two triple word scores, and using up all her letters (50 bonus points).  Grand total: 311 points.  That is higher that the total score in many games I have played!

After my initial shock, I congratulated her with grudging admiration.  It seemed rather pointless to continue the game after that (although we did just for the practice).

That’ll teach me to be nice….

1.  Some types of bacteria may stimulate precipitation, such as hail, possibly to facilate their own dispersal.  This is the hypothesis put forward by researchers who found significant amounts of bacteria in the centres of hailstones.  The protein coating of the bacteria causes water to freeze at relatively warm temperatures, and therefore act as the nucleation point for the formation of hail.

2.  Researchers using infra-red have detected an entire buried city in Egypt, as well as some possible pyramids.  Check out the pictures and video…the detail is phenomenal.

3.  A few months ago, I mentioned a story that came out about how cats drink and the amazing physics behind it.  In the story, the researchers suggested that dogs drinking was “messier” because they used their tongue as a scoop, rather than the elegant liquid column method employed by cats.  But it turns out that close observations of dogs drinking using high speed cameras show they use essentially the same technique…the scooped tongue actually has little to do with it.  The reason dogs are so much more messy is because they plunge their tongue through the surface of the liquid, whereas cats just touch the surface.

I love this story because it shows the best aspects of science – challenging assumptions and testing hypotheses.  Some researchers read the first study about cats and its assumption about dogs, and then thought “Lets test that.”  They went out and looked more carefully at exactly how dogs drink.  And found something new.  Exactly how science should work.

4.  Spirit, one of the Mars rovers, has finally reached the end of its adventure, a staggering seven years – SEVEN YEARS! – after it’s projected lifespan of only 3 months.   NASA has been trying to establish contact for 14 months now; they believe it is unlikely they will ever hear from the rover again.  May the intrepid little machine RIP after a job well done.

Even more amazing is that its brother, Opportunity, is still trundling along somewhere on the surface of the Red Planet, a bit arthritic and worse for wear, but still gathering data.  Go, little rover!