Cwmorthin's dead spooky and scary inside. Nearly as trouser-filling as Croesor-Rhosydd, which I'm pleased to say I haven't suffered (yet). Not called "The Caverns Of Doom" for nothing. I rather like the idea that it's a one-way trip, and one's successful exit, and indeed continuing life, depends upon whether the previous sufferers remembered to leave the inflatable dinghy for you to abseil into:
Top drawer madness. ANYWAY.... Perrin Junior forced me to take her to Rutherford Appleton Lab today so she could fiddle about with their synchrotrontronronron thingy... it belts electrons round a big doughnut at silly speeds (yes, even faster than ScottOfTheWoods down that mental fire-road from Mynydd Bychan to Hengwm) so you can do things like investigate new surface treatments for jet engine fan blades, or in her case to draw 3D images of cells. Apparently. I've probably got the wrong end of the stick as usual. The main thing is it goes PING and is very expensive. I find it particularly gratifying that one beamline is being used to study the microstructure of ice-cream to try and improve its quality, which I think is a capital use for one of the most advanced capabilities in the world.
So, far more importantly, before she had time to turn the planet into green quivering jelly, or magic us into a black hole, I wandered off for a potter round on me bike. Just up the hill is the Ridgeway, and being the rank amateur that I am I've never done any of it despite it starting almost from my front doorstep. There seem to be some surprisingly remote looking areas just south of West Ilsley, with lots of byways and things down towards Peasemore. So I managed a little 15-mile toddle. The pictures are nothing special but maybe that's the whole point.
Crap view of the Diamond Light Source. Probably not supposed to have this pic and am expecting the black Range Rover with persuasive gentlemen inside at any moment:
Obviously this place appealed to my lavatorial sense of humour, Scutchames Knob, or "Scotchman's Knob", an Iron Age barrow. I couldn't find it, presumably someone was off doing some gardening with it (the barrow not the knob):
Rubbish shot of a red kite, of which there were more than you could shake a stick at. Probably an inadvisable thing to do unless you want your limbs ripped off like the Black Knight in Holy Grail:
An unassuming pic of loads of rolling Berkshire downland with not much going on. Again, that's probably the point:
From this location you can see as far as Egypt. I hadn't realised the Berkshire Downs were that high to be honest:
Lots of lovely byways through oak woodlands. I know this is James O's stamping ground, so he'll probably agree that it's very similar to that area behind Stevenage. I'm very partial to a nice byway now and then:
And some particularly attractive sunken green lanes. With, as I recall, particularly attractive horse riders (ohhh, those jodhpurs...sigh...) using them to test out those local thoroughbred race horses:
And like all good news reports we finish with something cuddly. In this case a remarkably friendly vole, chilling out smack in the middle of the Ridgeway, which came much closer than it realised to perishing under my 2.4 Mountain Kings poor thing:
Well we don't seem to have turned to green jelly while all that was going on, so that's a bit of a relief all round really.
'Reg'