The fabric of life

This one's for my quilting friends.

Several days ago we visited a manor, Lytes Cary, where the National Trust volunteers stood guard in a friendly way over some amazing treasures. Treasures you'd expect should be in a museum. The NT way of stopping the visiting hordes from resting their backsides on the many beautiful chairs was to place a seedhead of a teazel on the cushion. I was amused to see this because in the area around our farm at Homerton this plant is a noxious weed. It is growing in the Mt Eccles National Park and on the roadside near the house I grew up in but not on our farm as yet. It is a prickly customer and obviously effective at deterring anyone thinking of having a rest.

But what I really wanted to show my quilting friends was the beadspread on one of the four-posters and the tapestry on the wall - both very old.

And in one of the churches I've been in the local ladies have made an embroidered image of their own town. Each lady embroidered one house which was then attached to the background fabric and then the whole was embellished with more embroidery of gardens and so on. It was over one metre wide and quite spectacular. To see this picture (or any of the blog pictures) more clearly just click on it. It shows the Saxon Square, which is the central part of Wedmore village, as it is today. The houses that surround the square each have a private garden that extends into the centre area. Unfortunately the central square is not open to the public.

It once were an island

My Gran's father, Gabriel Duckett, left the parish of Wedmore in 1867 as a young man and went to seek his fortune. He ended up in Victoria, Australia in the gold-mining town of Wedderburn and never went any further. He supported his large family by gold-mining using a method called puddling which involved a horse going round in circle to operate a machine to crush and puddle the mud and quartz in order to extract the gold.

It's all very different from Wedmore. We wandered the village as the bells were pealing for the Sunday morning service, and earlier a knowledgeable and friendly local had very proudly shown us around the church. I was very surprised to learn that Wedmore and the nearby villages of Heathhouse and Blackford where the Ducketts lived and worked are on high country that was an island in Saxon times. "It once were an island" she said. Since then the low country has been drained and is now farmed. The area is still criss-crossed by drains and channels and the farmers can't use it much in the wet months. This is view down to the lowland from Heathhouse and a lane in Heathhouse itself.

And this is the village and farmland of Blackford where Gabriel's grandfather lived. The hedges are all neatly trimmed in the winter and are now coming into bud. I was surprised to learn that hedges are a mixture of species because I had the notion that they were all hawthorn. I have a lot to learn. I was reading about one hedge that had been there since Elizabeth 1's time! We have seen quite a few new hedges being planted, especially in Devon, which is a good thing because there has been a 25% decrease in the number of hedges in the last 40 years.