An Autumn Day in Cornwall

[weeladdie18]

Monday and Tuesday Morning we had an early autumn frost...Now the wind from the North East has
gone , the weather has turned warmer again...12 C by day. Many of the leaves have fallen with the wind.
The sky is unsettled but spectacular with the fronts coming through.....I prefer the warmer weather

[Kirbstone]

Too right, Rod,

When it belted down rain on us in Martinique it was at 30+ degrees and had dried off within half an hour. Pity we don't have any of that sort here in Ireland. Mind you, we could do with a LOT of any sort of rain here at the moment.

Tom

[6ft3Aussie]

Weeladdie.......10° to 12°C... That's about what we get for an average overnight low in winter (June and July)........ During the day in winter we usually get 20° to 21°C and sunshine...

[weeladdie18]

Weeladdie.......10° to 12°C... That's about what we get for an average overnight low in winter (June and July)........ During the day in winter we usually get 20° to 21°C and sunshine...

Thanks for that info sounds like a pleasant temperature to me..
....our summertime in South West Cornwall U K is often up to
25 C to 30 C...... at 3 or 4 o'clock in the late afternoon....
we had sea temperature up to 19 C.

Are your temperatures in North or South Australia ? .......thanks Weeladdie

[weeladdie18]

5 th of November in England U K is Bonfire Night . .....Remember , Remember 5 th of November ,
Gunpowder treason and plot.....................
in 1605 , Guy Fawkes was believed to have been involved in a plot to blow up the houses of parliament.
For his alleged crime , a stuffed effgy of Guy ( called a guy ) is burnt on bonfire night
as an annual festival with fireworks. A good way to burn up all the old rubbish and enjoy the
fun of penny bangers, sparklers and rockets being fired into the autumn sky.

I remember the Old village Bonfire back in the Fifties and Sixties. A good way to get rid of all the old
rubbish on the local farms and fuel it with used gearbox oil and old tractor tyres from the local garage.
All exciting fun for the young kids.

Tonight was perfect weather for Bonfire Night ....Calm , clear night with bright stars....Temp is 12 C
Plenty of bangs and crackles this evening...........

[Kirbstone]

Yes,

The night of the Year when England raises its carbon footprint by 4000%. Having lived there for 23 years I have fond memories of 'our' amazing annual bonfire in Hartley-Wintney in Hampshire, which has very extensive common grassed areas reaching out in all directions from the village green. These are still planted with the oaks that were not used to build ships, they started building them in iron, but I digress.

Groups of people with wire cages of oiled rags assemble in all the distant parts, light their torches and march towards the unlit woodstack, swinging them. The sight of groups of swinging torches converging on the centre in the dark under the trees never failed to quicken the pulse. Then all the marchers circled round the pile until the order was shouted for them to pitch their torches in onto the pile. It didn't take long for the fire to reach a fabulous heat and with flames leaping up 50+ feet it sucked air in from all around, so standing there you got a roasting face and a cold backside from the hefty draught from behind. Marvelous fun and spectacle, though.....and the pubs did a roaring trade.

Here the bonfires are lit at Halloween, but I've not seen anything so organised as was common in England on Guy Faulkes' night. In 1605 King James's spies were alerted to something big being planned when a certain Earl who always attended the Opening of Parliament annually decided not to come. (He'd been tipped off!) This raised the alarm among those trusted with Parliamentary and Royal security and it didn't take them long to home in on the basement under the House where they found the stack complete with Guy himself with a tinder match in his pocket plus a faggot fuse notched to time the ignition. They hung & quartered him, of course and ran his accomplices down, too.

Tom

[weeladdie18]

Thank you Tom for your history of Guy Faulkes and your memories.

Weymouth was famous for its firework display on the barge out in the bay , surrounded by the
sightseers in their boats.......Unfortunately big beach bonfires are now a thing of the past.

Big firework displays are the trend for any occasion...particularly carnivals and New Years Eve.
They say there are 9000 visitors at St Ives on the North Coast for new Years Eve...
Many in Fancy Dress........Less than 2 months away now..............

[weeladdie18]

Buckets of rain in Cornwall recently...68 Mph wind from the south. Temps 10 C to 15 C.
Some days are sunny.....others are damp and misty.

All the Christmas Fare is on display in the supermarkets.....I had my first Xmas Day Turkey Lunch
a couple of days ago.....Makes a mid week change from sunday lunch.

Hedging and ditching is the order of the day...3 foot deep ditches beside the secondary roads.

I saw one of those Scandenavian Scrub Cutters working yesterday on a duel carriage way embankment.
A tracked vehicle driving along a bank with a rise of 45 degrees. A very wide vehicle with the cutters
extended........weeladdie

[Kirbstone]

Spent last weekend down on the Iveragh peninsula, one of Ireland's four 'Cornwalls'. Ballinskelligs, and it blew force 10 practically the whole time out of the SE, an unusual quarter.
Dry, but too unpleasant to walk. Motored out to a prominence from which these two pics were taken. With the gale in the SE the Skellig rocks, 700-odd ft high offshore were 'in wind shadow' from the higher mainland, with their surrounding sea flat for a change. Big yacht out there with mains'l up !
Wave height between Horse Island and nearby land impressive every few seconds. Not the day for cutting through that narrows!

Tom

[weeladdie18]

Thanks for pictures Tom...the S.E. wind looked impressive..
.We had S.E.strong to gale force onshore wind straight into a narrow cove South of the Helford river...
Probably 6 to 8 ft swell running up a boat launching beach. ...Plenty of seaweed ,cuttle fish backs
and a very decayed porpoise carcase on the beach............
temperature down to 5 C by day in the wind chill....with an easterly wind
Ice in a bucket of water overnight....
Big tides on the make for Saturday...6 ft swell... 2 miles up the Helford River on the Flood
Tide with an easterly wind........Gweek and Malpas are still laying up yachts.
The yachts are lifted on a boat hoist and placed on a cradle. The trailer unit behind the tractor then
lifts the cradle and the boat is towed half a mile through the boat park to the winter storage area.
Clever stuff ...these modern hydraulic lifting systems.

Ref..........Gweek Classic Boat Yard ...Mylor Yacht Harbour....Cornish Maritime Trust ....Barnabus..

We were standing on the cliffs at Lizard Point at sunset....Shell fish prices are already up to
Christmas Prices for the French Christmas Market the week before Christmas...

Everyone is hoping for a break in the weather...........

[weeladdie18]

I like your pic of the lifeboat house .We have one down the beach.
In service 1914 to 1961. .....It was difficult to recover the Lifeboat , winch her up the beach ,
get her onto the turn table and set her up inside the boat house, facing down the slipway
for the next launch. .... a new lifeboat house was built in a more sheltered cove with an incline
railway to transport the crew down the cliff to the new boathouse house.

Before the first lifeboat house was built, the boat was stored in what is now the car park on the
top of the cliffs. When the lifeboat was ordered to launch, 16 horses were commandeered from the
local farms to help launch the lifeboat off her carriage . When the wind was in the wrong quarter
the lifeboat crew had to crawl down the track to the beach on their hands and knees ,so they
did not get blown over the cliff.
One of my old friends is over eighty years old. His Grandfather owned the land where I live.
and my friend used to work the land as a turnip field with his uncle before the estate where I live was developed in the 1970's
The farm was split up to share the gentleman's estate between his heirs.
As far as I am aware I am a resident of a village which was described by a Victorian Visitor as a
shanty town of timber buildings with thatched roofs, inhabited by pirates and smugglers.
Little has changed in a 150 years.

[weeladdie18]

On the other side of lizard point there is an old church on the top of a hill in a village square
I often visit the church yard walking anti-clockwise around the church.
Suddenly the view of Falmouth Bay appears....A most impressive sight.

Walking round the back of the church there is an old Celtic Cross which marks a communial grave
of a hundred and forty souls who were lost in a shipwreck of a liner bound for America.
Walk along the Cliff Path to Lizard Point and you will see the old white building
which received the flag signals as an identification for each ship inbound for Falmouth for orders.
Lloyds Signal Station......Over 800 ships per month sailed into Falmouth for orders.
Walk past the Old Lifeboat station and down to the next valley. It is believed that many sailors from a wrecked customs and excise galley were buried in this patch of unconsicrated ground following the loss of the vessel on passage to the West Indies .
There are at least 5 old Lifeboat Stations for the old Lifeboats around the Lizard Peninsular
between Falmouth and Penzance.
One of the stories tells of a pilot who boarded a ship bound for Falmouth. The ship was caught in a
North Westerly Gale and ran before the wind. The ship took three weeks to get back into Falmouth.

[Kirbstone]

Fascinating local history lesson, Rob. I can't compete on that score.

We're currently 'enjoying' storm Diana and she has put all the remaining apples firmly on he ground. She has also restored our water-table levels to normal, no 'navigation' on our little private lake can resume. Mild. 15 deg. today around midday. We'll no doubt pay for that ere long!

Tom

[r.m.anderson]

Spent last weekend down on the Iveragh peninsula, one of Ireland's four 'Cornwalls'. Ballinskelligs, and it blew force 10 practically the whole time out of the SE, an unusual quarter.
Dry, but too unpleasant to walk. Motored out to a prominence from which these two pics were taken. With the gale in the SE the Skellig rocks, 700-odd ft high offshore were 'in wind shadow' from the higher mainland, with their surrounding sea flat for a change. Big yacht out there with mains'l up !
Wave height between Horse Island and nearby land impressive every few seconds. Not the day for cutting through that narrows!

Tom

PHOTO #2 looks like a scene out of the last Star Wars movie "The Last Jedi" - and perhaps it was ?

Missed the fine print at the top of the image and it was !

[Kirbstone]

RM,
Of course it does. One needs a windy day with a lot of spume aloft to give those rocks that half-hidden spooky look. For the last two-three years on & off they've been filming scenes for Star Wars out there, by the way the home of Ben Kenobi, I think.

I took that pic. with a telephoto from Finian's Bay on the mainland which looks straight out at them.

Tom