Fountains

Finally, a sunny spring day and Tony's day off, so we ran away to Fountains Abbey. It shouldn't be hard to find on a search engine, it's a World Heritage site. At one end is a towering and beautiful ruined abbey, destroyed by Henry VIIIs cronies, and a deer park, and at the other is an elegant Georgian estate with water gardens and follies. Do you have follies in the US? A folly is a small decorative building with no very practical use, built by somebody wealthy enough to do things like that. Sometimes they were built as a way of giving employment in lean times. They may have been pointless in their day, but they make great places to play now.

And they were played in today, because we weren't the only people to escape to Fountains and the place was full of families. The estate is so vast that even when it seems overrun with kids and dogs it's not crowded at all. The pussy willow was out, and the dog violets and primulas, oh, and the frogs. Dogs and frogs. And toads.

The first toad we saw was so perfectly camouflaged that I nearly stepped on the poor thing. And the lake was very well supplied with frogs, and small children watching them, sometimes picking one up to have a look and putting it back again, all of them handling them sensibly and responsibly. No frogs were hurt in the making of this blog. One little girl told me which one was the mummy, and the daddy, and the baby. Very kind of her to explain it to me.

As for music - which was in the last blog post - on the way home it's often Iona, Lindisfarne or Dire Straits. 'Going Home' from Local Hero is one of my favourite pieces ever. But Tony had the radio on a classical station and I don't know what it was playing because all that lovely fresh spring air knocked me out and I slept most of the way back.