enchanted valley

When we bought the house the owner, after my wife had reduced him to a cringing mass of jelly during the negotiations on price, threw in a piece of land free.

Apparently it had been in his family for ages, which I can well imagine because the lands belonging to our house are the same as they were in the 1600s, but nobody in living memory had ever been up to see the land or to find out where it was, so you’re looking at at least a hundred years of abandonment. Considering how high it is that’s not surprising really. It’s denominated, high pasture.

So we inherited the same problem as they did; how do you find three quarters of an acre of land in the middle of nothing, five thousand feet up the side of a mountain with no reference points to go by? Then this week, the wife managed to find the GPS co-ordinates on the newly computer literate land registry. So we have been able to plot the plot on the map with extreme accuracy and I now have the coordinates stored on my GPS. It’s even got water.

For years now every time I go to the top of the mountain I look down and see the ruin of a fantastically placed sheiling house on a remote promontory. But the way down has always seemed a little tricky so despite wishing to marry the house, I have never actually gotten down to see it. But it’s always fascinated me. A dream position for a house. So imagine my contentment when I discovered that our land is pasture land attached to that sheiling.

Yesterday as I went to the top of the mountain to check on rock carvings again, whilst I was passing I had a look down from above and to see if I could make out more or less where our land was. I’d sussed out the morphology from the balcony with map in hand and my binoculars but from above, well, WOW!! What a lovely view. What a lovely spot. It’s in an area where nobody goes, in a beautiful though steep valley running down from the top of the mountain which the photo does not in any way do justice too. Now I’m absolutely itching to get down (or up) to it.

Not that you can do much with it because it is only a little patch of land. But, hey, until I bought my old house I’d never owned land before. It’s still a thrill. I mean, it’s just a piece of land on a mountain, but it’s my piece of land (oh, alright, our piece of land, tch! Tch!) I’m delighted. In a society where land is owned by everyone else, having our own land is an idea I like. Even if only just to go sit on it or put a tent on it or something and say high to the rocks and stuff..

You can just see the house at the base of the promontory on the top right of the photo and the land is somewhere between it and the gully just visible below (not the steam) at the same height as the sheling.