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The Gravelly Hill Interchange, popularly known as Spaghetti Junction, is a road junction in Birmingham Courtesy Historic England It covers 30 acres (12 ha), serves 18 routes and includes 4 km (2.5 mi) of slip roads If you wanted to drive along every road at the Junction itself, adhering to the Highway Code, you would Junction appears in the Guinness Book of World Records, as “the most complex interchange on the British road

Originally published on Photoblog by Gethin Thomas MARCH. 12, 2021 [223-365] 12th. March 2021- It's been a rocky couple of days. From cairns to gravel. Years ago, when we lived opposite, we had a gravel drive. At least that is how we described it. Today, now that we live opposite to where we lived then, we also have a "gravel" drive, but please note I now put the word gravel in quotes, because we are wiser and older and we have been inducted into the mysteries of the world of Elvan 14. You will notice that Elvan is Blue, but blue is so last decade. So where we were once blue we are now pink. I should add just in case you haven't realised yet that the photo above is not Street Art or Graffitti. No it is far more Street than that and far more serious. This is the local Elvan 14 storage bay and it isn't a radioactive isotope and it doesn't have a half life, it is rock, and it is rock hard. Many years ago in our youth (comparatively speaking) we were naïve and foolhardy and did stupid things like go to the local quarry where there are real quarry types with big muscles and big beards and big machines, and that's just the women. And we wanted a truck load of gravel so that is what we crept in and quietly and shyly asked for. "Can we buy some gravel please?" "We don't do gravel". A very long pause while we wait for the punchline, which doesn't arrive. Which is just as well with her muscles. We had just driven into the yard which was lined with bays full of different attractive pastel hues of gravel. So how do you form your next sentence without sounding facetious? "What is all that stone like stuff in the bays that looks like gravel?" "Chippens". For those of you not from round here, that's chippings. Back then it turned out that what we really wanted was Elvan 14, so we politely asked for a truck full. We also explained that when they delivered it, could it be an itty bitty truck because there is a bridge over a stream on the way in to the property and it is itty bitty and therefore prone to breaking when overly large trucks drive over it. Two days later a juggernaut pulls into the drive loaded with Chippens. Miraculously the bridge it has just crossed is still intact. We obviously have a language problem here, which is puzzling because we both speak English as a first language, even though I am Welsh, and we are still in England, even down here, and we have managed to make ourselves understood, even in rural Japan and up a mountain in Poland and in a souk in Morocco. The juggernaut was the tipper type which was a relief because we had a brainwave which involved the man mountain tipping and driving forward slowly at the same time, in a multi tasking manoeuvre which would have had the effect of doing most of the hard work for us and spreading the Chippens evenly along the drive. We explained this to man mountain and he nodded and got back in the truck giving a convincing impression that he had understood every word. Like when we ended up with miso soup in Japan that we asked for, and an ice cream in Poland that we asked for and a small leather satchel in the souk in Morocco that we asked for. Sadly there was then a thunderous roar as every Chipp of Chippens ended up in one giant heap in front of the garage door, the garage with the car inside. Almost as if he despised us. Upon which he drove the juggernaut over the itty bitty bridge again. At least it was a lot lighter on the way out. Today we are on a different mission though because we have left Elvan 14 behind and a year ago we discovered that we are now a Devon Pink home. We already had a "gravel" drive when we moved in and it obviously wasn't blue so last year we went on a vicennial (that's twenty years later) anniversary visit to the quarry, wiser, but still terrified. This time we went armed in the full knowledge that we needed Chippens, so we fairly swaggered in with braggadocio and flung down our small ziplock bag on the counter. This bag had a handful of the Chippens we now needed to match and they looked muddy and grey. We expressed an interest in purchasing half a truck of the sample enclosed and had to admit we didn't know what it was. BD as I will call her, with the muscles, tears open the bag. I hesitate to mention it is a ziplock and can be simply peeled open quite gently. BD already has the Chippens out on the counter. She shouts through to the back office, something undiscernible as a debate begins between aficionados of Chippens. All is resolved after BD licks the sample Chippens to reveal they are pink beneath the grey and the mud. Licking Chippens is the only definitive way apparently. Having destroyed the ziplock bag with one swipe of her bejewelled fist, BD offers us back our licked Chippens which in these Covid obsessed times we politely declined. Definitely Devon Pink she hisses. But that was a year ago and today we just needed to address a couple of bald patches in the drive, so we needed bags and a shovel and we were on our own. They supplied the bags which we could keep and a shovel which we couldn't. They are very trusting like that around here. So we drove back to the bay of Devon Pink across a great expanse of gritty, muddy, puddled, yard to get our daily exercise manhandling Chippens. We manhandled three bags of Chippens into the boot of the car with our beady eyes on the very useful shovel. It only briefly crossed our minds to drive off with the shovel until we realised BD had put her name on it, so reluctantly we drove back to the prefabricated office, perched on blocks, and guarded by three Alsatians on heavy chains, to return it. We followed what counts as normal procedure in polite society these days and when we got the shovel back out of the car we wiped it all over with anti bacterial wet wipes to hand it back to BD. We needn't have worried, there was no place for Covid in this quarry, as her disparaging look made clear. Covid wouldn't dare. The dogs snarled as we drove off, I mean the Alsatians.

This shot is at the start of the road looking downstream. It is five miles by road to Bigbury on Sea but a lot less on the river, probably half that. This is the shorter section of road that features marker posts. As you can see below, there is not a lot of room for error. It took fright, and pitched the occupants into the road.

Cheddaring is a cheese making process, while Cheddar is the cheese, a town, a gorge and a man. Cheddar is a large village and civil parish in the Sedgemoor district of the English county of Somerset. It is situated on the southern edge of the Mendip Hills. Cheddar Gorge, on the northern edge of the village, is the largest gorge in the United Kingdom and includes several show caves, including Gough's Cave. The gorge has been a centre of human settlement since Neolithic times including a Saxon palace. It has a temperate climate and provides a unique geological and biological environment that has been recognised by the designation of several Sites of Special Scientific Interest. It is also the site of several limestone quarries. The village gave its name to Cheddar cheese. The name Cheddar comes from the Old English word ceodor, meaning deep dark cavity or pouch. There is evidence of occupation from the Neolithic period in Cheddar. Britain's oldest complete human skeleton, Cheddar Man, estimated to be 9,000 years old, was found in Cheddar Gorge in 1903. In 1997, scientists were able to sequence DNA extracted from one of the Cheddar Man’s molars, and astonishingly were able to find two people living in the village that shared the same DNA as him, making the Cheddar Man a very distant ancestor! The Cheddar Gorge Cheese Company is the only company to make Cheddar in Cheddar. We join the process after the milk has been separated into curds and whey and the whey has been drawn off. This leaves behind the milk solids which make the cheese. It is what happens next which determines what type of cheese you end up with and many different traditional processes yield many different traditional types of cheese from hard to soft, dry to washed rind, young to mature. In the Cheddar making procedure, most of the moisture is drawn off in a draining and pressing process. This involves cutting the compressed curd into ever smaller pieces. This releases more and more liquid. A giant wheel of cheddar cheese was presented to Queen Victoria of England for a wedding gift back in 1840. It weighed over one thousand pounds. In 2015, around 3.4 billion pounds of cheddar cheese were produced in the United States alone. The caves at Cheddar Gorge in Somerset, England are a constant temperature of 7 degrees, providing the optimum temperature for the cheese to mature – and it still does so to this day. This cheese meister Luke. Originally, in order to claim the name cheddar, the cheese had to be crafted within 30 miles of Wells Cathedral, Somerset in England. In 1901, Scott of the Antarctic took 3,500lbs of cheddar (made in Cheddar itself) on his famous expedition. Due to rationing during the Second World War, and for almost ten years after, most milk in Britain was used for making a single type of cheese – ‘Government Cheddar’ – which resulted in almost wiping out all other cheese production in the country. The curd is being cut yet again. For the 1964 World’s Fair in New York, Wisconsin created a 34,951lbs cheddar cheese from the milk of 16,000 cows. Now the smaller pieces have the salt added. Salt is added for flavour, to increase moisture loss and also for preservation. Eating cheese late at night, the rumour goes, will give you strange dreams. As far back as 1964, a researcher noted that a patient stopped having nightmares when he dropped his habit of eating one or two ounces of cheddar cheese every evening. More recently, the now-defunct British Cheese Board, who funded a study in 2005 and concluded that eating blue cheese causes vivid dreams, while cheddar makes people dream about celebrities. Now those smaller pieces are milled into crumbs. Despite the fact that most people prefer their cheddar to be aged for a year and a half or less, there was recently some cheddar that was 40 years old. This was not intentional however; it was a lucky accident. Ed Zahn had made the cheese years ago when he was still working in an old cheese manufacturer in Oconto, Wisconsin and when he went back in 2012 he found this batch in the back of a cooler. Some people said that this cheese was so old it was barely edible due to the sharp flavour but it was such a rarity to find a cheddar aged for so long that it sold out quickly. Cheddar is made in at least 14 countries worldwide. At this stage any added ingredients can be mixed in. In this case garlic and chives are added and tossed by hand. The curd is then placed in metal drums where it is put under pressure. When removed the cheese is in the traditional truckle shape, wrapped in cheese cloth. The cheese can be matured in different ways and is a complex process. It is the cutting of the curd into smaller and smaller pieces and the stacking of those slabs to drain out the whey that constitutes the Cheddaring process. Mac'n'Cheese is said to be the most popular cheese recipe.

This is the ceiling of a room in the base of a church tower. The two-storey brick building has Hamstone dressings and a hipped tile roof. It made a lovely late summer walk, away from roads and with some beautiful riverside ancient woods. This first bridge was the Wilford road bridge, by the car park, itself very old, although not what we font and further east the small turret steps behind a glass door that in earlier times led up into a rood

The Jammie Dodgers are the favourite snack food of singer Labrinth and Dr. Who.

The screens, which were saved, are in safe storage. The ancient wood carvings on the Parclose Screens in the church had as recently as the 1860's been removed So the screens that we see today, I presume to be reconstructions using original parts. architect, of Plymouth, in A.D. 1869; until then the remains of a pair of fine old carved oak Parclose screens The two screens, will each be about l2 ft, long and about the same height.

So making grape jelly is a good isolation project.

It reached the main road and there was still half an hour to go. We sometimes have to have a seaweed clearance on the road after the highest tides. There are several actual tidal roads around here which go under twice a day for most of the year. Those roads are actually impassable or impossible so you need to know your tide times, as cars do sometimes

a mix of old and new, and once you emerge into the Market Square on the High Street you are in the Food and new goods section. lathe, a variety of chair legs from green wood. Using a spokeshave he shapes the green wood into spindle legs. You can see more of his work here. We are finding some good words today. Despoliation - The action or process of despoiling.

medieval castle more than a church with it's unusual pepper pot tower that originally gave access to the rood The stained glass is mostly modern but of good quality. Over in Kingswear they have the far more erudite names of Lower Contour Road and Higher Contour Road. This is West Alvington Woods with this years stunning display of wild garlic. I have never seen it this good.

Originally published on Photoblog by Gethin Thomas AUGUST. 06, 2021 Strictly speaking this is just one dominating structure in Tavistock that I did a whole set on because it fascinated me. I did drop clues in part 1 and part 2. As you walk up the hill from the town square this monumental structure starts to appear between the buildings and trees. Dated 1889 it comprises eight arches, five spanning fifty feet and three spanning thirty feet. The pier between the third and fourth arches from the western end includes a narrow archway. It closed in 1968 and is now a listed structure carrying a walkway. There is some discussion of reopening the railway.