Out and about again (At last)

In my last blog, Diary of a Writer, I talked about the benefits of writing every day and building up a routine and said that I don’t always do that because life sometimes gets in the way. Looking back, it seems that those words were prophetic. A few days later I was given the date for an eye operation, I had been waiting for. The result is six weeks of being unable to write anything. (I was told not to use a sceen). I couln’t see well enough to read either, and was very grateful for audio books.
The down side of having the operation is that I have ‘lost the plot’ in the sense that the thread of the story I was writing no longer exists in my mind. The up side is that I won’t go blind, at least, in a few more years.
Fortunately I have notes, so that when I begin again I do have somewhere to start. In the meantime I have some catching up to do in the form of emails, routine admin tasks also some marketing tasks to carry out.
Last weekend I went out for a walk for the first time since before the op. I wore sunglasses to protect my eye, and it was pouring with rain (I Looked a little odd) I was determined to get out into the countryside. Six weeks of doing nothing except on days when I had a check up at the hospital was killing me. (Not literally)

We decided to follow a way-marked Route, and take the dog with us. This was a bit of an experiment as Welby, our two year old Border Collie, has been very car sick ever since we got him. Last week Steve took him to the vet (less than five minutes in the car), and said that for the first time he was fine. He enjoyed looking out of the window and generally enjoying himself. Now unlike many dogs he loves visiting the vet, and gets more and more excited the closer he gets to the surgery so we wondered if his expectation of a treat was the reason he wasn’t sick. We wanted to try him on a longer journey where he didn’t know where he was going. The dog was fine although I would be hesitant about a very long car ride, without seat coverings and towels to clean him up. He loves long walks so this will open up a whole new world for us all.

Note the collie stare

We started walking in the rain, but the path was good enough for me and my wheels and it wasn’t long before the sun came out. We though we were walking to a castle at the top of the hill and then back down into the village of Páramo.
Turns out that we had got that wrong, but we didn’t realise this at the start. The path was pretty rather than dramatic, cutting through farms and patches of woodland. Hamlets of two or three houses dotted the landscape but we didn’t come across any people. There was plenty to look at, piles of giant rocks were everywhere in the woods and in the fields, like huge cairns made by an ancient race of giants. I assume it’s an ice age thing, however else could such enormous pieces of rock be piled so precariously on the top of each other? Let me know if you know otherwise. It’s fascinating and in places a little bit spooky, I would have loved it as a child, clamouring, making dens playing hide and seek or even camping out under the overhangs. Do kids still do that, or have videos and computer games replaced that kind of thing?

Another interesting thing was the strangeness of the dry stone walls. Dry stone walls aren’t strange here they are the norm in Galicia and vary in the construction technique used from place to place. These were different and included oversized stones with strange markings, Gate posts which were too grand to be field entrances. Rocks of very different sizes fitted together and though the builder had abandoned everything he knew in order to make it work somehow.

As we approached one of the tiny hamlets, we found an information board which gave us the reason and its an interesting one. The castle at the top of the hill, The Torre de Barreiros, was knocked down sometime in the the twelfth century. Almost a hundred years before it’s eventual demise, the then owner got into a dispute with the local council, something along the lines of a planning dispute. The nobleman who was in charge of the council ( Which was less of a council and more of a lord who employed his relatives to police his lands) took it personally and started a battle which lasted about ninety years, and ended nastly with the owner being thrown in jail and told his family were about to be tortured unless the castle was taken down.
Not content with winning the dispute, the family we told that all of the building materials were to be taken away in horses and carts so that no castle could be built on the site in the future. A task that ruined the family. Lumps of granite perfect for building are scattered naturally across every field had to be removed along with the castle walls so they couldn’t even build a house. The locals took advantage, to move not only were they paid to move the rocks, they took the opportunity to use the stone to build their own houses and field boundaries. If the council realised what was happened they didn’t object. As long as the castle was destroyed and the family punished no one cared where the stone ended up.

I wanted to nose around the villages looking for castle stones but unfortunately there was a local fiesta and the fireworks signalling the start the parade and mass, scared Welby. He might have grown out of his car sickness but I can’t ever see him getting used to fireworks, especially the ones with load bangs.

Notice, I’m using the dog’s fear of fireworks as an excuse because, to be honest, I was glad to get back to the car as I felt worn out. We will return to look for the castle remains though it was a fun walk and an interesting piece of history.
One last photo. This tree is a beautiful relic of sustainable agriculture, livestock usually pigs roamed the forest floor eating acorns and young shoots thus managing the woodland and the oak trees were pollarded in this way for firewood. The tree made new growth each year but the young shoots were too high for grazing animals to eat and the tree was protected and allowed to grow old.

I’m more or less back to normal now, I still need to be careful and won’t be allowed to drive ’til the consultant signs me off, but in a practical sense I am back doing the things I do.
The next diary of a writer will come in the next couple of weeks and I’m looking forward new adventures in the wild, getting creative out in nature.
I am planning some new projects, now that I can see again and I’m excited about that. So join me next time for more about living in the Galician countryside and writing crime fiction.