Devotees

An irresistible pairing from the Victoria & Albert Museum

Head of a Buddhist devotee

Victorian ladies

A Day in London

We traveled yesterday from Coventry to Heathrow, dumped our bags at the Hilton, and took the Piccadilly Line into London for a day's recuperation before flying back to Portland. Here are a few shots.

Section of the walkway from the Hilton to Terminal 4

The Victoria and Albert Museum is into style. 

Here the young ladies are admiring their mothers' fashions.

This fellow was sketching for hours, and attracted a small crowd.

Escalator at Harrod's Department Store

Soccer shoe display

In the Fog

Between Land's End and Sennen Cove we walked along the road rather than the Coast Path, because the fog lowered the visibility and made the rocks dangerously slippery, But fog can be provide some evocative effects for photography, as seen in the first two photos.

Close to the road, fog doesn't interfere, but it softens the light - also a good effect.

Coventry

We're in Coventry, UK for a conference for a few days. Yesterday I explored some of the main attractions in the center of the city. Here are three photos, all of them impressionistic fragments of much larger scenes. More will come later.

Coventry Cathedral: Small portion of the huge tapestry by Graham Sutherland, 

flanked by half of the organ

Holy Trinity Coventry: Medieval painting of the Last Judgment, painted in the 1430s

Coventry Transport Museum: Exhibit of historic bicycles

Pendeen to Sennen Cove Revisited

Some more photos from the first serious hiking day of our Cornwall trek. The remnants of the mines are striking additions to the otherwise beautiful scenery.

St. Ives Revisited

Now that we've completed our Cornwall hiking trip and I've posted a few photos from each day, I'll go back to the beginning and post some more keepers that didn't make it into the first round. So here's from our first full day in St. Ives, June 18.

From certain viewpoints, the St. Ives beach looks like the Caribbean.

I'm intrigued by the "Takeaway Public Toilets" concept.

A white railing in front of a white wall at the Tate St. Ives

View from the 2nd floor of the Tate St. Ives down to the first floor and out to the beach

Barbara Hepworth's workshop where she made plaster molds

Mousehole Scarecrows

As we walked out of Mousehole along the Coast Path yesterday on our way to Marazion, we passed a set of small gardens on the cliff overlooking the sea. Each was protected by a fanciful scarecrow, Here are some examples.

Last Day in Cornwall

This was our last day in Cornwall. Our walking tour took us on a long (7 mi) but flat walk on pavement along the coast from Mousehole through the active fishing village of Newlyn to Penzance and finally to Marazion, which Dylan Thomas called "the prettiest town in England". It's also supposedly the oldest town in England, chartered in 1257 according to a sign in town.

Mousehole harbor, looking back to the town

A beautiful stand of nasturtiums on the way out of Mousehole

Statue honoring the fishermen of Newlyn

The Pirates of Penzance

The big attraction in Marazion is St. Michael's Mount, like Mont Saint Michel in France an impressive medieval monastery/castle on an island in the middle of a bay, reachable most of the time only by boat, but at low tide by walking.

St. Michael's Mount as sunset approaches

Chevy Chase, the formal dining room of the castle

Impressions of Queen Elizabeth's and Prince Phillip's shoes when they visited in 2013

 An attractive building in Marazion. Note the seagulls on the chimneys.

Marazion street in evening light

Penzance

Monday (June 22) was an urban day. After breakfast we took the bus from Mousehole to Penzance (a stretch that we'll walk tomorrow) and spent until mid-afternoon sampling civilization in Cornwall's biggest town.

Penzance was the birthplace of Humphry Davy, known to all students of chemistry "for his discoveries of several alkali and alkaline earth metals, as well as contributions to the discoveries of the elemental nature of chlorine and iodine" (Wikipedia). As these photos show, he is memorialized in a number of ways in his hometown.

We went to a very nice exhibit of late 19th C painting at Penlee House Gallery and Museum. "Cornish Light: Nottingham 1894 Revisited" is a reassembly (to the extent possible) of the paintings shown in 1894. The particularly attractive feature of the exhibit, to us, was the focus on the Cornish locale and way of life by some very skilled painters. Unfortunately, photos were not allowed, but the entrance to the museum was guarded by this impressive primitive cross.

In an attractively modern restaurant we enjoyed a lunch of smoked salmon and mackerel. I snapped a picture of the two waitresses behind the bar.

After lunch we went to another museum, the Exchange Gallery, where they showed banners, videos, and photos of the reenactment of the ancient Cornish celebration of Golowan and Mazey Days.

Waiting for our bus back to Mousehole, at the station near the harbor, I was struck by the boats listing to their sides in the low tide.

Porthcurno to Mousehole

Sunday: a day of considerable variety. We decided to avoid the most difficult part of the hike by taking a bus from Porthcurno to Lamorna. Since the Sunday bus was at 11:23 AM, that left us a good chunk of the morning to visit the Porthcurno Telegraph Museum. To quote VisitCornwall,com, "Porthcurno became an unlikely hub for high-tech global communications in 1870 when pioneering engineers laid thousands of miles of undersea cables from the remote sandy beach to Bombay, India."
This is quite an extensive, well-done museum with particular emphasis on the role of communications during WW 1 and 2.

The bus dropped us off at the road into Lamorna, which is one of the few remaining wooded cove towns in Cornwall. A number of artists seem to live there, and we enjoyed a small art exhibit along the walk.

The harbor itself is picturesque, with the Coast Path running up the headland into the distance.

Much of the path is wooded (and in places quite rocky) with beautiful views out to sea.

Approaching Mousehole from above, the array of flowers adorning the walls was striking, perhaps as colorful as anything we've seen thus far.

Our hotel is right on the harbor, which was at low tide with stranded boats during the afternoon.