First up, breakfast -- topped with the blackberries we picked on the way home yesterday. Yum:


Berry-fuelled, we tackled a wonderfully scenic little walk today.

Among its many amenities, our cottage makes available some books of walks. Short Walks (Northern Section) is a treasure-trove of not-too-long but rewarding-looking expeditions, and this was the first we tackled.

If you park at the entrance to Tholt-y-Will Plantation, you can follow a track that winds uphill, and gives you good views of Sulby Reservoir:







Eventually, you emerge onto the Druidale Road, whose wild views never failed to give me a little frisson even as a child. We were also treated today to occasional glimpses of Snaefell as it went in and out of the cloud:





The path back down takes you through the plantation (where fallen logs provide for comfortable picnic-lunch consumption).


All up, this was a top-notch walk. Lots of reward for comparatively little effort.

This evening, we walked back down to our nearby beach to survey the stars. It's very dark here, and the night sky is stunning. Truly, nothing puts your small life into perspective quite so effectively as standing on a dark beach, hearing the ocean breathing rhythmically in front of you, and gazing at the firmament glittering overhead...

In the little book of history that's provided for us here, there's a delightful account of a story told to the Manx Folklife Survey by an informant from the north of the Island: "Another thing we used to be told when we were children was that heaven was up above the sky, and we really believed it was there. When the stars were shining we were told that it was the lights in heaven showing through the floor -- we thought that there were holes in the floor of heaven."

Certainly, there were plenty of holes in heaven's floor tonight.