Les allées couvertes...

Not far from the cottage is the Gorge de Daoulas, and if you follow the road through the Gorge for a mile or so you come to a steeply banked lane, almost tunnel like with tall branches closing in at the top.
A couple of hundred yards up this hidden path brings you out on top of the world... where you can find the Covered Alleys of Liscuis.

Nobody knows for sure the original purpose of these neolithic structures... of which we came across 6 all within a couple hundred yards of each other.

They could easily be used as shelters on this high, gorse covered, windswept place... although I find it hard to believe that stones of this magnitude would have been moved into these positions originally for shelter.

Whatever their reason this is a spiritual place...

with misty views over the majestic Abbey of Bon Repos.

barn

GREAT NEWS!!! The builder along with his brother and brother-in-law are going to do the barn... which used to house a cider press ;) -*

This is the back of the house and the barn's to the right of the picture

This is the barn from the lane to the canal... and as you can see the barn is built up to the lane. This means the builders will be using a kind of 'bookend' metal structure inside, tanking it etc. against water and then lime rendering the inside of the building....

The fireplace is filled with old piles of roof slate... The local roofer who fixed the ( previously caved in) roof of the barn was able to recycle a few rows of these which you can see on the previous pic.

Bathtime!!

... got loads of stuff organised... met with a builder who's going to give us a quote for doing the barn, which is great AND he seems to be pretty clued up and professional, so hoping for a good quote and we can get things moving :)

AAAnd we've * got * a * bath**** with hot water!!!

OK I know there's still I big hole in the floor so effectively you're in the kitchen but isn't it BEAUTIFUL!! No more trips to swimming pools/lakes/campsites to get washed. Pure.... luxury :)

The hot water's all off the log burner too; a gravity fed system means we don't have to depend on any electric, which is quite handy seeing as we don't have any  ;) (from a supplier I mean as we're off grid)

It's also been decided that sorting a stairs to get up to the bathroom is my domain.. mmmmm

Spring

I haven't posted here for a while..... have been setting up an internet based sock yarn shop!
This has finally been launched into space and you can view it at the link.

This week I'm going to split up some snowdrops as I'd like to encourage them to multiply down in the woodland..

Other creatures recently spotted

This is a european fire salamander. Sadly the one i saw a few weeks ago was squashed near the car but it was easily 5" long.

I spotted one of these tree creepers on an oak tree in the garden.

and a red squirrel

I'm looking out for these

Local wildlife

Over the last few months I've seen all sorts of wild and wonderful creatures in Brittany.

One late evening in spring while outside the front of the cottage I heard rustling coming from some old leaves by the front wall of the house.

Thinking it was probably the lovely fat resident toad I shone a torch at the leaves and was amazed, and not a little disturbed, to see about 15 huge beetles with massive front antlers; some on back legs locking horns with each other.

As soon as the light shone on the visitors they started to climb straight up the wall of the cottage heading for the (open) eaves.

After a fairly uneasy night they had all disappeared by the next morning and some internet searches revealed them to be rare and harmless stag beetles.

I've been trying to get some of the earlier photos of the cottage but they seem to be lost in the virtual world for the moment so here is a photo of the floor we laid, with the help of kind friends, over Easter.

It's sandstone and different slabs have different colours in them. Once the floor is all laid we'll brush in some pointing and then seal and wax it. The finished colour will be different; darker with more contrast.

We also managed to go for a few local walks. Here's a pic from a walk in the Bois de Gouarec... this is the viewpoint over the canal. From here we went in the direction of Bon Repos, crossed over a river and onto the canal towpath to complete the loop back to the cottage. There are various routes on a board at the beginning of the wood so we picked a fairly easy one. Saw lots of spring woodland flowers; wood anemones, primroses and lesser celandine that I could recognise.