No, I haven’t posted. Yes, my last posts were gloomy, featuring a dead cat and a stunned bluetit. No, that’s not really me. Let me catch up on what I’ve been doing since my last cheerful post.
The first genuine holiday I took this year was to Combe Martin on the edges of Exmoor. I’d booked it as a treat for us in the winter, when we were still almost thinking we might be back into lockdown for another long set of months. The cabin was booked through Canopy and Stars, a company that specialises in accommodation that is comfortable but not luxurious. This cabin was… made of lumber and recycled items. Which sounds like sleeping under a pallet, but it really, really isn’t.
Let me admit upfront; the original idea was stargazing. Exmoor is a dark sky reserve, and with all the building going on around our house, the sky is getting more and more polluted. The thought of a really dark sky… Try this one for yourself. Go outside any time after mid-September and find the constellation Orion (start by looking east). The distinctive three-star line of his belt and the smaller three-star line of his sword is easy to spot. Follow the line traced by that belt up and away from the east, until you find a tiny group of brilliant blue-white stars. That’s the Pleiades, the Seven Sisters, a group of relatively young stars still full of energy. Light from those stars has taken around 425 years to arrive on Earth’s surface. Queen Elizabeth the First was still alive when the light you see now was emitted from those stars. That’s truly alien.
If you can see the Pleiades as a set of distinct stars, congratulations, you have a pretty good dark sky. If you can see a murky bright glob, you’re probably near a city. When we first moved here, it was worth the mortgage to see all ten major Pleiades without binoculars. Now? It’s starting to turn into a bright blue white mass, most nights. If the Ministry of Justice go ahead with their threat to build Europe’s largest prison in a rural beauty spot ten miles away, the 24 hour lighting of that monster will turn our view of the Pleiades back into a murky blue blob.
So, Exmoor. Dark skies. Cabin set in a sheep field. Telescope weighing enough to tear the arms of two adults out of their sockets. English summer. What would you think might go wrong? We got the only full week of cloud and rain in June. I’m laughing more than grousing. Lugging the telescope around was good exercise, the cabin had the most comfortable bed I have ever slept in, no kidding, and the rain was warm. I could easily live in a cabin that size (maybe half again as big as my living room) if it had a bed and a silence and a view of Jacob sheep being total hooligans in the field below from eight till half nine every night.
We finished off the four night stay with a visit to friends of ours, on the run from the crowding and general unwillingness of officialdom to fight back against the nastier side of too many people per square metre, now living in Devon. The peace and quiet of their view reminded us of the quiet we enjoyed twenty years ago, when we first moved in and looked up at the Pleiades and said; “Oh my word.”
Julia Chalkley 