Garden Blooms

I have Campanula and Chinese windmill palms in flower

Monkshood, the queen of poisons (if ingested)

A most obscene looking peony

Astrantia and Firefly broom

Tutsan, (Hypericum androsaemum)

Bara Brith

(We've been in Wales for 4 weeks already! Time has flown by)

Speckled bread is a traditional Welsh bread, known as bara brith (pronounced bara breeth). I made a sweet, tea infused version that is more cake than bread, but which is the most widely served kind. It's pretty much like a regular fruit cake and is definitely speckled.

I then dove a little deeper into the origins of this bread, and discovered that it had traditionally been a yeast bread with sugar, mixed spice and fruit for special occasions in the mining community. 

I tried an online recipe of the yeast version, which came out like this. Funny thing was, this one didn't have any tea in it. It tasted just like hot cross buns for Easter, it just didn't have a white cross on it.

I tried to find a more 'traditional' tea and yeast bread, and found one from The Great British Bake Off TV show, so I tried to see what the tea version was like.

Mixed dried fruit plumped up with tea. The remaining liquid part of the tea is used, too.

This is it

Well, it was okay. Meh, nothing to write home about, though that is exactly what I'm doing! Definitely bready, but no real impact from the tea. I'm going to stick with the fruit cake version from now on. We both like it more.

You just never know where curiosity will take you! In researching breads, waterfalls, town and river names, I have stumbled onto a pattern of Welsh naming conventions - the common noun comes first, followed by the specific name, so for Bara brith: bara is bread, brith is speckled. For Pistyll Rhaeadr, the literal translation would be Waterfall Rhaeadr and for Afon Cain, it would be River Cain. In English, we're more likely to say Cain River or Speckled bread. So happy to have worked it out for myself!

Solar Update

Our solar panels are installed and wired up on our roof, with the first generation of power happening late on May 28, though we had waited a short while for a cable and some other bits and pieces that were not shipped by the supplier in time for the installation. The initial delivery was badly transported and the weight of the panels crushed the wooden pallet. It was feared some of the fragile panels may have been damaged too, so everything was sent back and re-ordered, but some pieces took longer to be rounded up than others. 

The installation company (PAV) was happy to adapt and tweak the design as we went along, accepting and discussing input from us along the way.

The last panel about to be placed

We've had scaffolding around our home for 2 weeks, making it almost impossible to park our car in the garage. We're told that the scaffolding company only removes it when the next job is nigh (aka we are a temporary storage yard), but our contractor said our container's arriving next week so it must be removed chop-chop! It worked - the next working day it was gone. It took less than an hour to dismantle.

This is our power wall in the garage - still needs some tweaking. Dale walks around with his phone, calling out how many kW we're generating at different times.

Welsh Gem

This most stunning Welsh waterfall, Pistyll Rhaeadr is but 10 miles from our home in the Berwyn Mountains. There are a series of 3 drops down the rock face. 

As you get closer the 240ft drop looks even more impressive. That natural rock arch is so amazing!

Local Legend says that a serpent with wings, known as Gwybr (GWEE-brr, the shining white dragon), lived in the lake above the waterfall and once every few days would fly down the valley to the village and snatch children, women or animals, taking them back to the lake to devour them. Gwybr Legend

We were lucky to find a shady parking spot near the river Rhaeadr, where we sat and ate a calming picnic lunch.

My knight made sure the serpent didn't capture me

There's so much luscious greenery here