This walk: 2010-4-21. Jimmy Bickle's Lane, step stile, church stile, Horrabridge, Pew Tor, Great Staple Tor, Vixen Tor, IngraTor, lesser celandine, violets, dandelion, dry leat, halo around the sun, dismantled Plymouth & Dartmoor Railway, poetry plaque, stone row, spring, Black Brook, cattle "creep", new-born lamb, Gipsy Rock, daffodils, crustose lichen, Dartmoor longhouse.
Dismantled Plymouth & Dartmoor Railway track - 2, looking the other way.
The bridge under the railway has incorporated old railway stones that the rail ties were once attached to .....
One of the five mystery plaques bearing poetry that appeared around the Walkhampton area .....
Close-up of another railway stone with two old nails broken off, still in place.
Stone row, discovered in 1963, at SX 55000 70700 .....
Looking the other way, the row runs through gorse bushes to a tall blocking stone.
Moor Strollers relaxing .....
The nearby spring forms the head of Black Brook, which runs into the River Walkham.
| Dartmoor CAM movie A 180� panorama of the area, panning rather quickly and half back again, finishing on Vixen Tor.
|
|
Click the photo to download File size: 2 MB. Time to download: e.g. 13 secs Length 18 secs |
A cattle "creep" under the railway. Some of the associated iron work can be seen to be old railway rails.
Cows .................
Along the way.
New-born lamb.
Explaining Gipsy Rock ....
Gipsy Rock .....
Gipsy's Rock, seen to be sedimentary i.e. laid down in layers and not an igneous granite. It is probably changed by heat and therefore it must be metamorphic, with the heat that came from the very hot igneous granite intrusion from the upwelling of the Dartmoor batholith, forming a gneiss? The study of rocks is called geology. Some rocks contain specific chemical elements that enable them to be classed as minerals. There are 4174 minerals on the Mineralogy Database.
Daffodils down a private drive ..... "You must take a photograph!"
I took a photograph .....
Did they wait? Did they jiggery!
A brown crustose lichen on an old tree stump, with fruiting bodies ..... possibly Melanelia subaurifera .....
Close-up of the lichen fruiting bodies (singular - apothecium, plural - apothecia) - probably lecanorine in this case. Lichen reproduction is by means of fungal spores (produced sexually) that drift on the wind, settle, germinate and then must encounter a suitable algal cell in order to start the symbiosis that starts a new lichen "plant".
Special gate hook, fixed low on the gate for Dartmoor pixies .....
Close-up of the gate hook.
All photographs on this web site are copyright ©2007-2016 Keith Ryan.
All rights reserved - please email for permissions
