tumpy grumpy

Photos to come later from our weekend walk around the Dursley Five Peaks. Some of the route overlapped with the slightly longer walk we did as a training run for the ill-fated Dartmoor expedition back at the end of 2006, most notably around the neolithic long barrow of Hetty Pegler's Tump. There's been a bit of change in the intervening two-and-a-bit years, though, as you can see from this photo:


A repeat of our tomb-disturbing antics from 2006 (pictures here) was quite obviously out of the question. It seems this blocking-up activity was at the official instigation of English Heritage, and was in response not to anything as thrilling as the unquiet spirits of the dead rising up and possessing those foolish enough to penetrate the tomb's portals, and sending them rushing shrieking, white-haired and incontinent back into the daylight, their sanity destroyed, but the rather more mundane problem of some internal subsidence and persistent vandalism (my suspicion is that it's the latter more than the former). As usual The Modern Antiquarian has an extensive picture gallery.