Tag Archives: gardar

Wednesday 3rd March 2021 – I DON’T KNOW …

… if today has been a good day or not.

It started off as a good day anyway because despite the late night I was up very shortly after the first alarm yet again.

And even though I didn’t have much sleep last night there was still plenty of time to go off on a wander around.

I’d been out looking for cars to use as taxis and I’d been out at the auctions. I’d come back with not one but 2 Cortina either Mk IV or V but they were 2-litres. They needed some work doing to get them ready for the road. I remembered the issues that we were having in Gainsborough Road about the local council not liking me working on cars there and how we were going to cope. My initial reaction was to build a high fence halfway down the garden so that no-one could see over it. Nerina thought that we would be in trouble with the planning permission people but I pointed out that quite a few of their Council houses had high fences halfway down the garden where people couldn’t see over. I thought that if the Council took proceedings against me I could bring them into disrepute because of the story about their fences. There was the issue of wheels and tyres with these 2-litres having slightly wheels we’d have to go through the collection to make sure that we had enough tyres, that kind of thing. It meant swapping over one or two that were already on one or two vehicles that we were using.
As an aside, all Cortinas (except the P100) used 13″ wheels but 1.3 and 1.6 models used 165/80 tyres whereas 2.0 and 2.3 used 185/70 tyres. Even so, when I had the taxis, as long as the four tyres were the same size I didn’t usually pay too much attention to what went on where

Later on there were 3 tough cowboys last night, 1 of whom was black. They were riding together and came into this town. There was a lot of racism in the old Wild West of course and the owners of the livery stable where they were going to leave their horses weren’t very keen on the idea of this black cowboy and were going to make a great deal of trouble about it. Next day the 3 cowboys assembled to ride off and went down to fetch their horses. The 2 white guys rode off first. The black guy had some trouble getting onto his horse so he was a good few hundred yards behind the other 2 and when he rode out of the livery stable the guy who ran it simply drew his gun and shot him 3 times. A passer-by came to investigate but the livery stable owner fired a gun in the air to frighten him away.
And it’s not very often that there’s a voyage without me in it anywhere, is it?

Having deal with the dictaphone first job was to unblock the sink. The water was taking about a week to disappear. While I was at it I cleaned out and tidied the cupboard under the sink.

That’s all cleaned and the sink unblocked but the water isn’t going out all that much quicker. I’ll have to buttonhole one of my neighbours and see if they are having problems too. But it started all of a sudden yesterday evening and I’ve no idea why.

The rest of the morning has been spent in dealing with a mountain of correspondence that had built up over the last few weeks, as many regular readers of this rubbish will recall, having received a reply from me this morning. I think that I’m up-to-date now so if you are expecting a reply from me and you haven’t had it, let me know.

After lunch I’ve been tidying up – some bits and pieces in the bedroom but also on the computer. I’ve come across another raft of stuff that I’ve overlooked on a memory stick so I’ve been organising that. As well as that, I had a phone call to deal with and also an important e-mail to do.

And then, rather sadly, I crashed out for half an hour. Another really deep one too.

seagull windowsill place d'armes Granville Manche Normandy France Eric HallThere was quite a lot of excitement as I set out for my afternoon walk today.

The seagull was up on his or her windowsill talking to the china or plastic bird on the inside. But it was also tapping on the window with its beak in a kind of morse code. It was quite insistent too. One of the neighbours had told me that the bird did this, but I don’t recall ever having seen it in action.

Having watched it for a couple of minutes, I headed off on my little wander around the headland – in the rain because while it might be dry at the moment the ground was quite wet and there were heavy dark clouds all around.

jersey english channel Granville Manche Normandy France Eric HallThis is a pretty miserable photo, heavily enhanced, and ordinarily it would be discarded but it’s here to serve a purpose.

Just now I mentioned that the weather has changed. The really nice weather that we were having over the weekend has gone and it’s taken the sea fog with it too, so we can have our view back. Right out there on the horizon we can, if we strain ourselves, just about make out the coast of Jersey

Unfortunately the image isn’t clear enough to see any of the buildings

Down on the beach, the crowds of the last coupe of days have dispersed. The tide isn’t right out yet and in any case, the Grand Marée is over for the next few weeks. The tides won’t go low enough to make it worthwhile.

ile de chausey Granville Manche Normandy France Eric HallAnother photo that I took today, simply because I could, was of the Ile de Chausey.

That’s a lot clearer today and with the photo being heavily enhanced you can see the buildings on the island. But there’s not a single boat in the image today. It was very quiet on the water. I walked around the headland to look out across the bay but there wasn’t even a boat around there on the water.

No interesting old cars today on the car park either which was a shame but the change in the weather seemd to have kept everyone indoors. I pushed off along the path in comparative quiet.

aztec lady lys noir charles marie chantier navale port de Granville harbour Manche Normandy France Eric HallWe have a change of occupant in the chantier navale today.

As well as Aztec Lady and Lys Noir, we have another one of the charter yachts, Charles Marie in there today up on blocks.

I suppose that it’s the right time of year to be overhauling them. No-one has the least idea of when things are going to reopen and the infection figures are not encouraging so they may as well be overhauled when there is nothing else going on so that they will be ready (if and) when things start to get back under way.

Back here in the apartment I had my coffee and coffee cake and then attacked another 20 photos of the Greenland expedition. I’m now ashore at Brattahlid, the goal of my voyage, and the home of Leif Erikson, the original Norse settler of Greenland.

Following in the footsteps – or the wake, rather – of the earliest Norse settler/voyagers was my ambition and we reached as far as Hvalsey and Brattahlid, but the third site, that of Gardar, eluded me. I was making tentative enquiries about going there when the virus hit and Greenland closed its borders

There was time for a half-hour or so on the arrears of Summer 2020 before knocking off for guitar practice.

Tea was veggie balls with steamed veg and vegan cheese sauce followed by jam pie and vegan ice cream seeing as I’ve run out of soya coconut stuff. I was going to make custard but I was running rather late.

At the moment I’m listening to a few concerts that I have up my sleeve. I need to find three live concerts to take me up to the summer. I’ve a couple in mind including another one that is extremely rare but it does no harm to listen through them all and make a few editing notes about where they can be improved.

When I listen back to some of the very first ones that I did 10 years ago now, it makes me wince. I must have learnt something, I suppose, after all that time. As for “Strife”, I had some feedback from, would you believe, California. It had been played in a RV Showroom and by all accounts had gone down really well.

So I’m off to bed in a minute. Shopping tomorrow and I’m low on supplies so I’m going to be loaded up like a packhorse on the way home. I need to gird up my loins and gather my strength.

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Friday 4th October 2019 – TODAY WAS A …

… little more optimistic and hopeful than yesterday. Helped quite considerably by the fact that someone who had annoyed us intensely yesterday and who was the cause of everything going wrong kept well away from the premises and we could all concentrate on what we do best.

For my own part, I had a much better sleep last night. Awake once or twice during the night to dictate stuff onto the dictaphone, not that I remember too much about anything. But what I do recall is that judging by recent conversations that I’ve been having with myself during the night, it seems that I’ve managed to lay a couple of demons that have been haunting me for a while.

And having read that final phrase back to myself, I realise that I could have expressed that much better too and in a different way, otherwise my readers in Kugluktuk, Celbridge and Cahors will have completely the wrong idea of what I’m trying to say and that might lead to complications.

This morning the two kids managed to have a lift to school with the neighbour’s boy (he remembered to turn up today) and Rachel was in a hurry, so I had a leisurely start to the day.

A hot breakfast followed by a little relax and then I edited and uploaded another blog entry from my voyage on The Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour. This concerned my visit to Hvalsey, one of the three important places in Greenland that I had really wanted to visit.

Up at the tyre depot I found everyone submerged in work. It’s the middle of the potato harvest but the torrential rain overnight had made digging impossible. Consequently every farmer and farm labourer in the whole of New Brunswick had sorted out all of the jobs that they had put off doing and dashed down to have them done right now.

Added to that, one of the printers, the one that we use most often, ran out of ink. And as the Accountancy program and the inventory are old Dos-shell based programs, the print manager wouldn’t change over the default printer in these programs to the reserve printer. I had to go through and change every single page by hand, and when the new ink arrives next week, I shall have to go back and change them all back again.

Mind you, it could be worse. They could have been GEM (Graphics Environment manager)-based programs and I haven’t worked in GEM since 1998.

And that reminds me – I have a computer that runs on GEM somewhere around.

After we finished work I went to the Irvings to fuel up Strider. Just on a quarter of a tank left and he’s done 479 kms. That’s a dramatic improvement on what has gone before, and I hope that when his new chip arrives, it’ll improve even more.

With everyone being out this evening I finished off the pasta from the other night and then watched the football. Cefn Druids v Bala Town in the Welsh Premier League. Bala were the better team in the first half and the Druids were somewhat aimless, but the score of 0-3 to Bala, and having two other goals disallowed for offside, was rather flattering. But a couple of substitutions for the Druids at half-time brought a much more stable team out for the second half and they actually played with a shape and with a purpose. But no more goals were scored, even though the match was quite entertaining.

That left me with a short time of not much going on, so I added another page to my voyage. I’m now at Brattahlid, home of Eric the Red and a second one of the three places that I desperately wanted to visit.

But unfortunately we didn’t make the third. Gardar, home of the Norse Catholic cathedral, was not accessible to us on this trip. I shall have to go back, but not tonight because I’m off to bed.

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Sunday 21st July 2019 – SO THAT’S ANOTHER …

… place crossed off my bucket list. And it’s been a long time coming too. But today I finally made it to Brattahlid, the home of Eric the Red and his son “lucky” Lief Ericson

But putting things into the correct order, I didn’t have my decent sleep last night unfortunately.

As seems to be par for the course these days I awoke at 04:05 for a trip down the corridor and again at about 05:55. However it was once more a struggle to leave the bed.

Outside, the weather is cloudy and misty with a lot of dampness in the air, almost raining. But then of course this is the south-west coast of Greenland. What was I expecting?

Breakfast was another early start today and I had once more to do without my medication seeing as we were leaving the ship almost immediately. A quite pleasant ride took us to the landing stage of a small modern settlement called Qassiarsuk which was all sleepy and closed up, seeing as it was some kind of unearthly hour on a Sunday morning.

We walked past a farm – one of the earliest modern sheep farms in Greenland, founded in 1924 – and then out into the countryside to a pleasant bowl in the hillside. The first thing that we encountered, opposite the modern church, was a small turf outline which, having been excavated in the past, was revealed to be a very small church dating back approximately 1000 years.

And that was quite an interesting find.

It is well-known that whilst Eric the Red did not embrace Christianity, his wife Thjodhild did. And there is a record of her insisting on having her own church built – the Þjóðhildarkirkja or Thjodhildarkirkja – at Brattahlid. The dimensions of this church, its timescale and the site of this turf outline as described in the sagas corresponds with what we know about her church.

A little further on are some quite substantial remains of a rather large stone church. Not as complete as the church at Hvalsey but substantial nevertheless. And it’s a big place too, as you might expect from Brattahlid, because this was one of the most important communities in Norse Greenland.

Close by are the remains and sites of several large stone buildings that were presumably storage rooms of some nature and also some smaller stone walls that might have been sheep folds.

There were also the foundations of a substantial stone dwelling house which are such that would appear to relate to a very important personage. As there wouldn’t be more than one such person in any community, this is believed to be the likely site of the homestead of Eric the Red.

All together, there are over 30 Norse sites in the immediate vicinity but many of them have been disturbed by more modern buildings or by agriculture. The ones by the church are the most clearly defined and complete.

Eric the Red took a couple of years to cruise along the Greenland coast to find the best possible place for his settlement and indeed his own home. The richness of the area here and the number of Norse sites are a testament to the wisdom of his choice.

As well as the Norse remains there are the remains of several Inuit beehive houses, and also a more modern reconstruction which looks as if it is about to suffer the fate of its predecessors.

Farther on still are a reconstruction of Thjodhild’s church as well as a modern reconstruction of a Norse longhouse. In the immediate vicinity was another outline in the soil that corresponds with the size and shape of yet another longhouse.

We had a good prowl around the site, finding several good viewpoints from which to take photographs, and I climbed right up to the hill overlooking the fjord where they erected in more modern times a statue of Lief Ericson. From here the view was even more impressive and we could clearly see several layers of raised beaches, showing just how much isostatic rebounding there has been.

Of course, I was not alone on my travels. I was accompanied by Strawberry Moose, complete with Viking helmet, who had several photo opportunities.

Interestingly, in the distance I could two barns or storehouses that belonged to the farm of 1924. These, as well as the base of the house of the farmer, were made of local dressed stone. There is no record of any stonemason being in the area at this time, so it might be that these stones were pillaged from the Norse site in the days when conservation was of little importance.

Back on the ship we had lunch, and then I went down to my room where I crashed out for an hour or so.

This afternoon we were all on the aft deck in the glorious sunshine, watching the world, the scenery, the fjords and the icebergs go by, until about 17:00 when it became too cold.

And that reminds me of something. I’ve learnt a new way of describing distance. In Europe, we would say that someone lived, say, 2 miles away. In North America, you would say, say, 2 hours away. But Tupaarnaq, our Greenlander guide told us that her uncle lived “two fjords away”. I shall have to remember that one.

After tea, our host Dave Newland performed a few songs off his latest album. He’s actually a folk singer and his songs are all about the High Arctic. It made me quite nostalgic.

But now it’s bed time. There’s yet another early start in the morning and I can’t afford to hang about any longer if I want a decent night’s sleep.

It goes without saying that I’m really happy that I made it to Hvalsey yesterday and to Brattahlid today, but just 10 miles across the bay is the Norse settlement of Gardar – the site of the cathedral and centre of Christianity in the Norse settlements in Greenland. And we didn’t have the time to go there.

I shall just have to come back!

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