Not-at-all-Blonde

By: Blonde Two

For someone who is definitely on the ditsy side of Blonde, I have been surprised recently to find out that I have a rather sensible, grown-up daughter.  This fact has crept up on me rather but I quite like it.  She put this in a nutshell on our walk yesterday when she said, “I think I am the Mum in this relationship.”  She is so grown-up that we have given her a blog name of “Not-at-all-Blonde”.

We had a rare day off work together yesterday and when we woke up, the sun was shining.  As  Not-at-all-Blonde had been asking me to take her up to Dartmoor for a while now, we decided that an open top drive, a stroll and a pub lunch would be the order of the day.  This gave me the perfect opportunity to have yet another go at catching the Holwell Lawn bluebells at the peak of blueness.

Not-at-all-Blonde learnt how to navigate back in the day when she was a Scout and she asked me to give her a few reminder lessons.  After a couple of pointers, she did really well and we walked through the bluebells down to the Becka Brook.  Extra excitement was added by the fact that the Pony Club were having a “mounted rally” in the vicinity. Those of you who know Holwell Lawn, will know that there is a cross country course set out here.  Those of you who are a bit silly will have, in the past, pretended to be a horse and run around trying to jump the jumps (who would do a thing like that?)  Feel free to try but I suggest that you don’t do it at the same time as the horses – they appear to be quite friendly but the horsey Pony Club ladies sound a bit shouty!

Not-at-all-Blonde navigated our way successfully down to the bubbly brown brook.  Where we had the obligatory cup of tea and dangled various limbs in the water.  It was truly idyllic, birds, sunshine, water and a cuppa – what more could two girls want?  Except that it would appear that we both wanted a little bit of adventure so we crossed the brook on a fallen tree and set off up the hill the other side to find a Bronze Age settlement to the West of Holwell Tor, marked on the map and visible on our way down to the brook.  Looking for these settlements is fun but they are often easier to spot from a distance than they are closer up – we got to several spots that we thought might be the right ones but as we walked back up the hill the other side, we could see that we hadn’t quite been far enough up the hill.

It was a lovely treat to take Not-at-all-Blonde out and we did enjoy our lunch at the pub afterwards.  Guess which one of us was silly enough to wear a vest top and come home with sunburn!