Signs of spring

Hello to you, I hope you’ve had a lovely week!  It’s Saturday afternoon and the sun is shining, and it is most definitely warmer than it has been for a while.  The birds are singing, there’s new life starting to show in the garden – it really feels as if spring is on the way!

I realised when I looked through my camera roll that I’m a bit behind with my photos (I found some of the snow that I took in January that I never wrote about, so I really am behind!) and I thought I’d start catching today with a few that I took from the other week when I went to see my friend Lucy in Skipton.

It wasn’t the brightest of days although it was one of those where the weather is dull but the air is warmer than you expect.  We decided to take a walk around the castle woods – always a lovely walk to do: up through the town, along the side of the canal with Skipton castle towering about us, crossing the small footbridge over the water and up into the woods.

And then up, up, up all those steps!  Phew, you need a bit of a breather at the top, I can tell you … or maybe I just need to get fitter!

The path levels out and although you’re still walking higher above the town, that incline isn’t getting your heart racing in quite the same way!

From there, the path loops around over more bridges, past stone walls keeping fields of sheep safely contained and back out towards the main road.  It’s a reasonable length of walk, long enough to get some serious chatting in which is always the best part about walking with a friend, and we stopped for quite a long time to admire the snowdrops which appear every year in the part of the castle grounds …

There were so many of them, stretching as far as the eye can see with their pretty, nodding heads.  They’re not just pretty faces, though – if you Google “fun facts about snowdrops”, you’ll find out all kinds of things about how they were used to defrost tanks during World War 2, how they’re named after earrings and even how they have their own built-in antifreeze!

The footpath takes back down the hill from here into the town again.  We passed more fields of sheep …

They’re spotty ones!

And look – there’s the castle!

I think it’s quite exciting to have a castle at the top of your town High Street!  It’s open to visitors and I have been in, although it was when big daughter was in the bump (we caused great consternation at the ticket office in case I fell down one of the windy stone staircases, but you’ll be pleased to know that I didn’t) so it was quite some time ago!  In the castle’s timeline, it’ll be the blink of an eye as Skipton Castle is over 900 years old (a similar age to our lovely church in Winwick) – it’s incredible to imagine what history the castle will have seen, isn’t it?

It’s always a good time for a cup of tea after a walk around the woods and it would have been rude to break the tradition – so we didn’t 🙂

I’m going to change the subject entirely now and tell you that it’s three years since our kittens came to live with us.  Three years!  Goodness, that time really has gone in the blink of an eye and I’m not sure I would have remembered if it weren’t for my phone sending me reminders of the photographs I took.  I thought you might like to see too 🙂

They were so tiny!  Hattie is still obsessed by water in the sink and we quite often find the taps covered in fluff where she’s been encouraging them to drip.  They’re both still very cheeky, although there’s no way that Astrid can sit on my hand like that now!  Astrid has been a stay at home cat for longer now than she was an outdoor cat (she was hit by a car just before she was one year old, in case you’re new to the blog) and although I think she’d still like to go outside, she copes very well with being an indoor cat.  We were trying a new game yesterday of rolling ping pong balls around the bath and after realising she couldn’t eat them, she just lay on them so I couldn’t roll them any more.  I seem to remember her doing something similar when I was trying to get her to run on her wheel – she doesn’t seem to be a cat that wants to exercise very much!

I haven’t taken any sock photos to show you this week – to be honest, I haven’t done that much knitting at all as I have been out and about quite a lot.  I went out for a spa day with big daughter on Thursday to Ruthin Castle in Wales and that was just lovely.  To have the time to sit around in a calm, peaceful environment and chat with big daughter with a massage, a hot tub session and a cream tea as well was a wonderful gift of a day.

I’ve also been working on the garage.  I don’t know if you remember, but in February I had levelled the garage floor which was uneven and over the last week or so, I’ve been replacing the floor.  It’s been a big job as everything had to come out of the garage for me to work and then go back in again (several times), but every time I put all the stuff back in there was a bit less as I decluttered a bit more, and on Monday I finished laying the floorboards.

Yes, I was very pleased with myself!  Phew, it had been a big job and I would love to tell you that the floor space is just as empty and not completely covered with all the stuff from the garage that I still need to sort out … but I can’t!  Mondays are my house work days and so guess what I’ll be doing this coming week!

I hope you enjoy the rest of your weekend and you’re safe and warm, wherever you are.  I’ll catch up with you again soon!