Originally published on Photoblog by Gethin Thomas AUGUST. 11, 2020
[6-365] 11th August 2020- Since moving here we have discovered that village life is very different to city life. Everyone seems have some sort of link to everyone else.
This gentleman was just finishing his kayaking for the day, the tide was on the way out. We got talking. He was retired and had a little part time job for an Estate Agent (Realtor) erecting For Sale signs. He had put up the sign on our house a year ago, before we bought it. Opposite our current house is a house we used to own sixteen years ago.
This gentleman was born and grew up in this village but moved about five miles away when he retired. He was explaining how the village had changed since he was a kid. The houses behind me where I took this shot was an orchard where he used to play football as a child. One of the roads in the village is called Willows. He said that it was a field where willows were grown. Presumably to harvest and make baskets and lobster pots.
At our previous home, in the garden, was an iron disc about six feet across with a hole in the middle about a foot across. It was more than an inch thick and so heavy it took two of us to move it. I later discovered it was a blacksmiths tool. When wooden wheels were made and banded with iron rims, the wooden sections were assembled and the large wooden hub of the wheel fitted in the hole of the disc laying flat on the ground. The rim of the wheel lay flush with the metal disc keeping everything flat and true. The iron rim was heated up and dropped over the wooden wheel whereupon cold water was poured on and the metal contracted and shrunk, tightening the wooden wheel to make it stronger.
I mentioned this to the gentleman and he confirmed that indeed there was a blacksmiths workshop on that site when he was a child and even named the blacksmith and remembered where he lived in the village.
It's a small world around here.
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