Old and New

We have had a fascinating visitor attraction on our doorstep for over 2 years now, yet it has taken all that time to actually make the effort to go there despite driving past a couple of times a week for all of those two years!

The attraction in question is called Northumberlandia and is a wonderful piece of public art in the form of a landform sculpture in the shape of a female created from the clay, rock and soil of an adjacent opencast coal mine. Northumberland being the county of England in which the sculpture is set.

The various elements of the sculpture only become apparent as you move around the site. You can see the face above, and can perhaps see the scale of the site with the very small human perched on the forehead!

And here's the view from that self same forehead :)

The sculpture is 100 feet high at this point and is in total a quarter of a mile long. If only this had been here when our boys were younger, it would have been the perfect place to bring them to burn off some excess energy :)

You can just see in the background here, the opencast mine from which the material for the original structure was taken. With its constant movement of large trucks and machinery, the mine and the viewpoint from the top of Northumberlandia is a big attraction for boys young and old!

Equally impressive, but from a very different era is another local attraction, Belsay Castle, the original part of which was built in 1614.

and the plaque to prove it is still there!

As is this intriguing carving in an outhouse wall.

Graffiti, do you think? Certainly superior graffiti if it was :)

It makes you wonder what modern buildings will look like in 400 years time doesn't it?

And speaking of time, there is still time to link up to this month's Ho, Ho, Ho and on We Sew Link Party before it closes tonight

Link up at SLIK stitches to be in with a chance of winning this great pattern.

Linking up to