No, sadly we're not talking about the end of the COVID crisis. We are talking about a real tunnel.

One of the lovely adventures to undertake whilst staying at Gorge View Cottage, or visiting Cheddar, is to cycle along the old Strawberry Line trackbed. From Cheddar is goes to Axbridge, and here is about the only stretch on road as you get routed through the centre of Axbridge (2.5 miles from Cheddar) through the medieval town square and past St John's Hunting Lodge. What follows is the only steep-ish bit, back up to the course of the old railway line. Thereafter, with the occasional well organised road crossings it is flat or a gentle gradient.

The next main stop is Winscombe (5 miles from Cheddar), on the north side of the Mendips at it is on this section that the tunnel comes in, as it cuts under the Mendip ridge. As you see from the photograph it is straight and you can always see the far exit. But at 165m long, in the middle it can seem very dark. Solar lighting put in seems flakey so best to take bike lights or a head torch.

If you still have energy (remembering you must return this way too) then the next main stop just 1.5 miles further on is Sandford. Here a stop is definitely recommended because as the route now jinks through the orchards of Thatchers Cider, you can stop at the recently renovated Railway Inn which as the Thatchers HQ "tap" serves a wide range of ciders, alongside great food. Or pop a tad further along the road to visit the Thatchers shop  - local produce and ... well, yes, ... more ciders to taste.

The really keen might want to go the whole way. That gets you the full 11 miles from the cottage to Yatton station, which is on the mainline, from Bristol to Exeter and beyond. The Strawberry Line Cafe at Yatton station is itself worth a stop, run as a community cafe and provides work experience and training to adults with learning difficulties.

The Strawberry Line (National Cycle Route 26) takes its name from the strawberries that were taken to London by train in vast quantities back in the very early 1900s. The rolling stock was especially gentle sprung to protect the fruit. This all came to an end with the Beeching cuts of 1962. There are plans to one day extend it through to Wells and Shepton Mallett, and spurs to Clevedon and to Wrington. Slow work but it will be magical when done.
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Guests at Gorge View Cottage are welcome to borrow a couple of reasonable 21-gear bikes, one for ladies and one for gentlemen. We have helmets and can provide lights if needed. If you are not cyclists then the other option is to bus out (First Bus route 126 towards Weston-Super-Mare) and walk back. The bus can drop you at Axbridge, Winscombe or the Railway Inn in Sandford. Cheddar Walking walk #4 describes this, from Winscombe to Cheddar.

A slight gap in blogging, sorry, but it is due partly to busy life and partly because there was nothing obvious to blog about, and we don't want to blog for the sake of it.

But this time something for us that was remarkable. As some will know we use a camera-trap to monitor the garden, and particular any nighttime action. Recently we have had very regular captures of fox and badger on most nights somewhere in the garden, and sometimes hedgehog. 

Now we have always been a bit worried that badger and hedgehog don't mix ... badgers are known to attack and eat hedgehogs ... at least that's what we've heard. Which brings us to some recent video. We set the camera to view a little bit of shrubbery by the end of the main house patio area. We put it here because deep in the shrubs is a hedgehog house put there in the hope we might attract a hedgehog. We know we have one or more, but the question was are they using this purpose built "house". So just outside the place where it sits we put the camera.

And we caught lots of action, fox, badger, hedgehog and even (need a separate post) a wee mouse (we think wood mouse). We also know the many cats who wander through often sit and stare in to this area. Well the reason many come is seed - above in the shrubs we had had a bird feeder and the much-spilled seed is deep in the grass there. Equally clearly, badger, hedgehog and mouse all love this.

But the unusual  - for us dramatic - sequence was when a lovely few videos of hedgehog munching away, then becomes a series of videos with a young badger right in there beside it. For a scary moment we thought a soon-to-be-seen video might capture some ugly scene. But no. The hedgehog just hunches down (does not fully roll up) and stays still, for something like 7 minutes while the badger snuffles away at the seed - seemingly oblivious of, or certainly disinterested in the hedgehog. When the badger has moved on, the hedgehog stays still a few minutes longer, and then, seemingly unperturbed, carries on eating itself.

​So here for you enjoyment are are a few of the 20 second videos - before, during and after.

BEFORE - happy hedgehog

UH-OH - someone is coming

NOW - happy badger time

AFTER - happy hedgehog again ... wholly unperturbed by the encounter

Since we started with Gorge View Cottage we have donated £10 to charity for every booking we take. Initially we picked Prickles Hedgehog Rescue as our chosen charity and more recently we added The Mendip Hills Fund.

Prickles is a very local Cheddar success story driven in the beginning by the passion of one woman, Jules Bishop, who started looking after orphaned or ill hedgehogs in 2007. The project grew and grew in her regular home on an estate in Cheddar, and finally they managed to secure dedicated premises. They typically care for over 600 hedgehogs and hoglets every year. And that takes a lot of money. We are just giving our next donation to them of £250 bringing the total donated over the years to almost £2,500. Given that we are delighted to have hedgehogs in our garden, and indeed once discovered an unwell confused hog which we took to Prickles for care (although sadly it didn't make it), we are proud to be helping in a small way their brilliant and dedicated workers and volunteers.

​​The Mendip Hills Fund on the other hand is a community fund set up to conserve and enhance the environment, communities and economy of the Mendip Hills. It is a partnership between the Mendip Hills AONB Partnership and the Somerset Community Foundation. It is supported by local businesses and last year was able to give £11,000 in grants to thoughtful projects throughout the Mendips. Given that almost all guests at Gorge View Cottage gain from the beautiful and varied Mendip Hills we feel it is the least we can do to given back a little to the area, to help the maintenance and improvements that keep it special. The recent £250 donation brings our running total to MHF to £870.

So hopefully for all guests coming to the cottage they will know that every stay helps the local good causes.

Maybe it was that prolonged and unseasonal cold spell through April and in to May, but the pent up energy of nature seems to have finally burst forth this year. The Gorge View garden seems bursting with blooms. And the bees are loving it!

At first we were very worried to not see that many bees around and were concerned that the extended cold spell had hit their populations. But, at least here, the bee business has got back to normal albeit belatedly.

So as we wander the garden there are places where the noise of the bees if remarkable. Looking closely at flowering shrubs like the deep purple-blue Ceanothus (I had to ask Mary for the name!) you see it is covered in bees of all sort: honey bees of course, but a range of bumblebees (I love their Latin genus name of 'Bombus' - so appropriate), and solitary bees such as the Red Mason Bee.

Another amazing flower is the Passion Flower (see top photo). Mary planted ours on the front corner of the house years ago and it did nothing. We thought it was dying. But then, a few years back, it finally started to grow. And grow and grow. And now it is ballooning out and overtaking the thrusting Wisteria and the long-established Virgina Creeper. The flowers are extraordinarily complex, delicate and beautiful, and the knot of twisting green stems have amazingly tangly tendrils to help catch on to any support available. The bees love the flowers. Often you find a clustered mix of bees all feeding of one flower (and with no fighting). And whilst the 25 foot high tangle of the plant is covered in buds, at any one time only a few flowers pop out for a short but wondrous few days. After the late hard freeze in April the plant suffered badly, was brown leaved and looked very poorly. But within a month the health is back and the bees are tucking in to the nectar again.

They work so hard those bees - busily working before we are up and still going late in to the evening. Phew. We get so much value from these little workers and so it was a relief to hear that the EU has (after long deliberations and lots of lobbying from the agri-chemical industries) outlawed the use of neonicotinoid pesticides that have a hugely detrimental affect on the pollinator populations. They all still face other huge challenges, but at least one step has been taken to help them. Care for nature aside their contribution (for free) has massive economic value, but of course big business cannot grab that effort for profit.

​Anyway this was not meant to be a rant, more a celebration of the beauty of the blooms in our garden. Enjoy the photos.

Last weekend, as we have done for many of the last years, we were able to pop down to South Somerset for one of the loveliest day festivals we know: The Green Scythe Fair. Even the 50 minute cross-country run to it is beautiful, across the levels and up over High Ham to Langport, the wonderfully named Huish Episcopi and through the village Muchelney to Thorney Lakes. The last miles of lanes via Mulchelney were made famous during the heavy flooding of the Somerset Levels back in 2014 - the tiny village was cut off with boats needed to ferry people in and out of the village for over a week.

The fair itself is set in one large grass meadowy field where the grass has been allowed to grow nice and long. The centre of the field is set aside for scything competitions and the wide edge is lined with all sorts of stalls selling green crafts, local foods, almost all of it with an environmental or ethical foundation. A couple of tiny stages host small fun bands, and they usually have a afternoon debate tackling subjects with strong emotions on both sides. Power is all solar generated, loos are composting toilets (and very nicely kept).

This year, for the first time, the success of the fair led to it being closed to entry for a couple of hours after midday as the visitors hit maximum (5,000!) and the car queuing in the approaching lanes got dangerous. Next year they'll think this through better. Of course the preferred option is to get there by environmental means and in the past we've part-cycled. This year we went electric vehicle of course and they even had solar car charging available!

Luckily every time we've been it has been warm, usually sunny and (critically for the scything) dry! And the scything lies at the heart of it all. Lots of competitions to scythe a fixed area in races, heats and finals. Semi-professionals and complete amateurs; men, women and even children having a go (but safely). Education and workshops on the different types of scythe, and of course you can buy them and the bits to maintain them at some stalls). In competition points are given not just for speed, but style and quality of cut.

This of course generates a lot of freshly cut grass and hay. So there are pitchforking competitions, hay stacking, hay sculptures, and the many kids have a  great deal of fun building hay dens or just throwing the stuff around. Probably the one type of person who might hate all of this is anyone with bad hay fever!

We'll be going next year, and if you wanted to go then you can camp at the site (there is a very tidy permanent camping site right beside the fair), or of course you could stay at Gorge View Cottage and pootle down yourself.

We are delighted to announce that the cottage is now fully enabled for electric vehicles. We have just today had a new electric charging point fitted that can deliver 32A AC charging on a Type 2 connector. Most electric vehicles (EVs), and indeed newer "plug-in hybrid" vehicles, can use a Type 2 connector. The 32A charge rate will mean most EVs can charge from empty to full in 3-4 hours. Of course in practise most vehicle journeys are around 20-40 mile in range and so would only use around 12% to 25% of a battery's capacity, and a top-up charge would take less than an hour.
Our system is smarter still and will use the power coming from the solar panels on the cottage roof whenever they are exporting power. This means charging will be partly or wholly locally solar powered. The panels are not enough even on the sunniest of days to support the full fast 32A charging, but as our electricity supply has been 100% Green tariff since that was available years ago, a recharge will always be 100% from renewable energy. And if you do not want your car in a hurry then it can charge slowly and purely from the solar power available on the roof.
We will be offering EV charging for free to cottage guests and that means local travel will be completely free and green. All very exciting especially as the uptake of EVs and plug-in hybrids is accelerating, and now we hear news that the UK Government will ban sales of pure internal combustion (petrol/diesel) cars from 2040, and manufacturers like Volvo, and now BMW, are working to move their entire offering to electric, or electric assist, in a much shorter time span.

We're really pleased that the wildlife in the garden keeps growing. Lots of birds & bees of a wide variety, the badgers, foxes and hedgehogs, the frogs and toads and insects that love our ponds, the ladybirds eating the aphids on the veg, and even the slow worms. Now we have a new arrival on the block. Mary was just about to chuck some cuttings on top of one of our compost heaps when she jumped back with surprise. Basking in the sun was a beautiful Grass Snake (see picture). We got a photo or two as (s)he stayed perfectly still (playing dead?) yet keeping a beady eye on us. Finally enough was enough and the snake slid away. One more sighting a few days later this time in the weedy edges of the pathways through our veg plot.

We did have to check this was not an Adder (they're the one venomous native snake in the UK but rarely seen (very shy) and even more rarely in gardens. In all my life I have only glimpsed three Adders and then briefly as they quickly slide off. But no, this was definitely a Grass Snake, which is non-venomous. Apparently they can grow to two meters long. We reckon this one was about 2-3 feet in length, so maybe still youngish. Their one defence, a last resort as they prefer to keep away, is to excrete a smelly garlic-like fluid from their bottoms. Hmmm, something to avoid!

So - happy as we are to have this newcomer, we are also a bit concerned because the main thing Grass Snakes like to dine out on is frogs and toads. We have a very healthy population in our big pond, small pond and polytunnel pond, all helping to keep the slugs at bay. We'd be pretty unhappy if they all got gobbled up but hopefully the whole food chain should keep in some form of balance.

If you're expecting some reference to fossil-fuel-burning soot-belching locomotives, or 4-6-2 wheel configurations, or heritage railway lines, the sorry but this article is not for you. That's not to say I am not an enthusiast for this old and wonderful way of travel despite its less than great eco credentials.

No. This article is about the rise of steam cleaning. For the cottage we have always used eco products, including EM (effective microorganism) cleaners. But of course better still is to use no products at all. And that is possible using steam cleaning. A pretty old technology brought up to date, and for some years now it is something we use on every turn-around of the cottage. It not only sanitises using the heat of the steam, but also loosens dirt for easy mopping up with a micro-fibre cloth.

Whilst no chemicals are involved, it does of course use energy to heat, and then keep hot, the pressurised water container. Given that we clean during the day when no other power is being used in the cottage, the steam cleaner is pretty much fully powered by our solar panels if sunny. If not sunny then the PV contributes and our green import electricity does the rest. And we're not talking much electricity anyway for a hour or so's use.
 
We use our Karcher Steam Cleaner (pictured) to clean the oak floors, the bathroom (floor, wall tiles, grout, glass and ceramics), and the kitchen area including if needed the oven. We still use eco-products on kitchen and other surfaces, and the toilet, but steam is king otherwise. We also see that this has over the years helped enormously with maintaining the condition of the wood floors and tiles - for example almost no little black mould forming on grout and sealant in the bathroom.

So we're converts and are very happy to strongly recommend this way of eco-cleaning.

Toot, toot.

It has been a while in coming but we were excited to have our first electric vehicle (EV) at the cottage this week. Our guests had checked ahead to ensure there is a charging option, and whilst we don't (yet - but see further on) have a proper fast charging point, we do have an outside power point on the cottage. It is right beside the car parking area and so it means a 13am (3kW) charge can take place which is more than enough to "refill" a empty EV overnight (6 or so hours).

This also meant we had to decide on policy for the cost of that, and we have decided that, in the same spirit as our 10% discount to encourage car-free travel, we will provide the EV charging for free as part of the rental. Refilling a small EV should only cost around £3 a day if completely empty and charged to full. And for this particular EV that gives around 75 to 100 miles range, plenty enough to explore the area, completely emissions-free. We feel that seems reasonable. 
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Of course if the charging is done during the day then solar power on the cottage roof will be used, reducing cost. And as far as the green credentials go, as the cottage uses an entirely "green" electricity supplier (Ecotricity) all the electricity pumped in to the car will have come from renewable energy sources (hydro, wind, solar PV ...).

​We ourselves would love to get an EV. We have a Prius hybrid that is now 13 years old and with almost 200,000 miles on the clock. Still going and in good condition and the great mpg is holding up - the all-important battery seems fine. Mary has her tiny IQ too which does as good mpg as the Prius.

Whether or not we ever get an EV we have resolved this year to install a proper fast charge point on the cottage for our cottage guests, and that will mean a full recharge in a few hours. There is no doubt that EVs seem to have come of age, and yet as the technology is improving fast it makes it difficult to know when to jump and maybe buy. And of course there is the whole issue of embodied energy costs by just getting a new (or newer car). We typically have owned cars until they literally cannot be repaired for anything like a sensible cost. End of life. Yet it does seem that EVs have become practical and not just exotic: the charging network is good and growing, petrol is going up in cost (irrespective of the climate change argument, this is inevitably over time as sources run out and get harder to find). EV range has grown to the point of safe practicality for many people's usage. And running costs are ridiculously low: fuel, servicing (with no complicated engine) and tax. So getting an EV now starts to make sense but one question has to be will it be good for the next 10-12 years? The Prius Hybrid has proved spectacularly good and yet hybrid drive was a new, exotic and uncertain technology in its time. So I am hopeful.

We must give honourable mention our longest serving vehicle, our VW camper van, bought in Holland second-hand over 30 years ago. Still going strong, but needing some degree of TLC every year even though we only use it modestly. It seems it is now becoming a classic vehicle, our daughters have grown up knowing it, are now borrowing it themselves! It really seems part of the family. So that's one vehicle that is not going to be sold (unless maybe EV campers become available).

A few days ago we heard about a new initiative in Frome, not that far away from us, that has a very strong and green-minded community. They've opened a "community fridge": a large fridge in an outdoor kiosk by the library. Anyone can deposit perishable food that they will not use before the use-by date and anyone is free to help themselves. It helps to reduce food waste, which is a massive issue for our society, with waste in all parts of the production chain including those who buy more than they need and it most often ends up in the bin and off to landfill. Hopefully it will be a success.
In the cottage we have had a similar problem. Many guests leave small amounts of excess food they don;t need or want to take home. If it is perishable we try and use it ourselves. But if it is non-perishable we have taken to leaving it on a shelf in the cottage labelled for further guests to use. So salt, pepper and herbs, condiments, and teas and sugar. That sort of thing. All good.
​The conundrum comes with the provenance of the food stuffs. We obviously like to promote that everything we provide in the cottage comes from local, ethical and ideally organic sources. But the bits and bobs left are often not so carefully selected. And that is fair enough, we're not trying to be green police, making people feel awkward or guilty. We prefer the subtle approach of 'by example'. A recent example was some body wash left in the bathroom; a good but not ethical brand. We would not use it ourselves, and body-wash is not something we normally provide as part of the self-catering cottage deal. Should we throw it away which is a waste given that it has been produced and is perfectly viable? Or should we leave it for guests to use if they have, for example, forgotten some shower gel of their own?
We have chosen to leave it there, as we do with the condiments in the kitchen which are not the sort we'd normally buy or supply. In doing so we risk people seeing us as lax in our green standards, not practising what we (gently) preach - we cannot put signs everywhere explaining what is, or is not, 'left-over'. We hope the risk is small and people will understand what we are doing and why.
Ultimately another example that trying to be green, sustainable and ethical, is never as black and white as we'd all like to think. Or should that be 'green and white'.