Charlotte booked me onto this Portland stone stonemasonry course. She's the crafty one in the family, not me, so I had to do a good job here otherwise she'd ridicule me forever, and she'd be right to do so.
Seeing as I don't have an artistic bone in my body, I didn't have a giant library of drawings that I could select from like some of the talented people who showed up today. One guy had a full-on sketchbook that he selected his piece from. I felt woefully inadequate. Still, I was trying to kick within my coverage here, and I feel like I did that pretty well. I set out to do my thing, and I'm happy with what I did. How delightfully average.
The carbon paper looked cool after I'd traced my design. Yep, traced. I'm that artistic.
You use this pointy fellow to do what's called "sparrow pecking". I like sparrows, and I like this effect. You basically just chip away at stone. It's super relaxing. Until you accidentally chip away too much - then you need to try and make it look intentional.
I got quite into this so I didn't take many progress photos. This is just before I started tidying everything up and getting ready to finish. The little green thing in the bottom left is a sanding block made from diamonds. Real f**king diamonds.
The finished article.
After the class, and on the advice from some locals, we visited a quarry on the coast. If I take one impression from this island it's that walking in any direction will show you something interesting.
Tabitha looked cool as hell today.
The miners would pile rejected stone, and it looks cool from above. Warning: a lot of this looks cool from above, and the photos reflect this.
There's a huge graveyard that backs onto a quarry. All the gravestones seem to be made from Portland stone. It's one of the shorter circles of life.
I believe the locals call this Portland Henge. I was wrong. Portland Henge is in here somewhere
In a terribly insufficient way, the last two photos show the gradient from the quarry to land. On the right in the penultimate photo, you can see Portland Henge, and that tracks all the way out to sea. When standing there, though, the distance seems a lot shorter. Probably something to do with Pythagoras; the crafty little bastard.
Feeling very positive about everything at the end of the day today. In terms of mood, I couldn't have gone much further south from yesterday (something about going further south and ending up in the sea). Portland feels like a very special place. It seems like the sort of place that could easily be very hostile towards outsiders, but I haven't experienced that at all. I've met and spoken to some really interesting people who are keen to show the island off. It's nice, and decidedly un-British. I also feel like if the millionaires discovered this place, it wouldn't be as worth visiting. If you're a millionaire, avoid Portland. If you have a normal amount of money, come to Portland!
Tomorrow we're going to do more walking. There's a Grand Design on what seems to be the south-west of the island that I know Charlotte would like to see, and I will always take an opportunity to look at a nice view, and send the drone up to look at it from a different angle. There's also a mop fair (for those who don't know what a mop fair is) on, so we're going to take Tabitha to that.
It's nearly time to go back to reality, and I'm not ready. What'd be ideal is if someone could pay me to go somewhere interesting and take photos, then write about the experience. Is that a real job? Probably not.
