and all the while, they watched

BAGH. Last full day of holiday. I made sure it was full by scuttling out of the cottage nice and early to try and get some pictures of the big house thing and the little babbling rivery thing in the nice little valley stuffed with massive trees whilst the light was nice but didn't like any of the results enough to spend too much time processing them; probably best to just stick to details for now. And people. And other people.

I got back to the cottage just in time to find everyone else washed, dressed and about to leave after sticking a note for me on the door. After a quick change-out-of-horribly-sweaty-clothing-break we went for what was supposed to be a wander along the river to see the early hydroelectric pump-house thing but which turned out to be a wander along the river to see the early hydroelectric pump-house thing after an half-hour break for my mother to chat to one of her fellow postpeople into whom she bumped entirely by chance despite being two hundred miles from home. The power-generating things contained the information missing from the main house and had a few nice working models of the various methods of slowing down water to make other things move. Unfortunately there was nothing explaining how movement is converted to electrical current; my sister got the same information from my father as did I when we were small ("you turn a handle with steam and electricity comes out of the other end") but never followed it up with the slightly more explanatory syllabuses of GCSE and A-level physics. Unfortunately she stopped paying attention to me after a couple of seconds when I attempted to explain the left-hand-rule of electromagnetic inductance to her.

Everyone else wanted to wander round the house again after a short strange-coffee-and-dry-cake-break whereas I felt the hill behind the house looked a bit more interesting. After an initial quick run up the side with a little stop to read a few pages of the book in my pocket just so that I wouldn't have lugged it around all day for nothing I went a little further up and discovered what can only be described as a startlingly vast and complex network of little paths past all the trees and lumps of rock adorning the hillside. Apart from a couple of car-capable roads and a few proper paths paved with rocky steps there were bundles of paths consisting of little more than a channel a few felled-baby-trees wide linking the larger paths to the road or just winding along until they reached a nice viewpoint then petering out. I didn't encounter many people once I'd left the codger-friendly lower paths so I just left a few blipcards in a few interesting places for people sufficiently interested in exploring their surroundings to find. At the ends of the gloomy paths there were a few car-accessible obvious beauty spots but I much preferred just running up and down and along for a while after a few days of walking at everyone else's pace.

After making the agreed rendezvous BEFORE everyone else got there we went back to the cottage then drove back up the hill I'd just been running round so that everyone else could see the lakeybits at the top. Thankfully we dumped the car again and just walked into Rothbury for some chips and pints to save us a mealsworth of washing-up.