We love getting mail.  We appreciate all of your comments and the encouragement and emotional lift they give us on the road.  Thank you, and keep them coming!

I particularly appreciate it though when one of you passes on some new detail or information about the place we’re visiting because it enriches the experience for us by opening our eyes to something interesting we were unaware of.  Surprisingly, we received two such comments from yesterday’s post, both of them interesting enough that I wanted to highlight them and bring them to the attention of those of you that don’t follow the comments closely or at all.  

The first came from Stewart Brady in this comment on the photo below: It's a bothy, free to stay in.

Heart

3

Comment

0

Link

Log in to comment or reply

I’d never heard of a bothy, so that was interesting right there.  I like everything about this though: the fact that I was lucky enough to take a shot of one of only eleven bothies in Wales, and that it was clear enough for someone to recognize it, and for the added context it gives to such an evocative scene.  So I guess no one actually lives there after all, except on sleepovers after an arduous trek across the moors to reach it.  And it makes me curious to know more about one of our readers, and how he happened to recognize it in the first place.   Thanks, Stewart!

And then a second comment came in from Bob Koreis in response to the photos of the four Elan dams: And my mind adds a Lancaster flying over at 60'. There was a small dam, Nant-y-Gro, that was built early in this project and was used to test Barnes Wallis' concept of a bouncing bomb (depth charge) to take out dams on the Ruhr. The remains of the Nant-y-Gro have changed little since the test breached it.

My response to him: Well, that’s an esoteric fact to have running around in your head Bob! I’m impressed. I’m surprised I didn’t see anything about this in the tourism information here, but I’m sure it’s available if I’d been looking.  

I read up on the project and dam and consulted the map to see where the dam was located. It looks like it must have been around the corner on the right of the first dam, not near this one. It looks like it is straight across the water from the bike path though so the remains were probably visible if I’d known to look for them. 

So I went back to look through the other photos I took but didn’t include in the post. I only took one photo between the first and second dams but by pure luck I shot it at exactly the right spot and the remains are there, easy to see. I’ll include it in the next post. Thanks for bringing this up!

So this is as delightful as the first comment.  I’d never heard there were originally five dams, or of the project to intentionally blow one up to test a strategy for destroying dams in the Ruhr Valley in World War II.  Here’s a link with background on this story.  And it really tickles me that by pure luck I took a photo of the remains only because I was attracted by the scene - the path wandering up the slope looked like one Rachael might enjoy if it were close enough to town to be reachable.  What are the odds of that?

And an addendum to the addendum: here’s a link about the actual raid on the German dams that the test run led up to.  It’s a famous military operation known as the Dambuster Raid, another bit of history I’d never heard of until Bob directed me to it.

Heart

3

Comment

0

Link

Log in to comment or reply