A clear indicator that I had crossed the border was when the driver of the bus in Devon said "alright maid?" (they don't call you that on Somerset buses).
During my brief sojourn in Devon in which I managed to play havoc with one gentleman's hearing aid (he said that the pitch of my voice set it off whistling Scotland the Brave) I visited The Walronds, a seventeenth century townhouse in Cullompton that has just undergone restoration and conservation. The plasterwork ceilings there are just incredible:
I went there primarily to see a length of Kersey cloth, woven by local weaver Louise Cottey. Kersey; the working man's cloth was softer, more supple and more felted than I had imagined it would be, but also more waterproof. With Cullompton researching and celebrating it's own history of textile manufacturing, so the links between other local centres of woollen cloth production: Uffculme, Tiverton, Culmstock and Wellington are brought into prominence.
Is it coincidence that as imaginative awareness of historic local trade connections strengthens, so local public transport connections are weakening? Or is that need to dig down and find the roots of a culture, a direct outcome of the pruning of the current twigs and branches of its physical connectedness (as manifested in reduced transport links)?
On a related note, spoke with a friend today about how losing a relative can sometimes make you delve further back in the family tree for antecedents lost in time, not as replacements exactly - 'though there is a sense of trying to balance the books in a double entry book keeping type of way: So where was it we came from? And where is it we're going?
A day ticket keeps those kind of questions open, I find.
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