Clay, Pool, Hardy and A Harbour

This morning, I was doing a minute research about clay as an attempt to find out the history of the Blue Pool encouraged me to do so.

Ball clays are kaolinitic sedimentary clays, that commonly consist of 20-80% kaolinite, 10-25% mica, 6-65% quartz. They are fine-grained and plastic in nature. They are mined in Devon and Dorset in England. They are commonly used in the construction of many ceramic articles.

The ceramic use of ball clays in Britain dates back to at least the Roman era. More recent trade began when clay was needed to construct tobacco pipes in the 16th and 17th century.

The name "ball clay" is believed to derive from the time when the clay was mined by hand. It was cut into 15 to 17-kilogram cubes and during transport the corners of the cubes became rounded off leaving "balls".

It can be said that the Blue Pool is one of the historic places of past time clay business.
The Blue Pool is a lake in the Furzebrook Estate, a 25 acres (100,000 m2) park of heath woodland and gorse near Furzebrook in Dorset, England.

The pool is a flooded, disused clay pit where Purbeck Ball Clay was dug from the 1600s to the early 1900s to make smoking pipes and tea pots.

I must say the place was amazing. Well maintained. At the same time, it looked natural. Tall pine trees were growing well, beautifully guarding the blue lake. Birds were singing. It is claimed that there are wild animals inhabited , such as rabbits, badgers, squirrels, deer and sand lizards. It was drizzling. So I did not have a full range of chance to explore the area.

A request for the wood ant. British people are kind enough to save ants and their work.

An ant nest (British wood ants there)

The color of water ,which is varying from green to blue, is due to clay particles.

Pine trees

You can see the Blue Pool photos I took yesterday.

Well, I went to Hardy's home before going to Blue Pool. To be honest, I did not know Thomas Hardy until a friend of mine from Bath mentioned about his name and novels last month.

Thomas Hardy(2 June 1840 – 11 January 1928) was an English novelist and poet of the naturalist movement, although in several poems he displays elements of the previous romantic and enlightenment periods of literature, such as his fascination with the supernatural.

This is what he was described in wikipedia.

According to the Thomas Hardy society founded in 1968, he was born at Higher Bockhampton near Dorchester. During his lifetime he composed nearly a thousand published poems and wrote fourteen publised novels including ‘Far From the Madding Crowd’ and ‘Tess of the D’Urbervilles’. He died in Dorchester on 11 January 1928. Much of Thomas Hardy's work is based on Wessex, the South and West of England.

Unfortunately, when I got to Hardy's cottage, where he was born and raised, now under the management of the National Trust, it was found out that the small museum was not open for the public. For some reason, opening days are from Monday to Thursdays and Sunday only, what I leaned later. Why not on Saturday? Still misery. Anyway, I had a chance to walk around nice and quiet surrounding woodland area. I saw some families with their dogs enjoying the place like me.

Hardy's cottage

cute tiny wild fruits, close-up view (ရႊန္းမီအတြက္လက္ေဆာင္)

Here are some more photos of Thomas Hardy's birthplace.

After visiting above two places, I headed to Poole harbour to take boat photos. As it has been 6 PM, all deep sea boat services had already finished.

Full set of boat photos here

Reference:

http://www.bluepooltearooms.co.uk/index.php

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hardy

http://www.hardysociety.org/

Nearby beach

Summer time means more people going out. Beaches, holiday camps and caravan sites have been busy places. At the same time, there is a noise pollution with rescue helicopters flying over my area.

For me, I don't have too much chance to enjoy sunshine due to my work and education commitments. My organizer shows that most weekends have got full of appointments, on-call duties and "to do tasks". But last weekend, I was able to manage to go to nearby beach, where I spend one hour time. Here are some photos sharing.


Jurassic coast


A sea gull


I deliberately avoided people in my photos .




Dogs also enjoyed summer


ရႊန္းမိ ေမးဘူးလို႕ လမ္းေဘးကပန္းပံုတင္လိုက္တယ္။ Englandက ဒီအခ်ိန္ဆိုေနရာတိုင္း မွာပန္းေတြေတြ႕ႏိုင္တယ္။ ေပါက္ တို႕ ေမျမိဳ႕လိုေပါ့



feeding myself in that evening


fed a bird as well

Saturday Random Photos @ Town

British summer is what we were looking forward to. Now it has already arrived. Blue sky and sunshine. Flowers everywhere. People look happy and enjoy walking outside. Yesterday, I went down to town centre where I looked around and took the random photos with my mobile for blogging.

This is a small town in south England. Town centre is not really crowded. People smile easily. They look relaxed. But it is not a cosmopolitan place. I rarely see Asians and Afro-Caribbeans at work and on the street. Almost all are white.

On the other hand, life in London is hectic and most people look grumpy. In East London, many people do not speak English at all. When I went home during the weekends, it was disappointing. Some people had no nice manner . They did not seem to care the environment where they lived. The most annoying thing to me was speaking unknown language loudly on the bus and tube.

Some shoppers

A street entertainer

Entertaining with music

Fishing rods. We dont kill fish. It is just a sort of sport.

Fishing accessories

Photo frames

A British father

Nuts

A young lady waiting for something

with a best friend

A mother

Enjoying dog walk at town

No idea why these teenagers lying down on the street.

Street show

Street show

Street show

A young girl participating

Locals

A group of friends