An Afternoon of Time Travel! Blists Hill Victorian Town

First, I must apologize profusely for the long delay between posts; I was very busy for the last bit of my travel, and then was unfortunate enough to catch a dreadful illness on one of those awful heavier-than-air flying machines. I promise to chronicle the rest of my journey in reasonable time, and then we will get back to regular scheduled DIY tutorials and other such blogging.

So for those of you who may not remember my post on Iron Bridge Gorge, I remind you that the region was the jumping-off-point for the Industrial Revolution. And they built a fantastic outdoor museum to commemorate it! *cue geek-out*

Alrighty, picture spamming time:

This contraption here is to control a mine lift!

Inside an iron-working plant.

This is also the filming location for the show Victorian Pharmacy, which I blogged about ages ago. As if I wasn't already geeking out enough.

THE ORIGIN OF INDUSTRY! Iron Bridge Gorge

It's no big secret that we steampunks have something of a love-hate relationship with the Industrial Revolution.On one hand, it brought a whimpering end to the heyday of art and craftsmanship and forced millions of people into wage slavery, but on the other hand... gears! And other shiny things!

Love it or hate it, the Iron Bridge Gorge is where it all started out. With the right combination of coal and iron ore resources, and some guy who had the idea to work iron with coal instead of wood, the industrial age began with this big bridge here:

Pretty isn't it? Ah, lovely old days, when designers actually bothered with ornament instead of just cost.
Speaking of the past, tomorrow's post is Blists Hill Victorian Town, the massive and epic outdoor museum built to accompany the industrial history of this place!

Glastonbury Abbey Ruins!

This one's more or less self-explanatory. Medieval Abbey, destroyed during the Dissolution, and left to beautiful decay for several hundred years.

Glastonbury itself is quite the interesting town. It's believed to be King Arthur's burial place, which apparently means that it attracts tons of hippies. I wouldn't characterize myself as part of the hippie crowd, but where one counterculture gathers, others tend to slip in around the cracks, meaning I was able to find plenty of gothic and steampunk merchandise in nearby shops. I bought a lovely jacket, although I'll have to post it at another time--after a week of too little sleep and too much running around adventuring, I'm not in much of a state for modelling.

For now you'll just have to deal with these lovely abbey pictures.

A Fun-icular Ride

Ah, pardon the dreadful pun. It was the best I would come up with. A funicular, simply put, is a type of railway that climbs a steep hill with the aid of a counterweight.

And today, I got to ride this Victorian gem of one:

Exploring the Moors

I'm tired and kinda sick today so this one's gonna be mostly pictures. Some background: hiking in Dartmoor National Park (best known as the setting for Arthur Conan Doyle's novel The Hound of the Baskervilles.) The weather was quite nice, not very mysterious, but we got a few decent pictures.

The landscape was incredibly desolate. Fun fact: a prison was built on the moors long ago. This was a highly effective location, as any escape attempts would end with the escapee getting lost and eventually starving on the moors. 

These little birds (ravens?) have been all over the place in England. Whatever they are, they always seem to be strutting around with attitude.

Statue at the visitor's center. Sherlock here is way too cool to pay attention to demon hounds, even ones that look like they're about to eat his butt off.

An ancient stone cross. Nobody really knows anything more about it than that. It's one of those things that's kinda just always been there.

A random stone circle out in the middle of nowhere. Very mysterious and peaceful, and unlike Stonehenge, one of its more famous cousins, not crowded with hippies.

Horsies! All sorts of livestock, mainly sheep, cows and horses, wander the moors.

An ancient stone bridge. These things were everywhere.

And literally just on the edge of the moors, as though somebody had drawn a line around the edge of them, it was all bluebells and rivers and green pastures full of sheep.