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Ancestral Abodes

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I have spent many, many, many hours (and a few pennies) keeping the family heritage websites in business over the last 18 months. My interest emerged as a consequence of a) advancing age,  b) increasingly vague remembrance of stories told eons ago my grandmothers Celia and Maisie TV's 'Who do you think you are?' and 4 suitcases of photos and letters handed to me by my eldest aunt. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Orwell farm, 2009.  2 years ago I visited two houses close to Loch Leven, Orwell Farm where Maisie was born in 1901 and Grahamston Farm where her mother had been brought up. Orwell farm 1901/2 Grahmston 1890s Grahamstone farm, 2009. Grahamstone was farmed by  Alexander Dickie (born 1829). The land making up the farm was exposed after the water level of Loch Leven was lowered with the opening of  'The cut' in 1830 which exposed 1100 acres of la...
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Ilhas do Porto Santa

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I left off the last post as we were approaching the island of Porto Santo. We made good time through the night and as you may have read in the Skippers blog (see link on right of the page), whilst I slept we made such good progress that he slowed us down so that we arrived in daylight.    During the voyage we had become increasingly alarmed at a current leakage to the hull. Left unattended it will result in a thinning of the aluminium hull and eventually a hole can develop.... not something we really want! We had spent a lot of time trying to work out what was causing it, with several hours spent crawling around the engine and with my head down the bilges looking for a stray wire. The strange thing was that when we heeled hard over to starboard in a swell, the leak detector reported that it stopped, resuming once we heeled back to port. Having failed to find the cause we decided that we would do an exaughstive search once in harbour.  Preparing to enter the harbour at Por...
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Madeira me dear...

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The sail from Porto Santo to Madeira was an easy day sail past the Deserted Islands arriving at Quinta do Lorde Marina at the northern tip of Madeira just as the sun was setting allowing us to nip to the bar and have a double gin and tonic. It is a place that evokes the TV series 'The Prisoner' which was set in Port Merrion [sic], down to the emptiness and electric golf carts.  You can't spend a day I'm Madeira or any island for that matter without trying to get to the top of it. I failed in Porto Santo but here we hired a car and set off for a tour.  What an amazing place it is, steep tropical forest with sudden openings allowing views up valleys to cloud draped sharks teeth peaks, and down to nest villages and farms where every bit of land is put to use growing everything from beans to bananas, including sugarcane and taro or 'Elephant ears'. I was particularly interested to find tea growing, which I am sure does, but failed to see any. It was interesting to s...
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