Devon - a slightly bigger county!

Onwards to Devon, the fourth largest county in England, also home to the only town with an exclamation mark in it's name - Westward Ho! This is part of a little tour we're doing of the South West and in my hurry to get out of the front door I neglected to notice that I'd packed an odd pair of running shoes - I've another pair like this at home! Just as well I didn't pack two rights or two lefts. First race of the trip was the Beer Blazer organised by Axe Valley Runners http://www.axevalleyrunners.org.uk/index.htm, a friendly enough event. My 10K (55.30 - note the interesting time) involved beach running on loose shingle and climbing up steep cliffs.

You can see the cliffs in the distance behind Vicky who is looking upwards for some reason. The harbour is at the fishing village of Beer which I thought we just couldn't miss seeing. The event itself had all the elements of a category A fell race so I was pleased to find that the winner only got round in 43 minutes. I managed the first V60 and Vicky had an excellent run in the 5K coming in first LV60. And the one person to notice that I had odd shoes on was another runner who is the proprietor of a running shop, we had an interesting discussion about the comparative grip properties of Innov8 versus Adidas.

We had to spend some time on Dartmoor of course - this is me with Saddle Tor behind me and Vicky posing in front of Haytor Rocks. Very lucky to have nice weather and not many other tourists (Torists?) around.

Plenty of skylarks and ravens on Dartmoor plus stonechats and whinchats. I wasn't quite sure which chat was which but I bagged a photo of the stonechat which I was hoping was the rarer whinchat. Dartmoor also has many remains of prehistoric settlements, we saw stone rings, stone rows and ruined villages - not many seem to have been excavated in the manner that we saw in Cyprus (see our blog from last month!)

And finally a real rare bird, this being one of the black swans of Dawlish which have been breeding here for many years - they were originally introduced from Western Australia. Dawlish is also where Devon Violets come from - not the sweets but the perfume which was invented here. There are apparently hundreds of varieties of violet grown locally! Next stop Cornwall.