A Very Good Place for Retirement

 

The Craven district, in which Settle lies has been rated as the second (out of ten) best place for retirement in England!  Seems that the thing that knocked Craven off the top spot was house prices.  Scarborough (also in North Yorkshire) is more affordable so pipped us to it.

Here is a map of Craven, with Settle more or less bang in the middle:

Here's the report in our local paper The Craven Herald:

CRAVEN has come out as the second best place to retire in the UK, according to research carried out by Hunters Estate Agents.

The estate agent ranked some of the most popular retirement locations in England based on factors such as transport connections, air quality, crime levels, and average house prices to determine the best place for older people to live.

Its research revealed that the Craven area appealed to retirees due to its largely rural area full of spectacular beauty spots, such as Malham Cove and Bolton Abbey and the Yorkshire Dales National Park; as well as market towns Skipton and Settle.

Scarborough came in at first place, due to its house prices - the average cost of a home is £263,704. Also popular amongst retirees according to the research, was its seaside location, train station, 12th century castle and close proximity to the North York Moors and the Wolds.

In third place, after Craven was Wychavon in Worcestershire, which has seen a 31 per cent increase in the number of residents aged 65 years old and over over the last ten years.

The top 10 place to retire in the UK, according to Hunters research using data from UK House Price Index, data.police.uk.

1 Scarborough

2 Craven

3 Wychavon

4 Wyre Forest

5 Cotswold

6 Stratford-upon-Avon

7 Hambleton

8 Ryedale

9 Sedgemoor

10 South Somerset

This is a secret between you and me OK?

Amazing Amaryllis Trick

 One of the seasonal joys is the spectacularly beautiful amaryllis.   Those big bulbs that you may be given at Christmas but are too much fuss to actually deal with on Christmas Day.  They are then at risk of being set aside until you have time in the New Year perhaps.  

Given t.l.c. they soon begin to grow.  And grow.  And grow.

Then they flower abundantly but in so doing they get top-heavy and unless you arrange some support at least one of the stems gives way and over they go.

Anticipating how best to support the plant we soon came to realise that shoving a stake into the pot may not suffice.  There was a risk of skewering the bulb itself or maybe the whole lot - plant plus pot may topple over as one.  In any  case string would be needed and where was the string?

Then stuck a flash of the obvious.  Our amaryllis happened to be right alongside a far larger plant in a far larger pot, against which it had decided to lean anyway:

Both seemed to be enjoying the symbiosis but the risk of failure was still there so they needed securingtogether somehow.  But the string was in the garage and it had been snowing.  An in-house tie was a better option if one could be found.  A quick scan round the kitchen yielded nothing suitable for a tie.

Ah! a tie.  Over a career lifetime of tie-wearing, now happily emancipated, I, like others of my male vintage, have a drawer full of the wretched things (with a clip-on black one for 'those occasions')  Et voila:

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Keep going

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Rather tie-dy eh?

Anybody else found uses for redundant ties?

First Steam Train of the Year

 A good turn out at Settle station this morning for the 1/2 hour late-running Winter Cumbrian Mountain Express.   Clear skies with early mist clearing away nicely.

The people were eventually rewarded with this fine sight:

and a bit later on:

She had made up that half hour by Carlisle - and it shows how.

A Whole New Aspect to the North

 Our neighbours on the far side of Station Road are the Dalehead Veterinary Group.  Besides on-the-doorstep veterinary services they provide us with a good deal of amusement and entertainment.  Dogs especially almost sing when coming round from anaesthetics.  The processions of farmers around lambing time are a welcome component of  spring.

They recently improved out northerly outlook with tree felling and then the building of brand new farm animal facilities, clad beautifully in red cedar.

Their main building though was functional and was I suppose influenced by the 1980s near-certainty that the adjacent Settle-Carlisle railway was about to close.  Functional concrete block work were its outer walls over which we inevitably looked.  Its roof was, and still is, off-the-shelf industrial in appearance.

They were there long before we were of course.  But things changed recently with the installation of solar panels on the south facing slope of their roof which made for a bit of interest as well as helping the planet.

This week though things changed dramatically as the drab looking block work was most expertly clad in cedar too.  At the back you can see the farm animals building with similar cladding.  Pity about the water tower's shadow!  It won't interfere with those panels as the sun gets higher in the sky.

At the start of the week I managed to grab a 'before' picture as work was starting.  What a contrast:

Only a Rose

 Took this picture the other afternoon mainly for its shadows, caused by the low winter sun.  It is located in the most sunless part of the tower and annex - the corner of the wooden staircase without line of sight of any windows.  The carefully preserved dent in the wall is where my head it it, nearly five years ago now.

The sunshine that caused the shadow bounced off the wall opposite.  Little things.