This week's prompt suggests a number of topics to me, but as I have retired I'll ignore working at heights.
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| Scarborough Harbour |
That shot was taken from way up at the Castle.
At Whitby we were up on the 199 steps to the Abbey.
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| Whitby Harbour (between the houses and the 'pier'.) |
Neither are as exotic as the harbour at Monaco.
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| Monaco Harbour (from the way up to the Palace) |
In our prompt the resting workmen were looking down on a ferry station. From Monaco you can catch boats to Rome, Nice, Barcelona and Corsica but I flew in and out by helicopter.
When in Fowey, Cornwall I have only watched the ferry cross the estuary to Polruan.
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| Fowey - Polruan Ferry (Trevor Harris; CC BY-SA 2.0 = Geograph Collection) |
In "Vanishing Cornwall" Daphne du Maurier wrote of arriving in a hire car when she was 19 and seeing Fowey harbour for the first time from the Bodinnick side. The car deposited them at the foot of the hill by the ferry (The Bodinnick/Fowey ferry not the one from Polruan).
'Before climbing the hill to lunch our eyes were caught by a board saying "For Sale" on a gate just above the ferry. Behind the gate was a rough piece of ground and a house by the water's edge, a strange looking house built like a Swiss Chalet.
"Yes," said the ferryman standing near by, "they call it Swiss Cottage." '
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| Swiss Cottage |
The du Mauriers later bought Swiss Cottage and it was there that Daphne wrote her first novel, "The Loving Spirit" which was published in 1929.
Because of its location the du Mauriers renamed the house Ferryside, the name it still bears today.
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| Ferryside |
The road up to Bodinnick is on the left hand side of the photo: that's where the ferry docks.
If you study the next photo taken from a different angle -
you may be able to make out a figure on the right hand corner of the house.
This is the figurehead from the schooner Jane Slade.
Daphne was inspired to write "The Loving Spirit" after discovering the wreck of the schooner in nearby Pont Creek. The figurehead was added to the house at a later date.
The Slade family were shipbuilders in Polruan. Their life and history were used by Daphne to create the saga, in "The Loving Spirit," of four generations if shipbuilders and mariners in the fictional Cornish village of Plyn.
Daphne du Maurier's son and his wife live at Ferryside today.
If you check out the links at Sepia-Saturday-222 you can see where others have been.
