centranthus R. 'coccineus'

Here is my sketch of the plant we managed to get from a perennial nursery as a souvenir. Now everytime I look at it in the garden I will be reminded of our trip. It is the same as the plant in the photo below, only more of a red colour.

Centranthus

These flowers were growing wild everywhere in Pembrokeshire and I fell in love with them.

Porthgain

My sketch of Porthgain harbour where we sat and ate icecream and watched the boats come in.

The Shed in Porthgain

Here's a quick sketch of the inside of The Shed restaurant. I loved the scene of organised chaos, all the tea pots, glasses and bottles behind the counter and the curtain drawn back to reveal a bit of the kitchen.

Porthgain Harbour

Porthgain drew us back a few times. It's such a lovely place with it's sweeping curve of a harbour and fishing boats.

There's also an interesting gallery, a quaint old pub called the Sloop Inn and an award winning restaurant called The Shed. They're renowned for catching their own fish to cook in the evening. P and I had a nice meal there but I have to say the hightlight was the damp lemon cake I had when we popped back another day. It was deliciously light and moist! I was going to draw it but it wasn't on my plate for very long.

Camping in Pembrokeshire

Camping... Would we survive a week in a small 3 man tent?!!



This was the view when we opened the front of our tent in the morning. I was mesmirised by the changing moods of the sea.

I couldn't get over the amount of wildlife we encountered. It was brilliant!

The funniest thing that happened was each night there would be crashing and banging outside and then the sound of plastic bags being flung about in the porch of the tent. Every time it happened P would sit bolt upright and thinking it was seagulls (it was just getting light at about 4.30am) would start hitting the inner tent while trying to get the zip open. It had always got away before we could see the blighter. The barabrith that we bought had vanished and we never even got to try it.

On the 2nd night P was a bit faster with the zip but thought he might have been dreaming when he saw a badger stick it's head under the door. The next night was really windy, the badger didn't hear me open the zip and I got the best view ever. It was basically sniffing around, sticking it's dirty snout in P's sandals (very brave), and then scared itself by managing to get the lid off the cooler box. Why oh why didn't I have my camera? It really was incredible! On the penultimate night we got back to the tent to find something lying outside, and then we saw a few shadows disappear up the bank. On closer inspection there was hot chocolate powder EVERYWHERE and we could hear them laughing as they ran away.

We stayed just outside St David's (which is the smallest city in the UK - it really is a lovely village with a great big cathedral). It's a great place and there's a fabulous restaurant called Morgans. The food is top class and the owners are unpretentious and passionate about what they do.

In St David's Cathedral I drew these floor tiles. I'd spotted them on our first trip here a couple of months ago but didn't want to hold our friends up too much by sketching every 5 minutes. Yes, the birds really were like that - cute!! The patterns were very stylised and graphic in just 2 colours each. The tiles were in shades of terracotta, yellow ochre, dark grey and lemon yellow.

I made lots of drawings over the course of the week and when my camera battery ran flat I spent even more time than usual because I didn't want to forget anything! I'll post some more soon.