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“How to Find the Craigends Yew…”

…is the title of a web page that I really, really wish somebody had posted onto the internet *before* we found ourselves wandering around various housing estates, dead-end footpaths, and rarely-used farm tracks on our recent Scottish holiday. Just in case somebody else finds themselves in a similar predicament at some point in the future, and is bashing away at their mobile phone browser in frustration, I thought I’d put such a page right here. Are you listening, google search engine? Huh? Are you?

Hello visitor from the future! Here’s how to find the Craigends Yew:

From the B790, heading west out of Crosslee…
Look out for Ardgryff Cresent, to the south of the road
Follow Ardgryff Cresent to it’s southernmost point. You should see a tarmac path heading into the trees. This is a good place to park. Here’s the google maps streetview of the place you want:

(if you can’t see the embed, here’s a direct link)

Follow the tarmac path over the bridge. Turn left. Keep following the path. It branches at a couple of points; always take the left.

5 minutes later, you should find a little stone sign/info board by the path describing the “tree”. It’s a pretty cool piece of vegetation, covering a 30+ meter radius … though pretty much impossible to photograph until you’re in amongst it (due to surrounding trees). Here’s my feeble attempt to piece some mobile phone snaps together. Artistic interpretation FTW!


(click the pic to embiggen)

…and if you ARE a tree-hunting visitor from the future who found this info useful, please say hello below 🙂

Posted in Bizarre, Travels | 1 Comment
Articles

Back where I started…

So, after a few months flirtation with Tumblr and Posterous… I decided to go back to a plain, vanilla WordPress blog. While I liked the style-heavy categorization + brevity of the microblog format (especially Tumblr), I always got a lurking sense of your-site-is-not-your-own with those services, due to the annoying translucent overlays + branding that they’d drop onto your pages from time to time (c.f. the current banner for Japan Tsunami relief appearing on all posterous sites)… plus they weren’t quite as convenient/pleasant to post messages to as a wordpress installation is. The fact that my posterous items seemed to clock up thousands(?!) of reads was good for my ego… but, I think I’m altogether happier when I’m in full control of every minute detail. Just call me a control freak 😉

The good news is, I’ve now discovered the wooTumblog plug-in, which adds some very tumblr-like features to your wordpress theme… so hopefully I’ve now got the best of both worlds…

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