Sylvia Plath’s grave

We had a quiet night at our wild camp before embarking on the twisty, narrow, scary single track road down to Heptonstall. It was only a slight detour - I wanted to visit Sylvia Plath’s grave. The village is a “conservation” village with picturesque old stone houses and cobbled streets - even the main road through it was very narrow and people had to park vehicles by the road above the village. It was like a ghost place. I assume the cottages are mostly holiday homes as there was nobody around apart from a few people like us, in the graveyard. I didn’t expect it to be so overgrown with weeds that it was hard to walk amid the graves. It was totally uncared for - even the new graves had only some disconsolate plastic flowers amid the weeds. The war grave headstones were clean but the surroundings as ill-kept as the rest. We had to smile at one “GrannyBasher, head of her clan”. There was one with a wooden cross, no name and an Irish flag draped round it. A story there. It looked like people had tried to erase Hughes from Plath’s headstone. On top of it were some pens and pencils and a beautiful drawing, but it’s sad her family, friends, beneficiaries from her royalties or trustees of her work don’t pay someone to look after her grave.

From there we went down to Hebden Bridge to the Co-op, the biggest we’ve seen, and the first shop for months that had no empty shelves. Unfortunately we couldn’t find a place to park in the town so drove on to Sabden to visit an old friend for lunch. We try to come every year. Her old dog, her link for her husband who died just before Covid, had a £4000 operation for a tumour which has returned so she is facing up to having to say goodbye.

It took ages on narrow A roads to get a bit further east from Sedburgh to our wild camp overlooking the Dent fault. It’s raining and driving on these narrow roads with high walls/hedges is tiring so we’ll find a main road home. Route finding by road map is much better than using google which tends to route us on difficult roads for the van and driver.

Thank you for the stars and hearts for the Kusama blip yesterday. I’m honoured and surprised.