Devon UK is dairy country. Here is the devon breed of milking cow. I was surprised to see the how now brown cow, with horns that look like forerunner to the Texas longhorn!

So, devonshire cream naturally follows this, or clotted cream: here's a recipe.

and here's afternoon tea and scones with cream…..

This gorgeous glen is also in Dartmoor area at Lydford Gorge. It looks like Giant City and many creeks found in Southern Illinois.

When last we left the ancestors a group had left from the Devon Coast. Seagoing people living on the coast village of Brixham. Several other families in the line emigrated from other Southern Uk coastal towns, which all have distinctive landscape.
Beginning with another view of Devon, one ancestor came from the great landscape of Dartmoor, a place of romance and ancient time, when I see these landscapes I think of Boediccia, warrior Queen, riding a Dartmoor pony, her long hair flying. They have put the Dartmoor wild ponies on birth control pills. Because there aren't any more wolves.

More on Scotland after this….. Irish Wolfhounds. see the previous post.

A memory of Scotland

A memory of Scotland and wolves. Clan MacLeod and the Isle of Skye. Loch Coruisk vicinity, the smell of sea and fresh water, mist hanging in the hills. We stay at a large and long dark old hotel. I walk into the foyer, a long grayish green hallway with large blackish paintings and arrays of faded furniture. It smells a bit damp, musty. There's a baroque mirror on my right and I am drawn to looking into it as I pass by. There's a half moon table under it for gloves, or mail and what have you. There's a slow movement coming from under the table and for an instant it feels like the table itself is rising and starting to walk off. As high as the table, long rough brindle-grey shaggy coat and a low slung head that resembles a craggy rock suspended in the air, long legs that keep unfolding. It begins a loping walk down the hallway, silently, quietly, thinking somehow itself invisible. I have stopped breathing, watching. " Oh, don't werry the innkeeper says blithely, warmly, "tha's Lewsy. wuhn't herta fly."  Wolfhound, my father says from behind me. I fall in love. Later in life I will have a dream I am standing on a castle rampart, two of the wolf hounds walking at my side. I lower my hand, run my fingers through their deep coats, and know I am safe.

   The question is is landscape and place encoded in us? Do we have genetic preferences for certain types of places due to our huge ancestral imprints?  D.H. Lawrence had a lot of whacky ideas about landscape and character- he was convinced it shaped human being's perspectives and their proclivities. He basically says it was the light and landscape of the coast and sea that shaped the culture and art of Ancient Greece. What I am interested in is our affinities and their reappearance through generations.

For example one family line way back came from Dartmoor in Devon.

Another family line comes from the Isle of Skye.

and Isle of Lewis

My greatgrandfather takes his family from Pictou, Nova Scotia and Durham, New Hampshire

and settles in Point Reyes, Northern California.

Meet Pierre Fauconnier of Tours, and London. Settled in New Rochelle,Ny- French Hugenot colony. Buys big tract of land in Dutchess county along the Hudson River. It ends up later as Hyde Park. Hmm. Does this make me a New Yorker?   New Rochelle seacoast…..Ile de Re-ish?

okay here is a cool weird thing. See those stones rimming the picture? They're diamonds, and they match exactly in the style of cut and shape a pair of earrings I inherited from my great grandmother.

The landscape of Artois and of St Omer in Flanders, near the city of Lille( it was known as Ryssel). In 1440CE Jeanne Beauprez (pretty field!) gave birth to Pierre Bloedel in Hesdin, Artois.  His daughter Margrite Bloedel was born in 1585. The Bloedels lived in St Omer and later moved to Lille. Margrite was adventurous, her father agreeable, or he was happy to see she might have freedom from Spanish Catholic persecution and allowed or encouraged her marriage to an Englishman named Alexander Shapleigh, who was a) a soldier? b) a Protestant rebel and preacher or refugee helper, or c) a merchant from across the channel in Kingsweare, Devon. Alexander's brother Robert also seemed to like French women, because he married Marie Blabon, daughter of Jeanne Breman from St Omer. I hope the girls were friends. Robert Shapleigh may have been the eldest because he remained in Devon the remainder of his life, whereas Alexander and Margrite immigrated to Kittery, Maine. They had four children. Her daughter Catherine Shapleigh-who would come to America with her English husband from Brixham Devon, named James Treworge(an anglicized French name?) was born in 1608 in Lille.

Here is a painting by Avenkcamp of skaters in a landscape of Flanders in 1500's. The pair of French-English lovers might have played such games together in winter.

 

 Shapleigh's home of Brixham Harbor, Devon UK

 and Kingsweare, Devon UK

The journey was always by sea……….

in the 1600's crossings to the US were plentiful. Dutch, French Hugenots and English Protestant groups especially of younger sons, sought to make their way in the new world. This group head for the Maine coast.

 Kittery, Maine US

Old Blockhouse Fort McCleary, Kittery, Maine

Meanwhile on the western coast of France on the tiny island of Ile de Re, lived the Valleau and Descard and Dumas families. They were Protestant rebels, allied with the Duc de Soubise and had to flee France either before or after the  Siege of St Martin de Re that happened during the reign of Louis XIII.

 St Martin Ile de Re

 Before all this happened over in Tours in the Loire Valley, lived another family named Fauconnier (Falconers)- one of whom was royal falconer to Phillip of Burgundy. A lovely Frenchwoman(is there really any other?) named Madeleine Fauconnier married Pierre Valleau from Ile de Re. 

The main square of Tours is complete with buildings of the period still extant. Surely this square held the bon marche where Mlle Fauconnier would shop from an array of Loire cheese. 

Both the Valleaus and the Fauconniers emigrated to England first for a short period, and then to Dutchess County and New Rochelle, NY.  A theme or pattern: spiritual freedom fighters and refugees.

A move to blogging

I began a project on FB at first and then realized that I had more to write, and want to practice writing and that this is what a blog can provide. It's helpful too that I can see the whole thread in a sequence- so hence blogging.
I chose the name The Wolf's Nose is because the wolf pack has a scout who tracks scents and trails and brings it back to the pack and i like research so I figure I'm sort of wolfish that way. About 4 years ago I made a whole series of drawings about Red Riding Hood and the Wolf. It's time to give thanks to the wolf in my heart.

The first project is called A Genealogy of Place. It tracks landscape and architecture, art, music, food, of the places my ancestors lived in and left and then where they arrived. So far, I only know back as far as the 1300's, and must presume that they all were indigenous to their places to that.
Thanks to the public domain and many talented photographers for their photographs.

The river of this story begins, on one side of the family, in Northern France and Flanders.