We have been staying in a cottage near Monmouth for a few days. The countryside here is indeed a particularly green and pleasant land; we can sit outside the cottage looking over many rolling miles towards the Black Mountains. The ruins of Tintern Abbey are close by, as is Raglan Castle (both so very well looked after by Cadw for the Welsh Government, and both sites surprising quiet). There is a lot of wonderful walking here, through local woodlands, and in the Usk valley and the Wye valley. The weather has been kind. So a delightful escape from Cambridge.
With brilliant timing, the day before coming away, when I should have been concentrating on things domestic, Logic Matters got hacked. Or rather — since “logicmatters.net” then delivered a Chinese language advert, which hardly looked like a hack aimed at the typical reader here — I suspect some WordPress plugin had been hacked. (I’d been experimenting with different plugins while giving this site a fresh coat of paint). It took a while for me to find the source of the trouble; but then someone kindly recommended the Wordfence security plugin which quickly pinpointed where the evil code been added. Fingers crossed, but I hope the site is now more secure from such exploits. A long afternoon quite, quite wasted though. Not good for the blood pressure.
Calm was restored driving down to Monmouth and stopping at Kiftsgsate Court Gardens and then on to High Glanau, both gardens real works of art. We will visit Coton Manor Garden on the way home, which is even more stunning in its way (though perhaps I prefer the slightly wilder, less perfectly kempt style of Kiftsgate). I have said before, that gardens can be art-works of a kind that the English both do particularly well and particularly love. Is there, I wonder, anything attractively and insightfully written by modern philosophers on the aesthetics of gardens? (A genuine question!)