It Arrived....Well just a Little Did..!!

In my last post I predicted that some snow was likely to arrive in our area....
Well it arrived..Well just a little did..!! 
It wasn't a huge dump of snow which you can get sometimes up here on Dartmoor, but it was certainly more than a dusting.....

The snow actually fell overnight Thursday/Friday....
When we woke up on Friday morning the temperature had dropped further since the overnight snowfall.....

All the snow that had fallen on our awning had now frozen solid and it took me quite a while to remove it..... It's important to remove it if possible, because the weight of it all could eventually do some serious damage to the roof of the awning.

The empty hard standing pitch next to ours was a solid sheet of ice and the internal campsite road was too icy to attempt to walk on initially....
However it wasn't long before our campsite manager had spread salt/grit around and the site road turned back from a skating rink and became useable again....

We didn't venture out of the site on Friday as the reports we heard concerning the condition of the moorland roads made us feel that it would be more sensible to stay put even with a 4X4.

On Saturday it was Anne's birthday so we decided to venture off site to have a meal and a drink........
We set off up onto the top moor around Princetown and what surprised us was that although some of the snow had by now melted away, the roads were packed with cars parked everywhere. Lots of people had decided to visit the moor for a walk and a play in the snow..... Vehicles were parked up on the banks at the sides of the road and there were snowmen in almost every field.

Cars parked at the side of the moorland roads 

A lot of the snow had now melted

Although there wasn't much snow left it had proved to be a real visitor magnet.... 

According to the Dartmoor Ranger all these visitors had caused a major field invasion.... Although there are acres of access land that people can walk and play on, lots of these visitors chose to just park anywhere and enter fields where they had no right to be....

One farmer on entering one of his fields with his tractor to feed his sheep, had to avoid lots of loose dogs and children running everywhere only to find that his sheep had been scattered and had to be gathered and moved  into an area two fields away.....
Result... One very disgruntled farmer....

Most of these visitors seemed to be be 'Townies' who seemed to think that they could park and go wherever they wanted.
 Just a pity that they hadn't bothered to double check where they could in fact go.......

More vehicles parked everywhere

 As well as lots of cars being parked up at the side of the road, the moorland car parks were all packed solid and even 'Willy's' Ice Cream van was parked up at the car park above Pork Hill...

All the Moorland Pubs were packed solid too and it eventually became clear that we were going to be very lucky to find somewhere to shoehorn ourselves in and get a drink and a meal.....

The Plume of Feathers in Princetown itself was packed solid..... more like a Friday night than a Saturday late lunchtime.......
In the end we headed back down into Tavistock and had a very nice meal there.... Also I eventually got my much waited for pint (or two) of beer.
I chose a pint of Dartmoor Breweries Jail Ale which apparently is the best selling pint in these parts......

Princetown...The Plume of Feathers Pub on the right

My Pint- Darmoor Brewery Jail Ale