Well I am away again overseas! I cant Wait to see new horizons! This time travel will take me too eastern Europe, heading into Krakow for some travel around Poland, will be heading to the Czech Rep for a few days also. Then back to the UK to do some driving around Cornwall and other areas I have not seen before....Looking forward to Tintagel i must say! with luck there may be some pirates at Penzance too anyhow, will be away for 6 weeks all up!

M~

Greetings all,

Up for sale is the Waylander Bow as featured in Deviations. this is a one of a kind replica of the bow used by Waylander in the David Gemmell Drenai books.
Kit includes:

The Bow
Quiver with Bolts.
Belt carry Hook
and case.

Price is $1000AUD

please note me with any interest and we can discuss further.

M~

so since returning home i have now re-established the logistics of my workshop. so i am going to put into writing some plans for pieces. I have established a household in the SCA and will make the weaponry for those who are a part of it. to be made:
(5 of each piece at this stage)
boot knife
early dirk or seax
longer double edge dagger (barbaric dag)
feasting knives and cutlery
and depending on how generous and time allows. some swords.

so stay tuned. I also have a couple of commission pieces to complete first. so despite a TOTAL lack of anything interesting in the past year, i hope to remedy that soon!

oh, and i want to make another trailer! but that is sooo mundane!

M~

that reminds me...the household will have its own deviantart id...since i'll not be the only one to input into it...so all creations will be posted both on my site and on it too.

A much Shorter journal entry this time! Just wanted to Say I am back home in Australia. Came home much earlier than expected, several things did not work out overseas and had some Family concerns also. So I am back in sunny Australia, with a workshop at my disposal, and some new found motivation again from many months and places of travel!

M~

another long epistle from the journeys of DorianNavarre!!!

good morning all!

it has been a couple of months now since i have last had the opportunity to sit for a lengthy period and bring my thoughts together and recollect the many places i have been in this time, however this time is purely in the united kingdom!

I left the journey last time as i was about to head out of london and travel up north again, in steps and stages. it seems i have zig zagged my way across the uk from north to south again and again! not the most sensible way to do it!

heading back to mid july, I left london and caught a train slightly north to the Cambridge region. there i stayed a couple of days with a friend of mine, Andi (steelspike) from deviant art who is a blacksmith. had a couple of good nights talking shop and just relaxing, one of the days even had a chance to play in a workshop and do some forging, it was good to hear the ring of the hammer on anvil again and just to look into the forge fires for a short time.

Leaving andi's i headed a little further north to Ely, about half an hour from cambridge itself and stayed with some of my wonderful extended family, some truly kind and generous people. here i stayed for 5 days and in this time enjoyed wandering through cambridge and the sedate and inspiring university grounds that ramble among the city itself. On a sunny sunday we even enjoyed a bbq that brought thoughts of home! ely itself is a wonderful little town with a unique and amazing cathedral, nick named the ship of the fens. unlike most cathedrals this one utilizes an octagon rather than a dome for its central basilica. inside it really is an amazing piece of architecture.

from Ely and Cambridge i actually headed south again to london to head north...yes the joys of catching national express couches about the country! From london I was to catch the overnight bus north to Inverness in scotland, then onwards to Broadford on the Isle of Skye, where i had secured some work before i headed to cambridge and it was now time to start. a 15 hour bus trip with only 3 breaks is not exactly the most comfortable way to travel, but for value of money it cant be beaten if you book online and get some of the discounts on offer. i arrived tired and drained at the Dunollie hotel in broadford on skye where i planned to work for the next few months and save some money and then travel again before doing it all again before i would start uni if i could get in. lets say things did not go according to plan...

for location and people the dunollie is a wonderful place, it is very quiet and there is little to do there if you do not like walking and traveling on an island in the highlands, i was planning on doing exactly these things on my days off and hopefully spending very little during my time there. i was working in both the public bar as well as the lounge bar and the work was good if long hours, the trouble lay with the bar itself, which was literally falling apart and next to nothing actually worked! which made it a very frustrating place to be for both staff and customers! so that said i decided there was still some traveling to be done and left the work after a week as there was no plan in place to get anything rectified with the hotel and many things where set to get worse! still i did spend a week on the isle of skye, saw some wonderful scenery and met some fantastic people who i hope to see again some day.

i left Broadford and caught a scottish citylink bus south to Fort william. a place i have been to in the past and somewhere i enjoy being. I spent 4 days here and although the weather was not the most welcoming enjoyed doing some walking around the base of ben nevis and the glen where braveheart was filmed. I caught up with a friend there, brian, who i had not seen for quite a few years and was good to see. as i was camping the weather eventually got the best of me and i headed south again for london, thence to transfer again further south to the new forest region and a town called Lymington. so again it was another overnight bus trip and a day in london at the end, one bonus about those trips is that is does save you a nights accomodation!

in lymington i again stayed with some extended family, again generous to a fault! it was lovely to be near the sea again. lymington is on the english coast and just offshore lies the isle of Wight. with both the cities of Bournemouth and southampton within an hours bus ride in either direction. i spent 4 days here and explored both lymington, southampton, bournemouth and enjoyed a wonderful walk along the coastline around Hengisbury head. where some of the timber beach huts that nestle against one another along a spit of land leave some well appointed houses to shame.

Leaving lymington i travelled to salisbury, intending on heading straight on to avebury. i had forgotten how nice salisbury is as a city however and decided on spending a couple of nights there to explore somewhere i had only passed through in the past. the city of salisbury is a lovely place full of old buildings and great people. the river that runs through it, the avon, lends a peaceful feeling to the centre of the city. salisbury cathedral is another feat of medieval architecture that is just an amazing place to stand and experience. it also holds one of the original 4 copies of the Magna Carter. i had dinner and met some wonderful people at the aptly named New Inn...it had only been there since the 16th century... you just have to love history in these cities! i also paid a visit to Old Sarum, both an iron age hill fort and roman garrison and at one time the capital of the english kings. (amanda i aquired some chalk here for liz)

i left salisbury and journeyed to Marlborough, where i stayed before heading to avebury and experiencing the standing stones that dominate the small village, so much so that most of the village is within the stone circle. i did some walking along the ridgeway trail but had brought too much gear with me to venture far, so caught a bus back again to salisbury and then a train into london again where i met up with my cousin who is living in wimbledon, and this i had not realised till only a week or so earlier!

i spent a few nights with Dan in wimbledon and explored some more of the vibrant city of london in this time. during this time i applied for some more work and managed to secure a position as assistant manager in a hiking shop in north london, and would start it in 10 days time at the end of august. since i was to be starting a job i hoped to enjoy i thought it would be good to get some fast paced travelling done and see some of the sights and history i specifically wanted to see and see a little more in depth. so i hired a car for one week and thought of heading north again to take in hadrian's wall and parts of the lakes district. When i was due to return dan and kate were heading to the US for a month and had asked me to housesit so i had somewhere to stay for the forsgt month of my work at any rate, and it has been a huge help and i will be gratefull for a long time!!

So it was up to the north i was headed, as i'd picked the car up early afternoon i had decided on not travelling to far in the first day so i headed west at first before striking north. I went to Stonehenge. arriving in the early evening is a lovely time to see these monolithic stones, the sun was setting and lighting them with reds and yellows with the green of the salisbury plain and golds of the fresh cut hay dotted around. sitting having a coffee and watching the stones there was a young girl who was doing some drumming and also just experiencing the site, it was a good sound and lent to the amazing atmosphere of the evening. i had chosen a car that i could recline the passenger seat far enough so i could at need actually sleep in the car, and i chose to do this on the first night! sleeping on a lane overlooking stonehenge as the sun set and the stars came out was a wonderful experience, and i was not alone in that idea, as the evening drew to a close there were many camper vans and motorhomes that obviously knew of this spot as it seemed popular among travellers! it was another experience to watch the sun rise over the stones the next morning! leaving the stones early i set out and since i was in the area decided on stopping in at Bath and vieweing the roman remains there once more, it had been ten years since i last saw them. bath is another fantastic english city with so much history and great alleys and shops and too much to explore on my short visit. i spent a good couple of hours in the roman exhibition viewing history stretching back the better part of two thousand years!

leaving bath mid morning and heading north on the motorways it wasnt long till the wonderful morning gave way to clouds and eventually heavy rain! the distances in england are so close that it was not too bad a day to drive slower and still make excellent time. i arrived in the lakes district about 4pm and wanted to try and see a stone circle i had seen on a tv programme here, alas it was up the side of a mountain with no easy access and without a map, in the rain and mist i decided against it as it was likely to get dark before too long. i continued north to the town of Windemere where i stopped for dinner and to perhaps find somewhere to stay, after a good pub meal i decided on heading out of town and finding somewhere to stay in the car as i had been surprised by how comfortable it was! not to mention cheap! i spent a rainy night beside the road in a special layby for this purpose, with several motor homes which is how i spotted it in the thick mist! in the morning i headed to Keswick and spent a little time in this town at the heart of the lakes district, everything here is geared up for people following in the footsteps of wainright and walking the hills and fells of cumbria. whilst i was here i visited the stone circle of Castlerigg again as i remembered it as a special place, and it still was, to my dissapointment though i found i could have spent the night here rather than on the side of the road! oh well, something to remember for the future! after some breakfast i headed to my main destination along hadrian's wall. I had planned to simply camp somewhere for a few days but arriving in rain does reduce the enthusiasm for camping. i found the local youth hostel centrally located at the wonderfully named Once Brewed. a really nice little place with a pub, visitor centre and hostel, and that is it! the roman ruins, and wall are all within walking distance and this is the big draw card!

In the morning i headed out to complete a circular walk from the hostel, it headed a mile away to the roman fort of Vindolanda. here is an excellent site site it has ongoing archaeological excavations year round and they are constantly finding many new items. i shared my dorm room with a young guy from the states who was working on the site and in the three days i was there they uncovered several dozen roman shoes and the remains of a road that had lain under the earth for 1700 years... yep, heres history. Vindolanda also has an excellent small museum and holds many of the Vindolanda tablets, small peices of thin timber used just like cards are today, to convey letters and invitations in the colloquial latin of the period. from Vindolanda i headed across the hills and walked over the old roman military way and Vallum before arriving at Housesteds roman fort, another very well preserved examle which shows the layout of such forts extremely well. this fort lays on the wall itself and you can see it stretching off to the distance both east and west. i headed west and for a short period walked along the only part of the wall you are actually allowed to walk on. thence it was beside the wall for a few miles till i stopped for a break in one of the roman mile castles. i met a cool english girl, priya, whilst walking and spent some of the time walking and talking and making the journey very pleasant. the wall came back to a point where we headed down a lane and back to the hostel where Priya was also staying. over dinner in the pub met another girl staying at the hostel, Julie who was another aussie! made plans to do some more wall walking the next day as Priya was walking it from end to end. Julie decided to join us and over the course of the night kept some of the other guests entertained with stories of the deadly australia and drop bears.

walked perhaps 10 miles of the wall the next day and ended up in haltwhistle a town that claims to be the very centre of the UK. julie and i caught the bus back to once brewed while Priya kept walking further to the destination she had pre booked for the night. the next morning i was heading off to the east to see some of the other sites further along the wall, Julie was heading up into scotland via Newcastle so i asked if she wanted to come and see some of the sites, which she did so we journeyed to the remains of the Mithraeum, and to chesters roman fort. from there it was into newcastle itself where we had a look throught the castle and some of the town. a really nice place and somewhere i hope to spend some more time, I did want to come here for university but that has unfortunately not worked out!

from newcastle i dropped julie at the bus terminal and headed south, i journeyed along the coast and through the yorksire moors to Scarborough, though the evening was wet and wild so kept on driving and headed into York. here i took a look around the city with the evening lights and eventually found a layby with a late night cafe and truck stop where i could spend the night. the next morning i came back into york for a more detailed look and visited the Jorvik viking centre which i had missed in the past. an interesting place but it was now aimed more at the younger visitor. from york i headed south as the car was due to be returned the next day, not knowing how long it would take to get into gatwick in the morning i went with waht i knew and spent another night next to stonehenge. again an amazing experience... i would have liked to go up to the stones in the middle of the night as there was only a field between us but there was a guard walking around all night that discouraged this!!

in the morning i made good time back to gatwick where i had hired the car from, returned i caught the train back into wimbledon and organised myself for the start of work in two days time. since i had a weekend free i headed to Camden markets to take in the variety and culture of this bustling market, where almost anything can be bought, and at very cheap prices!

it has now been a month since i started work, i am in an area called Turnpike lane, not the nicest of areas, but the people i work with are fantastic and the store itself is a good place. at this stage my cousin has returned from the states and i am in the process of finding somewhere to live for the next few months. i am planning on returning mid february at this stage to complete some more university, but as plans go, they are always open to change, the weather in london is beginning to get cool and has been raining the last few days. with luck i will be able to get away for a wekend or so each month and still do some travelling, i may just head to paris for a weekend or to prague for a night or two if i can get some cheap flights, if not there are many cities that are only a couple of hours away by train or bus from london, oxford..cornwall, there are many options!

that is it for the moment, again there has been much left out, memory being what it is! i hope to have many photos to show all when i return..till then take care,

Mahkra~