Today was our third day in Devon! We had had enough of beaches, and it was too sunny and that sort of thing to go to the swimming pool indoors, so we decided to go to the castle. It was called Dartmouth Castle, and it was very colossal and it had small and narrow passageways and with tiny ceilings you had duck down to get through. Its inhabitants must have been tiny!
We listened to some talks, too, about guns and pistols, and also some old Saxon games. I read all about the past of the castle, and how it started a war with France and surrendered, and that sort of thing. We asked the people setting up the talks if we could have an activity sheet, and there was this real cool code we had to crack that I absolutely loved! And yes, it does deserve a new paragraph..
On our sheet was a little drawing of a sort of norts-and-crosses board, in the exact same layout. But instead of having norts and crosses on the board, it had letters; ab, cd, ef, gh, ij, kl, mn, op, and qr. Each of these were in the little boxes on the board. Then it had a sort of large X. And if I zoom in a little – X – you can see the little triangles on the X. Can you? In between the thick black lines? Well, in one of those triangles were the finishing letters of the alphabet, s and t. In a different triangle was uv, and wx, and finally y and z. Then you had to find the boxes scattered around in the castle and see what the pattern was on the lid. Inside was a little card saying, for instance, with the top triange on the X, pointing downwards. This, say, would have a dot next to it. The dot means the second letter of the box shape – so t. The word would start with t. According to the pattern on the lid, you would finish off the word in the correctly coordinated box. Hoopht, that took a lot of explaining – I suppose now you could have just looked it up on the internet, but anyway.
It was very fun, and then we saw a little path on a cliff we went down. At the bottom was the sea, big and gushing, clawing at the rocks and spreading out its soggy paws on them. Hurrying over the rocks, we were able to see a very, very small little pebble beach nobody had dared to go on – so what did we do? Climb over the wet rocks and go on it! We found an awesome, small cave that we played games in, and it was about six when we finally left! So excited about tomorrow! See you soon, everybody!
