Thank you to Sandra for your great efforts. My sunflower, despite being ravaged by slugs, appears to be the most resilient.

Sandra's wonderful sunflowers...

We had a fabulous day out at the Big Pit National Museum on Wednesday 17 August. It was a unique experience to go down a coal mine run by ex-miners and we felt genuinely moved and privileged to be there. Our guide was a fabulous raconteur, whose stories were personal, funny and poignant all at the same time. It is only a 20 minute drive from Newport, and Blaenavon is a Unesco World Heritage Site. Thank you so much for organising the trip, Dilys.

We had a superb walk around Bristol following the Bristol Slave Trade Walk on Wednesday 10 August. It was a lovely and informative day. A comprehensive brochure of the walk can be found in the foyer of the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery on Park Street with all the other leaflets. Rather bizzarely, you can pay a £1 and get a less informative version in the shop. There is also a bristol slave trade walk that I found on the BBC Bristol site, but it is not as informative as the one in the Museum, BBC Bristol Slave Trade Walk.

The Seven Stars Pub is a significant landmark to abolotion. Here, in 1787, Thomas Clarkson stayed in order to gather evidence of the slave trade for his friend, William Wilberforce.

A big thank you to Catherine for orgnanising and leading the walk.

June 16^th 2016

The meeting at Ingrid’s last evening was well attended.

The future programme was discussed and the venue for the meal out on 27^th July was agreed, “The Royal”. Our August meeting were mentioned and members are reminded that Lisa will be giving her talk at Anne’s house on 3^rd August. After a brief discussion it was agreed unanimously that the outing will be on 17^th August.

On Wednesday 29th Janet was due to lead a history walk, having prepared a fascinating theme on an unexpected topic, Portishead poet Fay Inchfawn. When it became obvious that our walk would not take place we were comfortably installed in Jenny’s sitting room where Janet intrigued us with a talk about the poetess.

• do not offer any financial support
• offer some support (eg half the fee £26)
• offer the full fee of £52

I have downloaded Dilys' presentation on Suffolk in PDF format into the Download's area. I strongly recommend having a look at the presentation, because in addition to the presentation being informative, the pictures are beautiful.

For those of you who attended my presentation concerning an introduction to computers, I have uploaded a PDF form of the presentation into the Downloads area on the Portishead NWR Web Page.

Welcome to the new year, and with it a new spring programme for the Portishead Group in 2015!