Buckfastleigh, Devon England - Walkabout and a Vincent Black Shadow
If you don't know what a Vincent Black Shadow is, and you're a petrolhead - then you're in for treat. It's the first ever 'superbike', announced in 1945 with a top speed of 125mph which would have sounded like 225mph at that time. A very serious machine - decades before anyone else came to match it. Then they just vanished around 1955 and never built another.
This is a walkabout back in my hometown, England. Buckfastleigh has an old train station that hosts car and bike events a couple of times every summer/autumn and this was another where steam engines and vintage motorbikes were on display. Following which I took a walk up into the foothills of the small town and those pictures make up the second half of this post. Good memories, and photos I wanna share so here we go!
If you aren't sure about the Vincent, please Google - there is plenty about it elsewhere we don't need repeat here. However, here is one in the flesh - I'd never seen one before. What a beauty, absolutely stunning and almost inconceivable they managed this design and technology back in 1945! 125mph ... what a beast.
As you may be able to tell this is a very immaculate restoration.
"THE" Vincent ... and a vintage Triumph sits on display alongside, another fantasic classic bike.
Devil is in the details, and check out how many this thing has. If this was 1945 can you imagine how crazy and advanced this thing would have looked?
Everything with a purpose, power, refinement, and 125 mph on a bike ... in the 1940s. It was probably 2 decades before any other bikes caught up. The Vincent was the Bugatti Veyron of motorbikes back then.
A Triumph motorcyle, also a beast back in the day before Japan came to dominate the market. Triumph are however still going, reinvented and renewed - we'll be getting back to them in a future post.
So once done checking out the bike show, walking up into the lanes around Buckfastleigh and found this pretty crazy spider. Bit but very harmless, btw. There aren't really any venomous spiders around in England, luckily!
He sure looks more scary than he really is! (Or she, very hard to say!)
Some really crazy interesting fauna around, Devon has the mildest climate in all England, at summertime, there are semi-tropical ferns and more growing around the lanes. Here being one example.
Rolling hills, green as far as you can see, farmlands, this is Devon. This is why I love my homelands, there are no words for these pictures. This is where I grew up.
Spot the church spire and ironically, the mobile tower poking up above the town. Here we are walking in the fields above Buckfastleigh. It's really beautiful on a summer evening, you can see the farmlands and Dartmoor in the distance.
This farmer seems to be growing a lot of cabbage. Probably this isn't human cabbage tho, it'll be used for feeding cows to make delicious beef.
At the tail end of summer, you can forage in the fields for berries. Blackberries grow in abundance, you just have to find them away from the roads a little, or they don't taste so good ...
There's a lot of berries right here on the edge of the cornfield. Again, this is the area around Bukfastleigh, it's very green and although mostly farmland, it's managed well alongside nature and makes for a very nice environment to be around. Note the lane running past, on the roadside these berries don't taste so good. However, many more can be found by going off the beaten path just a little.
You can find many varieties of wild flowers, Spring/Summertime they're popping up everywhere.
Wild heather and grasses, the sorts of which you only find in Devon.
The rolling green hills, forests, rivers, fields, and semi-tropical nature of Devonshire, England. Thank you for reading, and I do hope you enjoyed this little glimpse of the paradise which Devon can be.