Chorlton // Wishing Tree

In June we had a trip to Harlech during the Jubilee Weekend and visited Portmerion (famous for the Prisoner).

Whilst wandering through the amazing gardens packed with exotic plants and trees we came across this:

Hammered into the stumps were a variety of coins, I remembered reading about Wishing Trees in the past so it was nice to see them in the flesh. We added our own and made our wishes.

Information on the Portmerion Wishing Trees via BBC:

Meurig Jones, an estate manager at the tourist destination, told the BBC: 'We had no idea why it was being done when we first noticed the tree trunk was being filled with coins.

'I did some detective work and discovered that trees were sometimes used as "wishing trees" .

'In Britain it dates back to the 1700s - there is one tree in Scotland somewhere which apparently has a florin stuck into it.'

He said that a sick person could press a coin into a tree and their illness would go away. 

'If someone then takes the coin out though, it's said they then become ill.'

'We haven't publicised it at all, it's just happened,' he added. 'It's quite amazing really.'

In Scotland, there is also a legend about a kissing tree. If a young man could drive a nail into a tree with one blow, he earned a kiss from his sweetheart.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-north-west-wales-14464862

I really liked the history and magic around this ritual so decided Chorlton needed it's very own. One early morning I jumped on my bike with a bag of coins and went on the hunt for the right stump...

After a while whizzing up and down the Chorlton woods off Beech Road I came across this newly fallen beauty:

Wish my bag of coins and a rock I spent a good half hour hammering in a multitude of wishes to get the ball rolling. (In true English style the passers-by and dog walkers didn't enquire as to what I was up to).

So there we have it, Chorlton's very own Wishing Tree (in a secret location you'll have to uncover yourself). I left behind a few rocks for people to add their own wishes in the future.

Hopeully they will all come true.

P.S. This may not be the only stump I worked on...

Chorlton // Open & Closed

As I continue to do a little more research for my Digital Chorlton project i've decided to add an additional element to the website: As users hover over the shops they can see the shop in it's closed state.

To do this i'm going to create each shop as a sprite PNG file and use CSS to switch it's current state. This not only speeds up the loading of the page but also removes and "flicker" as the rollover image gets loaded.

Here's how Dulcimer will look:

To achieve this I will ise the following code:

.dulcimer {background: url(http://i.chorlton.me/dulcimer.png) 0 -145px;}

.dulcimer:hover {background: url(http://i.chorlton.me/dulcimer.png) 0 0;}

Now if I can make this happen automatically when night time falls that would be fantastic. Or, taking it further, have the shops open and close in real time.

Time to figure out how to do this methinks...