White Alice Farm B&B

Just had a very rainy weekend in Cornwall again visiting our microwind test site. We drove down on Friday evening in terrible weather and stopped at the Golden Lion Inn for supper. Simply nice food, and a good pint of St Austell best.

The White Alice Farm B+B is definitely the best place for us to stay. It's a little difficult to find by road in the dark which I don't think my wife will let me forget for a long time, but worth it. We stayed in the self catering barn which was useful because there was a bit of extra space to strew wet gear around. It's run by Sue Faryluk (White Alice Farm, Carnmenellis, Cornwall, TR16 6PH; tel 01209 860634) and her husband. She does a nice breakfast.

On Saturday I put up another wind turbine and various bits of instrumentation in pretty fair weather, and on Sunday we had terrible weather whilst we did some stuff with a wind tunnel we have. Our Ampair 600-24 is going really well on performance trials down there.

Agh the $%^** Blogger ampersand curse has struck again. No way is this out of beta !

Hugh Mereweather and early Kestrel / Harrier testing

Ampair was started by Hugh Mereweather back in 1973. He was a test pilot who enjoyed sailing and he designed the early Ampair 50 wind turbine that evolved into the Ampair 75 and then the Ampair 100. The Aquair was jointly his design and that of Don Street of IOLAIRE fame. Later the UW was co-designed with George Durrant who brought Ampair into some stability after the rather meagre early years. Anyway it is not often that one can find information about Hugh Mereweather's test pilot work and I have just seen some at the Harrier history website.

Hugh died last year and Ampair was represented at his funeral by George Durrant. I will post his obituary as written by Don Street another day.