Beverston Castle blues

GG and I drove to Beverston, near Tetbury, for today's walk. We started off in the cemetery of the Norman church, overlooking the castle, having a picnic on a flat tombstone. GG had brought some delightful goodies, even though I had begged her not to because of my special diet. I'd brought chicken and rocket sandwiches and carob-nut balls which had coalesced and turned into a large slab of sticky stuff.

We explored the castle walls (it's a private house now; the Berkeley family who had owned it went over to Parliament during the English civil war ) and the farm and the beautiful outbuildings. Daffodils were profuse and magnificent. Again, it's a manorial set up: castle, church, farm all grouped together. There are other village houses, probably for millionaires. No amenities to speak of.

After we'd finished oohing and aahing at the jigsaw-puzzle spring scene, we took a path through a field, following directions from a guidebook. It was supposed to take us to Chavenage green and another big house. It took us to an immensely long broccoli field and then another field and then a wood with a wooden pheasant coop (or was it a very small control tower left over from Colditz?), blue feed stores, and the shriek of distant pheasants. I also saw a spent gun cartridge on the ground. The end of this wood was pretty impassable, we were clearly lost, and Google Maps could not get a signal. GG decided that we needed to take a left across a massive ploughed field. At the end of this field was a wall, and beyond it another ploughed field. Nothing growing. Beyond that, the road. Beyond that, the signal returned and said we had to walk a mile up this road, back to the car. It was a speedway, despite being designated a B road, with lumpy verges, but we made it with a fair amount of discomfort.

Back in the car, GG announced that we'd done 10,007 steps. Is that all? I wondered. I shall probably dream of broccoli and a haunted wood.

Next time we may get to Chavenage. We'll drive there, and I'll take the OS map with me (I'd left it in the car because the water bottle had leaked). Never trust a guidebook with flimsy sketches substituting for 'proper' maps. We agreed we'd had an enjoyable afternoon overall, and the first time we'd ever had a picnic in a Norman churchyard.