Times Past

There is an apocryphal family legend that my grandfather (a WWI vet, wounded on the Somme, probably with undiagnosed PTSD) stood at the farm boundary in the 1930s and told the head huntsman that, if he brought the hunt on to the farm, he would "shoot yer horse, shoot yer dog and b***** shoot you as well". Since he only had two barrels on his shotgun, the dog would probably have been spared, but the hunt never put it to the test

We met them soon after this photograph - muddy people, muddy horses, muddy cars - on a narrow sunken lane, coming in the opposite direction, leaving everything muddy behind them. I'm probably supposed to be outraged, suspicious that they are breaking the law and chasing (and killing) foxes while pretending it was an accident. But foxes are thriving; foxes kill lots of things; people are suffering, starving and dying unjustly everywhere; ride on. The most annoying thing about them is that they have clearliy been drilled to death to offer a cheery, hearty greeting to everyone they meet, to counter their elitist reputation. Frankly, I preferred the days of honest, haughty disdain

The sun makes every picture wonderful. I think it made us a little light headed and reluctant to return indoors - covering more distance than we ever intended. A frozen glass left outside the pub all night; Christmas baubles hung along a hedgerow; crimson rosehips; woodpecker-damaged birdboxes; a motte and bailey; emergent butterbur: all could have been blipped - a cornucopia

This was once a mill leat. The mill is now a posh house; the leat a mere display, before its water flows back into the mainstream. The mysterious obelisk is a hydram pump, I think - an ingenious way of getting a proportion of the water from a steeply descending flow back up to a point higher than the start of the fall - literally making water run uphill - without the input of any external fuel or energy. I think it is long out of use. So, like the hunt, some picturesque relics