Wonderful firewood on a lorry

I found it hard to awaken this morning, which Helena thought was because of the big meal out we eaten last night whilst celebrating her birthday. It was very good and she thought the chocolate cheesecake might be to blame. Whatever the cause, and the meal was worth it, I awoke in the night and only got back to sleep after dawn.

I offered to drive Helena to work as she was in a bit of a rush. As we drove down the nearby old Bowbridge Lane, we both commented on a large lorry parked up where there are normally only cars, and Helena said it would make a good blip. The reason was that the open back of the truck was filled to the brim with containers full of carefully stacked dried firewood.

When I returned home, I saw the truck was still there so picked up my camera and walked back down the roads to it. What appealed to me was that at last it seems that wood is being appreciated as a wonderful natural resource that is too often under used. Britain has such a great heritage of managed woodlands, which have rather gone to rack and ruin in years since the Second World War. When I got up close to the lorry I could see that a lot of careful work had been involved in the drying, cutting, stacking, putting into large open containers and then finally lifting them onto a lorry. The lorry which had its own crane, was quite old but very serviceable. The cab had its curtains drawn as if a there might be a driver asleep in it. I did wonder where it had come from and what its destination was. Possibly this wood would be for use in a modern efficient wood-fired boiler? Anyway I am pleased to see that it must be an economic solution for something.

I wanted to blip it, although it wasn't a very pre-possessing image, so I circled around and then decided to climb up on to the old bank below the relatively recent houses built on the site of Highfield. The road is a very ancient route from the oldest part of Stroud out towards the east and is called Bowbridge Lane, named after the bridge over the river Frome about a hundred yards below this spot. I blipped a shot of a derelict warehouse beside the bridge a few days ago.

The rather grand house in the background is called Field House:
Field House incorporates on the north-east a 17th-century range with a central oak staircase around a well, some original windows, and two surviving gables with oval lights. Early in the 19th century a range was added on the south-west to provide a new entrance hall and living-rooms and the end walls of the older block were rebuilt to match the new work. The new part may have replaced an older wing, for in 1825 when it belonged to Samuel Clutterbuck of St. Mary's Mill, the house was said to have been recently taken down and rebuilt. In 1971 it had become the headquarters of the Gloucestershire wing of the Air Training Corps.

All this area was originally part of The Field estate, which included a farm, and a couple of years ago a range of new houses were built beside it, some of which you can see to the left of the main building. But the roof to the back right is protecting two old cottages, which were probably part of that farm area, although there are windows in the building which date from the fourteenth century, three hundred years older than Field House.