Just the other side of the church you can see in the distance is the farm shop (a local organic farmers' collective); a nice walk unless it's raining. Behind the camera the land dips sharply away through woodland to the river (photos to come another day).
As for the thing in the field: I thought at first that it was simply a concrete drainage ring housing an inspection chamber so I wandered over and took a look and it is old wartime solid mass concrete with rusty bolt holes. It is the base for an old WWII anti-aircraft gun. There was one of those in a hedge at the bottom of our road when I was a kid, still with all the rusting metalwork in place. A great place to play. The countryside round here is littered with tank traps and pillbox gun emplacements, half-filled bomb craters and abandoned airfields with rotting concrete control towers and bunkers and the like, all overgrown with brambles and nettles. When we were kids those places were the best playgrounds ever.
9 comments:
Oooh, I'd love to photograph some abandoned airfields! You live at a very picturesque place. It's a wonder you get any work done. If it was me I'd be just wandering about all day.
Vanda, I shall have to make an excursion to the abandoned airfields of my youth. Unfortunately I know that some of them are now (blech) industrial estates, with all the old buildings swept away, but I know where there are still some unspoilt spots. I shall do that this wintertime as the trees will be bare and things will be easier to find and photograph.
Beautiful. What a sky. So, which church is that? You've given us tours of so many, I'd like to put a picture with a name.
That's Saint Andrew and Saint Peter, Robyn. Why they have to share a church is beyond me. Saint Laurence is at my end of the village. You can't turn around in my neighbourhood without seeing several church towers. Nobody goes to church here any more (except the dozen old ladies I found in Saint Larry's one Easter), but the towers are handy for navigation and fun to climb up and take photos from the top (see many past posts).
How very beautiful and wonderful and exciting! A beautiful place and what wonderful memories to play among such historic sites.
We used to live near an old overgrown farm in Oceanville, New Jersey. There were overgrown orchards and gardens and roads. We wandered for hours wondering who lived there and finally found the old tombstone of Sarah and Obadiah Leeds. The Leeds family produced the legendary "Jersey Devil". The hockey team is now named after the famous creature. My father was known for telling stories to the neighborhood children.
Such a picturesque scene! And then to think what it must have looked like during WWII. But I can imagine it was a fun place to play years later. As kids, we explored old barns and houses that had been left to deteriorate, altho some of them were used to store hay bales. Like Neetzy, we also wondered who once lived there and what their lives were like.
Hoorah for the Jersey Devil, Neetzy! Boy howdy, it must have been spooky finding the Leeds' burial place. That's the kind of tale for long, drunken evenings of scaring the crap out of one another in the dark. I love those.
Ms.M, it would have looked pretty much the same here during WWII except for all the US airmen on the streets. We have a lot of vets still visit once a year and attend ceremonies in some windswept empty field that used to be their airbase. They love hanging out at the Samson and Hercules in Norwich, which used to be THE place for American airmen to dance and drink and entice local girls with stockings and bubble gum. It's great to see the old guys posing on the steps there, wearing all their medals and laughing at tales of past debauchery.
We don't have many disused barns and houses here. The country is too small and crowded to have much empty space.
It was the opposite in my neighborhood. Everyone was always building something, so we played on dirt hills and in the foundations of new houses.
Maybe that's why I have a nostalgia for such places as England, where I've only spent six weeks.
Oooh, building sites must be awesome playgrounds!
I feel the same nostalgia for Paris and Venice. Hey ho …
Post a Comment