Miles to Go - Day Ten

 Saturday 10^th July

This afternoon, I decided to take a walk through Maesbury Castle again, and see whether I could get some decent photographs this time.  I was also hoping to find somewhere to donate The Wave Theory of Angels, and, as there were numerous phone symbols all over the map and I knew that plenty of phone boxes have been converted into informal book-exchanges, I decided to plot a route which took me past phone symbols at Oakhill, Dalleston near Binegar, Old Down, and maybe Clapton.  If not, I could always leave the book behind at some café or something.

I set off up Ash Lane (empty phone box not doing anything in particular at the top) and into Oakhill (no sign of a surviving phone box).  I had never seen a phone box in the many times in the past when I had been there, but I knew I was unobservant enough to have failed to notice something nine feet high and bright red.

Even in the overcast weather, Maesbury Castle was looking beautiful, but wasn’t in a mood to look its best in photographs.  I took a few anyway, trying to capture first the long grass and flowers in the meadow as you approach the earth embankment,

then something of the embankment itself, bright with foxgloves, and the short turf within it.  

I emerged on the far side, walked north-west along Old Frome Road, and noticed that I was passing Rocky Mountain Nursery, which hadn’t even occurred to me when planning a route.  This is an example of how compartmentalised my thinking about places has become.  To me, Maesbury Castle is somewhere to go for picnics, or a walk, or to take photographs.  In more sociable years, we had sometimes been here for church picnics, and played skittles on the grass.

Rocky Mountain Nursery, on the other hand, was somewhere I had passed in the car many times on journeys to Wells.  I had registered that it was a garden centre with a farm foods stall and a café.  PDB11 and I had discussed what a strange quirk of the English language it is, looking at signs for Rocky Road Nursery and TreeHouse Nursery, that the one that has plants in the name is the one that does not supply them.  We occasionally had bought gardening supplies at Rocky Mountain Nursery.  I just hadn’t thought of it in terms of ‘places I can walk to’.

I thought of it now in terms of ‘places I can have a cup of tea at’.  However, it was half past three and the waitresses were busy soaping down tables not with the air of people cleaning them for new customers, but of people hoping the stream of customers has finished for the day.  They were now supplying only takeaways, I gathered.  I went on my way, pausing only to munch a cereal bar I had brought with me.

Turning north, and then north-west again up the B3135, I passed Rookery Farm.  Now, there are plenty of Rookery Farms in Somerset – usually prompting mock-serious conversations between PDB11 and me over why anyone would bother to farm rooks when there are so many of them flying around, and whether it could be because every chess set requires two white rooks as well as two ordinary black rooks, so the farmers need to breed the albino ones specially.

However, this Rookery Farm was the one that houses a number of businesses which I knew well, including Killens Auctioneers.  This was where where PDB11 and I had gone to sell off some of my father-in-law’s possessions after he moved into a nursing home and after his death.  Once, when we had been admiring bits and pieces in the auctioneer’s office, a member of staff had given us a tiny ivory Siamese dragon, because he needed a home and the auctioneer couldn’t legally sell ivory.  

We decided to name him Ping-Ping, after a dragon in the Drachenhof Feuerfels novels, which PDB11 is translating.  Ping-Ping in the books is female, but I think of this one as male.  If you look closely, he has wings on all four paws - not unlike the microraptor dinosaurs, which also had four wings.

Another familiar place was Hartley’s Kitchen Bistro.  This restaurant isn’t particularly cheap, but it is nice.  It isn’t so much a place I’d go for a cup of tea as a place I’d take a guest for a delicious meal out, as long as the guest doesn’t mind what my brother-in-law describes as ‘too much avec’ on the menu.  It’s a place to admire the quirky wall posters and place mats with punning pictures made out of food (for example, honey being combed, or a mountain made out of piled-up olives).  At four o’clock, it was closing too, but Paul Hartley

did let me take photos of him and of some of the kitchen staff.

Glad to be off a main road, I headed north-east up Bennetts Lane towards Dalleston, a charming area which I had never really looked around, even though it was on the outskirts of Binegar. 

I even caught sight of a church and thought, ‘Maybe I should go and take a closer look,’ before I realised that it was the one that I attend anyway (when I go to church, which I haven’t been doing a lot in the past year and a half, admittedly).

Dalleston does have a phone box, which has been converted into a defibrillator site.  I had to admit that people more often need a defibrillator in a hurry than they need a second-hand book in a hurry, so it seemed a sensible use of the space.  I decided to see whether Old Down had a phone-box library.  I was more tired than I had expected to be, and time was getting on, so I decided to give the detour to Clapton a miss.

To avoid a main road, I walked north-east to Lechmere Water (a name which always makes me picture lustful water-sprites rising from the depths to seduce humans) before heading east to Old Down (which also doesn’t have a telephone box any more, let alone one converted into a book exchange) and home. 

On my way past Old Down, I passed an ash tree which looked as though it had been ill with ash dieback last year, had sprouted a lot of new shoots reaching straight to the sky in a last desperate attempt to grab some sunlight.  Against all expectation, it had actually survived, and grown new leaves this year.  I was deeply impressed at its resilience, especially when so many trees had perished.

On my way home, the weather cleared enough that I could get one good landscape picture of a bright field –

and, more unexpectedly, one of a swallow. 

‘Look, if I touch the wire with my hand, it does THIS!’

Miles walked today: 10

Total miles: 104