Good Days

I may not be able to get out on the long walks that I enjoy, but I can still totter down to my local community woodland to see the snowdrops - at least on my good days!

There's not much I can tell you about snowdrops that I haven't covered in previous years. Just enjoy!

I came across this old photograph the other day while looking for something else entirely...

This is the office and sales room of J H Cooper & Sons in Cambridge. All swept aside now in the name of progress, but for over a 100 years the place where the canny people of the town went to buy their furniture. Mention that you needed a bed or an armchair in conversation and someone would always say, "Well, if you ask me, you can't beat Coopers". That seemed to be the only advertising they had.

Armed with that advice you'd make your way to Newmarket Road. "Yes, sir, we can supply a two seat settee instead of the larger model". "Might I suggest a slightly darker shade, sir, you'll find it won't show any marks". "We can usually have it ready in about four weeks, but some of the men will be on holiday at this time of year, so shall we say six weeks?" It arrived in three weeks.

I'm sitting on one of Mr Cooper's armchairs right now!

In order to add "unbeatable value" to this blogpost we'll finish with a little music.

Back in the 1990s I spent my holidays as a walks leader, taking groups through some of the best scenery that England and Wales has to offer. One of the places I went most frequently was the Brecon Beacons National Park (now officially Bannau Brycheiniog) in S Wales. You only occasionally heard Welsh spoken in the town of Brecon, except on market days when all the farmers and their wives drove in from the hills. Here's a piece of descriptive acoustic guitar music, from the great John James, about this resilient group of people....

Reminds me of a sunny day when I stood on the slopes of Fan Nedd watching the sheep being gathered on the other side of the valley.

Take care.

Fair Play

In September and October, you may remember, we visited a few country fairs of various kinds. Although I try to concentrate on what's going on - or at least the bits that interest me - I also occasionally like to play around with small details of the scene. It might be a fragment of an ornate mechanical organ, a steam engine, a rusty tractor or the fairground rides. Here's a small selection....

Take care.

Country Pubs

It's time that we had another collection of pub signs encountered on my rambles. In 1393, during the reign of King Richard II, pubs were first required to hang a sign outside to make them clearly visible. In those days few people were able to read and using a picture was a practical solution - "I'll meet thee for a tankard of mead at the sign of the Red Bull". 

The Red Lion is one of the most common pub names you'll find; it's a symbol much used in heraldry and may derive in some cases from the arms of John of Gaunt. The particular Red Lion sign seen above is outside a pub which the brewery wanted to close down. The villagers did not agree and overcame many legal problems to make it the first community-owned pub in England.

The Queen's Head in Newton, Cambridgeshire, did close and stood empty for some years before the arrival of the Short family in 1962 - they still run the pub today. It's one of "The Famous Five" pubs which have been included in CAMRA's Good Beer Guide for the whole fifty years of its publication. Inside it's not much changed since I used to make my way there for a pint of Adnams and a game of darts in the early 1970s.

The Plough, Shepreth is another community pub, just down the road from me and a music venue as well as serving meals and good beer. They've also got a cracking good sign in my opinion.

The John Bunyan gets its name from the Puritan preacher who was associated with the ruined cottage which lies just across the road. There are many pubs which have changed their names to reflect local history. It's unlikely that Bunyan ever popped in for a pint - or that the poet Rupert Brooke ever drank in the pub that bears his name - or that the Hermit Of Redcoats ever stopped being a hermit and joined the merry throng in the pub just a short distance from the house where he famously holed up for twenty-five years without washing or venturing outside.

The Woodman is one of many pubs which takes its name from the occupation of its onetime customers. Not that there are that there are many woods around Chapmore End in Hertfordshire. Presumably the woodmen cut them down before retiring for a well earned pint.

I feel I can't leave you without mentioning The Queen's Head Soup of the Day, part of a limited but hearty menu on offer in that famed and quirky establishment:

(from The Queen's Head website)

That should baffle TripAdvisor!

Take care.

Steamy Scenes

Before Covid raised its restrictive head this blog used to go to lots of country shows, but somehow we've never got back into the habit. But there are several such events coming up in the next month and, weather allowing, we'll be dipping in to some of them.

On Sunday we trundled across the fens to Haddenham, just south of Ely, for their annual Steam Rally And Heavy Horse Show. The temperature got up to a steamy 32 C and by mid-afternoon we'd had enough of it. But we were there early, soon after they opened the gates.

If you get there in the morning you can see the mighty engines being topped up with oil and getting their supplies of coal and water. And there's an enormous amount of polishing that needs doing....

....even on the small model engines.

It can all get a bit smoky - not at all good for the environment!

The full-size engines come in different shapes and sizes too. Some of the most ornate are the "showman's engines" which towed fairground rides from town to town and then powered the roundabouts and big wheels.

Steam rollers were used on the roads in my lifetime; their huge weight was an advantage for that kind of work.

Others were used for ploughing, powering stationary agricultural equipment such as threshing machines, and road haulage.

No, I haven't bought a drone; just been for a ride on the Big Wheel, or Ferris Wheel if you prefer. From the top we could see across to where the tractors were parked....

"There were a fair old few", as we say in East Anglia - more tractors than steam engines, in fact. This doesn't surprise me at all, for here in the fens every farm used to have its own collection of ancient tractors, kept for "any bits that might come in handy".

Now some of them turn up at shows like this, looking like they've just rolled off the production line.

Many of these are models that I used to see during my childhood. Happy memories.

There was a special gathering this year of old Field Marshall and Track Marshall machines. It was great to hear the nostalgic sound of their single cylinder two-stroke engines. Bomp-bomp-bomp-bomp! You always knew it was a Marshall, even from two or three fields away.

Plenty of vintage cars too.

These owners had organised themselves some shade from the mid-day sun.

It's difficult to believe that our police used to chase criminals in cars like this! 

And hard to remember just how small cars could be! Les had a mini-van at one time and many people seemed to be searching for the cars from their youth. I even found my first "set of wheels".....

And we'll finish with a wide view from the top of the Big Wheel.

The observant reader with notice the heavy horses in the show ring. I'll be back with some photos of them quite soon.

Take care.

Echoes Of Old Mistley

Mistley is easily missed! Just a small railway station on the branch line from Manningtree to Harwich. Or a place passed through on the B1352 road that meanders through the handful of villages that lie between those same two places. A birdwatcher might pause for a while where the road runs beside the muddy Stour Estuary.

In summer the local people gravitate towards the strip of grass between the road and the shore. A couple of ice-cream vans and a tea waggon loiter nearby and people bring deckchairs to sit beneath the trees and gaze out across the water.

We found a few Redshanks and an assortment of gulls as we wandered along, ice-creams in hand. 

You can never be too sure with gulls, but I'll say that those with a small dark patch behind the eye are, confusingly, Black-headed Gulls, while a couple of the larger Herring Gulls lurk at the back.

On reaching the end of the muddy shore we turned briefly inland.

If Mistley is famous for anything, it's these two towers standing in an old graveyard. They are what remains of a church built in 1776 and designed by Robert Adam.

Adam was a leading architect of his day and developed his own style in which many buildings were perfectly symmetrical. So when he was asked to design a church it had to have two towers, rather than the usual one, bookending the nave of the church. When the church was demolished it was decided to keep the towers as they provided a useful landmark for boats negotiating the estuary. That's the village sign in the foreground.

The door to one of the towers was open so we poked our heads inside and peered up at the painted ceiling, which is supposed to represent The Holy Trinity.

The graveyard has many surprising memorials including this odd group of graves, which look like coffins converted into beds! Very strange.

Lichens have conspired to give this plain cross a mystical inscription.

Around the back of the towers (and partly in their shadow) is this Egyptian-style mausoleum. The design was all the rage for just a few years around 1830, though it later came back into fashion when Tutankhamun's tomb was discovered. The material used here is actually polished marble, though the years have not been kind.

I became entranced by the weathered handle and keyhole to the door.

But how come such a prestigious architect was hired to build a church in such an obscure spot? For that we can thank Richard Rigby of Mistley Hall. He had an ambitious plan to turn Mistley, which at that time consisted of a quayside with granaries and malthouses, into a saltwater spa town. Adam was originally supposed to design the spa but it was decided that many other buildings, including the old church, needed to be replaced to be in keeping with the proposed fashionable resort.

One side of the village sign records Mistley's history as a port, when sloops and barges transported wheat, flour and brewers' malt around the coast to London. John Constable's father owned such a vessel. The quay still stands and I was keen to find out if there was any public access to the present-day facilities.

This huge building, dating from about 1896, was part of the old maltings, where top-quality barley was turned into malt for London's brewing industry. It appears to be flats or offices now. At one time there were seven large malthouses in Mistley.

Further along the quayside is an old kiln, also part of the malting industry. This shot was taken with a long lens as a sign warned against proceeding further without a hard hat! You can see that some kind of goods is still stored here.

That lens also came in handy for spotting a seal sunning itself on a sandbank.

On the way back along the High Street we came across The Swan Fountain. Along with the building behind it was designed by Robert Adam as a centrepiece for the planned spa town. Nothing else of the ambitious scheme was completed. Note again the symmetry of Adam's work - it's a wonder that swan doesn't have a head at either end!

Across the fields rises the lofty spire of the Church of St Mary and St Michael, the latest version of Mistley church, dating from around 1870. So there we have it - boats, birds, ice-cream, stylish Georgian towers, peculiar graves, a village sign, dockside kilns and malthouses, a sunbathing seal, a decorative fountain and a church. And looking at the map of listed buildings in the area I can see there's plenty more that I missed in Mistley!

Take care.