A Sunday walk

Today was golden with a June-like warmth, and sweet, mellow, autumn sunlight.  

A perfect day to go for my first real walk for months.

 

You can come with me, courtesy of my phone camera.

 

  As ever I start from my beloved park,

 where the trees at the edge of the golf course are beginning to turn their

 various shades of autumn auburn.

 

 On, over the footbridge and into the village , this handsome Georgian house sits on the corner,

 next to some older, but up-dated houses.

 The hand rail on the right runs alongside the footpath to the church,

but I walked up Church Road which lies alongside the house. 

 

Two horse riders,

 (of which there are many in the lanes and roads in and around the village today),

amble companionably along. 

The sound of  hooves breaking the afternoon silence of the lane

 lent a timelessness to the moment. 

 

  The field which is usually full of horses is empty.

The usual tenants must be part of the increase in equine traffic today.

  The village allotments,

(plots of land which are rented by the year to grow vegetables, fruit and flowers),

are being given their pre-winter tidy up.

Fruit and veg is harvested amid the blaze of dahlias,

 chrysanthemums,

 and Michaelmas daisies

 

 Back in the main village,

 the old houses straddle the street in front of the church.

 These cottages date from the 1680s. 

In those days this road, (still called the Birmingham Road),

 was the main road between Coventry and Birmingham,

 and was probably much busier then than it is on this sleepy Sunday,

 when the main artery is the A45 which by-passes the village.

 These cottages on the opposite side of the road were built approximately a century later,
around 1760.

The Old Stone House dates from 1600,

 and I have heard stories that it is haunted by the ghost of a roundhead soldier,

 but as Emily Bronte says in Wuthering Heights,

 it is hard to believe in unquiet spirits on a day such as this.

 

 

Back over the footbridge which links the village with the park.


 






The beech trees are still freckled by the buttery sun,

and as the afternoon shadows lengthen and tea time calls,

 families linger to enjoy the last rays before the autumn dews begin to fall.

 

My own street is much more mundane than the historic village centre but,

 despite my love for my native Wales,

 I still feel greatly blessed to live in this lovely part of England.

 

May your own place on this beautiful planet

Be Blessed

Today