BeenThere-DoneThat Blog

On our Saffron Walden trip we also stopped briefly in the village of Radwinter just a few miles east of Saffron Walden to have a look at the church. We were unable to go inside because it was locked but we were able to see this rather unusual porch.

It is not unusual to see a porch with timber struts supporting the roof but a porch with a room above and built as a timber-framed structure is unusual. It apparently dates from 1350 the church having been built around 50 years earlier.

We likes it.

When we visited Saffron Walden in the north-west corner of Essex we also called in to a few ‘extra’ villages one of which was Hadstock. This is just a few miles north of Saffron Walden and very near the Cambridgeshire border. Hadstock is a picturesque little village although would not be considered as extra special.

Well - nothing extra special except for St. Botolph’s Church.

It does look, at first glance, like a fairly ordinary village chuch. Most of what you see was built by the Normans but it appears that they incorporated some parts of the previous church which was Saxon and dates from about 1020.

This is the entrance door as seen from inside the church porch and both the stone archway and the door are Saxon. That makes this door the oldest door (around 1000 years old) still in use in Great Britain and has been there since it was first hung on its hinges by the Saxon builders.

On the picture above there is some interesting Saxon carved decoration on the doorway column’s Capital and just below it.

Inside there is further evidence of the Saxon church as seen in the next picture.

This is a cruciform church and these stone bases were probably intended to support a central tower which was never built and now helps to support part of the Norman structure.

It is suggested that this is King Canute’s ‘Mynster’ church which he had built in 1020 to commemorate victory over Edmond Ironside at Assandun.

An amazing piece of history for such a small village.

When we visited Wells Cathedral this past summer we eventually found ourselves in the Quire. At one end of the Quire stalls was a small pulpit with a flat wooden stand on the front edge which was obviously meant to support an open book. On this board was a cushion and on the cushion was - well see for yourselves.

This is Louis. He lives in the cathedral apparently in considerable comfort. Must be noisy when the choir’s singing and a chap is trying to get some sleep but then some people have no consideration.

I took Amanda back to the hospital yesterday for her first check-up after the operation. The foot apparently is progressing well. They removed the original, very bulky, dressings and most of the stitches. I say ‘most of the stitches’ because they couldn’t get one out. Amanda said it felt as if there was a knot inside the foot and the nurse was complaining about the surgeon for not using stitches that dissolve. Amanda said she’d have a go herself, later, at trying to remove the offending stitch.

The new dressing is much less bulky and can be removed when she has a bath. Her next visit will be in 4 weeks and she has to wear her clumpy shoe until then.

So far so good!

About a week ago I stopped my computer, it normally runs 24 hours a day, for its bi-yearly clean-out to remove any dust and fluff which could be starting to clog up the filters on the case air inlet and to blast any dust off that got through to the CPU cooler.

As expected the filter in the air inlet was covered in fluff so I gave it all a good clean.

When that was finished I re-connected and turned it on and - nothing!

It wouldn’t boot. To cut a long story short it turns out that both the mainboard and the RAM had failed. Luckily both are still under warranty but unluckily the mainboard is no longer made, these things go out of fashion very quickly, and has to be returned to Taiwan for repair. This, I am told, could take 3-4 weeks.

I can’t do without my computer for that long as it’s used for web site maintenance, email and the like so I retrieved an old computer from the cupboard, took the hard drives from the failed computer and put them in the old one. The old computer booted up and we’re back to normal. Well, not quite.

The CPU is only 512MHz and has to work its poor little socks off to run most of the heavyweight modern software. Waiting for a web page to display is like watching paint dry.

So now we have a geriatric owner and a geriatric computer. Not a good combination. I decided that in order to preserve my sanity I would have to upgrade the oldie. I have managed to buy a secondhand mainboard via the internet, a power supply unit (PSU) from ebay and a faster 2 GHz CPU from someone I know. This combination should give me a computer that is about 4 times faster than the current old one.

All I have to do now is wait for the various items to arrive, upgrade the computer and, hopefully, my sanity will be restored.

I haven’t bored you have I?

Hello?

Hello?

Is anybody listening?

Tomorrow, Monday, Amanda is going into hospital for some butchery, sorry, surgery on her foot to alleviate a bunion problem. She will be coming back home the same day but it may be at least 2-3 months before her foot is back to normal.

This will obviously put a stop to our travelling for a while and we shall just have to wait and see how she progresses.

Yesterday we drove to Kent, near Rochester, to visit two friends and, naturally, the weather was dismal. Low cloud with rain most of the time. We had a very pleasant pub lunch in a nearby village and on the way back to our friends house we went through the village of Aylesford. A view of this village appears on the cover of a book we have which is a Shell guide to England so, although it was raining, we stopped for me to take this picture.

Pretty ain’t it?

Yesterday afternoon was nice and sunny with a little cloud about so we thought a short walk would be in order. We drove to ConyField Wood where we intended to walk through it to a little village on the far side. Cony, or Coney, is the old word for Rabbit in case you didn’t know.

At this time of the year the sun is getting quite low in the afternoon which does give some nice lighting effects.

Near the far side of the wood is a tumulus which we saw although I didn’t take a photograph of it because the Bracken growing all over it together with the wood all around seemed to make it look rather insignificant.

Having emerged from the other side of the wood the footpath continued across fields with the village, especially the church tower, now visible below. The shadow from the hedge on our left is quite dark and noticeable because of the height, or lack of it, of the sun.

We soon arrived in the village which, believe it or not, is called Messing and here is a photograph of the village sign to prove it.

Just opposite the sign is the village inn, The Old Crown, which has a reputation of providing good food although, as yet, we haven’t sampled it.

I took this next view from the edge of the village because it was a nice view but primarily because of the clouds. They form rows and are sharply cut off at the bottom giving the lower edges a very flat appearance. They might even interest the Cloud Appreciation Society.

We walked back the same way, across the fields and through the woods, to our car and drove home. A short, but very pleasant, walk.

I have remarked, from time to time, that we have seen deer around our home and, sometimes, in the garden but have never been in the right place at the right time with a camera.

But today, when we were in the kitchen, we saw a Muntjac Deer in the garden and did have a camera handy. These are the resultant pictures.

The deer was eating some of the fallen apples and, as you can see, completely ignored my neighbour’s cat and the cat completely ignored the deer.

And then, of course, there’s the inevitable picture of me taking a picture of the deer.

Yesterday morning Amanda and I were having a cup of coffee when she noticed it was raining. I looked out of the window and could see that it was, indeed, raining.

But then I noticed something odd. Some of the ‘rain drops’ were swirling around as if they were floating on the air currents. Amanda agreed with me so I headed for the door to get a closer look and just before I reached the door it stopped.

A little later Amanda said “It’s that funny rain again” and it was so this time we both moved over to the window to get a better look. Some of it was ordinary rain drops but some of it was showing up brighter. It certainly wasn’t hail stones, they wouldn’t float, so it must be SNOW! It wasn’t snow flakes but those little lumps of powdered snow.

There was a strong cold wind yesterday, being outside wasn’t particulary pleasant, and there was a ground frost forecast for this morning.

Snow on the 3rd of October - Cor Blimey!

The autumn colours are showing early this year too. For the last few years we have had to wait until November for autumn colours but they are beginning to appear now.

I wonder what winter will be like?