I felt a different person leaving The Angel this morning from the one who’d arrived there last night. I was clean! I was warm! I was dry! I felt very welcomed. Because it was Good Friday the chef had prepared delicious fish specials for supper and I had brill for the first time. Big fan.

The Angel in Sherston

Sherston is a hidden away secret of a village. It goes back to Roman times, with a villa in a nearby field to prove it. In 1016 King Cnut did battle in Sherston for two days with the incumbent Saxons, led by Edmund Ironside. One of Ironside’s right hand men was John Rattlebone. His name came from the alarming effect he had on the enemy when he thwacked them with his broadsword. He was a brave man .. when fatally wounded in the battle against Cnut, he stemmed the bleeding with nothing but a stone tile .. brave but ineffectual in the end. The statue outside the porch of the Holy Cross Church in the village, of a man clutching a small tablet to his side is meant to be a portrayal of our hero. (Dear Reader, the interpretation of the sculpture as a pilgrim clutching a bible, is clearly an alternative fact). John’s defence of the Saxons is commemorated in the name of the village pub: The Rattlebone Inn. A excellent place to drink and eat, as many punters have discovered.

A fine pub sign for the Rattlebone

One of the many signs in the village

Note the slight bend in the front of this Sherston house ..

.. and this is its perfect name!

It was a chilly start to the morning and I regretted having lost one of my gloves. But there was no rain so I quickly warmed up. I left the Macmillan Way and navigated myself using tracks and country lanes to get to Westonbirt Arboretum, a couple of miles from Sherston.

Three generations of Holford men created the landscaping and collected many of the 2500 trees and shrubs from far and wide for Westonbirt Arboretum. It is a beautiful 600 acre gem, now in the Forestry Commission’s collection of properties. I’ve visited it before in the winter when the trees have made beautiful tracery shapes against leaden skies, in autumn when the acers defy belief with their reds and golds and also in the spring when woodland anenomes carpet the ground beneath lime green clad trees. There’s always something different to see and wandering the paths is food for the soul. Another bonus I found today is that anyone arriving on foot is rewarded with a 50% discount on admission. How very civilised. 

As we were somewhere between winter and spring, it was a bit of a lack-lustre walk through the arboretum today. The vivid crimson of dogwood was just about the only shrub to brighten the landscape.

Fiery dogwood

There was plenty of birdlife though, with the drumming of woodpeckers replacing the ever-present alarm call of the pheasant for a while on my journey.  And there was no shortage of black labradors .. this is the Cotswolds, after all! It was lovely seeing so many families out walking with their little ones and delighted dogs.

Plenty of dogs. Both real ..

.. and wooden ones.

In fact there are lots of sculptural treasures to see at Westonbirt. They’re well-secreted so that you feel a sense of discovery when you turn a bend and come across one.

‘If you love nature you will see beauty everywhere’, Vincent van Gogh

Thank you for all the messages yesterday, following my plea for identification of the emerald carpet of broad-leafed plants in the woods. Mr Google agrees with you!! It was indeed wild garlic. But you didn’t stop at identification .. there were also recipes! Love the sound of wilted wild garlic with softly poached eggs but I think I’d be adding a little hollandaise to up the calorie count.

Magnificent camelia

I made an on the spur of the moment decision when I left Westonbirt to make a slight detour and visit Tetbury. It’s a pretty, hill-top Cotswold market town and I’ve always liked the place.

Cotswold dry-stone walls enclosed the fields along the way and even in the greyness of the day their beauty shone through. They form an important part of the Cotswolds historical landscape and there are major conservation schemes set up to preserve them. They’re constructed without mortar and the stones are carefully chosen for size and shape by the skilled craftsmen who lay the stone. It’s clever because the the rainwater is then able to drain through the wall naturally. The Cumbrians turn their noses up at the single-skinned, three foot high Cotswold drystone walls. Theirs have to be double thickness and twice the height to contend with the adverse weather conditions and the strong and wily Blackface sheep, who have a sharp wit for spotting a gap and using brute force to get to the other side. Genteel Cotswold sheep would never dream of doing such a thing.

Moss on Cotswold dry stone wall

Consulting Mr Google once again I discovered that ‘dry stone walls aren’t just limited to the British Isles; they’re actually found throughout the world and span a variety of civilisations; dry stone walls can be found in Canada, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany Spain, Italy, Canary Islands, Croatia, Czech Republic, Zimbabwe (the ruined city of Great Zimbabwe was predominantly made from dry stone), Australia and New Zealand (due to more recent migration from the British Isles), Belize and Peru (the Inca built Machu Picchu using dry stone construction).

Peering over the drystone wall to see Tetbury

Close to the town I had to climb a fairly steep stile. It always amazes me how animals hear you coming long before you see them. As I got to the top, I found a group of young lambs watching and waiting for me.

Waiting lambs

They stuck around for a photo shoot

The swollen brook coming into Tetbury

The graveyard of St Mary the Virgin was lined with trees bearing spring blossom. What a sight for sore eyes!

Blossom!

Even at 2 in the afternoon the day was damply dark. You can understand why people in England paint their houses and municipal buildings such bright and mellow colours to brighten winter days. Tetbury is a small market town in Gloucestershire (Yay! My fifth county!). During the Middle Ages, the town became an important place to buy and sell Cotswold wool and yarn. Nowadays it’s renowned for its antique and bric à brac shops.

As a nod to the wool industry, in 1972 some wag initiated the Tetbury Woolsack Race. It’s an annual competition where participants must carry a 60-pound (27 kg) sack of wool up and down the steep Gumstool Hill. If you’re taken with the idea you need to get yourself to Tetbury in late May to enter the race.

Market House built in 1655

And then it was on to Avening, pronounced with an A as in angel. Avening also made its fortune producing wool, like Tetbury. There are two pubs: one down in the dell, The Old Bell and other at the top of the hill. The pub sign is a particularly attractive one, bearing a painting of its namesake, Queen Matilda. It’s not dissimilar to the Pre-Raphaelite style of painting and I assumed there must be some interesting history behind the name. And indeed there is! The story involves Brittric and Baldwin, who were kicking around at the time of the Norman Conquest and Baldwin’s daughter, Matilda. Brittric became the object of Matilda’s affections but alas, he did not feel the same about her. Matilda’s nose was put out of joint and once she had married the Duke of Normandy instead, she sent word that Brittric’s land at Avening should be confiscated and that he should be put into jail. Very soon the unfortunate Brittric was dead, jails in those days not being the most sanitary of places. Upon receiving the news of his death young Matilda was wracked with remorse. To appease her meanness she built a church at Avening, which was consecrated on Holy Cross Day in 1080. To show there was no hard feelings she presented the builders with a boar’s head to feast upon. The tradition continues to this day with ‘Pig’s Face Day’ in Avening. Unusual way to make amends, don’t you think? Rather glad it’s celebrated in September not March.

Queen Matilda Inn

Black Dog Tails
There were many dogs who helped out at Ground Zero on 9.11 and Jake was there among them.