A New Year's Walk

Since we seem to have spent much of the Christmas holidays inside, much of the time cooking and then eating (and our New Year's Day housewarming do was a great success and lots of fun), we decided to dedicate the extra New Year bank holiday, on 2 January, to going for a long walk. I wanted to get on a train and go out of London and walk in the country, preferably taking in something of antiquarian interest along the way. And, courtesy of the excellent National Trails website, we found the perfect walk - along the bit of the South Downs Way which skirts the Cuckmere Valley. The downloadable PDF told us which trains and buses we needed to take to the start of our walk and even provided an extract of the right bit of Ordnance Survey map, which we popped onto the iPad and took walking with us! Very handy for zooming in to check which path you need to take at crossroads etc...


We had the most idyllic weather - gorgeous cloudless blue skies and lovely sunny weather, though it as very cold once the sun set. We took a train to Lewes - from handy Victoria - then another train to Seaford, from where we took a local bus to Exceat, then set off across the valley - which was somewhat squelchily muddy thanks to the rain on New Year's Day. There was a white horse cut into the chalky hillside (= antiquarian interest) and our walk took us to the brilliantly-named Litlington where we paused for lunch in the lovely Plough & Harrow pub, before setting off up slightly higher and more wooded ground for the second half of the walk. At the end of which the footpath opened up on to the most amazing vista over the estuary, where the river meets the sea, with its winding channels and waterlogged tributaries glinting in the sunlight. We sat and looked at the view for a goodly while.


We made our way back to Lewes where we stopped off to visit the ruins of the Priory (= more antiquarian interest), which was dissolved by Henry VIII and meticulously dismantled by his engineers - and therefore of interest to K's book research. We had a walk around Lewes, which neither of us had ever been to before and which is really beautiful with a rather fine castle, though surprisingly lacking in good, quaint places to find a cup of tea and a piece of cake - or certainly on 2 Jan! After a refreshment pause, at disappointing Caffè Nero, we got the train back to London - and we were home in time to cook dinner and sit down in front of the new series of Sherlock!

A wonderfully idyllic day and hopefully an auspicious start to 2012!

Cast ne'er a clout...

... till may be out. So goes the old proverb, warning the optimistic against shedding too many clothes before - either the month of May, or before the hawthorn blossom appears, called 'may' because that is the month it traditionally blooms. And boy was it in bloom in Herefordshire last weekend!!


All those bushes with the glowing white blossoms. It was K's birthday on Friday and bank holiday on the Monday, so we took a long weekend and went to visit his parents. We took an early Thursday evening train after work, which also meant I could get away from it all after my promotion interview which was that morning (on which more below) - and as always when we go to Hereford, you get out in to countryside quite quickly, and as the train pulls further from London and gradually empties and the landscape through the window becomes more and more picturesque, you feel the weight gradually lifting from your shoulders...

And now that they are both retired, K's parents are making the most of exploring the Herefordshire countryside, which is something we have not done much with them at all - so on Friday evening we drove to a country pub for K's birthday dinner, taking in a gorgeous early evening walk along the ridge at Much Marcle (I also love the placenames in that part of the country...) with its panoramic views on both sides; and on Sunday we took a picnic and went to Wigmore, in the far north-west of the county, the region known as the Welsh Marches because it is right on the border with Wales and historically was a major defensive zone for the English. My marauding ancestors were on the far side of that border! In fact, not too far and not too marauding, and not too ancestral - my father grew up in Presteigne!

But this is where we were last Sunday -



- Wigmore Castle, a 12th-century ruined castle, managed by English Heritage. When they opened it to the public in the 1980s, the fact that they had preserved the castle's ruinous state was highly controversial - I guess people thought it should have been rebuilt so you could see and experience how the castle would originally have looked. But you can see and experience that in many other places, and over the centuries, this site had become a major ecological site for wildlife and wildflowers, so English Heritage were quite ahead of their time in treating this as a conservation area - they stabilised and strengthened the walls of course, and obviously did a lot of work, in very subtle ways. It was an extremely atmospheric and beautiful place. These were the views from our picnic spot - towards England...


towards Wales...


If you look at the large version of this picture, you can even see the spire of the church at the wonderfully-named Leintwardine.

Magnificent rolling hills. Sometimes you just can't beat the British countryside for beauty.

----------------------------------------------------------

And I got that promotion. I heard on Friday morning. I had been stressing about it and trying not to since the interview, which really takes it out of you, I can tell you. So I now feel enormously relieved, and proud and happy, and rather more relaxed than I have done in a while. Two colleagues from my department also went through, and we went out for impromptu celebratory cocktails on Friday evening - then K and I went out for a truly wonderful dinner at Upstairs - another one of Brixton's gastronomic delights. This gorgeous little place opened a few years ago, and we gradually heard about it via word-of-mouth because it doesn't advertise itself. You would never know it was there if you didn't know it was there - if you know what I mean! It's a converted flat above a cafe, with a bar on one floor, and the 'restaurant' at the top, all very tastefully-decorated and the food beautifully-presented and delicious. The dining area only seats about 25 people at the tables so it's an intimate place, and we started eating late so sat there gradually more illuminated by candlelight as the sun went down... Lovely. Even better for just having a 10-minute walk to get home.