Traffic has ruined the village – it is cut in half by the busy road, but if you take the trouble to stop and walk a little way down one of the lanes, you are soon back into a pastoral idyll where birds sing, cool breezes blow, brown leaves drift down from the oak and sycamore trees.
The road curves round for a reason – a great house used to stand in a park just behind the high estate wall, the village being scattered around the demesne’s periphery. The mansion itself was pulled down in the 1950s, and the estate split up into smaller units, but throughout the immediate area you can still find reminders of its past grandeur. At the weekend, on the way into the town, I stopped and took some photographs with my new Olympus digital camera.
The “Wild Man” again, used as a crest on the gate piers of the main entrance. This Wild Man is wearing a crown (or more accurately, a coronet) indicating he served a noble family. What led the family to adopt a Wild Man as a mascot? Perhaps in ancient times one of the noble forbears captured a Neanderthal woodwose deep in the forest, and brought it back to the village as a trophy (or perhaps they didn’t and there’s another, more simple, explanation).
No comments:
Post a Comment