Above: the village street (there is only one) is very picturesque, lined with thatched cottages. The walls of the houses are made of baked mud, and have lasted over two hundred years. Normally you hardly see a single car in the place, but today there was a row of parked cars for about half a mile.
Above: there was some evidence of gentrification, but not much. Tinker's Cottage was obviously once the abode of socio-economic class "E". Now it looked very prosperous and bourgeois.
Above: at the end of the village, by the sharp bend, is the church. Fourth church to stand on this site. The raised churchyard indicates a burial ground of some considerable antiquity.
Above: one of the memorial windows in the church, dated 1917, showed two pre-Raphaelite knights. This is how "modern" society viewed itself. The faces are so distinctive that it seems they are portraits.
Above: the fete itself was held in the garden of The Old Rectory. Pevsner says the building is 1839, the architect SC Lomas. The severity of the large three-story brick box was softened by the beautiful woodland garden that surrounded it (terraces, herbacious borders, rambling roses).
Above: as I looked at the main lawn I thought: this is England, 25th July 2010. It was so English it could have been a caricature by Eugène Ionesco. The heat of the day began to ease.
Above: the most interesting stall (for me) was the honey stall. It was run by a local farmer's wife who keeps bees. There were informative notes about bee-keeping pinned to a board.
Above: there was also a sample hive (without live bees!).
Above: samples of the honey were being sold for a few pence. I bought this little jar. The honey seemed to add to the Rupert Brooke ambience of the day.
Above: bee just outside my back door. The falling bee populations thoughout the world are causing scientists some concern, but so far no government has commissioned research on why this is happening. We still get bees in our garden, but for how much longer?
Above: the latest magazine from the Soil Association has an interesting article on bees.
No comments:
Post a Comment