There’s no travel on the horizon for the foreseeable future. It’s already been six months since I’ve been anywhere and I’m starting to worry now about how to maintain a travel & adventure blog while staying at home. I’ve got plenty of old stories never told (or never read) but is it enough to weather a year or more of no new material? At the moment, all I know is that no pandemic is going to force me to break a three and a half year run of unfailingly posting twice a week. There will be more home-based stuff and maybe over time, this blog will transition towards being less travel and more me. I honestly don’t know. I knew the travelling and adventuring might not last forever but I pictured it stopping because of a mortgage, maybe even a marriage, not a plague. The mortgage is looking more plausible since I’m not spending any money on airfares so that’ll be another question mark for the blog but that’s still another few years in the future.
Today’s post is about being at home. But it’s also about local travel. Hyper-local travel. At the beginning of All This, The Great Outdoors magazine did a piece on “how to keep your spirits up in lockdown” – alternatives to hillwalking you could do from home. One of the suggestions was “explore your square mile” and so I’m exploring my square mile.
“Essentially it’s the idea of being rooted in place, with intimate ties to our immediate natural surroundings and human community, and the sense of belonging that can result.” I’m not sure about any of that but “cultivating appreciation for my square mile” is something I can at least understand.
I live in a market town in Wessex. I’ve lived here for more than 23 and a half years and I know next to nothing about the place where I’ve lived for two-thirds of my life. To be brutally honest, I’ve discovered that… there’s not actually much to know but it takes a certain amount of exploration to discover that rather than just assume it.
The most exciting discovery in my square mile was a twelfth century leper chapel, now used as council offices. It was part of a hospital, which in the twelfth century meant it was pretty much a church. There’s only one end of it left, and plenty of evidence of reconstruction, renovation and repairs. There’s not much twelfth century left visible. But nonetheless, that thing’s been there since the days of Richard the Lionheart. Since the days when English kings still spoke French as their native language, possibly. Now it’s surrounded. It’s basically squeezed between a small housing estate and a fire station.
I knew all the old primary schools in town moved onto a new site some years ago but I’d never seen it. Never knew it was so big and modern. Primary schools don’t have an upstairs, not in my world. But more interestingly, there’s an adult learning centre on site. I might go down there in January to try and coax my Spanish back. Or I might do something else. Learn a new skill. Get a new qualification. Learn to carve stone! I’ve always wanted to do that!
We have a big wild meadow on the edge of town, sacred to open space and dog walking. I made a snowman on it in about 2011. I’ve walked down most of the length of it now although I still haven’t really made much use of it. I’ve also walked part of our local railway-turned-cycle path. Well, I’d done part of it last year but I took my dad this year and we also went five miles up the track and had a walk along a different bit.
I’ve found allotments! They’re less than five minutes walk away. I wouldn’t be that interested but since All This, I’ve started to become a bit of an amateur gardener, although that’s for another post. Everyone says an allotment would be far too much for me but I like to imagine a whole row of uncrowded lettuces, a line of beetroot and beans and onions, raised beds, polytunnels. Next year I’ll maybe turn the junk patch next to the garage into a vegetable patch but for now I like to look at the allotments and imagine what else I could grow.
Opposite the end of my road is a path. Been there since 1999 or 2000, next to the new houses that really aren’t new anymore. I’ve walked up there now. It runs between the new houses and the main road and eventually forms the outer lane of the new houses, complete with front doors opening straight onto it. In fact, I’ve prowled that estate a bit. I still can’t make any sense of the layout but I’ve had a look at it. Some of it looks a bit like an idealised modern version of an old-fashioned rural Georgian town. I’ve picked my house for when I have half a million pounds lying around.
Up on the industrial estate, there’s a fleet of milk tankers parked. I don’t know if that was because it was a Saturday evening – I’m pretty sure the milk industry has been one that’s under heavy demand, although I saw farmers on Countryfile making two British pence on their milk in March (and not actually receiving that money). So now I have a better idea of how a milk tanker works and a better idea of what it feels like to be in an action movie, because even when they’re parked and there’s no one else around, it’s surprisingly scary to walk around between them.
I’ve discovered it’s only a little over 2km to the DIY shop, if you follow the edge of town instead of barging through the centre like I instinctively would have if I’d walked home from there before All This. That’s only the length of an average daily walk, and more than half of it is along a bit of route I use for a daily walk when my dad’s with me. My square mile is smaller than it sounds – nothing in this town is quite as far, or as steep, as I thought. Maybe to be avoided in the 10.15am excruciating heat, though.
I’ve seen a couple of plaques down in town. We’ve got “on this site, Sept 5 1782, nothing happened”, we’ve got “this building looks like brick but is actually decorative tile” (I prodded it; I swear it is brick) and we’ve got “Eastway House, built c 1735 by John Ayliffe, infamous local estate agent, fraudster and forger” (I read the court report from the Old Bailey. He was executed for his crimes in 1759 – “There was another indictment found against him in Middlesex for another forgery; but being capitally convicted of the one, it was thought unnecessary to try him for the other.”).
I said there would be cats. I’ve met a lot of cats. There’s long-haired black cat Bella (whose name is actually Poppy) who loves to rub on your ankles and the grey kitten that follows her around but doesn’t want to be touched. There are three cats at the weird house and the black and white one will demand attention if it sees me with another cat. There’s a cat who spends its life perched on the cat-house trying to get in the front door. There’s Gate Cat and Roof Cat, both black long-hairs. Gate Cat will jump over the gate for some attention. Roof Cat will stare and then swipe if you reach out a hand. There’s a big fluffy ginger cat who once tried to follow me and Dad home – we literally had to run away and hide. There’s elderly purry Mia next door, young white-footed Simba down the road and Lulu and Max at number one. Max spends his days lying quietly on the landing, according to his owner. Lulu chases birds, rolls cutely and sits on the bird table. She’s adorable but I’m not having her getting my precious birds so on two occasions I’ve encouraged her out of the garden with the hose (no, I didn’t spray her. I just sprayed behind her to tell her which way to go. No cats were harmed or even unduly dampened).
It’s not very exciting. Chapels and allotments and cats. But it’s where I live and I know my square mile a lot better now, through my daily walks. It’s hardly exploration on the scale of the golden age but it’s a good thing and an interesting thing to explore your own place, even nearly a quarter of a century too late.