My nephew places my bag of presents on the road before he picks up my gifts to his family.

The Distance Project 25

I wasn’t too happy about spending time at Christmas in somebody else’s house, even though the rules had changed for the holiday. Even with close relatives who take the distancing measures as seriously as I do. I had been invited to visit for on Christmas day by my brother and his family, and I knew my sister would also be there; they are all in a bubble together.

I had already decided not to go in the house when the decision was taken out of my hands anyway; the rules had changed again although it was still permitted to meet a friend or a family member in a public place, and go for a walk together.

But there were presents to exchange.

The Monday Photo

Why are the carvings on this 12th Century arch in Stewkley’s Norman church called beakheads? It’s simple; many of these carved heads, found widely across England, are birds with beaks that point to the inside of the arch.

Each head (but sometimes in this church there are three heads together) is carved on a separate piece of stone. The zig zag pattern above these beakheads is another clue that this is a Norman building. There are 37 beakheads on this arch in St Michael’s, the West one of two that support the enormous weight of the tower.

There are over 160 sites with beakheads in England, but none in Wales and just one in Scotland. There’s just a few in Ireland. They can also be found in Normandy (of course!) and in the old province of Anjou in France, and in Northern Spain.

Stewkley is one of the churches featured in the book England’s Thousand Best Churches, which is well worth getting if you’d like to plan a few expeditions for when the present emergency is all over.

It's supposed to snow today, so that’s all the excuse I need to show you this shot, which I’ve been wanting to put on the North Bucks Wanderer for ages.

This is one of the defensive ditches dug for Castlethorpe castle, and I took this photo in early February, 2009.

(Edited)
It's 11 am and there's no snow so far; it's a bright and sunny day. Oh well. Not that I wanted snow...

It’s been a month since the shortest day of the year the Winter Solstice, and you might have noticed the days are getting longer. We are seeing nearly an hour more of daylight today compared to the 21st of December, mostly in the evening.

In other words, today there’s still a bit of light in the sky at five o’clock, but on the 21st of December it was dark not too long after four. This morning also saw the sunrise a dozen minutes later than it was a month ago.

The later evenings certainly lift my spirits. These two photos were taken just after five on the same evening, on the road between Winslow and Whitchurch, close to the Hoggeston turn. It was January 2012.

The Monday Photo

Remember the tree I showed you not too long ago, that wasn’t actually one tree but several things growing together? I’ve found another example, this time in Olney.

I’d gone for a walk with my nephew a few days before Christmas, and we crossed Goosey bridge (you can see it in the background) and around the edge of Goosey Island, on the Great Ouse. As we left the island I spotted this one on the bank. I couldn’t get too close, but I could see there’s a compact shape that’s still in leaf, while another set of branches, this time bare, has grown out further.

This tree or trees (I’m struggling to find a word that clearly describes it) is very much the same shape as the one I found in Woughton on the Green, except that the branches come down to a lower level. Perhaps only sheep are kept in this field, not cattle, and as sheep can’t reach as high to nibble at those tender shoots, the branches can survive closer to the ground.

If you’ve seen other examples of this mutual growing arrangement, please let me know in the comments.

The Distance Project 24

Here are a few shots from late last year, before we went into the Tier 3 and Tier 4 lockdowns. The lighter restrictions of that time are now just a memory.

This is my cat, and I can tell by his body language that he’s had just about enough of this; it’s just as well this was the end of the examination. You should be able to see the thick plastic sheets hung between me and the vet, but we are both wearing masks too.
Marmaduke is fine; I had just brought him in for a routine examination and his once a year injections. Thanks to Laura at Vets4Pets for letting me take photos of her examining him.

The Monday Photo

In 1805, it became far more practical to bring goods to London from the factories in the North and the Midlands when the Grand Junction Canal was opened; we know it as the Grand Union Canal, and this is Three Locks, not far South of Milton Keynes.

Before that year, the only way to London by water was via the Oxford canal, joining the Thames at Oxford then going downstream to the capital; it was much further and depended on how the Thames was running. These routes both still exist.

But how much quicker was it when the new route opened? On the older route via the Thames it’s 172 miles each way and and modern estimates reckon it will take you 151 hours of travelling to go there and back.

For the same starting and finishing points but via the Grand Junction Canal it’s just 101 miles each way, and the modern estimate is 102 hours for the round trip. So the new route cut a third off the return journey time and was more reliable, since none of it was on the river.

The new canal did well, but competition from the railways from around 1840 meant the canal struggled to survive, though it continued to take commercial traffic right up until the 1950s, one of the last canals to do so. Now it is mostly used by leisure craft and people who live on boats, and has now been open to traffic for 215 years.

The photo shows the bottom lock of the three, which together raise or lower boats just over twenty feet, and the end of the Greensand ridge.

I don’t know what sort of speed the 18th Century horse drawn boats could average, does anyone know? I suspect they’d be slower than a modern boat with an engine. But the time advantage of the new route is obvious.