In The Countryside

Take the trouble to explore on foot and you’ll find beauty spots in all manner of unsuspecting places.
This time I decided to take the long way round from home to the village church and walk — well, actually it is the shortest route, but it doesn’t seem like it with the need to cross two open fields, a couple of stretches of village roads, cross a ford and take a footpath through woodland.  It’s just short of two miles in all, and to be fair doesn’t take much longer than half an hour.
By car you need take what seems a circuitous route and it will work out a bit further in distance although maybe be much shorter in time.
But the walk on a fine day pays off, especially when you come across  a stream with the hint of a waterfall, meandering by the side of the woodland footpath.  Mind you, there is plenty of water around our village, with the River Blackwater, a tributary of the River Test running along the outskirts of the village, fishing lakes, and a handful of streams like this which in turn feed into the Blackwater.

If I did feel like taking a moment or two to rest on the way, this was the place to do it in a quiet, picturesque spot in the countryside.