Carvers Needed!

Here is a nice pile of pumpkins sitting in the sun, and perhaps continuing to mature. They will be ripe for carving, no doubt, and will all end up with faces and with flickering candles inside. Just over two weeks to go until the Eve of All Hallows.

These pumpkins are resting outside the house around which is a very nice garden centre. And the yellow wheelbarrows make a jolly row. We often buy our Christmas tree from here, and the whole of this front garden, together with a big area at the back, is packed full of hundreds of trees of many sizes and varieties. It isn't often this bright in the second week of December when we normally turn up.

And what is near here? Well, the canal is, for a start: what a surprise. The garden centre is on high ground, and descending to the canal, we reach Bridge Number 216. It's not a particularly inspiring bridge, I feel, but the stretch of canal here is really attractive. In this picture of the canal, the patch of green opposite the towpath is part of the garden of the Rock of Gibraltar, one of the best known of the canal-side pubs.

The towpath at this point runs between the canal on one side, and the River Cherwell on the other. There is some varied woodland, with fine old trees, around here, and a very interesting and unusual sedgebed area. Walking along the towpath, we saw on the other side of the canal this interesting waterside house.

In the opposite direction, and across the meadows and beyond the railway line, we could see the tops of the satellite dishes that I mentioned in my Blipfoto entry for 13 August 2011. This is what the satellite "field" looked like close up on that day. That information should be enough to pinpoint where we were!