Meandering

A chocolate box image; one we see every week – it is our turning point as we leave veg & milk at a communal drop-off. A burst of sunshine as we arrived today gave it added charm. A lychgate, with a glimpse of gothic turrets on the church tower beyond. I wonder how many wedding photographs it features in; I wonder how many of the couples know that lych is an ancient word for a corpse, this being the place where the coffin pauses as a prelude to a funeral

The stone is local “ironstone” – the same rock that I’m rebuilding (still slowly) our garden wall with – but my un-dressed stones are not so conveniently square! Technically the rock is a limestone – we live on the limestone ridge that runs all the way across England from Bath in the south west to Whitby on the Yorkshire east coast, incorporating the Cotswolds. The rock was formed from shells and bones, broken up in shallow seas and then compressed into rock. In areas where the water had a high iron content, the particles became coated with iron, giving the rock the warm colour often described as "honeyed". The iron content is sufficiently high that it was worth mining as ore in the 19th and early 20th centuries - the effects on the landscape are still plain to see in my village. The area around Banbury is known as "the ironstone villages"

This church in on a high point from which rivers flow outwards in all directions: North to join the Avon near Stratford; East to join the Cherwell, which meets the Thames at Oxford; and West and South to join the Evenlode, which joins the Isis, just before (in Oxford) it is renamed the Thames. The closest stream to the church is quite a significant waterway, running for over 10km before it meets the Evenlode, but it seems to have no agreed name - I'm aware of at least three, and I know of other quite large but similarly unnamed waterways in the area. These must once have been quite important locally as transport routes and sources of power, but now barely register on public consciousness

We have been having fun counting the votes to elect a speaker for the US Congress. More of them than in our Xmas chocolate box