The Exted Valley

It was a beautiful day, and I planned a longer walk with good views down to the village for Wide Wednesday's looking down theme. However, text alerts told me that both my parcels of seed potatoes would be arriving at different times in the morning, so I delayed the walk till after lunch and realised I wouldn't have time to go up Chalk Pit Lane before the supermarket delivery was scheduled to arrive. I walked into the village along the Old Road, then up to the hilltop above the long, sloping back gardens of any of the old cottages. This gave me views down the steep hillside into the next valley, which is a fairly flat bottomed valley with meadows used mainly for grazing. The only road along it is a narrow lane which hugs the hillside, and there are only a few scattered farms and houses, so it's very quiet. Another narrow lane from the village climbs up and along the ridge at the opposite site, to the hamlet of Exted and beyond. 

Between the deliveries, I had a pleasant and quietly productive day while S was supporting J. We hung laundry outside for the first time since the autumn, and although it didn't dry fully, most things were only a little damp by teatime. I picked a bunch of daffodils in the garden. It's lovely, but it really should not be this springlike so early in the year. I enjoyed doing some mending - sitting at my sewing machine always seems to make me happy - and picked some rather small Brussels sprouts, then the sun motivated me to make a very long list of all the urgent jobs in the garden: it's time to cut down the autumn raspberry canes and start sowing tomatoes and aubergines.