Poppies

A sunny day brought us to Rochester again where Fred's dad and aunt, and the two jack Russells, met us off the train. We headed off for a pub lunch at Cooling on the Isle of Grain. When waiting for the cow to be caught for the Sunday roast (my strawberries were being grown), we used the iPhone to look up the local history of which there is a great deal. Cooling Castle (which, according to Wikipedia, is now owned by Jools Holland) was built to keep out the French invaders. It has impressive crenellations, but is mostly a ruin. I learned about lollards since John Oldcastle lived in Cooling Castle and around. He also escaped from the Tower of London! That could not have been easy. I can't imagine that many people escaped.

The church at Cooling has a Charles Dickens link. He supposedly based a scene in Great Expectations in the graveyard there where there is a line of small, stone child coffins: ''To five little stone lozenges, each about a foot and a half long, which were arranged in a neat row beside their grave, and were sacred to the memory of five little brothers of mine - who gave up trying to get a living, exceedingly early in that struggle-.....' I haven't, thankfully, seen the like of those coffins before. According to one local website: 'It has been suggested that they were victims of the 'marsh ague?, which was prevalent at that time. It was a form of malaria, which was spread by the mosquito, and it was a serious problem for many years until it was finally eradicated at the early part of this century.'

A lovely pub lunch and dog walk later, we headed back so that Fred and I could clear more obstacles out of the way of the plasterer.