The mystery of the runaway carriage
Mar. 31st, 2017 12:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
oloriel... or make that "rotaway". A.k.a. this month's pic of the... month post. How my crest has fallen.
Oh well.
Having lived in this house for ten years now (and it actually is ten years this May, time flies!), one should think that we know everything about it and its surroundings. But we don't. We discover something new whenever we start something new. And even when we're walking in places we already know... there might be a surprise.
For instance, last weekend we went down to the pony/llama paddock to fetch the big branches that had fallen there during the big late winter storms. They come from the forest but they were now hanging in the fence of the paddock, making them ours. We can always use firewood, and the llama lady had no use for these half-rotted branches, so she invited us to come and pick them up whenever the ponys or llamas weren't there. (We could also have gone while the llamas were there, but we didn't care to find out just how badly they really spit.)
While we were finding out that even half-rotted beech is still pretty solid and pretty heavy, I happened to glimpse something strange in the forest. It was forest floor-coloured, and mostly hidden by the ubiquitous holly (seriously, why is this plant a protected species? You can't take a step off the path in these parts without being scratched by holly!), but the glimpse sufficed to get my brain going. "Huh, that doesn't look organic. It looks sort of like iron. Sort of like the suspension you see on these old-fashioned carriages."
So when the wood had been transferred to the barn and Julian had been fished out of the brook, I went to the forest to investigate.
Getting closer...
And indeed, it looks like the remains of a carriage. Which must have been there for quite some time. Certainly for the last ten years in which we've been walking that forest and working that paddock. The tenants-from-hell built a tree house within spitting distance of this thing. And nobody saw it hidden in its little holly copse. (To be fair, holly is a kind of forbidding plant...)
I really wonder how it got there, though. There's no proper road on top of that hill, so it's unlikely that a carriage would have tumbled down there in an accident. More likely, it belonged to the place that's now a riding school, and they had no more use for it so they just pushed it off into the forest where it crashed right next to the meadow/paddock/field/whatever that slope was back in the day, leaving it to quietly rot. So there's probably no point in digging around it to see whether there's anything else interesting down there...
The pics still look rather bleak and wintery, but spring is actually in full swing. Two-digit temperatures by day, no more frost, the sun is shining more often than not, it hasn't rained in two full weeks, the garden's a riot of blossoms and I already have to worry about the bees swarming. So back to work it is!
Oh well.
Having lived in this house for ten years now (and it actually is ten years this May, time flies!), one should think that we know everything about it and its surroundings. But we don't. We discover something new whenever we start something new. And even when we're walking in places we already know... there might be a surprise.
For instance, last weekend we went down to the pony/llama paddock to fetch the big branches that had fallen there during the big late winter storms. They come from the forest but they were now hanging in the fence of the paddock, making them ours. We can always use firewood, and the llama lady had no use for these half-rotted branches, so she invited us to come and pick them up whenever the ponys or llamas weren't there. (We could also have gone while the llamas were there, but we didn't care to find out just how badly they really spit.)
While we were finding out that even half-rotted beech is still pretty solid and pretty heavy, I happened to glimpse something strange in the forest. It was forest floor-coloured, and mostly hidden by the ubiquitous holly (seriously, why is this plant a protected species? You can't take a step off the path in these parts without being scratched by holly!), but the glimpse sufficed to get my brain going. "Huh, that doesn't look organic. It looks sort of like iron. Sort of like the suspension you see on these old-fashioned carriages."
So when the wood had been transferred to the barn and Julian had been fished out of the brook, I went to the forest to investigate.
Getting closer...
And indeed, it looks like the remains of a carriage. Which must have been there for quite some time. Certainly for the last ten years in which we've been walking that forest and working that paddock. The tenants-from-hell built a tree house within spitting distance of this thing. And nobody saw it hidden in its little holly copse. (To be fair, holly is a kind of forbidding plant...)
I really wonder how it got there, though. There's no proper road on top of that hill, so it's unlikely that a carriage would have tumbled down there in an accident. More likely, it belonged to the place that's now a riding school, and they had no more use for it so they just pushed it off into the forest where it crashed right next to the meadow/paddock/field/whatever that slope was back in the day, leaving it to quietly rot. So there's probably no point in digging around it to see whether there's anything else interesting down there...
The pics still look rather bleak and wintery, but spring is actually in full swing. Two-digit temperatures by day, no more frost, the sun is shining more often than not, it hasn't rained in two full weeks, the garden's a riot of blossoms and I already have to worry about the bees swarming. So back to work it is!
