Friday December 30, 2005

Day three at the Howards Arms

Our last day in the Cotswolds we decided to do a walk before returning home. In the morning my wife decided to have a lie in so I had breakfast on my own. The Howard Arms has great idea for breakfast, you preorder it and the time you want to have it and leave your pre-order outside your room before retiring. You then come downstairs in the morning and your breakfast soon arrives. As I had got up bit early I did a little more exploration of the village. I found its second pub - where all the smokers go now I suppose and a small pretty Catholic church with a very sad lament to someone who died at the age of forty:

My candle burns at both ends
But It will not last the night
But you would agree my friends
It burns very bright.

We set off to Upper and Lower Brailes a centre years ago for the wool trade and it was at one time the third largest town in Warwickshire after Warwick and Coventry It has a large imposing church tower (120ft/37m)and an equally imposing long nave. The tower is 15th century.

We left the village and entered a series of fields all of which had strange undulations on them. Again we saw deer prints but no deer. We followed the route of Sutton brook and entered a golf course. We left this, continued along more fields and entered the pretty village of Sutton-under-Brailes. This had a pretty church with a fortess like appearance.

With no pub in sight we then continued up onto the shoulder of Brailes Hill. Behind us the peace of the village was interupted first by a donkey making its usual painful braying noise then a farmhouse dog barking having detected our presence. We followed the shoulder of the hill around and then on a tree lined path which then descended. Soon the imposing tower could be seen. The picture below gives some idea of the strange undulations that we then came across on our return path.

We entered Upper Brailes and a horse passed us with a rider with a Father Xmas hat on her head, the horse was wearing the reindeer antlers you buy children that fit on their heads. We walked through fields to our starting point and took the 99 steps recently restored which link the Lower and Upper Brailes villages. At this point it had started to rain but we were soon back in the pub taking our boots off and having a well deserved drink before driving home. One thing we spotted before leaving the village the tower now had its familier George cross flag flying from it as a lot of churches do at this time of year. I will be back on this weblog after the new year break on Tuesday 3rd January 2006. Happy new year all!