If you have stayed at Kirkstead Old Mill Cottage sometime over the last decade you will have hopefully received from me an occasional NEWSLETTER that I have managed to send out to an "audience" of almost 300 via a program known as Mailchimp. Sadly, it proved to be beyond me to create and publish via this method without the support of an excellent IT tutor called Jodie who then, very sadly, needed to step back from helping me. Then to add to my problems in 2019 a Mailchimp "upgrade" sent me back to the beginning again.
However, fortunately, through the media program Facebook, I was contacted by another member who, having recently moved into the village of Woodhall Spa, chose to join the excellent networking breakfast group that meets on alternate Fridays in the Admiral Rodney Hotel in Horncastle. Nick Bennett accepted the challenge of picking up my scraps of knowledge and then helped to get me publishing again. This morning we took a sunny walk together into what I refer to as "The Wild Garden" so that I could see if there were any signs of the snowdrops that my husband planted there many years ago under the trees of a very small orchard. There was, and here is a photo that Nick kindly took of them:
We walked past this grassy bank and across a bridge that is over the little stream that drains the narrow strip of land that was once part of the railway embankment. Once you have crossed the bridge and turned to the right past the weeping willow tree, one feels there is an invitation to pass into an avenue, with Rowan trees on either side of you. Glancing through the trees I could see a patch of yellowish shoots on the far side of the water and Nick offered to double back and capture this image. If you think you know what these are the shoots of, please contact me by email at: b[email protected] or ring me on 01526 35 36 37, and if you are correct you will win a small prize. Gardening books describe this plane as invasive, but it's welcome here as I've plenty of room to fill. Its name is "butterbur" (Petasites hybridus).
We continued exploring past the hedge of hazels that form my boundary until we reached the bridge that leads to the row of pollarded willows on the other side of the stream. From here we made our way through an area that I once named "The Middle Way" with daffodils shooting up on either side of us until we reached the oak tree with a circular seat around its trunk. Soon the view will be like this image that I took a few years ago.
Nick commented that he was planning to place a seat similar to this around a tree in his new garden.
From here we could see the windows of the upper floor of the cottage across the beck, so we were ready to make our way back up through the dormant fruit trees and out onto the bed of the disused railway track where once a steam-powered train would have transported you direct to London, or back to the station at Kirkstead Bridge. Before we left my Wild Garden, Nick propped his camera in a tree and recorded our visit with this next picture.
So sorry that you will have to turn your screen round to admire us. I don't know what went wrong with this insertion, and I don't have a clue how to put it right, and I would have usually cropped photos before using them, but today was my first attempt at venturing into the world of "downloads". Wish me luck, and please try your luck by entering the competition using the last groups of photos. Entries close on the 8th of February, 2020.
4th Feb: Today, during my weekly IT lesson with Nick, he showed me how to turn the image round!