Pub Walks in Underhill Country by Nat Segnit

Author:Nat Segnit
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141933023
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2011-01-04T00:00:00+00:00

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth

And so, in its way, the planning committee stood, at the divergence of two as yet inexistent roads – one, as originally planned, that would displease the residents of Eastnor, and another that wouldn’t, in exchange for the demolition of a few ‘architecturally insignificant’ properties on the north-eastern outskirts of Ledbury, our very own Foxglove Cottage among them.

‘You know I’ve been thinking,’ said Sunita, the day after my appearance at the inquiry. After weeks of heavy rain the last few days of August brought a spell of dry weather, and arriving home in variable states of despondency I had derived some comfort lying out on the sustainable teak recliner, sipping from a bottle of something nutty as the dusk snuffed the garden inch by inch. Earlier that evening Sunita had popped out for a quick drink with her new best friend Daisy, and had returned three hours later touchingly incapable of quite forming a consonant.

‘You love this place, don’t you?’

In relationships as close as ours it’s not always necessary to verbalise a response.

‘Well then,’ she went on. ‘Why don’t you put up more of a fight?’

I sighed, and took Sunita’s hand in mine. ‘Because, my sweet pea, the residents of Eastnor have as much right to protect their landscape as we do ours. Besides, aren’t you glad? In a few months we could have sold up and be living in London.’

‘Oh, b*lls to London. I like it here.’

‘You do?’

‘Well, no. Not exactly. But the point is, you do. And I realise now how selfish I’ve been not to respect that.’

She was all for mounting a counter-attack on the ‘self-interested’ residents of Eastnor. The Stratford-upon-Avon Canal was built at the turn of the nineteenth century to link the Warwickshire Avon – made navigable within twenty-five years of Shakespeare’s death by the construction of a series of locks and weirs – with the Worcester and Birmingham Canal in the south-western suburbs of Birmingham. By the mid-twentieth century the Stratford canal had fallen into disuse, and but for the efforts of a local team of waterway enthusiasts ramblers would be denied the opportunity, crossing a road bridge at Bishopton Lane to continue up the right-hand side of the canal, to admire the harlequin colours of the narrowboats moored alongside, or chuckle at the often marvellously irreverent names with which their owners have chosen to broadcast their inimitably ‘boatie’ sense of humour! In the two miles between Bishopton Lane and the Station Road bridge, where Sunita and I left the canal to turn left into the village of Wilmcote, I counted a ‘Moody Cow’, a ‘Grounds for Divorce’ and – my favourite – a ‘Sir Osis of the River’, which, Sunita being her usual score of paces ahead, I would have photographed for her amusement, had the couple on its geranium-crowded deck not been patently on the point of murdering each other.

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