On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
It’s a trip to England for us today! Great stories. Green grass and daffodils. Blue skies and bunnies, even if we only get to hear about the bunnies instead of seeing them. And of course change, because change has its own cycle, and comes whether we like it or not. ~WaterGirl
R-Jud
I’ve lived in England for 15 years. For the last seven, I’ve been dropping my daughter at her primary school, which sits in the middle of a country park just outside the southern edge of Birmingham. Our routine looks like this:
- Grab a taxi at 8:20
- Arrive at the petrol station nearest the school at 8:30, purchase a coffee and a hot chocolate
- Drink our drinks while moseying the not-quite-a-quarter-mile to the school gate (parking is so scarce, and the school so awkwardly situated among residential streets, that all parents have to do this)
- Drop the child at the gate around 8:40, dispose of cups
- Run the three miles back home
If weather permits, I start my run in High House Wood, the bit of forest nearest to her school. It’s high on a ridge of hills known as the Lickey Hills. This area can be boggy after persistent rain, is frequently wrapped in thick fog, and will sometimes be thinly coated in snow dotted with animal prints: rabbits and squirrels, mostly, but sometimes fallow deer and badgers. There’s a monument in High House Wood, too– a colossal obelisk most people believe is a WWI memorial. It’s not; it is dedicated to the 5th Earl of Plymouth, the fantastically named Other Windsor (1751-1799), who used to own most of the land around here.
It’s a short jog from the monument over to the Lickey Beacon, where one can look north toward Birmingham, the Black Country, and (on clear days) Cannock Chase or the Brecon Beacons. As a boy, J.R.R. Tolkien lived in a cottage at the foot of these hills. He would ramble in the woods, which are full of immense old oaks looking very like Ents who’ve gone a bit slow.
I take a lot of pictures of this area– because it’s picturesque, because I like to document the changing seasons, because I’m not terribly keen to get to work sometimes. Here are a few from the last school run on March 17th. And I do mean “last”–schools here are closed through the end of the year, most likely, and the Child will head to secondary school in the autumn. If I’m going back to High House Wood again this year, it will have to be a special trip. I’ll miss having it as part of my daily routine.
Here’s a view of the Lickey Beacon. The little castle, which contains a toposcope, was erected by the Cadbury family (yes, them, the chocolate people). They gave this land to the city. There’s a good view of Birmingham and the surrounding area from there. Those long sight lines have been capitalised upon since Roman times, when there was an actual beacon here.
A little closer to the castle, for a kind-of-arty shot.
Daffodils in their pomp outside the entrance to High House Wood.
The monument. On a late spring morning, it’s common to emerge into this clearing and have dozens of rabbits scatter at the sight of you.
Some particularly Ent-y trees I took a fancy to. About two years ago I started making a point of snapping a photo of these trees from this angle every time I came through the wood. I have a few hundred pictures; maybe I’ll do something with some of them, eventually.
A view from the road at the northern edge of High House Wood–the last proper view from the hills before descending back into Birmingham. I knew I would have to say goodbye to these views this year; I just didn’t expect the parting so soon.
Amir Khalid
R-Jud,
Most food YouTubers who are not British have trouble pronouncing “Worcestershire” when mentioning the famous sauce — with often painful results. I am myself not quite certain of the right way. Can you help?
The clearing full of rabbits would indeed be a wonderful sight.
Mai naem mobile
@Amir Khalid: Wuss-tur-sher. ‘Wuss’ as in you’re such a wuss. ‘Tur’ and ‘sher’ rhyme with fur.
Luciamia
Wuss-ta-sheer.
Those trees look like the missing Ent -wives.
opiejeanne
@Luciamia: So that’s where they went!
Honestly, I am wide awake because at 2:30am, 10 minutes ago, someone opened our garage door. I was not quite asleep and heard it/felt it. Do you know how silly that sounds in the wee hours when your wife wakes you up to tell you she heard the garage door open?
It’s a 2-car garage and the side that was open when we got downstairs it was the side we rarely open, but its button is above the one for the door we use all the time.
I’m pretty freaked out and not sleepy now. We had the other door open while we worked in the yard today, shut it around 5. I think someone must have entered the garage during the period it was open, and got trapped when we closed it. They waited 9 1/2 hours to make their exit? It makes no sense unless they were too scared to do anything until they thought we were asleep.
We’ll have to do an inventory tomorrow to see if they took something. Meanwhile, the door into the house is now dead-bolted.
Mary G
@opiejeanne: Well, that won’t keep you wide awake at all.
R-Jud, love all the photos, but the headliner looking up into the Ents is amazeballs.
Viva BrisVegas
@Mai naem mobile:
I’ve always gone with Wuss-ta-sha, but then I’m a colonial.
How about Cholmondeley?
Betty Cracker
R-Jud — great photos. I love the Ent-y trees especially.
@opiejeanne: Is it the sort of door that can be opened with a remote? Maybe someone with a remote on the same frequency accidentally opened your door? If that’s not possible, double-yikes to think of someone hiding out in your garage for hours!
opiejeanne
@Betty Cracker: It’s one that is opened by a remote, but the code is a dozen or more switches long; we’ve lived here ten years and it’s never happened before and it would be a near-impossible coincidence. We
We are in a semi-rural area and there’s only one house close enough to have its remote trigger our garage door but they’re even older than we are and they never go out at night. I may go over tomorrow and ask them to try their remote.
I was just starting to wind down and maybe fall asleep when the damned coyotes cornered something in our yard and were saying grace. The cats are very rattled right now, and the coyotes’ dinner songs are unnerving to me. It was a large pack so the chorus was very loud.
opiejeanne
R-Jud, your photos are very soothing and remind me of our short visit to East Sussex several years ago. I would like to live in a place like you describe.
arrieve
I’ve always loved On the Road, but I have to say that these days glimpses of the outside world aren’t just welcome, they’re necessary. I love those Entish trees.
JPL
Wonderful photos especially the ones of the trees.
@opiejeanne: That is so unsettling. I hope that you can nap today.
JPL
@opiejeanne: Decades ago air force jets would fly over our house and occasionally something they did caused our garage door to open. We finally changed the remote code.
Betty Cracker
@opiejeanne: Scary. I hope you solve the mystery in a satisfactory way. Glad your cats are indoors!
One time when our daughter was an infant, we were sitting in the living room watching TV and the kiddo was asleep in her room, and we heard a man’s voice on our baby monitor. We both jumped up and ran into her room, but there was no one there except the baby.
Turned out the voice was our neighbor talking to HIS baby. The neighbors had also had a baby monitor that had been in use for weeks without interfering with ours, but somehow the signals got crossed that night. We all had a good laugh about it when we figured it out, but it scared the bejeebus out of us!
R-Jud
Thanks all for your kind words! I will miss those trees.
@Amir Khalid: WUSS-tur-sheer is how the locals here say it. But please bear in mind that the locals are Brummies. Their accents, and the accents from the Black Country slightly to the north, are routinely voted among the UK’s least favourite.
The Child sounds like me – eastern/ mid-Atlantic U.S. accent. At least for now.
opiejeanne
@JPL: I remember reading in the instructions that the remotes were supposed to be limited to a narrow band (or something) so that they wouldn’t interfere with airplanes somehow.
It’s been years since I’ve heard of planes causing a garage door to open, but it used to happen sometimes. I think we would have heard the plane, though. I had our upstairs windows wide open.
Sloane Ranger
@Viva BrisVegas: I go with Woostersheer, but I’m an East Midlander.
Cholmonderlay is pronounced Chumley.
We do this deliberately to trip up foreigners. It was very useful during WWII for IDing German spies.
Now, how about Cogenhoe and Leominster?
opiejeanne
@Betty Cracker: OMG! That is so freaky!
There used to be an issue with cordless phones when they first became common in the 80s, that sometimes the neighbor next door would get to listen in on your conversation. There was a murder plot overheard in exactly this manner.
opiejeanne
@Sloane Ranger: The second one is pronounced Lem-ster. The first one I would guess is cone-hoe.
opiejeanne
@R-Jud: You’ll miss those trees? Are you leaving the area?
Sloane Ranger
@opiejeanne: First one is correct but, amazingly, Cogenhoe is actually pronounced Cook-now.
If you like this game, try Magdalen as in Magdalen College, Oxford.
sheila in nc
@Sloane Ranger: Maudlin. And I also know how to pronounce St. John’s. Dad was a Rhodes. Scholar, I mean, not family.
scav
@Sloane Ranger: Maw-dlin, no?
Just One More Canuck
@Viva BrisVegas: or Featherstonehaugh
SkyBluePink
What wonderfully atmospheric trees!
call_me_ishmael
Bill
There are devices that can receive and retransmit door codes, called code grabbers IIRC that burglers will use. Garage door openers have used rolling codes (for the last 15-20 years I think) to foil their use.
Origuy
There’s a town in Lancashire called Oswaldtwistle, pronounced ozzel-twizzle.
BigJimSlade
@Origuy: You sure that’s not it’s hip-hop pronunciation?
Origuy
@BigJimSlade: Fer shizzle