Anglophile Friday - English Roads, Drystone Walls, Hedgerows

Pitt Road, Dorstone, Herefordshire

One of the things that I found most charming about England was the roads. Narrow or winding or sunken - or all three, they led us through the most beautiful countryside. The photo above is one of my favorites. After walking a few steps further, a flock of sheep appeared just beyond the fence and came out to greet us. I've posted about that before, but since this post is about roads and not sheep, it gave me an excuse to post this photo again.

Pitt Road, looking toward Dorstone,

Herefordshire

This is in The Golden Valley. How beautiful and peaceful it is there! We were there in March, and in many places the daffodils were in full bloom. It would be fun to be there a little later in the season to see the other flowers in bloom and to see what that amazing hedge looks like in May or June.

Narrow ribbon of road between Richmond and Low Row, 

North Yorkshire

All of the 'B' roads we saw are very narrow. This one is, oddly enough, a straighter stretch of road in  a military exercise range. Glad we didn't get run over by any tanks. I hope they don't use the sheep for target practice. Do you think the sheep appreciate the amazing view from their grazing spot?

Askrigg Common, North Yorkshire

Taken on a rainy day, with one lone foraging sheep in the picture. This was beautiful country, between Askrigg and Low Row. If anyone thinks England is too crowded, they just need to spend some time in North Yorkshire. There are a lot of places where we rarely ran into another soul.

 Cardington Road, Shropshire

After leaving Cardington, we were headed to an 'A' road (wider, with two lanes) which would lead to Shrewsbury, home of the fictional monk, Brother Cadfael. We hoped we wouldn't meet another car when we were on roads such as the one pictured above, but when we did, we always deferred to the natives. It seemed the prudent thing to do. After all, we didn't know for sure if they were friendly. We've watched a lot of British murder mysteries! :-)

Road near Church Stretton, Shropshire

Because they don't have the big accumulation of snow in the winter, like we do in Wisconsin, there are no ditches, even on the 'A' roads. Therefore, there are many roads that are just a ribbon of asphalt laid down. Then again, there are also old Roman roads, built over 2,000 years ago!

Road South of Kettlewell, North Yorkshire

I cannot look at the photos of drystone walls and piled stones on the side of roads without thinking of the manual labor involved!

From Britainexpress.com -

'Drystone walls are, with hedgerows, one of the most commonly used field boundaries in England, and help create what we now regard as the traditional pattern of field and lanes so evocative of rural England.

While hedgerows are most common in the Lowland Zone, drystone walling is most often found in the Highland, or Upland, Zone (roughly the south-west, the Pennines, the Lake District, the Northeast). In addition, most of Wales and Scotland can be included in the Highland Zone...
As individual landowners abandoned farming in favour of raising sheep and cattle, they enclosed land which had been owned or used "in common", by all the inhabitants of a village. The right to use the common land was lost as landowners enclosed fields and, in some cases, evicted villagers to make room for sheep.

Most of the drystone walls we see today are products of the post-medieval move toward enclosure. In the lower slopes of the Highland Zone the walls are rough and irregular in shape, enclosing small farms dating to the late medieval period and the 16th century.

Higher up the slopes the walls enclose larger fields dating from the 16th and 17th centuries. At the highest elevations are the great sheep grazing areas bounded under Acts of Parliament during the great Enclosure Movement of the 18th and 19th centuries. These walls are the most regular and may run for many miles across otherwise forbidding landscape.'

Pitt Road, Dorstone, Herefordshire

Proving a point.

So, as I said before, the English countryside is beautiful, and the country roads and little villages were charming. But I'll have to admit that toward the end of the 16 days, I realized that I wasn't really ready to transplant to the UK permanently. I would miss the straight, wide roads (with shoulders) of Wisconsin. In England, you can get everywhere...but very slowly. But in Wisconsin, you can get nowhere...FAST.

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 This post is linked to:
Photo Friday 
and
Saturday Nite Special 

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