Stung by Sting!!

Or, his 89 year old neighbour, to be exact, who crept up on me on a swish, silent, electric scooter!

The Quite Long Walk - 10 miles (3pm - 10pm)

From Berwick St James, up past strip lynchets and over onto the ridge, past Druid's Head Farm, over the main A360 Devizes Road, along an old drove and then dropped down on its way into Upper Woodford. The lovely little tree clump is Rox Hill.

"This is a private road", 'but with a public footpath', the elderly gent told me, which I already knew as I had pre-planned the route and read ALL the signs.

BUT, I had ventured off by a few feet to get to the edge of this delightful early field of barley, swishing in the breeze, a distant view fit for a king (or rock star) and a sky that was swirling.

A ramshackled sign said that the offshoot I had (very partially) taken was Private land. 

"That's all Sting's land", he announced. I assured him that I was only trying to get a very wide landscape and that I was definitely not a Papparazzi! How often do those tacky slimy Paps use an ultrawide 10mm for zooming in on celebs??

'That's Sting's shed down there and there's a wedding reception going on this afternoon.' Well, I couldn't really see which of the many buildings he was referring to, but went along with his story. I couldn't see a marquee and the only buildings that weren't houses were old farm buildings. A long way away, anyway!

Anyways, he couldn't care a jot either way and said that Sting was hardly ever there, in any case. I described my lengthy walk and final destination, still some miles up on the next ridge, at High Post.

Seems his daughter now ran the big farm that I had passed an hour or so ago, as he was now too old to run it himself. I remarked that his super-scooter - with TRAILER! - would be fit for Monaco this weekend but he lamented that he had suffered a blackout whilst driving and so could no longer trust himself to drive a car. But, in any case, he was on his Private Road, though, so he could do what he liked.

All this chatting about Stonehenge and the proposed Tunnel, that the country could not afford such a thing anyway and a few other subjects clearly showed that this Wurzel Gummidge dressed oddball was actually as sharp as a cucumber slicer, but all this while and my nice and interesting clouds were just getting less nice and less interesting, and so eventually, off he scootled, silently, down the steep hill, the other side.

I sort of meandered down and up the other side and waited for sunset, which kind of didn't happen that well, but high up, overlooking much of the route I had walked all afternoon and evening. 

I probably wasn't going to go for a black and white but in the end, it is rather me and it fitted in with quite a nice story.