Riders returning on their horses

After teatime this afternoon, I went for a walk up the valley along the old part of Horns Road, which is really still just a farm track. The road originally connected the eastern side of town with The Horns valley, and a small farm, woodlands and quarries. Where the housing from the late Victorian period ended below the Daisybank play area, there was an extensive coneygree, or rabbit warren, where they were farmed. The warren land was eventually sold and became the town's cemetery on the north side of Horns Road, and then some of the farm land to the south was built upon. This is where we now live, looking out and down the steep hill side to the Lime Brook that has gradually formed the valley. A new cemetery was later added below the original site, and now Horns Road leads on between the two cemetery sites, which is where I headed on my walk.

I followed the road for about three hundred yards between stone walls and wooden fences. As I walked I heard horses coming up the road behind me, returning to the riding stables which the old farm has now become. As the road dropped slightly to enter and then end in the farm yard area, I followed the contours of the hillside along the old pathway which leads on another half a mile to the head of the valley.

As I reached the site of one of the old limestone quarries, and a former lime kiln, I looked down beside me to where the road continued below, and saw these two riders as they slowly approached the stables. The other side of the fence is an area for training the horses which they then turned into and I watched from my high vantage point for a few minutes as they slowly walked the horses around the small arena, in odd patterns.

I carried on up the path through a wooded glade beside old abandoned coppiced woods set behind a high stone limestone wall that runs the length of the wood all the way up the valley. Where the valley narrows someone has placed a small park bench in order to sit and bask in the beauty of the view south across and down the valley towards the River Frome and Rodborough Common on the far hillside. I sat for a while and enjoyed occasional sunshine breaking through between the scurrying clouds. The bench is just out of the wind beneath a large hazel bush whose leaves were just beginning to open as the catkins begin to recede and fall.

Two horse were grazing in a small division of the field, with each horse owner obviously allotted just a small bit of the valley. They weren't interested in me at all, only in trying to munch on the very latest tiny shoots of grass, which seemed in very short supply not surprisingly given the very late spring having inhibited growth. Perhaps they will have better food soon as the air was definitely feeling warmer, at last.