In summertime, on Bredon....

A. E. Housman has a lot to answer for...  Inspired by his poem, I booked three nights in a holiday cottage at Cow Honeybourne in the Cotswolds, thinking that we could walk on Bredon Hill and "see the coloured counties" below us, as described in the poem, after visiting my husband's stepmother in her care home.

Alas, this is as close as we got to the famous hill, although we did some walking in the modern Cotswold countryside.

We began by taking our elderly relative out to tea at a garden centre close to her care home. All was going well until we pulled out of the car-park and the car simply ground to a halt.  There we were on a very busy road, traffic whizzing past, and with a 92 year old lady in the car who cannot walk without a walking frame.  After several phone calls, the care home sent out a rescue vehicle and the AA was on its way.  Several hours later, we were in a taxi to our rented cottage and my car was being towed all the way back to Essex, a journey which had taken us four and a half hours.

So then things looked up.  We were in a converted barn, very modern and comfortable.  But more than this, and purely fortuitously, there was a railway station not ten minutes walk from the cottage.

Next day, we took the train to Evesham.  At one time Evesham was a centre for fruit-growing and asparagus - and still is.  It once had a very powerful abbey, and there are still interesting buildings to be seen there. This is the Almonry Museum which houses a very extensive collection of the specialised tools of many trades.

Curiously there are two churches within a few yards of each other and with a stupendous bell tower between.  These once served separate parishes, but now one is redundant.

Inside one of them this item, dedicated to a river god.

And, my goodness, did it rain.  We were completely soaked by the time we got back on the Great Western Railway train back to Honeybourne.

The National Trust manages many properties, and in the next village, Bretforton, there is a pub owned by the Trust.  We set off to walk across the fields to have lunch there.

Acres of strawberry fields and liquid mud did not make for pleasant walking, but the pub lived up to expectations.  We enjoyed a leisurely lunch and took a taxi back to our cottage.