To fully appreciate this post I suggest reading it while listening to some Ralph Vaughan Williams, perhaps Lark Ascending, or Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis.

We just moved the boat less than two miles this morning, but this mooring has a completely different atmosphere. We are away from the hustle and bustle of the Braunston towpath and the road noise from the busy A45, and out in the country with a fine view of the rolling English countryside.

We are close to a bridge that has lost its side walls and is overgrown so much that it simply extends one meadow to another.

The towpath side of the canal is mostly public, and in most places you can moor your boat anywhere you like for up two weeks, but then you have to move on. The non-towpath side of the canal is private, but sometimes the property owner will rent out moorings there to people who want to leave their boat there longer, and sometimes live full time there. Just down the canal from us, the landowner is renting out moorings, and a patch of land too, so that people living on boats can have a back yard. Some of them are quite fancy.

This one has a summer house and a shed with a solar power system…

and this one has a designer kennel and hand crafted scarecrow.

We went for a walk through fields of sheep.

Vaughan Williams is definitely the best music for watching sheep. Paula amused herself by picking up tufts of wool and feeling the varying textures.

Not much remains of the village of Wolfhampcote. There is one cottage (imaginatively called “The Cottage”), a scenic ruin, St. Peter’s Church (which was rescued from dereliction by Sir John Betjeman), and some suspicious mounds in the ground which are probably full of barrow-wights. Here’s the ruin and the church.

Paula liked this carving on the church.

Here’s the inside.

One more view of the outside, from an abandoned railway bridge nearby.

Here’s where the abandoned railway crossed the canal.

You didn’t think I could stick with this wonders of the English countryside stuff for the entire post, did you? Screw the Vaughan Williams, let’s crank up The Wall.