Threatening land-owner

This is the sort of thing that really gets my goat.  A selfish land-owner (near Ashley) has put up a threatening notice on a public footpath warning walkers not to use the path.

Of course I understand that land-owners don't always want strangers on their land, but the fact is that these are established common routes - by law - and the owner must have bought the land (or inherited it) knowing that a right of way existed across it.  So they need to learn to live with the fact and adapt.

Secondly, ramblers and farmers have one common aim - to protect the countryside. What farmers don't grasp is that, by being aggressive to walkers, they are making enemies where they should be making friends.

Ashley mound of death

This peculiar 'mound' behind the graveyard of St John The Baptist's church in Ashley (in the north-west of Staffordshire) is something whose origin I had always put down to some form of building work in the past.

Well, I was right that there was some digging there, but... I found out that village historians believe it may well be the location of a mass grave of corpses dating back to the time of the Black Death in 1350.
The plague killed an astonishing FIFTY PER CENT of the population across Europe.

One day the mound and its inmates may be excavated; but, from now on, it will never be for me the innocent grassy knoll I once thought it to be.