SSR bridge - in brown & yellow

The South Staffordshire Railway Walk is a footpath that makes use of the now disused SSR line, but you can walk beneath its bridges of course, as I was doing here.
Somebody carefully restores the paintwork every so often - even though the railway company itself folded in 1923, giving way to the LNWR. 
These colours - a mud-brown shade, with borders of yellow must have been the colours of the SSR itself, one supposes.

Almost a fairy tale castle

The Victorian pumping station at Wombourne (now empty, disused and decaying) looks even more like a Sleeping Beauty-style enclosed castle, now it is behind its screen of winter-leafless trees.

Sunny bratch

The Bratch Locks are quite a feature in Wombourne.  Not only interesting to canal enthusiasts, they often make for the starting point of various walks.
You can see why.  The toll-house tower, which you see in this photo - is a nicely fantastical talking-point.

Christmas gardens

Once the towns have put up their Christmas lights in their streets (at the end of November), usually householders follow quickly - putting up festive house-lights and garden displays.

I saw this arrangement today in a front garden in Wombourne.

Railway colours survive

On the South Staffordshire Railway Walk, a footpath that has taken over the trackbed of the old SSR, you will still see, on the bridges over roads, these 'colours' - a mud-brown shade, with borders of yellow.
I'm guessing that these are the colours of the SSR itself.  Certainly,  the brown tint was the official colouring given to the SSR. 
The SSR was taken over by the LNWR in 1923.

Curiously, on the other side of this fencing (ie the side you can see from the road below), the colours are lavender & white...

What does it all mean?

'Castle' allowed to decay

This Victorian castle-style building is a really attractive work, on the fringes of Wombourne.  It's hard to believe that it is (or was...) a pumping station, in which two steam engines pumped up water from boreholes which went deep into the ground underneath it.

After The Bratch Pumping Station was supplanted by a new system, a group of enthusiasts, The Friends Of The Bratch, was given the chance to maintain the building and the steam-engines, which they lovingly did, holding a number of open-days along the way.... until 2010, when, for no reason I can find, the owners, Severn-Trent Water, withdrew their permission.
The enthusiasts are still, to this day, understandably bitter.

Meanwhile, the empty building suffers from ingress from pigeons, the engines are no longer maintained, and tree-foliage has been allowed to grow along the front to the property so that it is no longer easy to see the building from the road.

Seems hard to think why it should be so allowed to decline when there are volunteers who would take it on.

Wombourne's tomb-face mystery

This grotesque carving is on the tower of Wombourne's St Benedict Biscop Church and overlooks the main part of the graveyard.
It’s odd to see a carving in the centre of the wall; and not attached either to a water-pipe or a decorative part of the structure.

The other odd thing about it is that it might – or might not - be connected to the grandest tomb in the graveyard.
The family tomb to the Allens (see below) includes, as you can see, this inscription-tribute to Daphne Allen:  'Look Up And See Her Face'.
However… there is nothing on the top of the tomb, and apart from the trees, you see nothing except the sky by looking up … unless you look round at the tower.  Where the only face is that of the grotesque.
The two can’t be connected, can they?  I can’t find out anything more…