Wheels from Ivy Cottage

Oh how it raineth every day in this year’s month of February. In a mood of self-mockery for trusting my fate to the various weather forecasts, I found myself, nose to pane, staring through sliding globules at the drenched driveway. The forecasts pronounced confidently rain, but for now it was easing off to a still-visible, but fine drizzle. This was my free day of the week. I’ll chance it I thought. On with the gear. To my bicycle, waiting and pre-prepared the day before, I was off into the gloom. But immediately I felt the relief of an escapee, free from confinement and celebrated my decision to get out. If I don’t cycle on days like this in February, I thought, I’ll never get out. Nothing from now on could spoil the admixture of self-congratulatory delight and the joy from my lifting my face into the breeze as I turned to confront the east wind, nothing could quell the elation, not even the road closures that scuttled my plan to cycle into the wind for the first half of the ride, to...

This had been the day of the ‘water-music’, the music of the field drains, the splash of tyres though puddles and temporary fords, the rush of the swollen Welland. I cycled in the overhanging gloom of last night’s hurtling darkness, as the biting east wind continued its troubled buffeting into this half-day. I cycled up the north side of the Welland Valley, turning off to Gumley before reaching Foxton. Crossing over the canal bridge, I could glance to the right to glimpse the top of the famous flight of locks. I passed through Gumley, once a centre of Mercian power, where historical matters of church and the Saxon kingdom were debated and passed into charters and law. Some contend that the great King Offa lies buried here, and that his hilltop sanctuary high above the wet and once forested claylands below may have provided the model for the Norman French rendition of the Arthurian legends, this place being Camelot, this thin place where old crosses into new and reality into legend. But...