Limping through Manor Farm Country Park

7 February 2017

When CJ spotted the sign for Manor Farm Country Park he was surprised and delighted in equal measures.
“I can’t believe we walked so far,” he said.
“Only five miles,” I said, with a quick look at my Garmin, “less if it hadn’t been for the getting lost, and quicker if it hadn’t been for the mud.”
“I haven’t been here since I was really little. I think it was with school and I was about six.”
He had a big grin on his face as we set off along the muddy Farm track.

By this time I was limping badly. The piece of bramble twig that had fallen into my boot along the rutted, gloopy lane had worked its way down near my heel. With each step I could feel it digging into me. Originally I’d hoped to find a bench to sit on, where I could take my boot off and fish it out. The one bench was occupied by a couple of mothers with young children though so we walked on.

Manor Farm Country Park covers four hundred acres between the villages of Botley and Bursledon. The last time I visited, was for the RR10 last summer. That had been at the Bursledon end of the park and now we were at the opposite end by the farm museum in what was once the centre of Botley. On a different day, with more time and more than a few lonely coins rattling around in my pocket, we might have been inside for a look around. As it was, we stood in the lane and looked at the farm buildings from the outside.

There has been a farm here for more more than five hundred years and the barns and outbuildings we looked at date back as far as the sixteenth century. It’s still a working farm today, with cows, chickens, ducks and horses in the farmyard. In 1984, with all traces of the modern world removed, it was opened as a farm museum. Now it’s run as it would have been in Victorian times with farm workers going about their daily business, milking cows, feeding animals and the like, dressed as they would have been then.

Although CJ had been inside, it was so long ago he couldn’t really remember much of what he’d seen. Through the farm gate we could see a big red tractor, horses, cows and lots of interesting looking buildings.
“Maybe we can come back in the summer in the car and actually go inside,” I said, knowing CJ was disappointed not to be able to get a closer look. “I’ve never been inside myself and I’m sure it would be interesting.”
Just then a child started to howl and then shout, “I want to go home,” over and over again. CJ and I looked at each other.
“Today is obviously not a good time to visit,” CJ said.

To get away from the noise of the screaming child we crossed to the other side of the lane where there were some interesting outbuildings. I remembered seeing them when I last came this way in the summer of 2015. Back then there hadn’t been any chance to have a closer look at the buildings but today we  stopped to look through the open door of the pink painted wheelwright’s shop.

The place was an Aladdin’s cave of ancient woodworking tools. It reminded me a little of Pappy’s shed when I was a child. We spent far more time than was sensible, given the long walk home, looking at all the tools and bits of wheel. There were also some fun wooden sculptures including a reindeer with one antler missing. I couldn’t help thinking of Commando and how desperate he would be to tidy the place up and sweep away the cobwebs on the windows. Personally, I liked it just as it was, a chaotic mess of interesting things.

 

Between the wheelwright’s shop and the next building which I knew was a blacksmith’s, we found some interesting looking yellow wheels. CJ was sure they were some kind of farm implements, perhaps for threshing corn or something similar. They reminded me of sunflowers and I stopped to take a photo.

The doors and window frames of the blacksmith’s forge were painted green and I vividly remembered looking through them when I last came past.  Today, the windows with their rows of wavy metal bars seemed a little cleaner and less cobweb strewn. Sadly, the door wasn’t fully open so we could only peep through the bars at the fire where the smith must once have worked and the rows of tools  hung up along the walls.

While CJ took a turn looking inside I looked back along the muddy lane we’d come down and tried not to think about the pain in my foot. I really needed to find somewhere to sit and get the thorny branch out of my boot soon or I wasn’t going to be able to walk the five or more miles home. Dragging CJ away wasn’t easy though.

In the end it was the ducks that lured him away from the Blacksmith’s. The duckpond behind the farm is so ancient it’s actually mentioned in the doomsday book. Imagine that! Last time I came this way I didn’t see any ducks but today there were plenty of them swimming around.
“I wish I’d known,” CJ said when he saw them. “I could have brought some of our duck and swan food for them.”
It seemed I’d dragged him away from one distraction only to have him find another. Through the trees around the edge of the pond I could see the reason we’d walked all this way and I knew for certain there’d be somewhere to sit and sort out my foot.

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