Iron Age

It's amazing what you can discover in the seemingly well-trodden landscape of one's own locality. I've been out there on the highways and byways of Leicestershire within a handful of miles of my home, photographing, painting, and just generally gorging on the sheer delights of my patch of countryside this summer. With a little time on my hands yesterday afternoon I decided to go down a lane that joins the villages of Allexton and Stockerston, both right up against the border with Rutland. You wouldn't go down it unless you lived on it, were making for the Sweethedges Farm Tea Shop or were hopelessly lost. And so I saw, as if for the first time, this big corrugated iron barn. With the addition of a crow-stepped frontage that one normally sees on 1930's garages with a row of globed petrol pumps lined-up in front. No fuel-hungry motorists here, the nearest main road is the A47 preparing itself for Wardley Hill a couple of fields away over the Eye Brook.

Inside it was empty apart from some odd bits of agricultural detritus and the obligatory lone sparrow chirping up in the apex of the roof. It reminded me of a photograph I snapped once as I walked down a platform at Kings Cross station.
    It's quite fortuitous that I came across this pastoral peculiar now, as there's a notice attached to a fence that told me planning permission is being sought for building on that empty patch in front of the barn. So I do hope it survives, both for all those who love this kind of thing but more particularly for those who are annoyed by its crouching presence.