Snip Snip

In the world of topiary, this must be the evergreen equivalent of the terracotta army. One hundred and fifty yews, painstakingly cut into representations of Spitfires, anchors, windmills, three bears, dogs, lie just off the Clipsham to Castle Bytham road in Rutland. There's apparently an elephant in here somewhere too. Estate worker Amos Alexander started clipping away in 1870 at the yews which lined the carriage drive that stretched from his gate lodge home to Clipsham Hall. Most of these green giants are over 200 years old, and every September they get a short-back-and-sides from the Forestry Commission, whose badly-designed sign at the entrance makes one worry about what might be sheared-out in the future. Yews trimmed into I-Phones, Gordon Brown's rictus smile.

It's bit like suddenly finding yourself in Alice's Wonderland, expecting any minute that playing cards will run out from between the trees, or at the very least a pig baby crying in the surrounding woods. But it is an amazing place to walk, particularly as I did on a cold sunlit winter's afternoon when the black shadows give definition to the cut-out shapes. Later it must get very eerie here, as I expect they all start to silently shuffle about in the gloaming.

Pillars of the Community

More from Exton. Everyone (including me, as you have seen), gets carried away by Exton church and the monuments. Pevsner rushed through, barking at his assistants about lucarnes and stiff-leaf; Hoskins kept coming back before going over to Tixover churchyard for forty winks. Both missed (or ignored) this little building up at the top end of the village. There's nothing grand about it, just a set of pillars carefully constructed in curved bricks holding up a roof of Collyweston slates with a ball and cross finial on top. Exton was once an important staging post between Leicester and the Great North Road, (the Fox and Hounds pub on the tree-lined green still bears witness to this), and I had thought that this was a market cross. But I am reliably informed that it is in fact the housing for a now extinct village pump. It has immense charm, and I was looking forward to saying that it doesn't take much imagination to make the grass and trees disappear, replacing them with a rough cobbled area filled with wooden crates of vegetables, trestle tables stacked with butter and eggs. Nevertheless, this was still a meeting place for villagers, albeit with buckets rather than baskets, their children playing tag around the brick pillars whilst they gossiped and sheltered from the rain.

Exton Jam

Exton in Rutland is a funny old place. At once both quintessentially English and slightly odd to get to grips with, it is a village full of good things whichever way you look. Amongst the best is the 1686 Grinling Gibbons monument to the Third Viscount Campden in the church of St. Peter and St. Paul, but I don't want to spoil the surprise of it by showing the whole towering edifice here. Gibbons pocketed £1,000 for it, and must have heaved a very seventeenth century sigh of relief that it actually did just fit into the north transept. So as a taster I give you this relief panel that sits at the base, a graphic rendering of his third wife and her six children. The next wife is up above, and, like her husband and the rest of his extended family, is depicted in the de rigeur fashion of the times, viz: enrobed in (and in some cases erotically emerging from) full Roman costume. Thoughtfully the church has provided spot lights on a timer that highlight the simply colossal pile of both white and dark grey marble. It comes as almost another kind of relief to find jars of homemade jam with little cotton-print covers for sale on the visitors' book table. I came home with greengage.

Wonky Wessex

A wet morning in Dorset, trawling about the exquisite hamlets in the Cerne valley between Charminster and Lyon's Gate. Everything brooding in a very Hardyesque manner, except this is more Rogue Male country, at least for those who frequently return to the pleasures of Geoffery Household's novel. Oil lit churches, flint-walled cottages under hoods of thatch and then this, leaning precipitously in Minterne Magna. One can only hope that your phone call isn't violently interrupted by the whole thing finally toppling down the grassy bank, trapping you like Sleeping Beauty in a glass coffin. The missing sign from the the back wall is fastened into the hedge of a nearby cottage with what looks like those tags you use to tie-up freezer bags. But at least it's all a timely reminder of when a telephone company leaned over backwards to help you.

Signing Policy

Long Melford has much to please the eye. A big Suffolk wool church, a village green bordered by both a turreted gateway and a gabled garden building for the Hall, plus a red brick conduit house surrounded by the sweeping greensward.

But, whilst these eyecatchers don't exactly pale into insignificance, it was this little building that brought about the squealing of brakes and an abrupt u-turn yesterday afternoon.

In 1868 a Mr. Row was station master at Long Melford station. Possibly as a result of reading his staff magazine and newspapers, his eyes must have narrowed at the commercial possibilities of insuring passengers against railway mishaps. And so this little office opened, and was so successful that Mr. Row left the Great Eastern Railway and went into the insurance business full-time. Remarkably, that's what still goes on here, with the name Row still shining on the brass plates outside. Once restricted to just carefully-incised stone lettering, signing additions have subsequently appeared in a very ad hoc fashion over the years, creating, for me, a high spot on the high street..

Product Support

Since there has been considerable support for my showing-off one of my most treasured Christmas presents, here it is. My neighbour brought it round on Christmas Eve, beautifully wrapped, and said 'I've been looking for a good home for this for years'. What can she possibly mean? It comes from that era of English design where certain product packaging simply couldn't speak the name of the item within. We found it with contraceptive devices, trusses and other 'unmentionables' and even though everyone understood what a 'jockstrap' was, even its polite name of 'male support' couldn't be seen here. All we know from this box is that the mystery contents are 'hygienic, washable, durable', that it 'supports and protects' and that 'Wise Men buy Two'. Apart from that, I see that it was originated and manufactured by Fred Hurtley & Son in Keighley, Yorkshire, where you'd have thought they'd have been a bit more no-nonsense about it. Nevertheless, the graphics are superb and I certainly would have been sufficiently intrigued to give the Mayfair Model a thorough roadtest.

Oil and Gravy

You don't see many of these hump-backed dispensers around much either. For those unfamiliar with their use, a garage proprietor would grab those two handles at the top and let down the shutter with the classic logo emblazoned on it. He probably did this first thing in the morning, closing it at night after the last Morris Oxford had left the forecourt. Having checked your dipstick with a greasy rag, if necessary he would pump oil up from a drum held in the cupboard underneath, straight into either a green metal quart, pint or half pint pouring jug, again with the evocative logo on the side. It was all about personal service for your motor car, rather than having a vapid youth sell you wilting flowers in stifling cellophane to leave at a road accident. I say all this because I have sourced these jugs, which are still made to the exact same specification. The thought occurs that they would make superb gravy boats, although the quart one I might put to one side until I can dispense Pimms from it at my first garden party of the summer. I photographed this dispenser somewhere in remote east Leicestershire sometime in the seventies, although by now it's bound to be the centrepiece in a singles bar called The Garage, working hard as a vodka luge no doubt.