I have always had a fascination with old, ruined buildings. There were stories there once. Happy times and sad, births and deaths. Now just silent walls. From my window at the Twice Brewed Inn I could see a couple of ruined farm houses a short ways off.
Taking one of the many public footpaths I was off on a bright Saturday morning.
Of course you have to say hello to the current inhabitants.
The first building has a very modest feel to it. A single room now with walls tumbling every which way. It must have been a chilly place despite the hearth at one end and the stove - now mostly buried under debris - at the other.
There is just enough shelter for the sheep to huddle together against the elements. The floor has a solid carpeting of their little round droppings. It has been a very hard spring here. A weak one did not make it.
Up the hill a ways is a more substantial croft. All the walls still stand.
But the interior has a sort of sterile, unlived in feel to it.
I was surprised to see what looks like fortified firing slots in the walls. This was a troubled place in times past but a mini Alamo still seems a bit jarring.
Actually this little stone building has roots that run very far back indeed. Directly under it, or perhaps past its front door, the main East-West Roman road once ran. So, circa AD 70 when the first Gospels were being put into written form and when the very idea of a world without Rome was inconceivable, this was a busy highway. Nothing now remains but a muddy track, the only travelers but myself a bunch of witless sheep.
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