Fence work

We paid our annual visit to the  grave yard of St. Mary's Brading this afternoon. A large yard, quite possibly serving quite a large area, kept in a proper state of repair. That is to say, the grass is cut from time to time, but there is no aggressive maintenance of old gravestones. They are allowed to grow old in peace.

The area to the left is mainly from about 1950 to the present, dominated by a large, three-trunked cherry tree of some sort. Flowers mostly plastic, some of rather lurid colour. Some of the gravestones contained very spare details of what looked to be very.sad stories and we wondered what would happen if you let a class of teenagers loose on them to see what stories they could fit around the details. Rather like Maigret fitting various stories to the rather spare facts he has to go on, at the start of an inquiry. But perhaps in rather poor taste, and probably offensive to anyone related.

The gate in the foreground is old enough for the handle and lock left to be completely gummed up. But the missing spike was screwed on, when one might have expected the spear to come up through a hole in the horizontal bar. I was reminded of the fence around Venford Reservoir, on Dartmoor, noticed at reference 1. Fourth snap down.

Tempted to score it as a fake, but perhaps that would be in poor taste too.

PS: a buzzard or some such took off from the top of the tower as we left and headed south towards for the wood at the foot of Brading Down. Too fast for me to snap the monocular onto it for a positive identification.

Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2017/05/on-holne-moor.html.