The Common

Here are some pics of the Common. You are not strictly allowed to use it as it is supposed to be private land but everybody does, after all it is a Common, and somewhere along the line was Common Land (you can still see the furrows made by the medieval farming) until some greedy person sold it off, so our mass trespass is some sort of political statement against greedy capitalism and right for people to have green spaces. First and third pics(enlarge to see) school kids using it to go home and the horses. Second pic, you usually find this all over, if somebody has fenced off some land, someone will have kindly removed one of the railings so you can squeeze through.

During the summer a lot of the school kids walk back on it and it can be quite idyllic, when the may comes out on the bushes and with kids collecting frogs surrounded by carpets of buttercups. The horses seem to know when the schools finish because they are usually at the fence waiting for people to give them carrots. You've got to be careful with the horses as they have gone to the wild and will suddenly start galloping about in a herd. At times like this it is best to hide in one of the thickets pictured. Once the two dogs and I spent quite some time in a thicket while the horses thundered past, though Scamp will daringly run up to the odd horse, bark at it, and then run off again like the wind. They will also follow you if you've got a bag, because they think it's food. This happened to me when I felt breathing down my neck and turned to see a large horse eying my bag. Quite often you can see the big kids running away from the horses, and once I carried a young girl on my back across a bog because I had my wellies on because we were fleeing the horses, and had banded together for safety in numbers, as it were. I think the kids have worked out that if you work both your arms in a windmill motion it will scare them off, and you see this particular technique used quite often.

Once a horse got across a bit of fence and ended up in the playground and they have also been seen grazing on the roundabout.

The thickets are quite interesting as they have bit of wood lying about in some sort of pattern, and remind me of that film 'The Blair Witch Project', where objects are left lying about in the spooky woods, possibly by a witch. You will see this in the fifth picture. Who left them there?