Tag Archives: village

Apr 03 2025
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Art and architecture, Daily Post

Brize Norton: the non-military bit

Wednesday 2nd April 2025, 5.20pm (day 4,969)

Brize Norton village, 2/4/25

As I type this on Thursday morning, my latest journey has ended, and so for the next nine days you will be seeing pictures of a lump of volcanic rock in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. This will be a quite different environment from the genteel acres of Oxfordshire, the part of England that I had to transit through to reach my destination, seeing as I was flying out of RAF Brize Norton overnight. That being a military base, they were understandably touchy about deadbeat civilians like me coming in and happily snapping away at their installations for blogging purposes.

Here, instead, is the village of Brize Norton itself: a patch of quintessential Oxfordshire. With that thatched roof, I guess this scene might have looked much the same for two or three hundred years. Except for the one anachronism — it’s there, if you can spot it.

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Mar 06 2022
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Art and architecture, Daily Post

Vulcan (not the Star Trek one)

Saturday 5th March 2022, 1.40pm (day 3,845)

Vulcan village, 5/3/22

To Trek fans Vulcan is a desert planet inhabited by a race of sophisticated, logic-driven and mildly telepathic humanoids. As I discovered today, it’s also a planned village, built in Victorian times to house the workers of the Vulcan foundry, which apparently forged rails for most of northern England. It’s now slowly being swallowed up by the town of Newton-le-Willows. But if you want to pay your respects to Spock, Sarek et al, you’ll be pleased to know that there remains a Vulcan Inn and Vulcan FC as well as the white-painted rows of the houses themselves. A pleasant spot — but it did take some patience to get a shot in which there weren’t cars running up and down the street.

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Jun 05 2019
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Daily Post, Landscape

Lakones, Corfu

Wednesday 5th June 2019, 7.55pm (day 2,841)

Lakones, 5/6/19

In August 2011 we came on holiday to the island of Corfu, off the west coast of Greece. Greece is a place I fell in love with when I spent three months here, on the mainland, in the summer of 1991 (‘the Inter-Rail Year’), and this feeling has not changed on trips back since (all to the islands). It was largely because of enjoying the photography on that 2011 visit that I decided I would start the blog a couple of weeks later on 26/8/11. And in all the 2,840 days that have followed that date, I have not been back either to the island of Corfu or the whole country.

Well I’m pleased to say that is no longer the case. At least for the next three days.

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