I love this lane, which is just 5 minutes walk from my front door. There’s something about the whole topography. The gradual downward slope of the road, the angle of the banks, the trees and other vegetation, the quietness…

Everything feels just right to me. It’s how a country lane should be!

Even on the brightest summer day it stays shady down here. When you get to the bottom it’s always several degrees cooler than at the top, and it’s always damp! So when they tore down the old paper mill and factory that used to be there and built houses, no local people moved in because they knew just how damp it would be.

The glossy sales brochures made no mention of that, of course. The blissfully-ignorant outsiders loved the look of the place and didn’t enquire much into why it had taken a year longer than planned to actually build the houses (which was because it took them that long to divert all the springs and to seal the ground sufficiently to stop the water bursting through).

But for those of us who don’t live there, it’s great!