New Year’s Day Walk 2011.

A record number of members, friends and families joined this year’s event and began the Langdyke New Year with a gentle walk on the edge of John Clare country.

The route had been chosen and researched by Frieda Gosling and Jean Stowe to take us through the southerly end of the woods at Castor Hanglands and out into the fields overlooking Wansford and the Nene Valley to the village of Upton.

There the reward was a visit to the seldom seen Upton Church.

Once a chapel associated with Castor Church, the building is only used for services two or three times a year and was opened especially for this visit. It is possible the building will develop a role within the interpretation of the local countryside.

Certainly one object there has the potential to feed a research interest - a very unusual and seemingly not well documented sundial, maybe of late 16^th or 17^th century derivation.

Please get in touch if you have any ideas or knowledge of the origins of this early timepiece.

Fittingly for the turn of the year, there was still ice on puddles in the clay dome grassland of the Hanglands as a vestige of December’s deep frosts, yet also the promise of new growth, seen in the hazel catkins and the first showing of leafbuds on the honeysuckle. A sudden flurry amongst the brushwood birds was just enough warning to catch a glimpse of a sparrow hawk in flight.

Wellmore

Langdyke Countryside Trust

Jan 2011