Welcome to the blog

The farm track leading from Knowl Lane to the River Dee, Churton

The village of Churton in West Cheshire, a short drive south of Chester, is a terrific base for exploring many different aspects of life and landscape on the edge of the Cheshire Basin, along the Dee Valley and further afield into north and mid Wales.  It is just north of Farndon and Holt.

The basic premise of the blog is that everything I talk about should be do-able within a day’s drive (there and back) of Churton.  Some of my topics may be on my doorstep (quite literally where the garden and local footpaths are concerned) but others may require short drives or day trips.

A blog is organized by date, like a diary.  In many ways it is a far from ideal format for what is essentially magazine content.  To make it easier to navigate, under each of the page headings along the top (Walking, Heritage, History in Garden Finds) you will find links to the main posts on each topic, together with a list of labels at the right of the blog, which should help you to find topics of potential interest.

If you choose to follow the blog by clicking on the Follow by Email button just underneath the Search This Blog field (my thanks if you do) you will receive an email whenever I post anything, but nothing else.  No spam/junk mail or other unsolicited email will be sent to you from here.

Pontcysyllte

For those wondering about my qualifications, I trained as an archaeologist a long time ago.  In my university vacations I spent my time digging up most of Britain from the earliest prehistory to the Roman period, including the Cuppin Street site in Chester in the mid 1980s.  Since then I have done all sorts of things, both within archaeology and beyond it, spending much of my career working in mobile and Internet, with a major strand in website and software development management.  Some years ago I decided to go back to archaeology to do a PhD (and if you are feeling reckless, my PhD thesis about prehistoric  livelihoods in today’s deserts of Egypt has been organized as a website, which you can find here).  I am currently studying for an M.Res in medieval history.

All images on the site that are not specifically credited to another source are mine, but are available to share for non-commercial use under Creative Commons licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

If you would like to get in touch, it would be great to hear from you.  Please use the contact form on the Contact page.  I don’t show my email address on the site to prevent an inundation of junk mail, but the contact form simply routes any messages to my personal email address, from which I will reply.  In the photo to the right, on a superb day with my parents at the temple of Abu Simbel on the border between Egypt and Nubia, I’m the untidy one on the left.

Best