Hempstead, Elmore and Longney 14th February 2010

14th February is a significant date for many reasons.  First, and maybe most importantly, it is my daughter Victoria's birthday. She is 9 today.  Vic is, however, celebrating with her mum and having about a million friends to stay.  It is also St Valentine's day when we celebrate the life and martyrdom of any number of saints called Valentine that somehow turns into a commercial display of love.  Being the old romantic I obviously am, my wife, Tina, and I went out together for the day and a meal and stuff yesterday.  The other thing we remember is the 1929 St Valentine's day massacre in Chicago.  That is more how I feel now that Anthony is quite capable of leaving me in his wake.  That's the benefit of youth, an active lifestyle and not hauling 15 stone of blubber around.

Today's ride took us through a number of lanes around the villages of Hempstead, Elmore and Longney that I wasn't very familiar with before today but have been real eye openers.  These are, similar to my previous blog theme, villages within a stones throw of an ever increasing housing estate, this time the outrageous sprawl of Quedgeley.

We left our estate by crossing the Gloucester-Sharpness canal using Hempstead bridge, closed to motorised traffic a couple of years ago.  Up a bit of a hill to Hempstead village and turning left onto Rea lane which, according to Google maps, takes you onto Simms lane and drops you in Quedgeley.  Except it doesn't.  It is a dead end.  There is a public path across a field onto Simms lane.  Undaunted, we traipsed across and  continued as planned.  Turning back away from Quedgeley, Elmore Lane took us, unsurprisingly, to Elmore.

Elmore Court  This has been owned by the same family since the 13th century.  Around here there was also the added bonus of quite a plethora of wildlife.  From rabbits, pheasants (sorry, didn't have a gun) and a really quite impressive Kestrel(?) - I'm not much of a twitcher but there were a couple and I understand they aren't rare in this area.





Elmore Parish Church - St John the Baptist.  Strikes me as being a bit out of the way even for the village of Elmore although for the casual tourist this isn't such a bad thing.  The 13th century church stands very much in its own land with stones in the graveyard and tombs reasonably clearly dating back to 15th century.

This rather intriguing structure in the church yard and to the west is the remains of an 18th century mausoleum.

Heading out of Elmore, you quickly find yourself in the similar village of Longney.  The first sign of more civilisation again being the parish church of St Laurence from a very similar era and built in a very similar style.
This church, Elmore church that we visited above and St Nicholas, Hardwicke (not yet visited) are part of a three church union that despite nigh on 1000 years of history appear to have quite a vibrant community and a very modern web presence.















By now, it is fast approaching 5pm so we would be running out of daylight and we have no bike lights so time to head back home.  A bit disappointing as there are many more villages and areas of interest around here that deserve much more attention.   You could easily snake down the canal through Saul, Slimbridge and any number of other villages to the termination of the canal at Sharpness.  I reckon that could make for a whole day out in the summer.

Total distance - 25 KM

Average Speed - 25.5 KM/h

Weather - about 8C, Dry and calm