Friday and Saturday in Tring

 (I've spent the last few days chilling out in Bulbourne near Tring (Hertfordshire), doing small Ridgeway sections and seeing the sights more generally. I'm hading off the Chester tomorrow. Tonight we're watching the Women's Football (ENG v SPAIN) Euro Final and eating BBQ. 

Friday morning was spent at the Hellfire Caves at High Wycombe - a fascinating place where esteemed gentlemen (Churchman, Parliamentarians, etc) met in secret to undertake in general debauchery and pseudo-satanic cultishness. You'd never get such goings on nowadays (cough). I want to use the caves a setting for a role-playing game. If I lived near here I would hire them out for that purpose. 

The afternoon was spent at Wattlington Hill and Christmas Common, where the Ridgeway runs through in one of its final stages. Most of the Ridgeway here is located on small hills owned by the National Trust, and then down again into small byroads to the nearby villages and towns. It's not quite the same as further west, where once you are on, you're really committed. Here, you can easily able on and of whenever you like. Nick made venison stew with homegrown everything else - together with oyster mushrooms and 'chicken of the woods' which Anitas and I had picked the the previous day. We ate it with relish and then spent the next few hours monitoring for symptoms, but no one got the tingling blue lips indicating an allergic reaction. We're all still alive, fortunately. 

On Friday we went to the Natural History Museum in Tring, where Baron Rothschild collected a huge array of natural history specimens, often by shooting and stuffing them himself. Some of the taxidermy is excellent, some hilariously bad. The place is pretty fun, and free - although I am glad people don't still do this type of thing. We also took in the Tring Brewery, and I bought a hoodie with a toad drinking beer on it. This was all fitted in prior to a 3-hour ride on Nick and Anita's boat, The Hood, to a place on the canal called Cow Roast (apparently Cow Rest in an early dialect), where we turned around in the 'winding hole' and came back again at a very leisurely pace. I shouted the group to a feast at a Jamaican Restaurant called The Goat Yard, and then we crashed out again. 

Today, I 'finished' the Ridgeway, but more of that in another post. We're all a bit tired...