Tea and bisquits.... amid sheep?

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originally uploaded by Neil Rickards.

Neil and I joined his friends for a weekend of country pursuits. Neil took the train down to West Wycombe the day before my arrival where he joined Dom and Mel for a regatta. The men worse suits and the ladies wore dresses and hats. Unfortunately I was unable to attend, but later I joined them for the remainder of the weekend.

First, on saturday we went to the EJ Churchill shooting club for some clay-pigeon shooting. It turns out that shooting at a clay pigeon flying through the air with an immense shotgun that did not have sights like the rifles and pistols I have shot in the past is quite difficult. I kept leaning back while shooting which caused the kickback of the gun to tenderize my shoulder like a steak ready for barbequing.

On Sunday we walked through a sheep field on the way to the Hell-Fire Club caves. The caves were built between 1720 and 1754 for Lord Francis Dashwood on his land in Berkshire. After a few years of bad harvests, farm workers were left unemployed so he hired them to dig caves into the chalk hills on his land. The chalk was used to build roads between West Wycombe and High Wycombe and again to build a road to Oxford. The caves were then used for the secret club that Lord Dashwood founded called the Hell-Fire club. Benjamin Franklin visited (before the revolution) and was quite impressed.

We then walked up a very steep hill to the Dashwood mausoleum, a hexagonal open-air crypt of sorts where generations of Dashwoods are buried. Above this is the church, designed after a 3rd century temple in Damascus, that has a golden globe at the top from which Lord Dashwood used to signal his friends across the countryside.

On out return from the visit to the Dashwood Estate, we happened upon an awning with a table and chairs in the sheep field. Some girls who live in a house adjoining the field were trying to raise money for their school trip to Morroco, so they baked lemon cakes and flapjack cakes as well as making real lemonade. They printed up and laminated a menu and were very industrious all around. The six of us stopped and had a snack while some of the sheep became very nervous and tried to sneak past us to a water trough while their mother sheep stood her ground protectively.