Pre Covid, Terroir defined four criteria for determining where we wanted to live.  These criteria were, in no particular order:

·        Good transport links to make leaving (and coming back) easy!  Tick

·        Access to a lively city with plenty going on.  Tick (in fact 2 cities within easy reach)

·        Great countryside.  Tick (lovely, long linear belts of the stuff)

·        Near the sea – it takes about an hour to reach the coast from the current chez Terroir, so seaside is technically null points but not an impossibility.

Three out of four suits us pretty well for the time being.   

With regard to our local countryside, familiarity has not bred contempt.  A couple of days ago, we trialled anther local Slow Way (see Blog  29, on 13th May) and were embarrassed but also delighted to find that here was another walk which we had never tried before.  We climbed the scarp face of the North Downs, turned round and admired the view.

Here are a couple of samples, the distant haze showing just how hot a day it was turning out to be.

As we contemplated the panorama, we started that conversation which is usually spawned by looking down on a familiar landscape from an unfamiliar view point.  It went something like this: ‘Oh look, there is St John’s Church tower.  Can you see that tower block?  Where is the new school?  Why can’t we see the railway?’ 

Here is a list of all the things we spotted.  Can you find them?

13th century church tower, Victorian church tower

A Capability Brown landscape

Two motorways and a lot of railway,

Telecomms tower

Sand quarry and a landfill site

A high pressure gas pipeline (trick question)

1930s housing

1960s block of flats

21st century housing estate on former minerals site

20th century industrial estate, 20th century commercial ‘sheds’

21st century primary school

Answers below! 

It is amazing what you can hide in a summer landscape.  We will go back in the winter to see just how much a visual impact assessment is influenced by seasonality.

So here are the ‘answers’. This second set of photographs has zoomed in on sections of the view, panning from east to west. Terroir is standing on the crest of the North Downs chalk ridge, looking south across the gault clay below, to the Greensand ridge on the other side of the valley.