Northwood Lane, Bewdley: The Elan Valley Aqueduct, The Singing Detective and Jonathan Meades

Fire broke out beside the Severn Valley Railway (SVR) bear Bewdley yesterday, reports the Shropshire Star. I don't know if it was caused by a spark from a train, but many preserved lines have gone over to diesel-only operation because of the tinder-dry state of lineside vegetation this summer.

This fire took place near Northwood Lane, which is a long road that runs beside the River Severn north of Bewdley. And this post  is about three things you can see along its course.

The first is an aqueduct that carries drinking water from the Elan Valley reservoir in Mid Wales over the River Severn on its way to the Frankley Reservoir in  Birmingham. This 73-mile pipeline, which opened in 1906, was a wonder of its day. 

You'll find it marked on the endpaper maps of many books about the Welsh Border, and I suspect it was the inspiration for the plot about a Shropshire reservoir being blown up by German spies in the first of Malcolm Saville's Lone Pine books, Mystery at Witchend.

You can see the Aqueduct over the Severn and the rails of the SVR in the photograph above. Now on to two television connections...

There is a station beside Northwood Lane, and it was used as a location for Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective. It's in the scene where the young Philip Marlowe returns to the Forest of Dean after his mother's death in London and is met by his father, who is played by Jim Carter. You can see a photo of them above along with photos photos of the station and level crossing.

And then there's Jonathan Meades...

You may remember his film Severn Heaven, which visited the Bewdley plotlands. This is an interwar community of some 160 self-built properties, which appears to be under threat at the moment. 

I had a wander round it some years ago myself, getting off the train at Northwood Halt.

The Fenland floods of 1947

A film about farming and the harsh winter of 1946/7. In particular, about the flooding that hit the Fens when the snow finally thawed and the efforts to recover from it.

Those floods form the background to Malcolm Saville's book The Luck of Sallowby. Here's his description of the fight against the floodwaters:

Now they were close against the wall they saw it was only a few inches higher than the rising water which stretched before them in a turbulent brown lake, whipped into waves by the gale. And these waves beat against the wall ceaselessly and the spray from them blew over the top and drenched the bags and settled in pools on the tarpaulins and made the blue clay slimy and almost unmanageable.

The sky was full of rain again but they knew now that even if it did not rain in the Fens the danger was coming from the water which fell many miles away in the Midlands and in Bedfordshire, and that the swollen rivers were still rushing down to the plain while the wind which fretted these floods into the banks, made a menace which it was very hard to fight.

So they worked on with them men, laughing and joking with them, until a shout and disturbance about fifty yards away broke the rhythm of their toil. They looked round to see that the water had found a weakness in the wall and was gushing through the cracks between the bags like a fountain. There was another similar leak nearer to them on their other side, and now the gangs plastered these leaks with clay without waiting to bag it.

Petula Clark remembers making Trouble at Townsend

One of Petula Clark's early films in her child star days was Trouble at Townsend, which was based on a short story by this blog's hero Malcolm Saville.

In her memoirs Is That You, Petula? she briefly remembers making the film:

Rather less glamorously, around the same time I made an educational film for children called Trouble at Townsend. It was about a city boy and girl going to the countryside and having adventures. The little boy in the film with me put on weight and got too plump for his costume. We filmed some of it on a farm, and I got chased and butted by a goat.

Many years ago, I wrote a press release for the Malcolm Saville and as a result...

Bored longstanding reader: ...Petula Clark rang you. We all know the story.

Something amazing: A Shropshire businessman falling out of the sky and Mystery at Witchend

The latest Secret Shropshire programme on BBC Sounds is intriguing:

In 1937 Max Wenner fell to his death from a plane in one of aviation's greatest mysteries. Wenner was a wealthy landowner and pilot living at Batchcott Hall outside Picklescott in the foothills of the Long Mynd.

Wenner's frequent flights to Germany in the 1930s and visits from high profile Nazis like Joachim von Ribbentrop led to speculation that Wenner may be leading a double life. In January 1937 his body was found in woodland near Genk, in Belgium.

He had fallen out of a passenger plane but no could explain why. Almost ninety years later, the mystery continues to intrgue journalists in the UK, and on the continent.

Johnty O'Donnell visited Batchcott Hall to investigate the mysterious Max Wenner, the man who fell from the sky.

So there were rumours of a nest of Nazi spies in a big house in the shadow of the Long Mynd? Could this story have been an inspiration for Malcolm Saville's first Lone Pine book Mystery at Witchend? 

Wenner's death must still have been the talk of the district when Saville visited Shropshire during the war. Even the name Batchcott echoes the Hatchholt of his book, and I once drew parallels between Mystery at Witchend and the wartime propaganda film Went the Day Well?

While I was writing this the Trivia Desk phoned to point out that Max Wenner was the great uncle of the Blue Peter presenter Christopher Wenner, who later became a crusading documentary maker under the name Max Stahl.

Steam to the Sea! The Southwold Railway Story

This is from Malcolm Saville's introduction to Sea Witch Comes Home, his story inspired by the East Coast floods of 1953:

Every mile of this unusual coast and the lovely country behind it is worth exploring. Southwold, with its white lighthouse towering over its streets of flint and red brick houses, is waiting for you to discover – and so is the harbour at the mouth of the River Blyth a mile away. Between the river and the town are flat marshlands which were flooded when the sea broke through the defences not many years ago.

But the narrow-gauge Southwold Railway closed as early as 1929, and Saville's characters catch the bus from Halesworth to reach the town.

This engaging video from the Rediscovering Lost Railways YouTube channel shows what remains of the line and the efforts that are being made to prevent it being forgotten. And the Southwold Railway Trust has plans to reopen it one day.

Malcolm Saville inspired Vera, Ruth Galloway and Slow Horses

The Gold Edition interviews the crime writer Ann Cleeves, some of whose books have been adapted to make the television series Vera:

What are the books from your childhood you'll never forget? 

All of Malcolm Saville’s books. He wrote mysteries, but quite classy ones – definitely a step up from the usual Enid Blyton! I can remember writing him a fan letter and getting a handwritten letter back. It was very exciting. He had something called the Lone Pine Club, which you could join, and I recently found out that the crime writers Elly Griffiths and Mick Herron were both members too. So we all loved his books.

Saville worked in publishing before he became a children's author – I think he was Enid Blyton's publicist at George Newnes – so he knew what he was doing.

John Rogers discovers the lost city of Winchelsea

This is a lovely walk – I've done the stretch from Rye to Camber Castle myself. 

John's blurb on YouTube says:

This walk takes on a journey into England's medieval history on the south coast in East Sussex. Starting at Rye, one of the ancient Cinque Ports we follow the Saxon Shore Way past Camber Castle to the medieval walled city of Winchelsea. Originally planned by Edward I in 1288 it replaced the old port of Winchelsea which was swept away by the sea but had once been one of the most prosperous ports in the whole of England.

This is part of a series of walk in places within easy reach of London by train and one of the best day trips from London.

And he even finds the blue plaque on Chelsea Cottage, which was Malcolm Saville's last home.

John has a Patreon account to support his videos and blogs at The Lost Byway.

That time 11 years ago when I upset Enid Blyton fans

Asked by the late David Boyle, who used to do freelance shifts on the newspaper's comment desk, I once wrote a piece on children's loss of freedom and its implications for children's literature for the Guardian website. David later told me that it had nearly made the printed newspaper.

In it, as any good Malcolm Saville fan would, I took the opportunity to take a few pot shots at Enid Blyton:

Her characters were wooden, her plots slapdash and her settings – generic ruined castles and spooky old houses – were like a Hollywood set; look round the back and you could see the struts holding up the painted hardboard.

And 

Blyton was not helped by the illustrator of her most popular series. The Famous Five were made to resemble enthusiastic members of the Hitler Youth. Julian, in particular, looked capable of ordering the burning of the entire village if the tea he and his chums were offered did not come up to scratch.

Fair comment, I'm sure you will agree.

I recently discovered that this article was the subject of a pained thread on The Enid Blyton Society's forum:

I find it very sad when an opinion article on a pertinent topic loses itself in the author's own posturing and point-scoring.

I stand by the conclusion of my Guardian article:

While we wait for the spirit of the children's adventure story to seep back into modern society, those of us who grew up on Malcolm Saville's books will remain convinced of his superiority, no matter what Enid Blyton fans say.

One day we will challenge them to a picnic and drink them under the table with ginger beer.

Book Review... All the Wide Border: Wales, England and the Places Between by Mike Parker

This review appears in the new issue of Liberator. You can download it free of charge from the magazine's website.

All the Wide Border: Wales, England and the Places Between

Mike Parker

Harper North, 2024; £10.99

The Welsh border is the most intoxicating landscape I know, and Mike Parker is a companionable guide to it. Immune to the tendency to complain that things aren’t what they used to be – when were they ever? – he is interested in the towns and countryside as he finds them today.

Parker made the journeys he describes in this book during the Covid pandemic, a period that may turn out to be little represented in our literature. An English-born Welsh Nationalist, he found the more collectivist traditions of his adopted country served people better in that time of trial.

Along some stretches of the border, it’s easy to forget which country you are in. I remember once coming down off the hills to Kington and being almost surprised to find myself in a red-brick Midland town with Burton beers in all the pubs. Further north, around Chester in particular, Parker shows the border is still a hard reality that affects the economy and society on both its sides.

Much as I enjoyed All the Wide Border, it’s a reminder of how personal our reaction to places can be. The first chapter takes you to a place I’ve been many times: the country west of the Stiperstones up to Shropshire’s border with Powys. 

For me it means the remains of the lead-mining industry; the children’s books of Malcolm Saville; Ronnie Lane and one of his rock star mates, down to use the studio at Lane’s place a couple of fields into Wales, playing unannounced at a remote pub; the death at a farm of the foster child Dennis O’Neill, which led both to the 1948 Children’s Act and Agatha Christie’s play The Mousetrap. Parker’s chapter mentions none of these, yet I still found it as interesting as any in the book.

Jonathan Calder

"Let’s get him out before he poisons all the fishes": Robert Jenrick in the River Teme at Leintwardine

What the hell is Robert Jenrick doing in the River Teme at Leintwardine?

Readers of this blog will remember that Malcolm Saville's 11th Lone Pine Club adventure, The Secret of the Gorge, opens in this Herefordshire village, though most of the action takes place a couple of miles downstream in the Downton Gorge.

Seeing this photo of Jenrick, I was reminded in particular of this encounter with the villainous Simon Blandish in chapter 7: 

Macbeth advanced and so did the Lone Piners, for they already sensed what was going to happen. Macbeth made another little sortie and again Blandish swore and kicked out at him. He missed and retreated another step. Macbeth, with wildly wagging tail, pranced proudly forward and the man fell backwards into the river. If the water, at that spot, had not been about two feet deep he might have helped hurt himself for he was a heavy man and the bank was quite high where the water, swirling under the narrow bridge. had worn it away. As it was the water broke his fall but the splash she made was prodigious

They stood on the bank and watched him wallowing like a clumsy hippopotamus, blowing river water from his mouth. He staggered to his feet, lost his balance on a slippery rock and fell in again.

“Why was he doing that to you, Dickie?” David asked quietly. “Were you being cheeky?”

“Yes. I was a bit. Mary was down on the bank and I was watching her from the bridge when Old Pudding Face came up quietly on his bike and grabbed at me and told me to clear out. Then he pulled me down here and twisted my arm and asked me all sorts of questions about us an’ then –”

“An’ then I did the danger call,” his twin went on. “And I shouted for help ... Oh, look! He's fallen in again! Let’s get him out before he poisons all the fishes.”

Why Snailbeach and the Stiperstones saw the best Lib Dem result last Thursday

The candidate who won the highest percentage vote in any contest last Thursday was the Liberal Democrat Heather Kidd in Shropshire Council's Chirbury & Worthen ward. She received 71.1 per cent of the votes cast, despite having Conservative, Labour, Green and Reform opponents.

Chirbury & Worthen is a large rural ward which takes in the western flank of - you know what's coming - the Stiperstones, including the former lead-mining village of Snailbeach.

But stay with me. This post isn't just an excuse for quoting some descriptive writing about Shropshire, because the second passage includes a bit of history that may be one reason that Liberals do so well in this corner of the county.

Nearer the Welsh border Chirbury & Worthen is lush and pastoral, but that's not so true of the area close to the Stiperstones.

Even today, Snailbeach has something of the feel of the Wild West - a shanty town thrown up to accommodate a mining boom. When I first knew it in the 1980s, before its startling white slagheaps had been landscaped, that feeling was much stronger.

Anyway, here is Malcolm Saville writing in the Lone Pine story Not Scarlet But Gold in 1962:

Between the lower, western slopes of the Stiperstones and two mountains called Condon and Stapley is a stretch of desolate country called by some "The Land of Dereliction".

It is well named, for from the heather of this lonely moorland, treacherous with bogs, the gaunt arms of ruined mine shafts rise through the mist above slag heaps and pools of stagnant water. 

The Romans mined all this land for lead long, long before man came back in the last century, to this haunted corner of Shropshire. These miners tore up the earth, built engine houses, sank shafts and buried the golden gorse under piles of rubbish which may still be seen today.

And in 1944, in his Quietest Under the Sun, John Wood wrote of "a tract scarred with the waste of disused lead and barytes mines". He added:

Sad to say, this became in the between-wars period one of the most utterly derelict areas in Britain proportionate to its size.

That I can believe. The district seems to have been too remote to interest even the scrap merchants, and once the lead mines closed it must have been hugely overpopulated. There wasn't much work, and it's not good farming country.

And here is the part that may help explain last Thursday's result:

It is a point of interest that when these now abandoned enterprises were developed the labour power was brought from the tin mines of Cornwall, and even today the descendants of those Cornishmen make the valley a strong Nonconformist and radical enclave in an Anglican and conservative countryside. 

Ed Davey, Nick Clegg, Paddy Ashdown... and hedgehogs

Ed Davey has posted this charming photo of him and Victoria Collins visiting a hedgehog sanctuary in Harpenden.

It puts me in mind of a Liberal England post from New Year's Day 2016:

Today in someone's review of the year I came across an interview Nick Clegg gave to the Evening Standard on the eve of the general election:

Looking back at the campaign, it is the comic moments he remembers. For instance, his first visit was to a hedgehog sanctuary, with Paddy Ashdown. Ashdown muttered under his breath to Clegg: "When I was in the Special Boat Service we used to eat hedgehogs."

No wonder Ed is keen to repair our relations with the hedgehog community.

That said, if you do have it in mind to eat one of the creatures, my old post will tell you how to cook it. Blame Malcolm Saville.

If Enid Blyton was the Beatles then Malcolm Saville was the Kinks

Now here's a title for a blog post: The Famous Five vs The Lone Pine Club. It's on the blog Unpopular Culture.

I shall resist the temptation to quote it in its entirety, and give you just a taste:

Enid Blyton is perhaps like The Beatles. Certainly she was massively globally successful and subsequently went through dips of critical and popular appeal, before becoming established again as a recognisable global brand whose enormous material success insists on being endlessly reproduced and extended. 

I rather enjoy drawing this parallel partly because I know many Beatles devotees will prickle at the thought of any similarities in artistic merit between the two and partly because Lennon himself poked fun at the Famous Five in his ridiculous ‘In His Own Write’ book. 

In hindsight I wonder if The Comic Strip were as much inspired by Lennon’s parody as anything. Certainly there is a similar smug assumed ‘cleverness’ that irritates me more in my fifties than it did in my late teens or early twenties. Others continue to find it charming, of course, and that is their prerogative.

In this imagined realm of children’s authors as 1960s pop groups then, if Blyton might be The Beatles, who would Malcolm Saville be? Certainly not The Stones and definitely not The Who. The Kinks perhaps? 

Certainly I see Saville as doing something similar to The Kinks in terms of attempting to capture a world (specifically an England) that is dissolving even as they record it. There is too a shared sense of knowingness that what is being lost is in itself partially illusory. They both, at their best, mourn a mediated Englishness.

There's much else about the two authors in the post, which reminds me a little of an article I wrote for the Guardian website years ago.

The writer of Unpopular Culture like Saville's Rye books bests, whereas I'm a Stiperstones man. And he has written at least two other posts on Saville.

There's one on Jane's Country Year, which was Saville's favourite among his own books and shows the influence of Richard Jefferies' Bevis.

And a recent one on, amongst other things, one of the last of Saville's Lone Pine stories, Rye Royal.

Return to Malcolm Saville's The Neglected Mountain

In 2012 Miranda's Island listed the ingredients of the classic children's adventure story:

I mean the kind of rural holiday location where children get to sleep in barns, camp out on islands and cycle, walk or even hitch-hike long miles through country lanes, relieved by picnics packed up by friendly adults who know when to back off and when to interfere. 

Optional but highly desirable elements are caves, horses, dogs (actually, I’m not sure the dog is optional, I think it’s essential) and the frisson of danger provided by a treasure hunt or an odd character lurking around, clearly up to something fishy.

And then came to the right conclusion:

The Famous Five come to mind, and still have their following. But I think a strong contender for that place in the collective juvenile consciousness would be the Lone Pine novels by Malcolm Saville. The Lone Pine Club is a group of around eight children, the bonds between them forged on exactly the kind of holidays described above. 

Similar to the Arthur Ransome novels, the precise line-up of characters varies according to location, but the heart of their adventures might truly be said to be the remote Shropshire countryside between Shrewsbury in the north and Ludlow in the south, and specifically the country around the mountains of the Long Mynd and the Stiperstones.

"The Neglected Mountain" is what Jenny calls the Stiperstones in the story to give the book its title.

Miranda of Miranda's Island had reread the book before writing her post:

My husband claimed it was "throbbing with UST [unresolved sexual tension]"  and certainly Saville doesn’t ignore the - ahem - emotional development of fifteen and sixteen year olds. 

There are two boy/girl pairings - David, very much the leader of the group, and Petronella (known as Peter), an independent local girl who loves to ride her pony around the country lanes when she’s not away "at boarding school in Shrewsbury", a statement that neatly conveys the all-important 1950s identifier of social class.

Jenny, from a village post office/general store and Tom, who works on a farm, make up the second couple. It is implicit, though never openly stated, that Jenny has something of a crush on David, but he’s out of her league, and she pairs off comfortably with Tom.

Peter's school fees are paid by her Uncle Micah, though how he has derived such wealth from farming the unpromising country around the Stiperstones is never made clear, but I shall look for signs of Jenny's crush on David next time I read one of the early Lone Pine stories.

Miranda goes on:

Why do these adventures continue to be appealing? I think it’s because the issues that tend to worry adults now – premature sexualisation, social diversity and the degree of freedom it is appropriate to offer older children – are addressed quite differently. That is not to say they are ignored. Far from it. Here is Saville on the subject of gypsies:

The gypsies and Mr Cantor respected each other. The detective knew how honest and trustworthy they were. Gypsies are often accused of many things unjustly, but in their wanderings they pick up a lot of information: and when Miranda handed the detective a cup of tea she knew at once that there were questions he wanted to ask them.

Laid on with a trowel perhaps, but you would never, I think, find such a passage in an Enid Blyton adventure.

The Miranda's Island post makes equally interesting observations on adventures and the development of character, and on children and the adult world.

It ends by praising the Girls Gone By reprints of the Lone Pine stories. These paperbacks are now becoming collectable in their own right, by they do have the full text of the original hardbacks. The Armada paperbacks that many young readers relied upon in the Sixties and Seventies were quite heavily edited - and not well edited, in Saville's own judgement.

Saville hardbacks with their dust wrappers fetch silly prices, and I don't suppose it's as easy to find battered hardbacks without them at reasonable prices as it was when I acquired most of my collection of his work. So a second-hand Girls Gone By edition may be your best bet if you want to read the books as Saville wrote them.

Finally, I hope Miranda is still with us and well. The last post on her blog was written in 2022 when she was obviously seriously ill. I am reminded of my post on disappearances from the net.

Malcolm Saville visits Shrewsbury in 1963

Malcolm Saville was a Sussex man, but his most popular books were those set in the Shropshire hills.

This advertisement from the Wellington Journal (12 January 1963) shows him making an appearance at a Shrewsbury bookshop to sign books before giving a talk at the town library.

Saville had long worked in publishing - I believe he was even Enid Blyton's publicist at one time - and did not give up that day job when his career as a children's writer took off.

The Making of Gone to Earth 1

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger film of Mary Webb's novel Gone to Earth was released in 1950. The Stiperstones shot in Technicolor makes just about the ultimate Shropshire Hills porn.

This behind-the-scenes footage comes from Michael Powell's own collection. We see the starts Jennifer Jones and David Farrar and Powell himself, as well as many locals in and out of period costume.

Malcolm Saville fans should have a look at 3:00, where we see Gypsies. This is what Reuben, Miranda and their van would have looked like.

What strikes me most here is how cumbersome the film equipment looks. It's why you have to assume that every scene in a wartime documentary has been staged - there was little chance of reacting quickly as events unfolded.

The really good news is that this is the first of four of these films from the making of Gone to Earth (or "Tess of the Stiperstones" as I saw someone call it on social media - the story shares Hardy's triangle of innocent peasant girl, wicked squire and sexless man).

I did post these once before. It was 12 years ago, but who's counting?

Telegraph names each county's best pub, but two aren't even in the right county

Time Out reports that the Telegraph has named what it believes to be the best pub in every English county, based on reports from its readers. 

So naturally I turn first to the winner for Leicestershire and for Shropshire.

They are:

• Best pub in Leicestershire - The Swan at Braybrooke
• Best pub in Shropshire - The Sun Inn, Leintwardine

The only problem is that Braybrooke is in Northamptonshire and Leintwardine is in Herefordshire.

I don't expect the urban sophisticates of Time Out to know better, but shouldn't the Telegraph? Someone there has been misled by postcodes, as Braybrooke has a Market Harborough postcode and Leintwardine a Craven Arms one.

Anyway, this is a good time to point you to my post on Malcolm Saville and the Pubs of Leintwardine.

Mystery at Witchend is Went the Day Well? and Seven White Gates is A Matter of Life and Death

Malcolm Saville wrote his first two Lone Pine books while the second world war was raging. He somehow found time to work on them while holding down a day job in publishing and fire-watching by night. 

And there are elements to those books that put me in mind of the most interesting British wartime propaganda films. I even wonder if one thing Saville sought to do in writing the first book, Mystery at Witchend, was to warn children that they should be alert to the existence of fifth columnists and Nazi spies 

If the point of Went the Day Well? was to remind its audience that everywhere, even a village as remote and insignificant as Bramley End, was in danger from Nazi infiltrators, then Mystery at Witchend said the same thing about the even remoter countryside of the Shropshire hills.

So Dickie has to accept that even the dashing RAF pilot he and Mary helped find his way on the Long Mynd was a Nazi - "one of the worst".

And Mary makes an observation that could come from Went the Day Well?:

"And there was something else, Dickie. Did you notice what I noticed? Did you hear."

He looked puzzled for a moment.

"Wasn't anything to hear, was there?"

Then they stared at each other without speaking, and Dickie's second shoe dropped to the floor.

"Of course," he went on. "Of course there was something to hear. They were all talking all the time."

"Course they were," said Mary slowly. "But they weren't speaking English."

If Mystery at Witchend is about the risk of a German invasion, then Seven White Gates is about Anglo-American relations. You will find this theme in A Canterbury Tale and, above all, in A Matter of Life and Death.

When David Niven appears before a Heavenly court to plead to be allowed to stay on earth with his new American love, counsel for the prosecution is Abraham Farlan, who hates the British for making him the first casualty of the American Revolutionary War. 

Niven wins his case, and his and Hunter's love becomes a metaphor for relations between the two nations.

In Seven White Gates the metaphorical relationship is that of an estranged father and son. When Peter goes to stay at White Gates farm under the Stiperstones, she finds it presided over by the daunting figure of Uncle Micah, who speaks like someone out of the Old Testament and soothes his broken heart with midnight rambles to the Devil's Chair.

He is followed on one of these by the twins, who become trapped in old mine workings. They are rescued by some American soldiers on a training exercise, and their officer proves surprisingly knowledgeable about the area and inquisitive about the farm.

Mary realises he must be Uncle Micah's son Charles, who left for America after a terrible row with his father. And she duly brings them together at the end of the book.

I don't think you can carry on with the filmic comparisons after Seven White Gates. The Lone Pine stories becoming more formulaic and concern themselves with finding buried treasure or rounding up criminals.

But the first two of those stories display themes that you will also find in British films of the period.

In which I show two philosophers the real-life models for some of Malcolm Saville's Shropshire locations

As well as visiting new places, you can fight off holiday nostalgia by meeting new people. For all its faults, this is something that social media has made easier. 

So it was that I found myself outside Church Stretton Co-op waiting to meet two philosophers from Crete. We had arranged for me to give them a tour of some of Malcolm Saville's Shropshire locations.

The philosophers were Keith Frankish and Maria Kasmirli, who also brought their young teenage daughter Matea. I have got to know Keith on Twitter over the years through a shared affection for Malcolm Saville's books. 

The first location we went to was Hamperley Farm, the Ingles Farm of Saville's Lone Pine stories. You can see it in the photo above, which is by Keith Frankish.

Malcolm Saville describes Ingles Farm in Mystery at Witchend, the first Lone Pine book:

Ingles' farm was not very big, but the farmhouse of red brick was well set back from the road with a big lawn on the right and cowsheds on the left.

The real farm isn't red brick  and, though there is a lawn, it's on the left as you face it. I was surprised that there was a lawn at all, because it's not there on the photos I took of the farm when I was last here in 2012 nor even on Google Street View today - a clear case of Shropshire being "more like it was now than it was then".

And, just as happened to the twins in Mystery at Witchend, we got asked inside. I can reveal that the farmer's family name is Foulkes, but he does have a son called Tom.

You can stay at Ingles Farm yourself. Some of the farm's outbuildings have been converted into two beautifully appointed holiday cottages and you can see them in the photos below. (Follow the link for more information.) There's even a sweet little postbox if you want to send postcards.

Then we went up the lane to the real Witchend - it's a private house, so please respect that if you ever make this pilgrimage yourself. This photo was taken on a sunnier day than the one we had.

After that we went around the southern end of the Long Mynd and then north through Wentnor (where the Crown is currently closed) and on to the Bridges Inn at Ratlinghope for a pot of tea.

This is the pub that featured in The Green Green Grass, while Malcolm Saville fans will know it as the Hope Anchor from the second Lone Pine book, Seven White Gates. Again this is a picture from a sunnier day when it was still called the Horseshoes Inn and looked shabbier than it does today.

Then is was up to the Stiperstones ridge.

 I once heard a talk by Malcolm Saville's younger son the Revd Jeremy Saville in which he said he was pretty sure his father hadn't visited the Stiperstones when he wrote Seven White Gates. Even so, it's quite possible that Malcolm was right to paint the way from the pub to the Stiperstones as a rough, stony track rather than the metalled road it is today.

As we approached the car park near the Stiperstones ridge, we found that the Devil was in his chair - as the locals are supposed to say when the rock formation the Devil's Chair is obscured by cloud. By the time I took this photo, you could see it was going to clear from the west.

At this point I had better to pause to thank Maria for all the driving - the A roads in south Shropshire are single carriageway with lots of lorries, and the minor roads can be narrow and hilly. Not least the road we then took along the western side of the Stipersones through Stipersones village and Snailbeach, which has hairpin bends. And so we got back to Shrewsbury.

Thanks to Maria and Keith for their company - I even found time to talk philosophy with them too.

Richard Jefferies' grave at Broadwater Cemetery, Worthing

Here's a pilgrimage I should make myself one day. Richard Jefferies is buried at Worthing because he spent his last days near the Sussex coast. It was hoped that the sea air would ease his tuberculosis, but it had no such effect and he was dead at 38.

Another notable rural writer is buried at Broadwater Cemetery: W.H. Hudson:

William Henry Hudson was one of Britain’s greatest nature writers but was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina of English parents in 1841. His powers of description when writing about the countryside were said to be unrivalled. 

He died in 1922 and expressed a wish to be buried near Richard Jeffries but this was not possible as that part of the cemetery was full. He claimed to have seen the ghost of Richard Jeffries while walking near Goring Church. ... 

There is a memorial to him and Jeffries at the entrance to the cemetery and a Garden of Remembrance in the North West Corner.

It's a shame the cemetery website spells Jefferies' name incorrectly, but then this blog's hero Malcolm Saville made the same mistake whenever he mentioned him.