Simon English
England Revisited

On gate post at kink in road from Pebworth to Long Marston. 7 miles N.E. of Evesham.

On the left gate post of the north gate of the pair of gates on the dog leg of the Pebworth to Long Marsden Road. The original flag was on the right post but this and the wooden gate and the hedge has gone with the enlargement of the gateway replaced by a metal post and a pair of metal gates. The old oak right post still stands in the hawthorne hedge.

The disappearance of the gate post could be for several reasons. The field is now arable and modern machinery being so much bigger, the post taken out part of the ditch bridged over. An alternative version is that it was knocked down by a car coming off the sharp right hand bend before the gateway was enlarged. At some time a reflective chevron corner warning was put up.

This was pertinently given credence by finding tyre marks and broken lights in the plough. We learnt from the men plowing and loading big straw bales that only the day before a car had come off this corner at such speed that it jumped the hedge and ditch and landed in the field in good enough condition for the driver to try and reverse out. Only the softness of the ground forced him to seek assistance and be towed out. As to whether the absence of the chevron was by this accident or a previous one that then caused the next is unknown by this writer.

The modern enlargement of farms has meant that Farmhouse that once farmed these fields is now a private house and the land taken into a larger concern.

A contemporary land issue rolls on from the changes made during the second world war by the effect that the local WW11 airfield has on local villages with concerts, festivals and drag racing etc. Now the adjacent Army Transport camp has closed and there are plans to use the site to build an ‘ECO’ village. In the local hedges are notices of objection. Among the objections posed is the permanent increase in traffic this would create.

Point 52 has a personal significance. The 1971 photograph has me standing with my mother. She drove me out to this gateway at the start of the ‘All England Sculpture’. She died last year and I wondered how my old my father would have been had he been alive in 1971. He would have been aged 60 which means that as I stand in the gateway while doing ‘England Revisited’ I am as old now as my father would have been then. Now ‘England Revisited’ makes sense as an observation of change of the land we live on between one human generation and the next, both forward into the future and back into the past.
Points 51 & 52