Chilterns: Part 1 (March 25)

OK, OK, busy week, no posts, now there will be a zillion in a row. Or maybe five.

So last weekend I went walking in my new light-hiker boots. Here is a picture of my new boots. For all of you who want to know how they hike: really, really well. Not for serious hiking, but enough ankle support to make the walk through the English countryside a breeze. I wore a single light hiking sock that worked out just fine (one per foot, before y'all start).

I went walking in "the Chilterns" (an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty) which is an area of rolling chalk hills to the west of London. Here are some of the chalk hills I walked on (to the right):

The chalk hills consist of layers of chalk and flint -- and in fact many fields in the Chilterns are covered with chalk and flint nodes, as you can see in the picture to the left. This can make farming somewhat difficult, as you can imagine.

We walked a four-mile loop which included three Norman churches and one pub (on which, see next post) but also this totally cool thing: there are still hedges in England, and hedges must be built, and hedges get built (or rather, grown) by a process called pleaching. Pleaching is the process of cutting and grafting in order to weave together living branches. And there are a lot of living branches in a hedge. The branches are woven into the hedge frame and grow into the hedge. This is kind of a nice picture of pleaching. But I like mine better: