Well I do like milestones . My 928th blog. Who would have thought it when I wrote the first about my trip to the United States ? . My first flight on an airplane properly . A long distance , long haul what felt like trip of a lifetime. I never would have thought that I would be writing about riding round France in an Audi TT nor travelling to Croatia and Greece in a motorhome . It never entered my head that I would travel in Gabby or move back to Chesterfield . Now full circle have left Chesterfield and find myself writing about lack of holidays , distance walked and Covid . But there it is . 928 blogs . It feels an achievement .
I felt walking that I had done everything and seen just about all that there was to see. With a village one tenth the size of Wingerworth I was never going to find rich pickings for a story. Less people meant less houses. Fewer houses meant less house numbers or strange names to search out. However looking on the bright side I found the first snowdrops of the year . Hugging the ground
they shared a space with the sunshine yellow of the Celandines . The graveyard of St Dunawds was full of them if you stopped long enough to look . A sure sign of Spring on the way .
Bangor means the place of the choir which relates back to the monastic settlement that once was here . The Romans called it Bovinium . The Saxons Bancornburg. In 1291 it got its current name . It was once the largest religious centre in Western Britain . So where was it now? Nothing remains. The archaelogists have struggled to find it due to the movement of the river over time . I would have thought aerial photography would have shown something up. The remains must be there somewhere . In a field where the farmer might have ploughed something up. The village marks its religious heritage with street names harking back to that past . Abbey View, Abbey Walk, Abbeygate hill . So where is the abbey ? It must be there somewhere waiting to be found . A few medieval skulls appear to be dug up every so often in the village .
sky a slately grey with small open patches where the blue breaks through . The sun is weak but it feels a Spring Day . In the 17th century Bangor had little more than 26 houses . It grew during the 19th century and boasted 2 schools - an Endowed School for Boys - well they needed educating . And a National School for Girls . They were less important . The boys were taught to read and write and say their Catechism.
There was a lock up in 1873 . I was under the impression I would see signs of the sandstone wall of the lock up embedded in the church wall but however hard I looked I couldnt find any tell tale signs . Between 1851 and 1856 there were five public houses in the village . The New Inn - long gone. The late lamented Ship Inn . The Red Lion and the Oak . All that are left are the Buck Inn and the Royal Oak , Some turned into housing. There were two chapels . One Independent and the other Presbyterian . The Presbyterian still is in use but the Independent is now a
dispensary for the nearby doctors surgery. I found myself looking out for the houses that once were pubs and saw the dispensary in a different light . I walked past the Rectory Lodge now up for sale . The Rectory long gone .
I stopped at the war memorial . Now that is unusual . Most war memorials follow a pattern. Most of the time a Cross . Sometimes as in Alfreton a soldier . This one was erected in 1922. Art Deco in style . Beside it an old stile. Not seen one this shape before . It was very different to those I was used to in Derbyshire .
I passed Orchard House and Orchard Villa . All that remained to remind me that once there were extensive orchards in the village . Mount View suggested that in the past I would have seen the mountains in the distance . Long since obscured by new housing.
I enjoyed my walk . Made more pleasant having read up first on the long gone pubs, the schools that used to grace the village and the history of the name of where I now lived .
