Clun-chtime

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Had a bit of a scramble getting lunch out today: the first two places we tried, in Bishop's Castle, were either rammed or fully booked out and about to be rammed, so we bailed to The White Horse Inn at Clun. As mentioned in previous posts, I have family connections with the place, so it's always good to visit, anyway. Which we do. A lot. The picture above is of The Sun Inn, Clun: more famous perhaps, but less frequented by us, these days. I took this picture earlier in the year on our last visit. Just thought it a decent picture, is all...

So, Leo's headed back to Ynys Môn with Lady the Lab, this evening, due to work commitments, and will be back at the weekend. This just leaves the three of us for the next few days, which means we can go off-piste a bit easier without the dog, and explore. Tuesday, we're heading into Herefordshire, to revisit some of my childhood stamping ground around Fromes Hill [blog posts passim] and Bishop's Frome. It will be interesting to see what changes have occurred since last I was there: a short stop on the way back from my uncle's funeral a few years back. The time before that was in the very early nineties, when I detoured to the hamlet on my way back from working in London: my first visit in some considerable time. I only had an hour or so then, as the hour was marching on, and I had a good way to go to get home to Bethesda.

I did, however manage to have a chat with a chap from the farm where my sister and I would visit the village pump for water, as I mentioned before; asked whether I needed directions, I told him who I was, and asked him if he knew my uncle Mike at The Homestead, which he did. We jangled a bit about my childhood holidays there and my Southall family connections, currently the subject of my genealogical endeavours to tie in the various strands of my history. The more I discover about my origins generally, though, the closer, geographically, the two main strands of my family get, centred around Wales, the Marches, and the adjacent bits of Shropshire and Staffordshire. However, the one solitary exception to this borderland axis of origin is my grandad Harvey, whose origins currently remain enigmatic, to say the least. But we'll get there in the end. Keep you posted...

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