April 30th – So, there I’d done gone and promised to bring ny ill mate the best of summer, and it rains, and blows, and hails on a very blustery, intemperate Saturday. Just where do you find the beauty?
You slip out as the worst is passed, and get your feet gloriously wet in the local bluebell wood, and remember what it is to be alive in the outdoors, with the smell of wet earth, pollen and rising sap.
Just wish the light wasn’t so poor.
January 1st – This is… extraordinary. I came upon it out of pure, unbridled nosiness.
As you travel down the Chester Road from Shire Oak towards Stonnall, just within the boundary of Fishpond Wood and the old quarry, there’s a gated track.
As a kid, I was told there were cottages down there. Having seen a building on Google Earth, and occasionally seeing people pull out of the driveway, I paid it no mind.
But in recent weeks, there has been a pile of flytipped refuse in the track gateway, containing structural asbestos. I was wondering how the people here were accessing their house and if it was still lived in – I could vaguely remember seeing bins out for collection here, but not for a good while.
Passing the drive, I took a dive down there on my bike. It’s long, downhill, maybe ⅓ mile. With a large, derelict house at the end. A house once worth over half a million pounds.
It has clearly only been vacated in recent years, and is a rambling, oddly extended place with a wish-mash of extensions and levels, with one of the most bizarre fireplace arrangements i’ve ever seen. in it’s day it was clearly some place, but not now. Now, just vandalism, decay and eerie loneliness.
It turns out from subsequent research the place is owned by a developer, after the elderly couple who lived here vacated the place. Permission has been granted since 2013 to replace it with a large, new family home.
You can read about this, and some of the backstory in this Design & Access statement from the Lichfield Planning Department here.
Right now, it’s clearly a vandal magnet, and a target for flytippers.
A very curious thing indeed.
May 1st – Similarly, this poor phone photo of Fishpond Wood in Stonnall barely does the subject justice either – the bluebells there in the wood just off the Chester Road between Stonnall and Shire Oak were divine in the golden hour.
I was kicking myself for forgetting the camera.
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