Paxton

As promised, I visited Paxton House yesterday.

It has a fab adventure playground (can't wait to try the zip wire).

 And a really lovely river walk, featuring catkins (is this hazel?)(isn't "catkin" a great word?)...

courtesy elements (as a keen walker who spends a lot of time getting muddy and wet, it's wonderful when I don't have to look down all the time)...

lichen...

And, at the end of the path, probably the most terrifying bridge the world has ever known.

(Aside from those rope contraptions in South America, maybe.)

I took a few tentative steps onto the pedestrian portion of the bridge, and held my breath as a car (ONE car only -- the next one waited its turn) slowly made its way across.  There were several ker-thumps, and the bridge continued to bob gently for a minute or two after the car had crossed.

(Have I ever mentioned being phobic about rickety bridges?  Not to mention rickety 200-year-old ones?)

Eventually I made my way back to Paxton, although I managed to take the long, wide-arc way back (as seems to be my custom).  In fact, I traveled from optimistic ("I bet I'll make it back to the tea room for a nice soup-and-scone lunch!") to grimly determined ("I just know I can get there in time to scoff a scone") to breathlessly frantic (fumbling to open a rusty gate so that I could sprint across a pasture to the parking lot and race home to deliver the car to him who needed it).

But the detour was worth the exertion, because it allowed me to happen onto something magical...

But that's a story for another day.

 
(The Union Bridge was built in 1820, and it made life a whole lot easier for folks needing to cross the Tweed between England and Scotland.  At the time, it was the longest iron suspension bridge in the world; today, it's the oldest suspension bridge still carrying traffic.)