Cartoonist chum Matt had been working at home all week and wanted to go for a walk in the countryside. The notion appealed so on Saturday we drove to Tanworth in Arden to follow a route in one of those countryside-walks-centred-on-a-pub books. It was very pleasant indeed and photographs were taken…
About halfway round the book said we had to turn at the “abandoned truck”. Since the book was relatively old we were somewhat doubtful that it would still be there, but it was.
Never has a truck been so abandoned as this one. Trees were growing through the cab and the flat-bed.
Nearby the axle had been dumped separately.
Nice photo, this one. I’d been concerned that I didn’t seem able to take decent photos any more since leaving the farm last summer. It would appear that it’s just my camera - it just doesn’t like wintery city scenes.
It’s lambing season, which makes sense as it was lambing season when I started on the Isle of Wight farm this time last year. Here’s Matt sketching the lambs.
Spooky tree.
Moving away from the fields of sheep we passed a pile of gravel approaching a very industrial looking railway bridge.
There must have been a wall running along the edge of the field here which this tree had grown around. The wall has all but gone but the tree remains.
Railway tunnel of no apparent use other that to allow the farmer to get to his fields.
Now this is very scary. You see, I grew up in the parish of Tanworth in Arden. Earlswood, to be precise. Your grandparents moved from Brum to escape the smoke and found a bungalow near the Lakes (we lived on “The Common” at the time). Don’t go there, Tanworth is a much better option.
So here’s the gritty on Tanworth. Those blue bricks are Staffordshire Blues, best industrial bricks you’ll ever see. Canal builders loved ‘em. The railway from Tyseley to Stratford built all their bridges with Staffordshire blues except one, at Tanworth. Because the local landowner (who lived in Umberslade Hall) insisted on stone for “his” bridge.
Umberslade Hall is now a condominium or something. At one time it was a business head office. Before that it was HAUNTED. The road from Earlswood to Liveridge Hill is said to be visited by a phantom “coach and four”. If you stand or drive along this lane at night, the coach and horses are said to noisily pass straight through you.
I can only remember seeing rabbits dying of mixamatosis, never a ghost. April and I went back there this time last year. Now there’s the M42 to confuse the ghostly coach driver (which may explain why there was a big accident there last week).
I assume the blue colour of the brick comes from something in the clay?
Looking closely at the picture of the tree with the bricks there doesn’t appear to be any mortar between the bricks. My guess is that someone put the bricks in to support the tree which has a quite extraordinary growth patern.
The clay used comes from the Etruria Marl, a Carboniferous-aged rock that is associated with the coal mining areas of the Midlands. Canal builders liked the Staffordshire Blue brick because it was and still is strong and waterproof. The same properties worked well for early railway construction. The North Warwickshire Line, from Tyseley to Stratford was built in one piece with standard designs to keep costs down. So all the bridges are built of the same brick except one of the Tanworth bridges which had to be built of stone to get the landowner’s permission (this sort of thing happened all over the country).
Maybe the tree originally did grow around a wall but when the wall was removed some bricks had to be replaced to keep it upright? It’s not so clear in that shot but the gap was very rectangular and definitely not something that might occur naturally.
Thanks for the link to Matt’s stuff. Nice! And a diary! Yay! (Off to waste some time now.)
– on the brick and mortar thing, I used to see that in abandoned houses where I grew up. The mortar falls out from between the bricks, sometimes it can look like the bricks are floating.
That was a good walk. Lovely weather - kinda changeable, the way i like it.
At the end we went back to this inn which, in teh book, was an old fashioned inn. Nowadays it is an ultramodern business inn with the downstairs converted into something between All bar One and Pizza Express. The coolest thing was they had a special chamber for the smokers. It was the world’s smallest pub: they had all the standard pub furniture in there, a cheap old ashtray, a cigarette machine and a TV set showing snooker. You can sit in there amidst the fug that’s been hanging there in the several hours since the last person was in there and have a chat which is echoey because of the small barrenness of the room. Best of all, it has glass windows, so you can watch the smartly dressed businessmen walking past and peering in at you as though you’re a zoo exhibit. It was the most depressing pub I’ve ever been in.
Fortunately some locals also using the place for a fag told us about a real pub down the road so we went there afterwards.
Any chance of showing the actual sheep sketches?
I just came up with an idea for a sheep comic.
this is very itteresting because the labes you looked at are mine
Labes? If you mean Lambs then COOL! I like it when stuff like this happens!
>Umberslade Hall is now a condominium or something. At one time it was a business head office.
Umberslade Hall was once (late 60’s early 70’s)home of the Research and Development section of Triumph/BSA motorcycles. It housed some 300+ staff and a ‘computer’. The lease was said to have cost £250 000. BSA went bust in 72 and Triumph followed a decade later.
I had the pleasure of visiting Tanworth in Arden over the 2004 Christmas and 2005 New Year Holidays. I was pleased to find the abandoned truck on your site — I experienced the real thing while taking a walk on the public footpath. I came across the truck just as a couple of natives, a wiry silver haired woman of perhaps 65-70 years old along with her male companion, a slightly older gentleman with a full snow-white beard dressed in a proper tweed coat and hat, were enjoying themselves with an afternoon tea while sitting on the sideboard of the remains of this weed, moss and rust encrusted wreak. Sure wish I had brought the camera.
It could have been a National Geographic moment.
Hello, I am Fiona. I have lived in Tanworth for nearly 4 years now and I am really enjoying the scenery and the animals. I could never move back to the town as I am enjoying living in the country too much. I really enjoyed your website and thank you.
Fiona xxxxx
My name is Sheila, and I was born at Danzey near Tanworth in 1934. I’m wondering if the abandoned truck is a relic from WW2. Tanworth was under the flight path of German bombers on their way to Brum, and there was a gun emplacement and a searchlight sited somewhere near the village. The army would have needed at least one vehicle. My uncle farmed at Cank Farm and found a hole in his cornfield where an unexploded bomb had fallen.