Why Does The World Insist on Changing?

Each day for some five years from the age of almost twelve, I went to school along a path which went first of all through a recently built housing estate, and then through fields leading to a farm. 

It wasn't a big farm, I suppose by standards today, quite small. Jim and Mary, who were the farmers, kept a small herd of cows for milk, and a few pigs whose sty was placed conveniently close to the footpath leading through the farm for schoolboys to lean over the wall of the sty and torment them. They didn't seem to mind though.

 

These are the sides of the main working buildings of the farm. The closest is the roof of the dairy where Mary used to process the milk she got from the cows each day. The large building is a barn where Jim kept a bit of the machinery he used, and towards the end of summer, the hay he had made from the few fields lying beyond the buildings.

As you left the farm there was a rough unmade track through the woods. This is where occasionally if I wasn't quick enough, one or other of the cows would try and tup me over the wall. Became a bit of a game for them, terrifying for me.

 

Of much greater interest in time, and before if I am honest, was the woodland which lay to the sides of the bridge you can see in the photo above. It was a wild place where we played in as kids. And now, some sixty years later on, it has changed. Most of the changes are man made, though not as bad as that sounds. The undergrowth, mainly Rhodedendrons, has been stripped out and replanted with Birch trees. The thing is though, all the other familiar things I knew, the river bends, the banks, have altered. Some of the photos below are of places I knew intimately as a kid. Now, I hardly recognise them.

Some things do change I suppose, after sixty years.