A Sleepy Summer Sunday

Last week-end in Birmingham I had free time on the Saturday afternoon and I walked into Bourneville and visited Selly Manor, a Tudor manor house. There was hardly anyone else in the house and I had the charming garden completely to myself. I remembered another expedition over thirty years ago in my Birmingham days. On a sleepy summer Sunday we set out from Moseley to visit Sarehole Mill, an eighteenth century watermill, best known for its literary associations. Tolkien spent part of his childhood nearby and used the site of the mill and its surroundings as the inspiration for the Shire in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. It has now been swallowed up by Birmingham suburbs.

When I say ‘we’ I don’t actually recall who went with me. I just know that I wasn’t on my own. I have a hazy memory of clambering about in the mill, but the thing I mainly remember is that we caught two buses to get there. In my memory it was a real expedition and what what comes back most strongly is a sense impression of waiting for the bus in the sun, as we came home from a pleasant outing. But when I looked up the distance just now on Google maps, it was only two miles from Moseley where I lived to Sarehole! Two miles, and we bothered to catch two buses! I find that puzzling. Did we really do that? And yet it is fixed so firmly in my memory. Perhaps we had my mother with us and she didn’t want to walk. Or perhaps it was too hot to walk. What we remember and what we don’t remember is a source of fascination to me and is such a fruitful area for a novelist.

Sarehole Mill (pictured above) is still open to the public and you can find out more about it here: http://www.bmag.org.uk/sarehole-mill