At this time of year daffodils are never far from sight but equipped with a brochure see below which contains a map

At this time of year, daffodils are never far from sight, but equipped with a brochure (see below) which contains a map and clear instructions, you will discover many other interesting things along the way. You pass the vestiges of an 18th-century canal, a 19th-century railway, and many old buildings including part of an Elizabethan farmhouse, the 14th-century church of St Mary’s Dymock with its shingled steeple, and Kempley old church, referred to by John Betjeman as “a miniature cathedral of the Arts and Craft movement”, which contains interesting medieval frescoes. There is a convenient pub, the Beauchamp Arms, for a pause for refreshment, and if you don’t feel up to the full 10 miles, plenty of short cuts can be made following the link paths on the map. It is a walk you won’t forget.Daffodil weekends:22-23 March, Oxenhall Teas to raise funds for St Anne’s Church. Also sales of home-made cakes, scones, jam etc.29-30 March, Dymock. Two-mile guided walk on Sunday from Dymock parish hall, returning to the parish hall for tea.5-6 April, Kempley Guided walks from the village hall, 11am and 2pm each day See the medieval frescoes in the church. Refreshments and produce, village hall, 11am-2pm.`The Daffodil Way’, 50p, and other brochures from Tourist Information Centre, Church Street, Newent (01531 82246)..

When Barbara Sutton was a child in the Fifties, her summers were spent idyllically on her grandparents’ 300-acre farm near Skegness, beneath the big skies of the Lincolnshire fens. Her days were spent on the back of Peggy, the family’s shire horse, charged with ploughing and harrowing the rich, arable soils at the back of Ingoldmells near Addlethorpe. Each morning she would help milk the 20 cows so early that, on returning for breakfast, she would hear “Good Morning Campers”, drifting across the land from the Butlins camp on the coast. Then there would be haymaking, and in the evening milking again, before heading home to a farmhouse that had no electricity, a single cold water tap, a single gas lamp and beds specially made up for the children out of birds’ feathers

“It was a perfect life,” she recalls. “Paradise.” But earlier this week, we travelled with Mrs Sutton to the site of the old farm. Where once there were orchards of plums, apples and cherries, there is nothing.

The willow that stood beside the bridge over a dike has now gone Indeed, there isn’t even a farm gate. All the trees have been uprooted, save one sycamore which looks, after being struck by lightening, like the sole survivor of a massacre The hedges that surrounded the settlement are gone. Of the farmhouse and outbuildings, bulldozed in the Sixties, there is not a trace. All that remains are vast, featureless fields – a prairie that wouldn’t look out of place in America’s Midwest, drained, sprayed, artificially fertilised, tidied, a land devoid of insects, birds, wild mammals and people. Where there were once five small farms leading from a sleepy lane, there is just one, consolidated agribusiness, where the only thing that moves across the monotonous landscape is a huge tractor.
Yet this is supposed to be a model of British agricultural success. A land that has produced huge profits from decades of EU grain subsidies and more recently has cashed in on the explosion of prices on the world market.”I don’t come back very often,” says Mrs Sutton, whose family sold up in 1961 “I feel so sad when I visit To me this particular spot is like hallowed ground No one can take it away from me, because I have my memories.