Our base for visiting Hanbury Hall (previous post) was the village of Hadzor. We were staying with rellies, and were able to tick off several firsts of the trip: First cheese, first salmon, and first bacon. These milestones are important...

On Sunday morning, our pre-bacon walk took us along the Worcester & Birmingham Canal, which then joins the Droitwich Junction Canal.

It's a picturesque route, now just starting to look autumnal:







After that, we headed north, stopping for a break at Lichfield (Staffordshire). Where it was monsooning down...

The weather over the last couple of days has been really iffy, but until today we'd been pretty lucky, mostly managing to slide through the raindrops unscathed. This was our day of reckoning, however. The rain didn't let up throughout our entire walk round Lichfield, and according to the folks at the cafe where we took refuge for hot tea and soup, it had been raining and thundering all night. There was certainly plenty of evidence of flooding.

Lichfield is a lovely place, though, and deserves to be revisited sometime when it's not hosing down. It's the birthplace of writer and lexicographer Samuel Johnson, and of antiquary Elias Ashmole (after whom the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford is named), and of doctor, scientist, and inventor Erasmus Darwin (who also just happens to be the grandfather of one Charles).

And it comprises a three-spired cathedral, whose origins date back to 700:








From Lichfield we splashed on to Denby (Derbyshire), our home for the next week or so. We're living in a converted stable complex, and there are still a couple of horses in residence in the field out the back.



Looking forward to exploring another corner of Derbyshire.