The road that leads home

I have been in Lancashire for a few days, attending my niece's wedding and catching up with family and friends. It was really good to be there for such a joyous occasion since my visits in the last few years have been more solemn, visiting sick relations or attending funerals.

We set out after lunch on Thursday on what should have been a four to five hour journey. The first two hours went well, with very little traffic on the motorway but then the traffic announcements started: a lorry had shed its load, a pothole had opened in the road, a caravan had overturned and so on. The predicted long delay became a tailback of 7 miles, then 27 miles then between three,four then five, motorway junctions and growing longer. We had to choose between sitting in a queue of traffic for many hours or leaving the motorway and driving in the real world. This was one of the occasions when I was very glad that I had married a professional navigator!

We drove through parts of Shropshire and Cheshire on the wonderfully straight and wide Roman roads. We could see for miles across fields, rivers and canals, such a different experience from driving through narrow Devon lanes with their high banks and hedgerows.

Here are just a few of the sights we would have missed if we had stayed on the motorway:Stapeley Water Gardens
Churche's Mansion House, Nantwich

River Weaver, Nantwich

Aqueduct, Nantwich

Sankey Canal

Driving through the beautiful northern countryside, I was reminded of the pre-motorway and seatbelt days of my youth, when we would squeeze six or eight people into a car and head for the country pubs or picnic spots. I suddenly had an almost physical longing to be back there and thought of Mole, in The Wind in the Willows, being overwhelmed by the sense of his Dulce Domum:
He stopped dead in his tracks, his nose searching hither and thither in its efforts to recapture the fine filament, the telegraphic current, that had so strongly moved him.......... Home! That was what they meant, those caressing appeals, those soft touches wafted through the air, those invisible little hands pulling and tugging, all one way!........ his old home that he had hurriedly forsaken and never sought again... he had hardly given it a thought, so absorbed had he been in his new life, in all its pleasures, its surprises, its fresh and captivating experiences. Now with a rush of old memories, how clearly it stood up before him in the darkness.

Mole goes back to his old home and enjoys all the "familiar and friendly things" again but he realises that he doesn't really want to give up his new life above ground, "But it was good to think he had this to come back to, this place which was all his own, these things which were so glad to see him again and could always be counted upon for the same simple welcome." Like Mole, I thoroughly enjoyed my brief time in my old haunts, but I suppose one can never really go back. I do recommend leaving the motorway and driving through your childhood memories, though.