Geoff Jones

Rougham Circular walk

Yesterdays walk with the Cambridge Rambling Club was a good test for our foul weather gear, mine failed abysmally 🙁

We 11 started from St Mary’s Church car park at Rougham, in very wet and windy conditions, so it was heads down for the first 9 miles to Bradfield St Clare and a spot of lunch in the shelter of the church porch, followed by a drink at the Fox & Hounds in Bradfield St. George. The afternoon cleared up a little so we started to dry out.

From Rougham Walk

Very disappointing for me in that the left boot of my brand new Scarpa ZG65 XCR boots sprang a leak. So it’s back to Open Air with them today! My RAB Bergen jacket (QWA-05-RDB) was as useless as ever with little streams inside the arms and the pockets filling with water. It’s time has now come – I will return it to RAB. A quick survey of the other 10 people in our party showed the Karrimor & Berghaus as highly effective, the Paramo did OK too but they are really heavy to lug around on extended walks.

Here is the walk and photographs:-

Rougham circular walk

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Update 021109 – Open Air agree boots are faulty , should have new pair by Friday 🙂

Emily’s essay as a Wordle

Here is Emily’s essay that has been causing her a bit of stress, I will leave the reader to guess what it is on:-)

Swedish massage in Cambridge

What better after an invigorating walk than a relaxing Swedish Massage in the comfort of your own home, here in Cambridge, so many thanks to Sally for mine tonight. If you want to book a Swedish or Indian Head Massage then head over to Sally’s webpage and give her a call – she is in Cambridge most weekends.

Word of the day – Pightle

Whilst on our walk today we came across this farm with the name The Pightle, Larry and I were fascinated by the origin of the name so out came the iPhone and a quick search on wiktionary revealed:-
“Odd-shaped fields now caused problems which had not been encountered in the days before mechanization. Thus, over several years, fields were reorganized to be acceptably rectangular.This was cleverly and thoughtfully arranged but,inevitably, there were remnants, leftovers,off-cuts or tailings. In most cases, these were small pieces of land,which were essentially triangular in shape. The locals probably referred to these pieces as “pigtails”. In Norfolk dialect,this would quickly become pronounced as “pightle”. In the 1920’s through the 1940’s,the word pightle was in fairly common usage but has fallen into disuse in recent years.”

Once at home I was able to consult my 1909 first edition of the complete English Dictionary. this had the following entry:-
So there we have it an old East Anglian word dating from 1200 meaning a small piece of enclosed land.

Thanks to Rosemary, one of my readers, I now have a section from an enclosure map for Westhorpe, Suffolk the map was dated 1840 and is showing a pightle.