Sunday 3 August 2014. More about gherkins.

I live in a small town in North Hampshire in southern England. It is called Tadley. There are odd stories about Tadley, concerning treacle, besom brooms and hot air balloons. We'll come back to those. (If I remember.)

Hampshire is a large county. It has coastline and beaches, docks and harbours, The New Forest, ancient woodland, ancient towns, new towns, military camps, airports, heathland, large towns and cities, small villages and hamlets, farmland, downland, beautiful streams and rivers, football teams, shopping centres, Areas of Outstanding Beauty, Sites of Special Scientific Interest, stately homes, great estates, parks, private and public land and some industry. It is a wealthy and consequently expensive part of England in which to live, and the county has been my home for the majority of my life. (I am neither wealthy or expensive, however. But I am not cheap, before you ask...and apparently I have expensive tastes.).

The part of Hampshire in which I live borders The Royal County of Berkshire to the north, Wiltshire, Dorset, (west) Surrey and Sussex (east) plus the Isle of Wight (south, and formerly part of Hampshire) and is 12 or so miles from the neighbouring towns of Basingstoke, Newbury and Reading. The town has an average age of 60, based on the figures from the last census, and people rarely move away, apart from the young people, who cannot afford to buy a place here in which to live. Those who go away to university may decide to live in their university town, or move to the aforementioned bigger towns where there is employment and accommodation.

I do a lot of walking around my town as we own dogs which require exercise. Our favourite spot for walking is Pamber Forest, which was once part of Windsor Great Park and is an ancient forest with wild deer, rare birds and butterflies. We also like to walk on Silchester Common and Tadley Common, which are both rare examples of heathland and which are  browsed by Dexter cattle and managed by local authorities. These areas of land are free for anyone to walk in, and there is some forestry work to manage the woodlands. In the past, there was also gravel extraction, and Tadley earned its wealth from these activities. I do a lot of thinking on my forays in to the woods and commons, and some of the thoughts will appear in these blogs, but not all.

This may seem far removed from pickled gherkins, but will I hope serve as a background to the gherkins and where they, and the rest of our vegetables are grown, for the surrounding town and countryside are an important example of how the English land ownership, allotments and property ownership of the past shape the lives of today's residents. The name "Tadley" was first recorded in the year 909AD, and is of Old English origin, meaning the woodland clearing of a man called Tada. (ref: The Oxford Names Companion).

http://www3.hants.gov.uk/index/your-area/localpages/north-east/tadley/tadley-attract.htm

Our allotments, of which we have 6 (or 7, depending on how it's calculated), form part of a large area of land situated within the ancient parish of Tadley and consisting of over 200 plots of land. The land is owned by a charity (Allotments for The Labouring Poor) and was originally established after The Enclosure Acts of the 19th century in order to give those families turned off of the land somewhere to grow food for their families. (More on The Enclosure Acts at a later time, if I remember. )



http://opencharities.org/charities/268506http:

www.nsalg.org.uk/allotment-info/brief-history-of-allotments/

Tadley is different from other allotments in that it is not owned by a local authority but by a charity. The money collected in rents cannot be used; it must be invested and the interest from the investments is available to residents of the parish of Tadley to "relieve need." 

We have had allotments for the past 6 or so years, and as can be seen from the photos, we have had to clear land which has not been worked within living memory. ..... I'll get on to the gherkins another time, as I seem to have wittered on quite considerably and you may now be losing interest. 

 If you have any comments or questions, about Tadley, allotments, or anything else really, please feel free to ask. I'll do my best to answer them. :-) 

Thanks for reading. Have a good week.