Road trip to Buntingford via Sherwood Forest

On the road again… I think Chris has had enough of driving for one week; he’s certainly done a lot of it!! After a lovely chilled out brekkie it was time to say goodbye to Barbara. She has certainly been amazing and helpful these past few days and we’ve appreciated all her help and suggestions and most importantly, hospitality. She is a real star being able to run, successfully, the B&B singlehandedly. We hit the road perhaps just a little later than we first envisaged, but it was all good in the end. We drove through the Yorkshire Dales National Park which was very pretty, and as always, was an extremely tight, windy little road. It was beautiful though and we loved the extreme diversity of the landscape, the rocky hills, the green rolling hills, the rivers, all very very pretty. We made a quick stop down near a little waterfall which we discovered was the Robin Hood/Little John fight scene from the Kevin Costner Robin Hood film. It was lovely, though Kevin and Christian who played the characters in the movie must have been bloody cold for that scene! We didn’t get a chance to check it out as much as we’d have liked as we had such a long day ahead of us, so we moved on with our next stop being Sherwood Forest.

This forest has an eerie feeling to it, as if something or someone is watching you and that it’s hiding something. It’s a rather odd feeling. We took a 20 minute walk to the ‘Major Oak’ to stretch our legs which was nice. It’s a massive old Oak Tree that is 1150 years old and is now having its branches propped up by scaffolds. In the day the Major Oak use to be called the “Cockpen Tree” as the inside of it is hollow they use to keep bags of roosters in the inside of the tree (or tied to the branches of it) and would bring them out for the illegal cock fights that use to happen. You can feel the history of this place and you can’t help but feel that the woods are hiding something.

We didn’t have long to stay, we’d already been driving 4 hours and had another 3 or so to go, so we hit the road. Apart from another ‘comfort stop’ or two we made our way back to Sue and Patrick’s and it was lovely to see them again, felt like we’d been away for weeks, not days! Quick dinner and then a well earned nights rest!

written by

Chris and Emily on May 11, 2009 from Nottingham, United Kingdom

from the travel blog: Europe 2009

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