Running away from big trees - # 364

We'll make this the last of the shots of the enormous (I reckon they must be at least 200 years old - bear with me, and I will ask the Council's tree department) plane trees.

Thanks are owed to the "French School" for their kind comments. I'm sure that in France these trees would have been "pollarded" and held within some rather tight "rational" limits that conform to "Theory" rather than "Common Sense". Please allow me my small "John Bull" joke about our beloved conquerors who arrived in 1066 and decided to stay.

I read the other day a nice, perceptive comment in an authoritative journal........"Success in either France or Britain tends to drive the one or the other into a frenzy of productive anger and competition that has a beneficial outcome". Indeed, what would Britain be without France?

Even the Normans loved Richmond - # 114

The Normans conquered England in 1066, and very quickly built a royal summer palace in Richmond (a nice "out of town" riverside retreat in those days). The palace stood there from the early 1100s until it burnt down more than 500 years later in the early 1600s! The house was greatly enjoyed by Henry V111 and Elizabeth 1 who died there. Here is part of the old wall alongside Old Palace Lane.