The Old Tennis Court

Monday was a day composed of lots of finishing up jobs, like almost all of February that had gone before amalgamated into seven hours. A half hour of pruning the peach trees was followed by yet more tree planting and tractor driving practise. We trooped down to the old tennis court to plant six walnut trees, I'd not been there before and found it a somewhat desolate place with weeds growing through the old court surface, that is where I took the pictures of the old urns that top the walls. Hopefully when Giles has finished the new planting scheme it will be transformed into a nut walk, but that is for future generations to see. He says that in its hey-day it would have been quite a status symbol complete with a revolving summer house to follow the path of the sun, but now it is a bit melancholy and not somewhere I would like work alone. I wouldn't be at all surprised if it was haunted like the big house and imagine the ghostly echo of tennis balls reverberating off the walls when no one is around!

"The lawn is pressed by unseen feet, and ghosts return gently at twilight, gently go at dawn, the sad intangible who grieve and yearn" T S Eliot.