… went for a swim today.

We were out and about this afternoon in Northamptonshire meandering pretty aimlessly here and there in the general direction of Cambridge and we saw a sign for “Ford”.

With a sign like that of course we had to go for a look and Caliburn really fancied a swim. And he quite enjoyed it too

Last night I found a good spec on the A6 near Ambergate in Derbyshire. This was where I bedded down and I had the Sleep of the Dead.

Not for long though. The arrival of the Roach Coach at 07:30 and the noise that it made as it installed tself soon woke me up.

Once I’d summoned up the courage to heave myself out of my stinking pit and grab a coffee from the aforementioned, I moved on to Ilkeston.

Here at Vehicle Wiring Products I bought a pile of 6mm “red” and “black” cable and a pile of other bits and pieces for back home. 6mm because it has to handle high current at 12 volt so I need to avoid voltage drop as much as I can.

And red and black cable?

I’m heavily into colour coding, especially in electrical wiring. It saves all kinds of unpleasantness. I’m trying to keep to blue and brown for 230-volt so I buy as much of that as I can. But for 12 volt, it’s red and black. No mistake with the colours.

The polarity of red and black speaks for itself, but with brown and blue, the bRown goes to the right to where the fuse is in a British plug, so it’s positive. The bLue goes to the left where there’s no fuse, so it’s negative.

And that’s why I use British plugs and sockets, not European ones. British plugs are fused and so that avoids all kinds of embarrassment if I’ve made a mistake with the wiring.

After that, I moved myself on to the M1 where I stopped at Leicester Forest East for a shower, a shave and to wash my clothes. High time that I did all of the aforementioned seeing as I’d been living in a van for a fortnight. Even I was starting to notice.

And I dunno what was going on at Donington Park last weekend but the services were crawling with Goths and the like. Had there been a rock concert down the road?

Next stop was Corby and Radio Spares where I bought a few more bits and pieces. It was a good job that I had forgotten to buy the 7-core trailer wire at Vehicle Wiring Products because it was on special offer at Radio Spares.

25 metres for £25 which is a bargain, and it was a desperate shame that there was only one roll left.

On my way to Northampton I took a detour to visit the town of Geddington (which was where Caliburn went for his swim)

Several claims to fame, has Geddington, including the most magnificent Eleanor’s Cross.

The Eleanor concerned was Eleanor of Castille, wife of King Edward I “LOngshanks”. She died in Lincoln on 28 November 1290, and her body was embalmed and brought to London for burial in Westminster Abbey.

The funeral cortège was an elaborate affair and took 12 days to reach Westminster Abbey.

At each place where the coffin rested, an elaborate cross was subsequently erected.

The Eleanor Cross at Geddington is considered by many to be the best of the three that remain, but even so, it is believed that there was an upper part which is now missing.

But I haven’t finished yet. There’s the church to see.

And the St Mary Magdalene Church is extremely special because it has every grounds to consider itself as one of the oldest churches in the UK (although there are a couple known to be older).

I’m not talking early crusader, or Norman Conquest either, but quite possibly 250 years older than that.

Churches in the immediate post-Roman days were generally built of wood – that was because they art of building in stone had left with the Romans.

And that’s why there aren’t any still in existence today. I certainly can’t think of one, except maybe the church in Greensted, Essex, where bits of a 7th-Century wooden church were discovered in a later wooden church..

It was only gradually that the technique of stone-building was reintroduced to the UK and dates from the late Saxon period.

And sure enough, if you look at the end wall here, you’ll see the primitive stonework over the arch, and the building lines where more-modern stonework starts when the church was enlarged.

Taylor and Taylor, in their Anglo-Saxon Architecture date the primitive stonework to the period 800-950.

While others might disagree with the dating, one thing upon which all of the experts agree is that it is certainly Saxon stonework, and that’s what it looks like to me too.

At Northampton I had to go shopping for Terry, so Ipicked up Terry’s orders from Screwfix, Toolstation and a couple of other places and then took the opportunity of doing some food shopping at the Morrison’s there.

By now it was early evening and so I headed off to Cambridge where I tracked down the University library.

That’s my port of call for tomorrow

And I almost forgot to tell you about the bridge too, didn’t I?

Geddington is situated on the River Ise (the river that rises in the field where the Battle of Naseby was fought in 1645) and is a very good fording place (as you have already seen, thanks to Caliburn).

This is where the cortège of Eleanor of Castille presumably crossed.

But with the improved stone-building techniques of post-Conquest England, stone bridges were constructed and fords fell out of fashion.

The one here was built some time round about 1250 and is what’s known as a “pack-horse bridge” – with refuges for pedestrians as you can see.

It was rebuilt in 1784 – at least, that’s a date that’s carved onto some of the more-modern stonework – and was listed as a Grade II listed building on 25 February 1957.

It’s in excellent condition and it’s quite safe for Caliburn to drive over. But he thought that it would be much more fun to swim the river

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