A walk around

It's been a damp weekend here  meaning going out was more a matter of picking a spot when it was either dry for a short while or just drizzling a little and given how I've been over the last month or so such venturing out has taken me beyond my usual haunts.
I normally go into town which as more seasoned readers will have worked out is a rather old market town with black and white buildings just out of the sprawl of the North Staffordshire conurbation but closer to edges of it are still just about detached villages admittedly with much mid twentieth century ribbon development prevailing along the main road.

 There are for me two ways of starting this trek, one is on foot, the other is to take a bus so normally I walk from my place passing the woods around the local rather imposing Hall and vast Estate at Rode with farms passing the main Anglican church to arrive at Scholar Green.
As I was walking I noticed signs of the onset of the Fall such as the changes in colour of the leaves and that thanks to the recent rain, fields and gardens have started to repair themselves from the summers high temperatures.
Although in recent years the number of Public Houses has fallen, there remains rather more than what the local static population would warrant and one famed both for its food and ale plus its architecture which has a Grade Two Listing being built in 1936 replacing a older ne on the same site but having a thatched roof.
This does a great passing trade.
Passing it I walked toward Lawton Woods where you can toward the sprawl that starts from Red Bull and Butt Lane and doesn't stop until Blythe Bridge and Trentham in the south or the woods that form a part of the barrier between it and the cluster of detached villages that increasingly function as detached suburbs of the sprawl.
One thing I like about this area and it is also true for much of the South Staffs conurbation too is the relative ease in which for all the built up environment it is easy to get to the more quieter countryside that you can walk and enjoy the flowers, trees and farm life at a more slower pace.
It's a close to the best of both worlds you can get.