Tuesday 23 June 2009

Tennis, moats and ruins

It was a hot day today, about 27°C, so we returned to Howden because it would need a walk in the park to complete it. We trolled around the few remaining residential streets, then pulled up in the new car park near the Minster. The car park was so new that the ticket machines were not working so we parked for free. We wandered into the Ashes Playing Fields, which is a park, with children's playground, football pitches, a cricket ground with pavillion and some open space. At the entrance there was a map which a passerby said was upside down - it looked fine to me. It described a space in the middle as being surrounded by a moat. In this space there should be two bowling greens and a tennis court.

The moat would certainly not repell invaders as the photo shows, the tennis court turned out to be two new multiuse courts with a dazzling array of different coloured lines for each sport and two sets of basket ball hoops at each end. The park was a very pleasant place to take a stroll with a GPS.

Next to the minster is a ruin run by English Heritage. When I got home I realised that I didn't have a photo of any board or information, so I'll need to check that out again another time.

The landuse around the town was already in place. There seems to be a fad for adding the landuse to unmapped towns and villages probably to improve the look of the map at a glance. Whoever did this one just threw some lines at the map - it was completely and utterly wrong in just about every part. It's a bit better now. There was also one of the fairly rare cycleway=opposite_lane where a oneway road has a cycle lane on it that cyclists can ride in the opposite direction to the cars.

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