Distance: 12.6km
Accessibility: Flat roads but ill kept. Be mindful he hall itself is long abandoned, and by no means safe.
Landscape: Abandoned scout hut.
This is a book of local walks. I said nothing about sticking to the countryside.
The abandoned scout hut in Dunon sits a few hundred meters from an estate. A normal space at some point, used for everything from first aid classes to birthday parties.
Then one morning the caretaker arrived to find broken windows, and a door lolling on one hinge. Beige stuffing vomiting from the chairs with snapped legs. The tea dented, and dead upon the floor. A decent enough talk for th local newspaper. The photos look like a hurricane smashed through the British countryside.
Half a dozen vandals at least, the police reckoned. A fruitless search followed. The building fell between the cracks of property administration, and so followed the graffiti artists. Now the inside is a psychedelic mural of a hundred different creators. Worth a peek.
I travelled to the cusp of suburbia. Past a few houses, and a petrol station. A local shop. Always scanning for the graffiti. Nothing more than eyes and a few tags. The house is a blank space on a sat nav, but the moulding rood tiles reveal the truth.
I spot the moulding roof tiles, and park near a well tarmacked path. I keep a look out of old spray cans. My focus remained on discarded rubbish in the long grasss, so I came close to tripping over the pineapple.
That familiar spiky fruit sat bang in the middle of the path, like a tropical weed. The perky leaves refused to bow to the cold weather. If you popped this item in your shopping trolley, no cashier would ever apologise for the state of their fresh goods. Twelve hours was the top end of exposure to the elements faced by this delicious item.
I was relieved not to have pushed it over. The pineapple stood in place with care of deliberation. If someone had dropped their shopping, why put their purchases upright, and then carry on?
Who was bringing pineapple down this secluded route anyway, in what must have been early in the morning? Was the art spilling into the outside world?
The road offered no answers. Perhaps the solution lay within the ruins of the hut.
::The proof of the pineapple is in the photo Barbara. Although do you think a reader might consider this staged? I promise I didn’t buy a pineapple, and whack it in the middle of the road!
Thinking of the scout hut made me remember Archie in his cubs uniform. There’s real innocence at that age, isn’t there? You cannot dilute the simplicity of that joy.
If people don’t believe this, they certainly won’t believe what happened next…::
