O'er moorland and brae: Curios and curiosities

Lovely Rockbourne is a pretty village we came across made of cob and thatch, brick, tile and timber with a little chalk-bottomed stream running down one side of the village street, crossed by foot bridges. The stream is a winterbourne stream, it only flows in winter, or only when it buckets down at other times of the year. Bourne. I wonder if that is where the Scottish 'burn' comes from.

We later found a lovely wooden effigy of Anthony St Leger in Slindon. Anthony was a knight in the War of the Roses, who, before he died in 1539, asked to be buried in front of the statue of Our Lady in the Slindon church. This is an amazing piece of work.

Then came a pumpkin stall in Slindon we stumbled across attempting to park: but, having found it, we discovered that it is famous. This year the theme of the vegetable mural is Cinderella and the Glass Slipper. We spoke to a lady who now helps out at the little market stall which operates at this time of the year in a small lane in the back of Slindon village. It has every kind of pumpin and squash you can imagine. We asked how long the stall had been operating and she informed us that she had brought her daughter here to buy a pumpkin 39 years ago, so it has been in existence longer than that. The son of the original farmer who started the stall still runs it every year.

We are dawdling over the roads we love with whimsy and tales at every turn. One is a minor road between Breamore and Rockbourne, which claimed to be 6'6" wide. This one actually was. Many are not. Still our side vision mirrors scraped the hedgerows on both sides at the same time.

A Saxon cooking pot was dug up by an archaeologist delving into the foundations beneath the ancient tower in the church in Singleton. We found it stored in a dusty niche in a dark alcove in one of the tower walls. We loved the shape of it.

One night our stopover while we roamed these unusual villages was Lyndhurst. As pretty a place as you could hope to spend a night. Some of these farms we have been staying on are simply gorgeous.

And in a gorgeous little pyramidical towered church in Ashhurst, we found this rare tin plate Vamping Horn. Ashhurst is a village that goes way back to the Saxons with its name, as 'hurst' is Saxon for clearing. There may once have been an ash tree in the clearing here leading to its name.

We believe there are only six Vamping horns left in all of England and this Ashurst one is conical and built at an obtuse angle, making it even more unusual.

Vamping horns were invented in the 1700s to magnify sound. So it was more like a megaphone than a musical instrument. Before organs, vamping horns were used in churches to tune in the choir, and, if needed, to amplify sections of it, say, the bass, or the soprano section. The horns could also do the job of a Town Crier, as they could be heard for over a mile, and were often used for important announcements like reading the Parish Notices, or the Wedding Banns. I would imagine the vamping horn would be useful, too, if the Vicar was a wee bit deaf.

We are so enjoying these curios everywhere.