Broughton (a day in Penfold city)

A male Brimstone – our first butterfly on the wing this year

On Wednesday we had a pleasing reminder of one of the reasons we love living on the boat.  Having breakfast looking across the cut I caught sight of a kingfisher perched on a tree opposite us.  The sight of seeing a kingfisher flying fast and straight over the water always brings a smile to our faces.  The distinctive flash of the electric blue and the way they stay at a constant height above the water is so different to other birds we see.

Even though we are still having frosts at night, the days are feeling unseasonably mild; even our daffodils have started flowering:

Our mini-boat-daffs (bulbs saved from last year)

Thursday saw us having a day trip to Cheltenham. We fancied a look around the Cotswolds, searching out VR boxes and Karen arranged to get fitted for some new running shoes.  We were successful on the last two fronts; however, it was too foggy to take in the beauty of the Cotswold views.

We found six hexagonal Victorian pillar boxes that were designed by a guy called Penfold and were cast in the 1860s making them over 150 years old.  The boxes are now known as Penfolds and there are only a couple of dozen originals left in the country.  The Cheltenham ones all appear to be original, manufactured by Cochrane Grove & Co at their Woodside Works in Dudley between 1859 and 1866.  We could still make out the maker’s inscription on five of our boxes.

One of our Penfolds in a less salubrious part of town

There is a seventh box that we didn’t find and, until about two years ago there was an eighth but that was destroyed by a reversing demolition truck on 1^st June 2017!

The destroyed Penfold on College Lawn opposite the ladies’ college (from Gloucestershire Live)

Friday was yet another spring-like day and we got on with some spring cleaning.  It’s amazing how much ‘rubbish’ we accumulate on the boat and we did a good job clearing out a load of stuff that we definitely won’t need in France.  Items we wanted to keep were taken to Karen’s mums house as she kindly has a room set aside storing a lot of our gear.

It was whilst leaving Ann’s that we saw our male brimstone flying along a hedgerow.  This was the first time we have seen a butterfly in the last four Februarys that we have been living on board.  The early spring butterflies overwinter as adults and the warm sun brings them out of hibernation, so we do hope these early fliers don’t suffer if we get a prolonged cold snap.  The brimstone picture at the top was taken by Karen last summer.

It still doesn’t feel like spring to us until we see our first orange tip; these overwinter as chrysalis and undergo their last stage of metamorphism in late March/early April.

The final task of the day was to get some coal and diesel as we never made it back to the Grand Union in time to catch Jules & Richard when they were passing through on Monday.  We have found a fuel supplier in Long Crendon that sells red diesel (at 71p a litre) so filled our two 20 litre jerry cans and then popped into the coal merchants at Marsh Gibbon.  The coal merchants are W G Smith and they supply coal to a lot of the fuel boats.  We had a good chat with the guy who loaded our bags into the car.  He knew nearly all the fuel boat operators (and their boat names) that we have used over the years, up and down the country, and he used to run a pair of fuel boats before joining the company.