Walks with my dog (1)

Our first walk started at a point west of Basingstoke, just east of the point where the railway line splits between Basinstoke – Winchester and Basingstoke – Salisbury.

We walked anticlockwise from the point where Pack Lane meets the railway to the north, just off the above map, where this picture was taken, then west, and back down the left track. My grateful thanks to the farmer for leaving a 3 metre strip of grassland for walkers around his fields.

Our first picture is the view to the north from south of the road, as indicated on the satellite image below.

On the return walk I took several other photographs, thinking that they may be useful for (Particularly non-British) folks contemplating a wargame set in England. Therefore each is annotated.

Generic North Hampshire rural landscape. Before WW2 the fields may have been smaller with dividing hedges. Before the mid 17th century it may have been subdivided without hedges into strips of cultivated land.

English meadow with a copse. The trees have been allowed to grow undisturbed over an old (iron age?) barrow (burial mound). In WW2 this land would have been ploughed for crop growth as a priority.

A typical British railway bridge. Missing in WW2: The housing estate in the rear, the mobile phone transmission mast, the large warehouse complex to the left. if you can zoom in that far, the graffiti painted on the bridge. It is possible that the electricity pylons would have been present, but they look “post-war” to my uneducated eye.