Daneswood

A Memory of Great Elm.

My maternal grandparents owned Daneswood, which you reached by taking the Mells road out of Great Elm, then turning left at a bungalow set right on the edge of the Mells river valley. After passing the bungalow, Daneswood was the first of three fine Victorian houses set in their own beautiful gardens that fell away down the valley to the Mells river. Daneswood has since been renamed Wood Rising.
When our family of mother, father and three boys returned from Egypt in 1952 we lived at Daneswood for a while, and attended Mells school.  We played by the river and learned how to fish, using bent pins and bamboo polls to catch first roach and then trout. There was great excitement when my mother brought us a packet of real fishhooks from Frome. The river at that time was full of crayfish, and we used to catch them and have crayfish races in the grass by the river.
I n 1953 my parents opened a school called Roselyon in Cornwall so we left Daneswood; but first my elder brother Anthony was sent to Greenways, a prep boarding school in Codford, and then I was sent there from 1956 to 1958. Three times a term my grandmother would collect us from school after Church on a Sunday, and we would spend a treasured day at Daneswood. Most summer holidays we'd spend a wonderful couple of weeks there too, until my grandparents finally sold up in 1962 as the garden had become too much for them.
Daneswood, in its glorious setting, was heaven to us boys at that time. To stand on the terrace looking over the lush valley with only the sounds of songbirds and the running river; to cast our lines into the mysterious waters of the river, from the then forgotten old ironworks upstream to the series of deeply shadowed pools downstream; to walk every morning through the bracken, hazel bushes and wild garlic by the river amid the constant cooing of wood-pigeons; to watch water voles busily swimming along the muddy banks, and herons and kingfishers at every other bend; it was simply idyllic. You never saw another soul.
Betty James, who lived by the village green, used to help my grandmother in the house twice a week. I remember Mrs Wood, owner of a grand house off the main road, who complained the new housing development children said 'ullo instead of Good Morning. I remember having tea in the beautiful old house to the left of the Church, with its tiger-skin rug - head still attached. I remember my grandmother attending her WI meetings and making lampshades, and their visit to the Babycham factory. I remember the walk through the village then down to the Wide River as we called it, with its stone bridge and mill. There was a fine walk over the bridge and then left between the river and the railway line.
We used to cross the river too on a wooden bridge built by Roads Reconstruction, which lay close to the lower gate of Daneswood's garden. You would then climb up the far side of the valley through the elm and other trees till you reached the lost world at the top: old lanes, open meadows, bramble patches and rabbits. We used to pick blackberries there. You never saw anyone there, either.
As a boarder at Greenways, then later at Allhallows near Lyme Regis, I used constantly to dream of Daneswood. Everything about it was magical. The village, the garden, the valley, the river. It was utterly idyllic. It is all much changed now, of course, but I needed simply to record that for a while at any rate, Daneswood and its village were - for three young boys - heaven on earth.

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