Today Charlie has a ‘French Experience’ which sounds good but turns out to be more educational than profound.  Charlie here revels in the steep sided valleys which abound in this area.  The tiny church at Bleasdale comes in for a mention.  The track/path which winds down from the Church to what used to be a very popular cycling cafe (known as Toffee Jack’s in my day) was the location of a cycling accident here, probably in Charlie’s time.

A local farmer’s son was cycling down to the cafe, no doubt at speed, when he came off his bike and banged his head so hard on the pathway that he was instantly blinded.  That boy, unsighted, could not not in later life continue to live on a farm so finished up in a small terraced house in Blackburn, and I used to visit him each month to collect his insurance premiums for my father, who was an insurance agent.  But that blind man used to look forward to my visits, as by then I was old enough to have thoroughly cycled all over the area of his youth, and he would yarn away for hours given a modest audience.  I almost became his social worker.