David Caldwell's photostream

DaevidCaldwell's photostream on Flickr.

Recent photographs taken with a Fuji Finepix S7000

Hook's Lost Racecourse

I live in a village called Hook, located in the north western corner of Hampshire, eight miles east of Basingstoke and eight miles west of Farnborough. Today the village is a growing small town of modern sprawl. A mainline station makes Hook an ideal location for commuters and is the secret of the village's success, there is an old village centre that has less than a dozen original buildings which was the same size of the Hamlet a hundred and fifty years ago. So why build a train station in a backwater? The answer is entertainment and in particular horse racing. Just one hundred metres south of platform two is the nearest stretch of an 18th century racecourse that operated for 125 years between 1774 and 1900. Below is a rough approximation of the location of the racecourse


View Odiham Racecourse in a larger map

The nearby pub at North Warnborough called the "Lord Derby" is all that remains of the horse racing days, with the site briefly being used as a golf course in the early 20th Century, later the area was transformed beyond all recognition by the building of the M3 motorway. Without the races the trains would never have stopped here, and without the station the village wouldn't have grown, all thanks to a forgotten racecourse.

Triumph Traffic Master (Raleigh Twenty Flolder)

Cycling is too serious these days, expensive gear, elitism and Lycra,  I just want to bomb around from a to b as easily as possible and have fun in the process.

I had this ancient bike delivered yesterday and have had fun riding it today, the Sturmey Archer gears with an uncomplicated three settings and shining chrome really take me back to childhood cycling,  you could almost smell the Vimto.

The Triumph Traffic Master is great to ride with it's 20 inch wheels being surprisingly stable.

 The unique feature of this bicycle is the ability to fold it in half, whilst not a folding bike in the true sense this feature is great for stowing the bike away or for when in transit.

I have dated the bike to being made in Nottingham in January 1980, one of the first bikes of the Eighties, if you need to date your retro Raleigh or Triumph this is a great resource :http://www.jaysmarine.com/TH_raleigh_serials.html#19731982

At 31 this bike is still going strong and hopefully this will be the start of a beautiful relationship

What is Time?

What is time?  No one is really sure; we measure it in years, months, days hours and seconds, time is also motion and we measure speed in miles per hour.

We are slaves to time, it dictates when we sleep, wake, eat and work, we live our lives swept up in the whirls and eddies of a relentless river that is our creator and will be our destroyer when worn out by time our bodies die and are spat out.

We live our lives surfing on the record stylus of the present as it carves its way through time.  Time is a river which flows from it's source, the singularity of the big bang at the galactic centre.  As the universe expands so doe’s time, in a sense our ancestors are still back there, they’re just closer to the big bang than we are.

Personal Perception of Time

Our perception of time seems to speed up as we grow older, is this because the heart rate slows? Or is it a matter of comparison.  Imagine you have five coins stacked on a table, take a coin and hold it in your hand, it seems a large amount.  Now imagine one hundred coins on the table, the coin in your hand now seems a small amount compared with the number of years we have hoarded away.

Sit still and you are aware of the passing of time as the present becomes the past which only exists in memory, move through the world and you are conscious of moving through not only space but time.  Time has an effect on inanimate objects, a mountain will be worn away to a stone which in turn will be worn away to a grain of sand.

Imagine you are on a train passing stations crowded with people, minutes pass and you can no longer see the people, but they are still there, you’re just further down the line.  Our lives are overlapping lengths of string weaved together to make one big rope, all parts exist but only the present part of our small string can be experienced.  Before our birth billions of years passed without our knowledge and when our string runs out billions more will pass unknown.  But our small string of existence will still be part of time.

Time is Relative

Time is relative, that is relative to the observer, the closer we get to the speed of light the slower time would be if seen by a stationary observer, if I jumped in a rocket and was viewed from a telescope on earth, I would appear to be in slow motion, even though my experience of time would be normal.  I would also arrive back on earth younger than if I had stayed.

Time Travel

To navigate the emptiness of space between solar systems we have to travel close to the speed of light if we want to make the trip within a lifetime, we don’t presently have the technology to do this but when we do the passage of time experienced by an interstellar traveller would be like time travel to someone who was earth bound, fifty years on earth could seem but a year to the traveler.

There is another shortcut to the stars or through time, remember the analogy that time is a river, with whirls and eddies, if these eddies were worm holes through time and space it would be possible to pass through one and travel though time or across vast distances.

The End of Time

With time flowing outwards in an expanding Universe where is time heading?  If expansion is infinite then time is infinite, however if the universe slows and then contracts how will we experience time if time starts to run backwards?   


Time can be stretched and bent by large objects of mass as a pebble stretches the skin of a drum.

At every centre of a galaxy sits a dark eater of worlds called a black hole that consume not only space but time.  If the space time we existed in got caught in the massive gravitational pull then time would be stretched and accelerated as it got sucked towards the singularity, how would we experience the passage of time if we could live to tell the tale?

Lost Iron Age Sites of Hampshire

There’s an old saying that nothing is truly lost just forgotten. It is conventional wisdom that the pre-roman Iron Age civilisation left no trace in the gravel basins of south east England.  No mysterious Stonehenge’s, nor colossal Avebury’s.  

But is this true?

Many early structures are made of stone, the single cell Norman churches were often built on Saxon structures that in turn were built on Iron Age sites.  What were the Iron Age sites like and did they like their usurpers use stone?  Churches often sit on prominent sites such as hilltops and mounds even on a mound on a hilltop.  A common feature of this mound is that is circular and the church has been built in the centre, claiming ownership of the site.  

Often ancient yews are planted in a circle around the church this can be found at St Swithins, at Nately Scures near Hook.  It is reported by Victorians renovating the church at Twyford that they found a ‘ring of druid stones’ at the base of the tower.  At Farnborough the church sits on a circular mound outside it’s lynch gate stands large flat stones piled upon each other, they were used by churchgoers to mount horses but they probably predate the church by millennia.

At Spratt’s Hatch Lane near Dogmersfield a procession of large standing stones lead down to the Island at Tundry Pond, many believe that they are old parish markers connected to the monastic settlement on the Island; these stones are huge and are more like the stones in an avenue than boundary markers.

What I have just written is all personal hearsay and speculation, I am not an archaeologist or a historian but there is I feel, evidence that Iron Age civilisation did leave a mark on this corner of the Thames Valley, Only to be covered by the conquering civilisation and organised religion.

Nothing is truly lost only forgotten.