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The four images above, taken on 8 January, are the same views as those in my very first entry (This is Home.. 14 November 2009.)

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The ash tree just to the right of our gate as you look in

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Down-river from the bridge.

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From our back door

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The house from the mill along the bank of the mill pond.

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The beech trees above the house and the mill pond and which border Cayley's Avenue (see below).

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The view up the road from our gate with the entrance to Cayley's Avenue on the right

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Cayley's Avenue.

We know this avenue as 'Cayley's Avenue' because, back in the early 1970's when Sue and I moved here, Beatrice, and her daughter Amanda Cayley owned Coolmore House, to which the avenue leads.

By this logic it should, today, be known as Mellon's Avenue. (Yes, yes he of the builders in South Africa and the Voice Newspapers, amongst other things).

As you turn off the road, from where this shot was taken, onto Cayley's (or Mellon's) Avenue you pass above our house and the mill pond before arriving at what was formerly John and Annie Gaffney's house, off whom we bought the mill, which is today occupied by our nearest neighbour, Ollie.

On another few yards and you pass David (son of John) Gaffney's house.

And then you pass no further as the avenue's new owner has erected a barrier worthy of the Belfast peace-line in the 1970's or Gaza today.
This barrier probably breaches a right-of-way and certainly every tenet of neighbourhood and neighbourliness.
But then, you cannot choose your neighbours, can you?

But we prefer happy memories, so it will always be Cayley's Avenue to us.

And it meant (means) many things to our family: the start (or end) of many and many a walk; the natural playground of our children; the inspiration for an oft told story about squirells and nuts, invented by Sue; the quick constitutional for the dogs (and cats); a source of windfall firewood that even tiny children were coaxed to drag back home; the avenue up which the children rode to a simple cross-country course in the woods; the pathway to freedom taken by the children early one summer's morning after they had concluded that our parenting was not up to scratch and decided they should 'run away'!
But above all, it led to the 'umbrella tree' beneath which we have innumerable photographs of family and friends.
(I'll show it to you another day and I'm sure we must have some pictures of it in the snow).

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The view down Brede Thomas's field from the bridge. Brede is our neighbour on our other side (and the far side of our river). - There's another (happy) story for the telling, yet another day!!


As I write this, Sunday, Sue has set-off for Kilkenny City to attend a weather crisis-management meeting.
Yes, for any reader who is not familiar with Ireland, snow which settles, throws Ireland into crisis!

But as I've said, probably once too often, that's another story!

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