A visit to Bottengoms

Beguiling Bottengoms

A couple of weekends ago I was feeling a bit meh, so I decided what I needed was a little adventure.  A visit to Bottengoms, home of the distinguished writer Ronnie Blythe, who died aged 100 in 2023, would be just the thing to lift my spirits. 

And the perfect company for such a visit would be Moss!

Ronnie Blythe is a great inspiration to me.  I admire the fact that, having to leave school aged fourteen in order to earn a living, he was more or less entirely self-taught.

 As well as writing some 41 books, he also wrote a weekly column for the Church Times.

He wrote his column, entitled Word from Wormingford, on Mondays; edited it on Tuesdays; posted it, and it was published on Fridays.  Which is something I find both deeply practical and enchanting.

Bottengoms is notoriously difficult to find; yet Moss doesn’t mind one bit when we get a little lost.

She certainly doesn’t moan when we come across a sign that reads, Private Keep Out, and I climb over it.  Nor does she mind that, when we finally reach Bottengoms, I decide that all I want to do is sit on the doorstep of my hero, pour myself a cup of tea from my flask, and I bask in the delight of seeing the views that he saw and wrote about so beautifully.

I am deeply in awe of Ronnie Blythe’s prodigious talent - Moss is not!   

All she wants to do is bomb around in the garden enjoying herself. I can only hope that Ronnie Blythe would have been amused by her irreverence.  

Had she chased one of his beloved cats, it would have been quite a different story …

AJK