Tag: Handsworth

Hawthorns to the House Trigging

This is my second failed attempt at the Pillar in the golf course, which lies about 100m beyond the wall, above. This time, it was a Sunday around 8:15 am but still too late as the greens were crawling with maintenance dudes.

Continuing down the hill from there, I am pretty sure my next mark in the wall is obscured behind all that shrubbery. I opted to turn around here but the cemetery across the road was stunning:

Back up the Birmingham Road across from where Park Lane meets it, I picked off a decent cut mark in an old building:

Then, is was mostly a straight dash down to the High Street and homeward except I new of one intermediate stop to do…

I’ve looked this structure up before but this was my best excuse to prowl around it. It is listed as Arch Lodge on my database (there’s a Rivet on its benchmark) and was one of the gates to Sandwell Hall, a stately pile demolished in 1928, long before the motorway over the house and bisecting this roundabout was even conceived.

This side of the roundabout interior is something like a park and fairly clean largely due to the hazardous crossing. I spotted a fox and several wrens during my short stay.

There were a couple of misses from there and then I hung up the database to focus on building up a sweat before reaching the far end of the street market at St Mike and the Angels Catholic Church.

This was probably the door to the vicar’s lodge, but hiding away behing a rain drain pipe (I almost typed ‘Pope’) is the last Cut Mark of the day.

The Farcroft, Handsworth, Birmingham

Pub #2449:

A short, black gent about my age and wearing a tour t-shirt of an obscure psychedelic band from the early 70’s paced slowly and somewhat aimlessly a few pool cue lengths from the snooker table at the Farcroft.  Mental patient, I thought, as I got a beer then tried not to bump into him on my way to a table.  The pair shooting when I came in eventually potted the last ball and he sped over to rack things for his go.

I looked up a couple minutes later and the billiards table was half empty.  Our hero sank the ball he was shooting at, shifted slightly as the cue ball rolled to a halt near him and, almost without looking, he banked off three cushions to lightly tap his remaining red ball into a pocket from behind the yellow ones blockading it from a direct shot.  Hustler, I reckon, because after easily potting the black ball and starting the next rack I caught his eye just before he sloppily missed two easy shots — the only time this happened in front of me.