In the many years that I have lived in Dereham, I have often seen a sign posting the way towards something called The Dereham Windmill. This has always troubled me firstly because I have never heard anything locally about The Dereham Windmill and because I have never seen any sign of it from the road despite always trying to glimpse a peek so one day the other week, before HC's holiday began, I decided to take Emilie in the push-chair and try to track down this long sought after local attraction. This is the forested road that supposedly points the way to The Windmill. I took this photo because walking down here reminded me of a Stephen King story I once read about a woman who is always trying to take short-cuts whilst travelling from A to B and ends up taking the narrator through dark, woody roads in which fearsome and scary creatures seem to lurk beyond the shadows. This path doesn't look that menacing during the day but you can well imagine that as dusk approaches, suddenly your imagination might go into over-drive. It also looks to me like a road that might lead you somewhere nasty....
Finally, we reached our final destination, The Dereham Windmill, and it is fair to say that I was less than imprssed seeing as how I had been curious about this local "attraction" for several years now and had quite built up my anticipation. Luckily Emilie had long since fallen asleep so could conceal her disappointment. I however was not so lucky and experienced feelings of "Is that it?" and "Well, that was worth it, wasn't it?"It's not even as though it gets any better from the other side. In fact, it is fair to say that our local Dereham Windmill was something of a let-down on all fronts! Glad I waited all this time to see it...not!
These last couple of images are taken of Dereham's abandoned Railway which no longer operates a passenger service except for on certain weekends during the summer, when a steam powered locomative runs tourists up and down the line. From the front, it all looks quite nice and polished and the Railway Station has all been made quite pretty with an old-fashioned feel and a new lick of paint but I thought it might be nice to also show what lies behind the pretty facade and what can be seen if you approach the Station from the other side....suddenly, it all doesn't look quite so swish does it? I also have it on good authority that the carriage pictured below does indeed stink of piss and vinegar and that it has become a local hang-out for wino's, bums and drop-outs from society of which there are several in sleepy Dereham because after all, who would really want to live here by choice? Because it is difficult to see from the picture, I should point out that all the windows in the carriage have been put in and that someone has scrawled some local colour illegible graffiti down the side presumably in an attempt to educate the masses or just to pass themselves off as the next Banksy perhaps...
Finally, this is the old Mill-House building, some of which has been converted to housing. There are plans to convert the rest to luxury studio apartments at some stage but presumably they (whoever "they" are) have run out of money and I pity the fool who gets left with the apartment that juts out towards the road. Especially if we get another bad storm like the one which ended Sir Michael Fish's career so cruelly. As you can see, the same graffiti artist has been at work here too, which is convienient as this building locates just behind the Station; either that or another impoverished and under-deprived hoody lurks the dark streets of this quiet market town. And that would just be unthinkable wouldn't it? Especially seeing as how we have only just cleared out the Polish because and I quote, "They ain't be from arund here, is they?"
