This is the primary school in Temple Grafton, Warwickshire. As you can see it has had a fairly nasty looking extension tacked on to what was a lovely wee building, but no doubt they needed the extra space. When we parked our car nearby it was morning break time and they certainly sounded like a very healthy and noisy bunch of youngsters. The school is across the road from the church, just down the road a few yards.

These houses are called ‘schoolhouses’ and they’re almost right across from the school. They must have originally been for the teachers to live in, they certainly didn’t have far to go when they got up in the morning. As you can see from all the building stuff lying around – one of them is having building work done in it at the moment.

Considering that Temple Grafton is such a small village, there are a lot of different styles of houses, thatched wattle and daub cottages, red brick houses, stone terraces, representing the times they were built in and even 1950s, 60s and 70s houses.

I think this is just about the biggest house I saw there, it’s quite grand looking really and probably beautiful inside, I don’t know about you – but if it was my house it would drive me nuts that it isn’t symmetrical. It doesn’t look as if it has had bits added on to it so I think the builders must just have been rubbish at measuring. Typical, in my experience men still aren’t very good at measuring things.

Temple Grafton is quite hilly and I took this photo from outside the thatched cottages which are in my previous blogpost. We puffed up the hill from the church so we could get a closer look at the houses, they’re a real novelty to us as there isn’t much in the way of thatch in Scotland. There is some heather thatch but I can only think of one roof like that in the whole of Fife. Anyway, as you can see, they have a nice view of the rooftops and the church spire in the middle of the village.

A bit of Shakespeare information outside the church. It says that the church is open every day but I think we must have been there too early.

This is the back view of St Andrew’s Church, I think you’ll agree that it’s a handsome building and I would have thought that people would be queuing up to get married in it, even if it didn’t have the Shakespeare connection.

And that’s all the photos I have of Temple Grafton. I couldn’t see a shop or even a pub in the village, which is a real shame, so many places are losing their community spirit because there’s no place for people to congregate, but the fact that the school seems to be thriving is great, as what with all the cut backs that we’ve been having, small schools have been closed down all over the country. I think the buildings are all fairly typical of Warwickshire and I hope that it gives you a bit of an idea of the place, particularly for Debbie.

If you want a bird’s eye view of the area have a look here. It’s all very rural and if you zoom in on the fields you can often see strange circles and outlines of ancient buildings which have disappeared over hundreds of years. I find things like that fascinating.