As I write with the rain pounding down outside, my glass being currently half full thinks that at least I don’t have to water the garden. But summer it would seem has passed and been traded in for autumn. I even have the BBC weather man’s say-so on that one.

Thing about summer is that if it’s any kind of a summer at all you tend to be out and ‘doing things’ rather than sitting at a computer writing about doing things. So you may be under the impression that not a lot happens in Lymington during the summer based on the extreme paucity of updates to this site. Dear reader, nothing could be further from the truth. Rather than give you a long list of the many attractions, I thought I might go for some of the perhaps less obvious.

The last run of the slam-door trains from Brock to Lymington Town occurred on 22 May. I have to confess I am not a great train freak, I like trains, when necessary I use trains, but when it comes to nostalgia if there is a dry eye in the house, it may well be mine. Unless we are talking steam loco’s. My predominant memory of slam-door trains was going to school and then work from Peckham Rye Station in the days when slam-door was all there was. It often wasn’t an entirely pleasant experience as I’m not sure the then publicly owned British Rail had cleanliness high on it’s list off priorities. So one was careful where one sat and often times couldn’t see out of the grime caked windows.

Off course that wasn’t the case with the ‘Heritage’ line trains, but it’s hard to simply dismiss that many years experience! However it is good to know that there are people who do get misty-eyed about such things and if you want to read about it, go to the second half of Last Slam Door Trains. You can see the Lymington flood defences via YouTube, oh and there’s also some trains on their final journey.

Just to show it’s not all about sailing, the Lymington Arts Festival manifested during June with a remarkable array of events. To give you a particular take on it, I present the write up from Brock College on their adult learners exhibition. Not a bad advert for their courses either Adult Learning News. If you’re maybe a little masochistic and want to see what you missed, the website for the festival is still open for views Lymington Arts Festival.

It would be remiss not to mention the world famous Lymington carnival, so I just did.

Of course the real highlights of the summer are the walks you can do in the surrounding area. Yomping buddy visited a couple of times resulting in the requirement for four new walks, two per weekend. Having done to death the more obvious, and some less obvious walks in the immediate area, I checked Google and came up with some the excellent new-forest-national-park.com. A number of the walks we had already done, but the Matley walk took us into an area we hadn’t previously walked and was most enjoyable, though quite warm on the day.

Becoming emboldened by the experience we sallied forth north of the M27 for our last walk of the summer and yomped around the Fritham walk. The guide says it is popular, and I think it’s true to say that is somewhat understating the case. We got there just in time to park in the overflow car park, although in truth the car parks aren’t exactly epic in scale. Nonetheless it was nothing compared to the number and creativity of cars parked by the time we left. If you want a quiet walk then don’t go on a Bank Holiday weekend. Actually it’s probably safer to keep it outside the holiday season, although if you do the whole 4.5 miles, it’s really only busy at the start and finish as the less dedicated strollers drop off fairly quickly.

So with the leaves on the Liquid Amber in our garden just starting to go a deep red, we poetically bid adieu to summer and look farward to actually having to turn the heating on.