The people of Sandy in Bedfordshire must be heartily sick of the joke about sandy beds (Sandy, Beds. ) or perhaps we caught the town on a bad day, but when we visited everyone seemed a little dispirited and gloomy, and we had a rather unfortunate cup of coffee experience when were in need or a really good cup of coffee experience after a very long walk. These days there is no excuse for bad coffee… but maybe we were just unlucky.
We strolled around the town looking for somewhere to sit and have our sandwiches, and eventually found a bench by the River Ivel. There have been people living in these parts since a couple of hundred years before the Romans came and built a settlement and staging post here. The actual name is easy to understand if you realise that an ‘ee’ sound on the end of a name often means ‘island’, so Sandy was Sand Island.
We found the juxtaposition of these signs quite amusing
The Maharajah of Sandy – apparently a great place to eat, but we had our sandwiches…
The lovely looking pub I’ve used as my featured image is named after William Peel VC; he was the third son of the Prime Minister, Robert Peel, and he served in the Crimean War and was awarded the Victoria Cross for bravery. He also fought at the battle of Inkerman, and in India during the uprisings known as the Indian Mutiny, but he died not from battle but from smallpox at the age of only thirty-three in Kanpur.
Lois Elsden 