The second half of 2026 already. I almost can’t believe where the time has gone this year.
July ended up being more of what I would have described as a typical summer month for me during the years just before Covid, when I was beginning to work as a tourist guide.
More time at home, with a few shorter jobs that seemed to require an immense number of emails and other messages to organise. What was not typical, was the weather!
Usually when planning tours, whether in a town or city, or out in the countryside, if I’m constantly checking the weather, it’s to see if it’s going to be wet, cold or windy. It seemed very strange to be in constant contact with a client about a walk that I had arranged, regarding how we would cope if the weather was too hot. At what point would we cancel the walk due to the heat?
In the end, the walk was fine. It was a very warm week (well hot really), but it wasn’t the hottest week that we have had. We were also starting the walk very early (8:45), I had shortened the walk from the original brief of 9 miles, to about 6.5, and a lot of the walk was through areas of woodland with no particularly big ascents and descents. About three quarter of the way round the walk, we had arranged to have a refreshment break at the Anchor Inn in Leek Wooton, a very pretty Warwickshire Village, and from there it was only a shortish walk back to the hotel for a buffet lunch.
Worrying about how hot the weather was ended up being quite a theme for July.
At the beginning of the month I was still in the Cotswolds for the last few days of a garden tour. The gardens were lovely, but for all of them, the biggest challenge was whether to water, how much to water and with the ground incredibly dry, even weeding was quite difficult. My garden at home is really suffering this summer but it’s interesting to see which plants cope with the dry weather.
The only other longish trip away was in the South Downs, acting largely as a Tour Manager for a group vising the area on a Discover More Tour of West Sussex. The tour was a mixture of a little bit of countryside walking to get up onto the South Downs, visiting an RSPB nature reserve and more conventional sightseeing in villages and big sites such as Parham House, an Elizabethen Manor House, and Bignor Roman Villa with it’s amazing mosaics.
As a tour manager a lot of my role was to manage the logistics of the tour as well as sharing a bit of general background knowledge regarding the history and geology of the area. Part of being a Blue Badge Guide is that we have to study the whole of the UK under various general themes including history, countryside, architecture and industry amongst other things. This means that wherever we are with clients there are general themes that we can talk about as well as other things more specific to the area. For me it was really interesting to compare the building materials used in the South Downs, flint and brick, and a lot of timber framed buildings compared with some other areas of the country such as the Cotswolds, where the predominant material is limestone.
At a networking event in the middle of the month, run by the Coventry & Warwickshire Chamber of Commerce I was asked what sort of tours I did and in many ways, the work I had in July just about covered the full range.
As well as the couple of longer tours, I had a site tour – Warwick Castle; a countryside walk starting from Chesford Grange a hotel near Kenilworth for a networking event, and a tour of Coventry City centre for a group of friends from Belgian who were visiting the city for the first time.
In between, there was a bit of catching up on admin tasks, including finally asking someone to help me to sort out my photos.
The photo is one I took of a cottage in Leek Wooton. The style of building is sometimes known as an ‘Eyebrow Cottage’ as the thatch above the dormer window is a bit like the shape of an eyebrow.