The Lincolnshire fens have been my home for the last 25 years though even our children born in the house where we live have not really earned the prize of being local. If you do not know the area imagine a landscape as flat as can be, with some trees, but not many; not a place of small and interesting corners or little fields but one of big spaces and skies and few meandering footpaths.

It is two miles to the local primary school, or rather 2.2 miles, the 0.2 being significant in local free transport arrangements when the children (all four of them) were small. But in the school’s 125 year history the right to free transport is a modern invention. For the generations of children brought up in our cottage the way to school was via the Willow Way. This rare thing hereabouts, this public path, connects us to the school and by its arrow like direction shaves a little more than 0.2 from the passage to school. If you walk this path today (and if you do you will only have me for company) you will not pass any willows but in its length a single elder and a fugitive hawthorn.

Our elderly neighbour used to tell of the journey to school, the mishaps on the way, the dawdlings, the soakings, the wild flowers and yes, the willows. The school log books, fortunately preserved from 1876 when the school opened, tell of the absent Postland children, as our area is known. For when there was snow or rain or harvests or a local fair or one of the many measles outbreaks then the Postland children stayed at home. From the tone of the school board records and the frustrations of the headmaster I think the Postland children must have been a rowdy and headstrong lot, at least I like to think so.

I think a lot of those children as I walk the nearly two miles between our cottage and the school each day. The dog is nose into rabbit holes the whole length, unless distracted by a pheasant or partridge. The grasses come waist high and must surely have soaked the five year olds trailing along after the others all those years ago.

Those big skies must still have been there and the wind too, though maybe the willows and hedges gave them shelter from that. The barn owl that seems to track our progress along the path on a winter afternoon, the odd rat surprised to meet us and the hare already travelling fast away as we approach, surely all these featured in the lives of those children.

There is now only one school age child in Postland, ours having long since passed through the system. His journey to school Land Cruiser style misses the Willow Way by 0.2 miles and a good measure of this local being. The Willow Way though does not mourn the passing of the young feet. It is just there, without my fanciful feelings, ready and waiting to share its riches with who ever would like to sample them.

(The Willow Way runs between Shepeau Stow and Queens Bank in South Lincolnshire, UK. The photographs were taken yesterday morning).