Amersham; Sunday, 25 June, 2023

Thankfully the person in the room above was having a bit of a lie in this morning, so instead it was the over enthusiastic shouting of people in the courtyard instead that woke me up at 07:30, so I still ended up having a relatively early shower and breakfast.

After checking out from the hotel I headed up to the railway station. I had intended on catching the bus up the hill – given it’s a 1¼ mile hike uphill all the way – but the live info showed it was running late enough to risk missing the train, so instead I slogged up the hill in the rapidly warming day, arriving at the station with about 5 minutes to spare before my train and with no sign of the bus having gone past me.

I caught the train one stop down the line to the next village of Great Missenden. This is a picturesque small Chiltern Village, made up pretty much of just two streets – the main street and church street leading from the centre of town up to the church of St Peter and Paul on a hill outside the village centre. It would be unremarkable if it wasn’t for one resident who spent the last, and arguably most productive 36 years of his life working from a small hut in his garden creating the books the certainly defined my childhood any many generations more. From Charlie and the Chocolate Factory through the BFG and Matilda to The Twits and Fantastic Mr Fox – Roald Dahl made Great Missenden synonymous with him, even using places in the village as settings for his books.

Today in the centre of town a collection of buildings have been converted into the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre and that was my main stop of the day, to have a look around the museum, including, taken down from it’s original location and reconstructed inside the museum, the writing hut where so many of those characters first made it onto the yellow lined paper that he wrote on.

Having looked round the museum I walked the half mile or so up to the parish church and over to the churchyard where Dhal is buried in a simple grave, with a small memorial of a tree wrapped around by a bench with five seats, one for each of his children and step children and a passage from the Giraffe the Pelly and Me carved into the stone - We have tears in our eyes; As we wave our goodbyes; We so loved being with you, we three. So please now and then; Come and see us again; The Giraffe and the Pelly and me.

From the graveyard I walked back to the station and caught the train back into Amersham, where once again the buses were suffering delays so I walked back down the hill into town and visited the Church of St Mary the Virgin to have a look around inside.

From the church I walked the short distance over to the town museum, housed in a former Tudor Hall House and telling the history of the town. By the time I’d finished looking round the museum I had pretty much exhausted all of the sights that there are to see in the town and, because those buses were still running with delays, I had just enough time to get back to the hotel, grab my bag and make the bus back up the hill to the station where I was just in time to catch the tube back into London.