Roman Town

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  • Alcester’s Gold Postbox

    To honour the achievements of British gold medallist’s at the 2012 Summer Olympics and Paralympics, a number of post boxes in their respective hometowns throughout the United Kingdom were repainted gold. And if you visit the high street you will notice Alcester has it very own golden post box – this is thanks to Alcester local Nick Skelton winning the top prize in the Team Show Jumping event. But this isn’t the only tribute to Nick’s achievement – Nicks birthplace of Bedworth also has its very own Gold painted post box after hundreds of residents there backed a Facebook campaign to mark the success.

    Nick won gold on the sixth of August. The photo below was taken by me two days later which tells you the Royal Mail got to work very quickly!

    The post box is a Type-C oval pillar box and was originally located just outside the Post Office at the bottom of the High Street. The Post Office has since moved and so has the box, but only a couple of metres closer to the road.

    Alcester's Gold Postbox
    Alcester’s Gold Postbox in 2012

    Picture taken on Tuesday the 8th of August 2012

  • Alcester at Christmas

    From the summer bunting to the Christmas lights – Alcester always makes an effort with its High Street. Here are a few photo’s I took while walking around the town at night over the Christmas period – unfortunately the conditions were not right for the drone to fly up, maybe next year!

    Butter Street
    Butter Street
    High Street
    High Street
    St Nicholas Church
    Malt Mill Lane
    High Street
    Hopkins Precinct
    St Nicholas Church
    High Street
    Globe Roundabout
    Waitrose Car Park
    Market Place tuery
    A mixture of pictures taken around Alcester at Christmas time in 2024

  • Broadway Tower

    Following on from the earlier footage from Northleach we stopped off at Broadway Tower to take in the winter sunset. Some glorious shots here.

    Broadway Tower from above
    Broadway from Broadway Tower

  • Northleach

    A short visit to the Cotswolds market town of Northleach over the Christmas period. Managed to take the drone up to take some aerial shots of the town. What a day to do it on – glorious winter sun!

    Northleach from above

  • Elmley Castle & Bredon Hill walk

    Parsons Folly at Bredon Hill

    The weather was a little drier yesterday so we decided to walk Bredon Hill in Worcestershire.

    Parking the car at Elmley Castle (there used to be a castle there) we stopped off at the local pub, the Queen Elizabeth, for a coffee and a mince pie. This is a lovely little place with an old English countryside feel to it. Wood, stone, thick carpet etc – things I like about an English pub. And it’s community owned.

    I’m going to have to do this walk properly, with a proper planned route as I just can’t accurately describe where we went! Unfortunately I only captured the walk on my Garmin at the summit so before that my retelling won’t be up to scratch, I’m afraid.

    The paths were quite muddy as you’d expect and there were very strong gusts blowing as we were reaching the north side of the hill. The weather did actually turn up there and so we were pelted with hail. Thankfully my new coat was up for the job.

    The skies cleared southwards on the horizon once we’d walked past the Parsons Folly.

    Malvern Hills from Bredon Hill

    And now for the embarrassing part.. We didn’t take the turning we should have to do the loop and ended up in Westmancote! The loop had now increased in size and a journey back along the road would be 8.5 miles! And at 3pm this just wasn’t doable. And with no buses on a Sunday we were stuck – enter Uber. Thankfully this service is now operating in the area so we were taken back to the car at Elmley Castle. A small price to pay for a big mistake I say.

    A quick debrief in the Queen Elizabeth pub over a tea and what was one of the best homemade sausage rolls I’ve ever eaten. Home. Relief.

    Elmley Castle with Christmas lights

  • Winter solstice sunrise

    Today is the shortest day of the year here in the Northern Hemisphere. Tonight will be the longest night and from tomorrow the day’s will get longer until June when they start fading away, slow, again.

    I’ve been meaning to capture a sunrise over the town for a while so I took the opportunity to get up early to do so. The forecast for the actual solstice day itself was overcast so this was the next best thing… Enjoy

    Aerial photo of Alcester High Street on the morning of the 20th of December 2024
    Sunrise over Oversley Wood on the morning of the 20th of December 2024

  • Alcester Solstice Sunrise (almost)

  • Moorfield road fallen tree

    Fallen tree
    Fallen tree at the back of Waitrose, Alcester

    Storm Darragh has been causing widespread damage to the UK this weekend. This old tree at the back of Waitrose an unfortunate casualty of mother nature.

  • Uploading photosphere images to Google Maps with a custom location

    I’ve been contributing photosphere images to Google Maps ever since the Google Nexus phones. The ability to post a photosphere was baked into the Photo’s app on Android and also through Google Maps itself. This was great as you could upload a 360 photo at a given co-ordinate. Google Maps users could drop the little stick man on a blue dot and view the 360 photo. Fast forward a few years (I can’t remember exactly when) and it seemed as though Google want to push people to uploading images under the umbrella of a “place”, rather than a co-ordinate. I can understand from their perspective they don’t want blue dots all over the map, rather to have images placed under a “place”. The problem with that is there are some circumstances where the place is too big an area – such as a National Park – my picture could be taken miles away from the “place” located on Google Maps.

    Now, for a few years there was a solution to this. An official solution, in fact. You could import your picture into the Google Street View app and upload it from there.. until the app was recently sunsetted by Google.

    So, imagine my disappointment when all of this was taken away – I had to find a solution.

    Enter PhotoSphereStudio – https://maps.moomoo.me

    I found this while Googling the subject (from this reddit post)

    You simply sign-in to your Google account, upload your photosphere image and upload. Wait a few minutes for the image to appear on Google Maps and your done. Simple! Though the one thing I noticed is the title of the image was something like “Unknown location” as it was not associated to a place – but thankfully the developers of this application have solved this – simply go to the advanced options at the bottom of the page and enter the placeId yourself (there’s a link to search for it). And just like that you can upload photosphere images to Google Maps the classic way.

  • Hello World

    Hello and welcome to the Roman Town blog/web site. If you’re wondering why “Roman Town”, well, my home town of Alcester is a Roman Town. It’s a place I grew up in and my where my family has called home for many years.

    I’m looking forward to showing you things I find interesting, history research (including family tree and local history) and photos.

    So, let’s start with a photo. Here’s one I took recently.

    Sunset over Alcester High Street
    Sunset over Alcester High Street