The park was opened in 1983, created artificially as a requirement on the back of extensive mining in the area that had been undertaken over the previous decade. The lake was filled with clean water and nearly half a million plants and trees were put in.

After meeting up by the lake with our friends and one of their friends we all set off along one of the trails in the area. We picked the sculpture trail as it was one of the shorter ones and we were mindful of still a long drive back home to follow on. The trail through the country park was nice, taking us up some reasonably easy-to-climb hills and granting us views of the Rother Valley from their heights. Along the way, as the name implies, we happened upon the sculptures, these being wooden posts with various carvings in their faces.

As the photos from along the sculpture trail show, the landscapes were lovely, bringing to mind imagery of a Windows XP desktop background.

Carrie came across as very personable, perfectly happy to talk to anyone who came up and asked, even posing for photos with passersby.

I wasn’t the only person standing around and gawping at the sight of a television personality in the flesh although I may have been one of the few trying to catch details of the camera being handled by the operator. I’m very much more a still photography sort of person but video work still holds an interest as many of the setup principles are the same, of course.

To be honest, nothing really did. The shops along Castle Road aren’t really our sort of thing, with perhaps the exception of Pie & Vinyl (where you can eat pie and buy old vinyl) but it’s a cramped place that can be busy at the best of times and a bright, sunny day with hundreds of people milling about in the vicinity is not the best of times for a casual browser. So while the shops didn’t entice us to enter and the stalls didn’t wow us with their offerings we contented ourselves with some people-watching and event-photographing. There was plenty to see and buy and we saw plenty of business taking place so there’s definitely an attraction to the Castle Road fair for many people.

Photographs taken during a stroll down the road then an amble back up it now follow. I don’t tend to have anything specific in mind when I’m taking photos at events like this; it’s mostly just a capture people going about their day thing to get a feel for the atmosphere without worrying about overloading it all with some deep artistic explanation of the shot.

An iconic sight along Castle Road is the Tudor-style but definitely not Tudor clock tower. The Ernest Smith Clock Tower – if you look at the clock face you can see it has letters instead of numbers – only actually dates from 1903.

Every city has its claims to fame and Castle Road can count one of Portsmouth’s claims as its very own as it was the birthplace of the actor Peter Sellers, a fact you’ll see identified on a blue plaque. Sellers and his family spent the first decade of his life in Portsmouth and at only two weeks of age he appeared on stage in Albert Road’s King’s Theatre.

After we’d passed along Castle Road’s length once and had a quick look around Old Portsmouth and Southsea seafront we came back through the vintage fair still taking place while a musician was now entertaining visitors. I know that there were multiple entertainers during the couple of days over which this fair took place but I don’t know who this man was nor can I remember what sort of music he was playing, but the photos seem to indicate the crowd enjoyed it.

In May 2013 we visited Manor Farm because my sister-in-law wanted to take my niece there and wanted some company. So she, her daughter, her parents, my wife, and I all drove there and proceeded to have a lovely day in the sunshine, enjoying as a group the farm animals outside and my very young niece’s reactions to them, then just my wife and me heading to the wartime house and a nearby church for a look inside them.

We started at the farm area of Manor Farm, and, as the name might lead you to suspect, the animals there were all the typical ones you’d find on a farm: cows, sheep, pigs, horses, goats, hens, rabbits. Okay, I don’t know what sort of farms have rabbits either but just go with it. Everyone likes bunnies, don’t they? Actually, pigs are some of my wife’s favourite animals – it’s an intelligence thing – and there were plenty of breeds of those so she was happy.

Manor Farm opened to the public in 1984 after purchase by Hampshire county council in the 1970s but its history is a lot older. A church was originally built around this area in the thirteenth century and various farms and buildings would have grown up around it soon after. The farmhouse building that can be visited as part of the wartime house at Manor Farm dates to the fifteenth century.

The living museum experience on the site is in the form of the fifteenth century farmhouse that shows what farm life in a house in the 1940s would have been like. We do like seeing these snapshots in time in places like this; all the various objects in situ and a genuine sense of everyday life.

Close to Manor Farm was St Bartholomew’s Church so we had to take a wander inside this small building too. The church was originally built in the thirteenth century as the Church of All Saints but when a new, larger church was built in the nineteenth century to serve the same congregation further away this church was rededicated. Norman and Georgian architectural elements can be seen inside and we found the church to be small but perfectly pleasant and a nice cool escape from the warmth outside.

There was more to see and do on the day of our visit and more has been added since so I’d say it’s well worth a visit. It’s probably a very nice day out for families with small children, but as an adult couple there was enough of interest for us to enjoy it too.