That news story about Bourton-on-the-Water, which provided a recent Headline of the Day, was everywhere. Not least, it provided liberal Bluesky with a target for the day's Two Minutes Hate.
But Bourton-on-the-Water put me in mind of a book I read at primary school. And a big of googling showed that I'm not the only one with that memory. Over to Mumsnet:
I read this book at primary school, when it was at the back of a dusty "free reading" cupboard and would love to find it again.
The story is, a group of children are out on holiday by themselves and someone offers to drop them off at an unknown destination so they can play at being explorers. They make their own names up for the towns they pass through and draw up maps etc. After a while they decide to pretend the "natives" are hostile and travel at night and/or hide in trees whenever someone comes past. One of the towns they went through they named "Million Bridges" At the end of the book we discover they've been walking through the Cotswolds (so I assume it was really Bourton on the Water or somewhere). ...
Anyone have the least idea what I'm talking about?
I remember it as "Hundred Bridges" or "Thousand Bridges", and am sure it did turn out to be Bourton-on-the-Water at the end of the story, but this is clearly the same book.
What I now wonder, given that our class library was also housed in a cupboard, is whether the writer was a fellow pupil at the old Boxmoor Primary School in St John's Road.
But what was the book called and who wrote it?
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