The Land of Milk and Honey

This is Rose, she is related to Deadloggosaurus, but is a much more modern descendant. She’s also considerably more benevolent than Deadloggosaurus, and is actually the gateway to the Land of Milk and Honey. You can find her on Holmbury Hill. The way to gain entrance is to present Rose with a jar of honey. If your offering is deemed acceptably delicious enough (tip: only present her with raw, organic, glyphosate-free honey), you will magically get pulled through to the other side. Don’t worry if you think you won’t fit through her gateway mouth, the magic will take care of that. You won’t get a scratch or a splinter, I swear. You should know that it’s only worth bothering to have this adventure if you are a dairy lover, as literally everything on the other side is made of it. Mountains of Stilton, sofas of brie, fountains of chocolate milk, etc., etc.

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The Reader in the Pod

There are lots of kooky tellybox shows which say that aliens built our wonders like the pyramids and Stonehenge and whatnot. To be honest, I think they are probably right because this pod fell from the sky a very long time ago, and once contained millions and millions of books and their Reader.  The Reader who lived and traveled in the pod came from a star system full of light and stories. Her planet had fourteen suns, although they were smaller than our own. The suns were different colours and traced patterns across the sky so that the whole day was kind of like a rainbow. Not too bright though, due to their smaller size, and the fact that they were pastel coloured. As beautiful as the light show sky was, the Reader sometimes found it annoying, as not all of the colours were the best to read by. So one

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Tree crisps

These are called tree crisps and are a very rare find indeed. In fact, they’re so rare that I had to consult my Woodland Trust app to even know what they are. According to the app, tree crisps (or arbores calamistratus to use their proper name) generally taste of salt and vinegar. However, there are some varieties growing in the West Country which taste like prawn cocktail, and in extremely rare occasions in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, you may find tomato ketchup flavoured ones. I don’t know about that though, it sounds a bit far fetched to me, but then again, so does deep frying a pizza. The reason tree crisps are so rare is because they only appear to hungry travellers who habitually kiss trees. I wasn’t actually hungry as it goes: the tree mistook my fannying about taking random photos of Serious Pig rosemary cheese balls as a

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The wizard’s tombstone

This is known locally as The Wizard’s Tombstone, because that’s actually what it is. It’s an interdimensional marker which blends in by taking the form of a common warning sign. So in this dimension it looks like a traffic cone, but in another it would look like something quite different. I can’t help you imagine what, as I am from this dimension and I am not sure what common warning markers look like in other dimensions. Any attempt I make at a description would likely be hopelessly inaccurate. Let’s think about it a little. Warning markers in this dimension come in a wide variety of types: prickly spines, too good to be true handsome types, unseasonably yellowing leaves, top marks on everything, bottom marks on everything, and switching cat tails. So a warning marker elsewhere could be anything from a pebble to a peach to a piranha. The problem with warning

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Here lies Trouble

Trouble was born in 1742 and died in 1806 by an arrow from her very own bow. She wasn’t born Trouble, you understand, that was just what she made of it after all was said and done. I know the plaque says 2004-2018 – the engraver got it wrong. That’s because they didn’t have this story to reference as they made it. I shall go back to Black Down with a sticker to correct it one of these days. Anyway, Trouble was a maiden of lowly birth, neglected by her parents and hence thoroughly resourceful from age 5. She grew into the type of woman who, had she been born in contemporary times, could make quite a successful living delivering bushcraft courses. But no one paid for things like that back then, so she just used her skills to survive as a genuinely free and liberated eighteenth century lady-lad. Trouble lived

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