In honour of Halloween we decided to do a bit of exploring around a couple of spooky abandoned houses nearby.
These are part of Silverburn Estate, a lovely little park with woods and a walled botanical garden which was gifted to the local council in the seventies on the condition that it ‘should remain forever as a quiet area used for the benefit of the public in general and the people of Leven in particular for nature trails, quiet parkland and organised camping.’
It’s one of our favourite places to go and let the boy run off some energy while we enjoy the beautiful surroundings, but today we decided to venture a little further and seek these beauties out.
We stayed a safe distance away – even without the toddler I would have been too afraid of breaking my neck/meeting a ghostie to try anything stupid. The boy seemed very excited when we told him this was where ghosts live, bellowing ‘Night night, ghosties!’ when we told him they were all asleep because ghosts only come out at night.
(I do realise I ran the possibility of a weeks worth of nightmares and ‘can’t go to sleep, ghosts will get me,’ but he’s obviously made of much stronger stuff than his Mama.)
Venturing even further away from the park area, we came across a small paddock with these in them:
They all had feathers and scraps of paper tied to them, and made us adults fret that something ‘a bit Wicker Man’ had been going on. The boy was fascinated, however.
Turns out that this is some sort of interactive art installation thing, and people are encouraged to add their own decorations to these posts. I think it straddles the line between ‘fun family activity’ and ‘littering’, but we are going to make some paper and string things and return very soon to add them. And help spook the next family that stumbles upon them after watching The Wicker Man once too often.
antooshki 