"After the Lord Mayor's Show comes the dustcart"

After the Harvest Festival and Supper comes the clean-up. So that is what Christine, Kath, Peter and I spent the morning doing, and now the Village Hall is spotless and shiny again. While we were there a couple turned up in their car and asked if they could leave it on 'the lot' while they went to see the church. (This gave us a clue as to where they came from.) So we said yes, of course, and I went to my car to fetch the church key. We have a key notice, but 3 of the 4 keyholders were cleaning the village hall and the other one is in America enjoying a New England fall, so they wouldn't have had any luck if they had gone looking.

Anyway, it turns out that he is a direct descendant of Stephen Gibbons who lived at Vale Farm in the middle of the 19th century, was Lord Yarborough's agent, and whose memorial (containing a maths mistake about his age) is in the church on the south wall of the nave. Three of Stephen Gibbons' sons emigrated ending up in Alberta where they farmed in an area not dissimilar to the Lincolnshire Wolds. According to Wikipedia "Gibbons is a town in central Alberta, Canada. It is located on Highway 28A, 37 km (23 miles) north-east of Edmonton. The town was named for William R. Gibbons who settled in the area and was created from the merger of two smaller communities: Astleyville and Battenburg. Gibbons is situated on the southern banks of the Sturgeon River which is a major tributary of the North Saskatchewan River."

The church apparently is a smaller, but clearly modelled upon Swallow's.

When they had finished looking at the church, I directed them to Vale Farm where I hope Basil gave them a warm welcome, though I warned them that Joyce can be a bit suspicious of strangers.