What a wild couple of weeks it’s been! As expected, the first two weeks back at school have been utterly manic. Both Wednesdays we’ve had ‘visitors’ (i.e. inspectors) at the school – the first a ‘challenge partner’ visit, which is supposed to function as a practice OFSTED inspection, and the second a review by our CEO. At the same time, we were finishing our reports, I was completing our Primary Geography Quality Mark application, we had to moderate the children’s writing out in Crayford on Thursday and we had our final assessment week in year 6. It’s led to very long school days and a very tired me!

As usual, we’ve broken it up with some nice activities though. Last Saturday we caught the train down to Eynsford and visited the Lullingstone Roman Villa, which was pretty spectacular! Even the trip there was beautiful, walking up from the station through fields of wildflowers until we reached the building in the trees by a stream. It is thought the villa was built around AD 100 and it is amazingly well preserved, with original mosaics and some paintings still intact. English Heritage had created an exhibition all around the ruins themselves, and it was a fantastic place to visit.

From the Roman Villa, we walked up the road through the Lullingstone Viaduct, a beautiful railway bridge still in use, and into Eynsford. The stream widened into a little river through the town and it seemed like everyone was picnicking there, with children paddling in the water. We were starving at this stage so we headed up the road to a pub and got a table in the garden out the back. I had scampi and chips and Peter had a huge lamb shank in mash. It was great food, and a lovely spot to sit for a while enjoying the warm weather. Once we’d eaten, we headed up the road to Eynsford Castle. This was a fairly basic example of an ‘enclosure castle’ with just a huge wall surrounding a little keep – still hugely impressive though, especially as the majority of the wall is still standing! Considering it was built in the 1080s, it’s done pretty well! We had a wander around but decided to head back when a large group of people entered the site.

From the castle, we walked back through town and checked out the church before having a look at train timings and realising we could either head to the station at that point or have to wait another hour. We decided to go home and powerwalked our way back up the hill to the station.

On Sunday I had to do a bit of work to finish off the PGQM application in order to submit it on Thursday, but we made up for that by having a lovely picnic in the park in the afternoon – the warm weather has been absolutely delightful!

While work was absolutely crazy this week, it’s downhill from here and we now have Bigfoot Festival to look forward to!