Laurel Cottage And The Clints

A Memory of Sunderland.

We used to visit Sunderland when I was a child. Laurel Cottage had an orchard full of daffodils in spring, and whenever I hear Wordsworth's poem I'm taken straight back to the sight of all those daffodils on the corner of Sunderland, going towards Isel. Down the road from the cottage was a barbed wire fence, with dead animals and birds shot by local poachers hanging from it. We used to go for walks in The Clints, which I always thought were very eerie, and after jumping from stone to stone, I was always ready to go back to civilisation. There was a tumbledown cottage on The Clints and an old man lived there. What he did, who he was or how he lived I never found out, but the cottage has long since gone. I just thought he was scary!

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