Marsh Farm - goatally brilliant or a pigs ear?

Advantages: Lots of educational activities, lots of animals, good play areas
Disadvantages: Overpriced, pigs made me sad, mermaids & pirate summer special wasn't very good, abit depressing

...Firstly I must apologise for that shockingly bad title! Marsh Farm Country Park is a working farm that is open to the public and is owned and managed by Essex County Council. It is situated in South Woodham Ferrers, Essex and is easy to find. It is signed up well from the main road alongside ASDA - I found it with no directions. There is a main carpark and an overflow carpark and although we visited in the summer holidays there were plenty of spaces to park in the main carpark. Marsh Farm opens at 10.00am daily (10.30 in winter months) and closes at 4.00pm or 5.00pm at weekends and school holidays (3.00pm in winter months). At the entrance are toilets and an indoor reception area. Inside the reception area is a desk to pay for your entry and a giftshop, although I recommend looking around the giftshop after you...

karalouk 06.10.2009 · Read review
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Review of Marsh Farm Country Park, Essex

Titchwell Marshes, Norfolk

Advantages: Lots of wildlife
Disadvantages: Admission charges

...Titchwell Marsh on the north coast of Norfolk is the most visited of all of the RSPB reserves in Britain. The area consists of marshland and shallow lagoons with reed beds that are set just a few metres inland from the coast . Along the boundary of the reserve there is a shingle and sandy beach that runs along parallel to the reserve. The low lying land that comprises the reserve is actually below the level of the sea and there is a high sea wall with a footpath along the top of it that has so far been successful in preventing the sea from flooding across the reserve. These current sea defences have not however always held back the forces of nature and the lagoons that we see today were created in 1953 when the sea broke through its defences. This area was then left derelict for the next twenty years until 1973 when over 400...

micksheff 07.01.2008 · Read review
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Review of Titchwell Marsh Nature Reserve

Jodie Marsh.Keeping it real

Advantages: Juicy book,with tons of gossip!
Disadvantages: May set younger readers hormones into overdrive!

...I have not wrote a review for a while on here,so I thought i'd give it another go. I must admit I havnt achully picked up a book for a number of years and after getting back into the swing of things by reading 'Wuthering Heights',I decided that I'd give a book a go that didnt drain me of every tear I had to cry,and would be a little more 'easy reading'. I picked up 'Keeping it real' on Ebay for 1.60p,which I thought was quite a bargain,as if I hated the book then it wouldnt be a great loss. I also thought that the title 'Keeping it real' was a bit of a laugh due to the way Jodie looks!..sorry! I achully take that back though after reading it thoroughly. You may wonder who Jodie Marsh is?,Well shes basically a girl thats famous for partying all night,having strings of relationships with celebrity men and basically rivalling...

rosierozi 07.03.2008 · Read review
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Review of Keeping it real - Jodie Marsh

MARSH MARIGOLDS TO CELEBRATE SPRING

Advantages: EARLY SPRING COLOUR FOR YOUR POND
Disadvantages: NONE

...INTRODUCTION If you are looking for an aquatic plant to really cheer up your pond with Spring colour, look no further. Marsh Marigolds (or Kingcups) are hardy, herbaceous perennials and will be lush with leaves and in full bloom at the beginning of April, when most other flowering aquatics are only just waking up. The most common varieties have bright yellow cup-shaped flowers with 5 to 6 petals, which closely resemble buttercups. They are, in fact, part of the same family of plants (Ranunculaceae), belonging to the species Caltha palustris. Their dark green leaves are round to heart shaped with slightly toothed edges and they have thick, fleshy stems holding them proudly above the water surface. If by any chance your pond is in an unsheltered, windswept part of the garden, these plants are so strong they will bear up nicely...

biddow 11.04.2004 · Read review
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Review of Marsh Marigold

Singing the blues

Advantages: Classic whodunnit
Disadvantages: Not Marsh's best work

...Lord George Pastern and Baggott has always been eccentric, but when he decides to join a bunch of jazz musicians under the tutelage of Breezy Bellairs, his relatives think he has finally lost it. His wife, Cecile, is even more concerned when she finds out that her daughter (and George's stepdaughter) is seeing one of the jazz musicians, an Argentine called Carlos Rivera. Then disaster strikes at a performance - Rivera, who pretends to die as part of the act, is actually killed. Fortunately, Detective Inspector Roderick Alleyn is part of the audience and quickly becomes involved in the search for the killer. Can he find out why everyone involved seems to be lying? And what does the agony uncle of a popular magazine have to do with the case? Ngaio Marsh, along with Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers and Margery Allingham, has long been...

sunmeilan 22.08.2007 · Read review
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Review of A Wreath for Rivera - Ngaio Marsh

A real gem in the heart of the Cotswolds

Advantages: Delightful old hotel, friendly staff, reasonable prices, great food
Disadvantages: None at all

...found in the area, so I took a random stab in the dark and clicked on one, Moreton-in-Marsh. The page it took me to detailed a little bit about the local area and listed the hotels and guest houses that are there... not many (3 hotels I think). The first hotel I rang said they had no rooms available for that weekend so I called the Redesdale Arms, who told me that they only had an executive double available. I snapped it up! Redesdale Arms Hotel The Redesdale Arms Hotel is a magnificent old Inn, dating back to at least 1661 and my first impressions on seeing the hotel from the outside was that it was exactly what I was looking for. Most of the buildings in the area were built from Cotswold Stone, and the hotel was no different, it had a very olde world feel about it and is situated prominently on the main road through Moreton-in-Marsh...

TheHairyGodmother 09.07.2009 · Read review
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Review of Redesdale Arms Hotel, Moreton in Marsh

'Your Son is a Cabbage'

Advantages: True Story, great detail, inspiratrional
Disadvantages: heart wrenching and sad

...Shattered is a true story which has been written by Mavis Marsh about a tragic accident which happened to her son. She starts to book with a short Prologue and then chapter one takes us back to her childhood. She was a war baby and grew up with her two sisters, mother and father. She openly admits that she was always the spoilt one of the family. As she grows up she has two very close friends who she would go dancing with and she still remains very good friends with them today. Mavis met a boy called Keith and in time they married and set up home. They soon started a family with 2 girls, Dena and Gaynel and then they had a son, called Matthew. Mavis talks about the children growing up and tells how hard she and Keith worked to give them a good life and help them get a good education. Dena and Gaynel both leave home in time to...

sewbizzie 11.08.2008 · Read review
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Review of Shattered - Mavis Marsh & Andrew Crofts

Teenage Kicks

Advantages: Memories and more, wit, insight
Disadvantages: A tear or two maybe

...?but the reflection is hers and not John's. The 'Peel' voice we get post-mortem is inevitably frozen in time, but frozen in the much earlier time of the initial writing. His anxieties and upsets are not tempered by retrospect or the wry wisdom with which he might have overlain them later. The result is that "Margrave of the Marshes" is not the book that John Peel would have written had he been permitted to finish it, but perhaps we get a much more keen insight into who he really was in consequence. ~ I called the book a 'treasure' - it is just that: a treasure chest of reminders of a time many of us shared, even if at some remove (in space, or class, or age) from the Ravenscrofts. There are musical references galore to send you traipsing through your own vinyl (or perhaps your parents' or grandparents'). The family photographs will amuse...

hiker 27.01.2006 · Read review
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Review of Margrave of the Marshes - John Peel

Proof that lawyers shouldn't drink?.

Advantages: Good plot, entertaining read
Disadvantages: A bit old-fashioned

...solve the seemingly unsolvable mystery before more murders are committed? Ngaio Marsh is well known as one of the Queens of Crime Fiction, along with Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers. Her books all star Roderick Alleyn, detective extraordinaire, and the various murders that he manages to stumble across, usually while on holiday. As a detective, Alleyn is not one of my favourites; he is fairly bland, a bit too smart for his own good and has never really made much of an impact on me anyway. In this book though, he does appear quite a lot softer and more human than in other books. For a start, he makes his feelings for his colleague, Fox, very clear when Fox?s life is put into danger. This made me warm to him much more than usual. There is not a great deal of time committed to other characters, but the information we are given is...

sunmeilan 10.05.2007 · Read review
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Review of Death at the Bar - Ngaio Marsh

Stands the test of Time

Advantages: Love of native country
Disadvantages: Some old fashioned writing

...of Cambridge educated Maori doctor, Dr Te Pokiha. Someone has tampered with the rigging. Amongst the suspects are Hailey Hambleton, leading man and would be lover of Meyer's beautiful wife, and Francis Liversidge, a younger member of the cast who is in debt. In the true tradition of the genre, extraneous people are dismissed for 'they are local and do not know the company'! (The crime takes place in an enclosed community.) Marsh, 1895-1982, b NZ was a keen supporter of the theatre, but if you are not interested in the workings of a small theatre then the story can get a bit tedious. The other point of interest, however, is a small Maori greenstone carving called a tiki. Marsh tries to draw superstition into the mix, which to some extent works, although it seems old fashioned. However, there is a revealing scene later on when Alleyn and Te...

aspebbles 03.09.2007 (22.01.2008) · Read review
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Review of Vintage Murder - Ngaio Marsh