While several months are starting to develop Seasonal Area themes, October is not one of them. In 2008 someone forgot to give it an image; in 2009 it was a motorway; last year it showed Penzance in the pouring rain. This year we have a lovely summer view of a pub on the Wentloog, South Wales.

Six Bells is the pub for the village of Peterstone Wentloog - a delightful location whose local Lord of the Manor is one Mark Roberts, a man with many interests including enforcing obsolete feudal rights in a way which resulted in the Government being forced to tidy up the law regarding common land. (Under the law as it stood when he bought the relevant manor - which for some obscure reason is apparently Trellech, which is some 30 miles away near Monmouth and on the other side of Newport - it was possible for him to charge people to cross the grass verges, like the one in this photograph, to reach their homes, owing to the verges being common land and therefore his.) Unfortunately he failed to suggest that he might be the sort of benevolent Lord of the Manor that was normally expected in the Middle Ages and spend the money on such valuable areas as waste collection, drainage and maintenance of local facilities (tasks which have passed, along with the tax income, to Newport County Council). A generous donation to the Parish Church might not go amiss either; it is currently a trifle derelict, with the gates locked and a "Private" sign in place.

October is being unusually and apparently record-breakingly warm, though since not all of Mr Roberts's predecessors were as handy with the thermometer as people are today it is possible that it was warmer on the 1st of October 1194 and we just don't know about it. Accordingly, this picture looks rather like a warm summer evening when it was in fact taken on an October afternoon. It is a delightfully stark difference to the scene on the 30th of January 1607 (then known as the 20th of January 1606 in the UK) when the whole place was several feet under water, owing to the sea wall which keeps the River Severn out having washed away in a storm.