Hash 1476

My maths isn't that great (it is really, I'm just being modest) but I can work out the diameter of a circle of radius 10 miles. So when Google told me that the distance from my house to the pub was slightly over twenty miles I knew this was going to be a journey into the unknown; a journey into a far off land known to the locals (and the Ordnance Survey) as Hertfordshire.

Of course Paul had very carefully made sure that the pub was indeed inside the 10 mile radius, although if you ended up at the bottom of the car park then you'd probably have gone to far (so unlike the hash to go to far).

It was generally agreed by the elders of the Hash that no one could remember ever having run from The Land of Liberty before. Mind you there's an awful lot the elders of the Hash don't remember these days. It was certainly a new addition to the Hashalator though so we've not hashed from here for a least a decade if ever.

The history of Heronsgate is rather interesting. It was founded by Feargus O'Connor, and MP and Chartist leader who established a 'land colony' where urban factory workers were given plots of land to work. Sadly the experiment failed and it's now occupied by stock brokers and hedge fund managers.

At this point I was going to have a little aside about Heronsgate sounding a bit like Heaven's Gate - you know, the famously disastrous Kris Kristofferson film which is generally considered the biggest flop of all time (it lost about 37 million dollars in 1980). But then (thanks interweb!) I found out all about the Heaven's Gate cult of the late nineties. Bloody hell, they were barmy. They believed they could ascend to 'The Evolutionary Level Above Human' by being picked up by a spacecraft that was trailing the Hale Bopp comet. They did this by eating poison apple sauce.

Back in the slightly more sane world of the Hash, Paul gave instructions about the evening's run. This mainly consisted of warnings about the 'Angry Farmer' who was likely to put his 12 gauge to use if we bothered his sheep. Luckily we are very pro-sheep in the hash as the Bashers in Cirencester can attest to.

We set off left out the pub before finegalling down through the site of the Chartist cottages before hitting the M25. Luckily we didn't have to run across it this time but headed back inland (you know what I mean) through Bottom (smirk) Wood towards Newlands Park. After passing by the garden centre we headed down to the Epilepsy Society before making what I now see was a flyby of Paul's house (he's clearly set a hash or two before) and then heading back up to the Open Air Museum.

After a bit of phaffing around we looped around the Museum avoiding any Romans and headed back up towards Long Lane and back to the pub.

In the pub there was a fine range of beers and some chunks of pork pie. And a nice dog called Purdey - possibly named after angry farmer's shotgun or Joanna Lumley, not sure which.

Thanks to Paul for a nice run in a new area, and for giving me an excuse to waste the last two hours looking stuff up on the internet.