Adventures with windmills in Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire - far from La Mancha where Don Quixote is said to have jousted and ‘tilted’ at windmills in the 17th century... Your travels will bring you to Brill, the inspiration for Bree, the fictional village in Tolkien's Middle-earth, east of the Shire. Along the way, the windmills of the mind will feed your imagination on quiet country lanes riding your noble stead through forests, meadows, and gentle sloping hills in search of new exciting adventures. “Good fortune is guiding our affairs better than we could have desired, for there you see, friend Sancho Panza, thirty or more enormous giants with whom I intend to do battle and whose lives I intend to take, and with the spoils we shall begin to grow rich, for this is righteous warfare, and it is a great service to God to remove so evil a breed from the face of the earth.”
“What giants?” said Sancho Panza.
“Those you see over there,” replied his master, “with the long arms; sometimes they are almost two leagues long.”
“Look, your grace,” Sancho responded, “those things that appear over there aren’t giants but windmills, and what looks like their arms are the sails that are turned by the wind and make the grindstone move.”
“It seems clear to me,” replied Don Quixote, “that thou art not well-versed in the matter of adventures“
(“Don Quixote“, Miguel de Cervantes, transl. Edith Grossman)(Photo: Copyright Ann Harriss 2017 facebook.com/AnnHarrisskittPhotography/)