Am I in Texas?

You may have gathered from my previous post that Gail and I are spending a few days down in Nottingham with human Granny and Grandad. Well at least I was told it was Nottingham. 

But we went for a walk in a nearby wood, and look what I found...

Yes it really is an old oil well (although Gail confused me for a moment by referring to it as a 'nodding donkey').

Most perplexing. I mean surely this is not Texas? Or Arabia? And it certainly isn't the North Sea!

And then we found this.

Well I asked wise old Grandad what was going on. He said, let's sit down for a minute Bertie, and I'll tell you a bit about the history of this place.



And you know what? Here in Duke's Wood, near Eakring, Nottinghamshire, there really was once an oil field. In World War Two, when the country was desperately short of fuel supplies, a team of drilling engineers from Oklahoma came over to this very spot to help extract more oil, and faster. The big statue was erected as a thank you to those very same drillers. Grandad also told me that, while the drillers were here in Sherwood Forest, he was sweating in his thick woollen RAF uniform in the summer heat of Ponca City, Oklahoma, training to be a pilot.

Isn't the world a fascinating place?

Duke's Wood is nowadays a nature reserve, a lovely oasis of calm and beauty, fragrant with the scents of Spring.  Hard to imagine all that bustle and activity so many years ago.