An Easter Sunday wander along an incredibly cold Eton High Street might have been expected to inspire kinky thoughts. After all, the school is synonymous with discipline and birchings.

In the event, it was so cold that we didn’t make it as far as the College itself, turning back towards the comparative comfort of Costa Coffee. As we crossed the road, I happened to glance up – and look what I found:

A plaque of mixed school in Eton

So, it was deemed that the local girls would benefit from a traditional Etonian-style education, was it? One imagines that the experience must have been fully authentic – the masters strict, the birchings soundly administered at the front of the class.

Further along the street, we came across the village stocks, abandoned in front of (I kid you not) a half-timbered Chinese restaurant.

Village stocks in Eton

And around the corner? Could it be – I so wanted to tie Haron to what we guessed to be the whipping post, but it was far, far too cold!

We think this is a whipping post