Devon May 2008

11 May, 2008: There is no doubt about it: when the sun is shining then England in the springtime is sensational.

We picked up our rental car from Barnsley on Saturday, the same little red Citroen that we had way back in November for our trip into Dorset, Wiltshire and Hampshire.  Loaded up with sufficient of our belongings for a week Sunday morning found us zooming along the motorways very nicely at some 75 mph.  That's about 120 kph.  Our route skirted Birmingham and Bristol. Gradually the flat and uninteresting terrain of the midlands, then the Cotswolds gave way to the more dramatic rolling hills of Somersetshire then Devonshire with its sudden descents into water-carved ravines. In sunshine and a light breeze the trees are a shimmering brilliant green in their newly opened leaves. Because the summer grain crops are at their photosynthetic maxima most of the fields we passed were a deep green but, every now and then, this was broken by a field of canola  already in flower and whose dazzling yellow had one instinctively reaching for sunglasses. Then there is the May bush, now in full flower, more a tree than a bush with some reaching twenty or thirty feet in height and so laden in white bloom that their very branches appear to list with the weight. As we neared Devon we could see many of the fields were a carpet of yellow buttercups and sometimes there was a white bank of another meadow bloom beside the road.

Looking for a spot for lunch I noted brown tourist signs to "Cheddar Gorge and Caves".  I had never heard of the place before or its part in palaeontology.  I wondered if its name had something to do with cheese.  The answer is yes.  What it turned out to be is a steep limestone gorge with Britain's best limestone caves that have been inhabited since prehistoric times.  The technique for making cheddar cheese was discovered here over 1000 years ago and the caves were used for their constant 11 degrees temperature for storing the product.  They are still used for this purpose today, but more for its historic and tourist value rather than in commercial quantities.

In the late 1800's a local man and his sons were excavating what turned out to be the best example of limestone formations after the cave had become silted up when they discovered the complete skeleton of a prehistoric man.  Now named "Cheddar Man" it turned out to be the only discovered example of a subspecies of the human race that existed shortly after the last Ice Age.  DNA testing of the bones has determined that he has at least one descendant still living in the village of Cheddar.  Who knows, he might even have been one of our ancestors given that this is in northern Somerset, not from Taunton, where the Brinsmead name first started appearing in records from the late 1500's.

The whole area is still owned today by the Earl of Bath or his Trust but they are doing an excellent job of preserving and restoring it.  It had become quite degraded as a consequence first industrialisation then the removal of sheep grazing, with species of ivy rapidly covering and then beginning to destroy the geology of the gorge.  Today the Trust uses abseiling volunteers to descale the cliffs and goats to keep it clean.  After our lunch in the pleasant park beside the waterway and some purchases from a sheepskin shop nearby, we took a audio-assisted self-guided tour of the best cave for £8.50 each with an afternoon Devonshire tea (scones, jam and lashings of thick cream) thrown in.  It was excellent value and we quite enjoyed the skilfully lit limestone formations, albeit nothing on the scale of those we have in the Margaret River region of Western Australia.  A small plaque outside our cave announced a special relationship with the Jenolan Caves of NSW however.  Pam scored some nice images of reflections in a pool.

Given that we are only 6 weeks away from the Northern Hemisphere's longest day of the year we still had plenty of daylight left after our fascinating diversion to Cheddar to motor on and find the Woodford Bridge Resort on a quiet back road beyond Bideford.  This is North Devon and not too far at all from the historic family village of Weare Giffard and St Giles in the Woods on either side of the market town of Greater Torrington.  There is also a Brinsmead family grave in Bideford.  It is this branch of the family who lived by the river on the sea of the Bristol Channel that may have provided a captain or suchlike for Drake’s Armada, although Andy Sims, on the Brinsmead website www.brinsmead.net, points out that this remains a bit of family folk lore that has not been substantiated.

The Woodford Bridge Country Club is the third resort that we have used in the past three months as a part of our Accor/International International entitlement, the other two being in Tenerife and Austria, and it matches up to the standards we have come to expect.  The Pacific Bay Resort, Coffs Harbour and Crackenback Resort, Jindabyne are a part of the same chain.  Based around a picturesque old Devon pub with a thatched roof, the resort comprises some 50 villas built probably 40 years ago in a typically English regency style at the bottom of a wooded valley and set in rolling hills on a quiet back road between Bideford and Holsworthy.  Our villa, with two bedrooms and two bathrooms, is very spacious by UK standards and it is excellently equipped.  Well, it has everything except a vegetable peeler we discovered last night.  The only problem is that it is a long way from anywhere and there are absolutely no Internet facilities.  Even the phones in the units are not working so dial up is not an option.  We are invited to use our mobile phones to call for any services and "the management regrets any inconvenience". There is a well stocked shop on site as well as 20m heated pool, gymnasium, tennis and squash courts.

W watched "The Queen" last night provided on DVD as our incentive for spending more than £10 in the shop.  It is very good and perhaps not an unrealistic portrayal of the Royal household in the days following the death of Diana.  The characters of Tony Blair and his wife Sherie were also skilfully drawn and played.  I wonder if, in time, it will go down as a semi historic masterpiece.

12 May, 2008: With continuing glorious sunshine and temperatures in the high 20's we put it to good use with a trip north towards the Exmoor National Park.  Our destination was a National Trust property on the coast at Heddon Valley but it proved quite difficult to find given the address we were provided in our guide book.  I attempted to take the scenic coastal route to the north and west of Barnstaple but did not reckon on the need to crawl through a number of villages in full summer market mode.  We went to a weird little village called Parracombe at the bottom of a steep valley and would have been sent from there to the National Park headquarters at Lynmouth Bridge had my instincts not told me otherwise.  With a fresh set of directions from a volunteer working on the railway at the Woody Bay Station, we drove down a very narrow and winding back road expecting to arrive at an isolated spot that we would have almost to ourselves as we had at Murtough Bay in Northern Ireland.  However, we were surprised to emerge at the bottom beside a busy pub, National Trust office selling ice cream and plenty of cars disgorging walkers, albeit mostly of the retired variety.

After a light lunch at a picnic table in the shade we joined the walkers in a two-mile stroll to the beach along the Heddon river that is no more than a stream cutting through a steep shale-sided valley to the Bristol Channel. Once thickly wooded with oak trees this area was badly degraded by deforestation in the 18^th and 19^th centuries but the Trust is gradually restoring it.  There work was set back by a mini tornado that flattened a lot of young trees in 1981 but that has recovered now. The Trust is also re planting a couple of small orchards with otherwise disappearing strains of west-country apples.  The Hunters Inn here was once a coach staging post on an amazing road between Barnstaple and Bristol that was carved out along some of the highest cliffs along the English coast.  We drove along a bit of this road after our walk but turned back beyond Woody Bay because it was just too narrow and precipitous to the sea.  We had to back up to allow opposing traffic through and there were only a few passing places.

The "beach" is a 50-metre stretch of huge rounded shingles into which the stream disappears to re emerge at the water's edge.  There is an old lime kiln down here and it was a pleasant place to wile away some time in the sunshine and paddle in the Atlantic.  It suddenly occurred to me that, when we fly to California in July, I shall be crossing this ocean for the first time.  We saw one large ferry  leaving from Bristol no doubt and probably headed for somewhere on the continent.

Our route home dipped into the inappropriately named Exmoor Forest, first at the twin towns of Lynton and Lynmouth where there were a handful of tourist buses disgorging pensioners and then across the bare moor to a village called Simonsbath.  En route we passed a couple of cars parked miles from anywhere with their occupants sitting in deck chairs in the sunshine and staring at nothing much at all.  The Poms make good use of what little sunshine they get.  From Simonsbath we meandered back to the route we had taken in the day before to Barnstaple.  This time Tescos was open so we stocked up there and made it back to the resort at about 7 pm.

13 May, 2008: With continuing fine weather we kept or activities out of doors and headed south from our resort today towards the ancient town of Okehampton.  This is on the northern edge of the Dartmoor National Park so that the gentle hills roll up from here to the plateau that forms the moor with its scattered rock formations forming silhouettes against the skyline.  There is a RAF base at Okehampton but also the ruins of a castle and this was our first destination for the day.  It is kept by English Heritage so we had a free pass.

Okehampton Castle is Norman in origin and was built about the same time as Peveril Castle in the Peak District not long after 1066 and all that. Like Peveril Castle it is strategically located on a small natural hill that stands guard to a rich hunting area and its location also provides a commanding view of the valley in front of it.  For some 350 years it as owned by the Courtney family whose principal residence was down near Tiverton and they used it mainly as a hunting lodge.  After fluctuating fortunes of the family during the War of the Roses the last Courtney to own it was the Chief Steward of England, Earl of Exeter and the most influential baron in the west country but somehow he raised the paranoid suspicions of Henry VIII who had him arrested and executed.  Thereafter the castle fell into ruins and its structure cannibalized for other structures in the town below.  At various times during the century it was used as a prison for captured Napoleonic forces, a bakehouse and an enclosure for animals.  Today there are only a few skeletal remains but with sufficient detail provided by an audio commentary it was a warm and pleasant place to spend an hour or so wandering in the sunshine.

There are a couple of magnificent copper beeches at the entrance to the castle ruins.  We also took a 30-minute walk around the grounds passing first over meadows by the river and then climbing into a shaded old woodland before returning behind the motte or mound on which is built the castle's keep and whose northen slope was a mass of blue and pink wildflowers.  Our laminated walk guide, provided at the caisse in wee stone cottage near the entrance, told us that we were seeing meadowsweet, pink purslane, bluebells, wild strawberry, red campion, vetches and violets.  It was only a short walk but a delightful one. Afterwards we dined on our sandwiches and fruit at the picnic table below the copper beech.

It was about 1:30 pm when we made it to our next objective, the National Trust's Lydford Gorge about 10 miles south of Okehampton. Here there is a ravine carved to a depth of some 150 feet by a river. It was actually formed over millions of years after a geological phenomenon called river capture when one river flowing westward cut back through rock and captured the water from another river flowing south.  Their combined forces have cut a narrow gorge in a series of swirling pools against smooth black rock at the Devil's Cauldron, then a wider valley below.  This is filled with ancient oaks in whose shade we found the same amazing variety of wildflowers that we had seen at Okehampton castle but in even greater spreads plus a few other species as well.  The walk along the length of the gorge and back is a couple of miles.  At the lower end a side stream empties into the gorge in a 90-foot waterfall whose descent can be traced by stairway and return by a gentler sloping pathway.  We chose to do it the other way around since it is gentler on the knees. With frequent stops to take pictures of the wildflowers it was after 4 pm by the time we returned to the entrance and car park where there is the inevitable gift shop and kiosk.  Pam had an ice cream but I was content with an orange, ice cold water and the remains of the tea in our flask.

On the way home we paused to take pictues of the "Gingerbread House ", our nickname for a cute thatched house at the top of the hill just above the resort.

14 May, 2008: Our fourth day in Devon was taken up with family and gardens: family by way of a visit to the historical family village of Weare Giffard and gardens in the form of two paying visits as I will explain. First of all we took up the invitation from the Stanley-Browns to drop in at their place.  Not that this was a specific invitation to us nor indeed was it our plan when we set out in the morning.  It is just that we were approaching Weare Giffard from a back road and came upon this invitation to visit one of the many in the "Open Garden Scheme" for 2008. We drove up a longish drive and found ourselves at a stately home on the hillside on the opposite side of the valley to Weare Giffard.  We put our £3 each into the collection box and I spoke with the very old lady at the door.  She invited us to go "wherever you like" around the property.  It is a colourful old garden and there was an interesting breed of sheep in the field adjacent. I fell into conversation with a younger man who was strimming the grass on the bank in front of the house.  He explained that he had been a jeweller in London but had moved down to this house 19 years ago.  He had traced his family back to the late 1300's.  That beat me by about 200 years so I dropped that topic and asked where I should take my Longine watch for a battery as it had stopped a few days before.  He recommended a jeweller in Great Torrington if it was just a battery but Barnstaple if it was anything more than that.

With fresh instructions we set out to cross the valley, the A386 from Great Torrington to Bideford and the Torridge River to the village of Weare Giffard that I had seen from the gardens of Stanley-Brown.  Once upon a time this village would have been on the main thoroughfare from Great Torrington to Bideford but now the A road has been taken to the south and on the other side of the river.  Unlike St Giles in the Wood, a neat and compact village set down at the intersection of fields and roads, Weare Giffard is stretched out over a mile or more and wedged between the river and a steeply rising valley wall. The presence of a "Quay House" and adjacent "Quay Cottages" close to a vertical bank on the river suggests that it may have been navigable to this point in the days when this village developed.  Now the river is a fast flowing shallow stream with evidence of bank erosions and flooding.  Most of the houses are built just above the flood level except for the Cornmill House that stands alone on the flood plain. There is evidence of an adjacent mill pond fed by a diversion from the river. Many of the original buildings in the village have been converted to domestic.  This includes the old School House, now a dwelling one end and a community hall on the other and some stables or farm outhouses that have been converted to home units in none too subtle manner. We were surprised to discover that even the village pub, a wisteria-covered building called "The Cider Presse Free House" is, in fact, a converted farmhouse whose bar with low ceiling and rough-hewn timber beams turn out to be plastic coated RSJs on an extension to the original house.  There is a new estate behind this called "Tavern Gardens".  Some enterprising farmer, or more likely a canny developer, has done well from the whole project.

But the Holy Trinity Church and adjacent large old rectory remain as they would have been when there were Brinsmeads in the village circa 1750 - 1875.  We quite quickly found the graves in the churchyard, seven in all, six in one group in the southwest corner and one alone on the other side of the church. Unlike the headstones at St Giles in the Wood that have been removed from their original sites, presumably for re use of the plots, the Brinsmead headstones at Weare Giffard still mark the original graves of our ancestors

However, it seems that the village of Weare Giffard is aware of its Brinsmead heritage. This emerged when we fell into conversation with a cheery 19-years retired couple from London who were trimming the hedge outside their large Regency-style home built circa 1800.  They recognised the name and said that there was "a Brinsmead in the old rectory". At first I thought they meant a living relative(!) but it quickly transpired that they were talking about a piano. They explained that it had been salvaged from elsewhere and placed in the old rectory because of its association with the village.

Situated as it is on the Tarka Way, a long distance walking path across Devon, it is obvious that Weare Giffard is much more of a tourist destination and trendy new domicile for retirees than is St Giles in the Wood.  After a dry draught cider (4% alcohol, I even convinced Pam to have a sweet apple cider with 1% alcohol that tasted just like Devondale) at the synthetic old pub and finding no more locals who would talk to us, we set off for Great Torrington.  About the only thing that I learned from the publican, who has been in residence for only 12 months is that Weare Giffard, is pronounced with a soft "g" as in "giraffe". 

Great Torrington turned out to be a pleasant little market town set high on ridge above the Torridge Valley. There is an old fortification here, circa 1600, on Castle Hill and, given the panoramic views we enjoyed from the public car park beside the castle, it is not surprising that it had strategic importance.  We moved on after managing to convince the local Civic Enforcement Officer that we were "standing" for our lunch and not parking because this is a "Park and Pay" spot.

We drove down the hill and into the valley for just one mile to stop at the Royal Horticultural Society's property called Rosemoor.  This came into their hands when one Lady Anne Bower donated her home and 8-acre garden, together with 32 acres of meadow lands to this charity in 1988.  The latter portion has been developed into a sort of botanical garden with formal and informal portions featuring a great variety of horticulture from around the world together with reception area, restaurant, nursery, gift shop, library, education centre, orchard and vegetable gardens. I was expecting a lot of spring flowers but the bulbs were finished and the roses not yet out so I enjoyed the old original garden much more because of its magnificent display of rhododendrons.  I like colour.  The lake was a picture as were the cascades and the huge lawns in which meadow blooms were spared from the mower .  The old wisteria-covered home that is now a teahouse and self catering flats is also quite picturesque. A short distance away, within a bicentennial arboretum that should look fabulous in about 100 years time, there is a relocated historic gazebo that once served as the studio for a famous painter. Its reconstruction in 1998 is the reason for the title of "bicentennial".

We returned to the Woodford Bridge Country Club on narrow country lanes. Whereas my previous experience of lanes in Cornwall and Devon in '99-2000 had lead me to speculate that the long tunnels down single lane thoroughfares with earth on either side and fields hidden by these mounds and a hedge was due to water erosion down the road, I now know, from my experience on the Isle of Man, that what we have in the southwest of England is the extensive use of sod walls to mark out fields.  In the centuries before barbed wire there were few options to enclose a field.  Palisades with stakes would have been temporary and limited by the supply of wood. In the north of England there was plenty of stone to build walls, a very long lasting barrier indeed, with a little maintenance, so there are thousands of miles of these throughout Derbyshire, Yorkshire and Cumbria. Elsewhere, when stones were less plentiful, the early farmers resorted to a technique based on stone but supplemented with soil or sod and surmounted by a hedge.  Over time these come to appear like lanes down subterranean tunnels whose sides can reach a height of 10 to 12 foot above the carriageway. This obscures any view of the fields except at gateways and it can be quite difficult to pass oncoming vehicles particularly if they are of the large white van variety that seem to be ubiquitous throughout the UK.

15 May, 2008: It was our first day of rain since we left Yorkshire. Not only rain but the temperature dropped by 10 degrees C as well such that I curtailed one activity today simply because I did not have enough clothes on.  A bit silly since I certainly have them with me.

We returned to Great Torrington and into the "Park and Pay", taking a 4-hour ticket.  Pam stayed in the car and booted up my laptop to see if she could pick up a wireless network whilst I slipped off to the jewellers to have my watch battery replaced.  This was done by a handsome young lady so we chatted about genealogy whilst she did it.  Most of her relatives had emigrated to Australia.  Back at the car Pam had picked up a network, possibly from a nearby computer store but it was secured.

We spent the next couple of hours in "1646 Torrington" which is the remains of the town castle, a simple walled fortification, but it had a critical role in the Civil War. Royalist forces were holed up there under the command of a General Fairfax, and the Parliamentarians, who included Oliver Cromwell, were camped at St Giles in the Wood which is only two miles away by direct marching.  What began as a late afternoon skirmish ended in a full scale attack in the black of night that concluded when all the ammunition, stored by the forces loyal to Charles I in the church, was detonated.  This killed quite a number of members of the Cromwell's forces who had been captured and imprisoned there. However, the night belonged to the Parliamentarians.  Fairfax was killed and his forces routed from the town, the residue escaping down the hill and across the bridge of the River Torridge at the western feet to the castle.  Next morning there were 3,000 dead on the streets of Torrington and surrounds.

Students of Brinsmead family history will recognise the name of St Giles in the Wood, the second of the two north Devon villages where the family name begins to appear in registers from the 1700's. However, my memory seems to indicate that it some time in the mid 1600's that the name disappears from registers around Taunton in Somersetshire so I wonder if the Civil War and the Parliamentarian encampment at St Giles in the Wood had anything to do with this translocation?  Thus far, Andy Sim's research has not been able to trace a direct link between the Somerset and Devon Brinsmeads but this could be explained by the sort of disruption that a civil war would cause.

At the Torrington Castle today this story is retold by volunteers who dress up in period costume, prepare some lead shot in a fire and then fire off a genuine musket with all the trimmings.  There is audience participation and the whole exercise is geared towards kids.  Our party consisted of four adults. It finished with a talk from the "midwife" about the uses to which local herbs were put, this occurring not in the herb garden as usual but around the musketeer's fire  because of the cold and wet.  We ate lunch in the car.

After a visit to the Torrington pannier's market that consisted of the usual Chinese-manufactured consumer items and recycled goods set out under cover down an arcade, we went on to check all the gravestones in the churchyard but found no Brinsmeads.  This is known, of course, because of Andy's research.  I abandoned this outing because of the cold but Pam continued doggedly and read every inscription that she could.

We then spent the rest of the day at Dartington Crystal Factory.  This was set up by a charitable organisation that was begun by a Yorkshire farmer and his American wife who was heiress to a fortune that had secured them an estate in south Devon called Dartington.  They began a number of industrial and educational enterprises there in order to stimulate the local economy that was flagging after the second world war. With the help of immigrant Swedish glass blowers the Torrington factory was their north Devon enterprise.  Fifty years later it is a remarkable success and the quality hand-blown products are sold throughout the world under the Dartington brand name.  It has become a British institution.

Much to my surprise our factory tour did not occur behind thick plate glass and miles away from all the action.  Instead we were allowed to wander onto an open galley that was almost directly above the small team of about 10 men working on the floor below.  Moreover, whilst a production line was in progress, it was not a line as such but a series of complicated pirouettes from the furnaces to the annealing ovens that involved the workers, whose only protective clothing was a pair of dark goggles, often moving one just inches behind another with great red hot globules of molten glass on their stems.  It was fascinating to watch. The adjacent museum traces the history of glass from 4,000 years BC to the present time. Afterwards, Pam spent some time and a little money in the factory store and the adjacent Edinburgh Woollen Mills so my next planned trip for the day, to St Giles in the Woods never materialised.

16 May, 2008: When Miss Rosalie Chichester died in 1949 she donated her family home and land to the National Trust. She was the last of the Arlington Chichesters who had occupied the 2500 acre estate in North Devon for more than 500 years.  There was a branch of the family who owned land in the nearby village of Shirwell.  Indeed, when Rosalie’s father Sir Bruce died at the age of just 39 years, her mother Lady Rosalie, married Sir Arthur, a member of the Shirwell family.  But they did not produce another heir.  It was probably quite difficult as Sir Arthur only came over to Arlington every Sunday.  And the last Rosalie Chichester never married.  Perhaps that is because nobody wanted to take on her father's debts. He had spent a lot of money on the property as did his father before him. The latter rebuilt the grand house in the 1830's but some of his grander plans for landscaping, including the suspension bridge across the lake, were never completed.  The pylons, still standing, are visible amongst growth at the top of the lake.  Beside the lake stands an urn below which are the ashes of Miss Rosalie.  It was one of her favourite spots.

We arrived at Arlington via Bideford and Barnstaple at 10:15 am today after an hour's run from our villa at Woodford Bridge Country Club.  The house does not open until 11 am so we took the hour long loop walk to the lake and back.  It helped to warm us, particularly the return back up the hill through the wilderness, over meadows and past the 17^th century church where most of the other Chichester family lie buried. We visited the bat cam in the basement of the house.  A colony of bats has taken up residence in the old kitchens and one can spy on their nursery by means of a remotely operated and zooming CCTV. By then it was time for the harness demonstration up at the stables.

Arlington is the home for Britain's premier collection of horse drawn carriages. Photography is not permitted although I sneaked a picture of one and Pam took a picture of one of the colorful model gypsy vans.  It was all quite interesting but lacks the magnificence of the gilded carriages and sleighs that we saw a few weeks ago in the Nymphenburg Palace, Munich. At Arlington there are three young working horses in harness that offer carriage rides around the estate.  I was told by one of the many volunteer attendants that they were having great difficulty finding suitable draught horses anywhere in the UK and that they may have to send to Australia for one of our Clydesdales.  The Shire breed has all but disappeared right across the world.

Beside the stables there is a fascinating example of an old Devon granary that has a traditional approach to protection from rodents. We next inspected the church that still functions as a parish place of worship and did a quick whip around the headstones to see if there were any Brinsmeads (there weren't). By this time we were quite chilled and a light rain was beginning so we forfeited our plan to picnic and headed instead to the tea room where we had hot potato and leek soup and a Cornish pasty. That set us back almost $AU50.00 so you can see why we prefer to take our lunch every day!

Then we went and rang the bell to the huge front doors of the manor house and were admitted for the inspection. Some of the rooms are in original condition circa 1850 and the rest are more or less as Miss Chichester had left it a century later. These Chichesters are distant relatives to Sir Francis, famous for his 1960's solo round-the-world voyage, and they shared his passion for sailing.  The house is stuffed with many models of yachts and ships including one that Miss Francis sailed herself in the late 1800's.  The remainder of the house was a personal collection of Victorian opulence including an impressive sea shell display.  It is all excellently described in laminated hard copy descriptions available hand held in each room.  Each room also has at least one volunteer for the National Trust.  Very little is roped off but there are numerous injunctions not to touch anything together with polite explanations how moisture and the oils from our hands will eventually corrode and destroy it all.  Photography is not permitted of course.

We finished our day with an inspection of the formal garden and a walled vegetable garden.  The former had some magnificent azaleas in bloom and the latter had a much better spread of vegetables than did the RHS at Rosemoor.  All this, of course, has been restored slowly over the 60 years since the Trust obtained the property.  Little would be possible without the many volunteers that we saw.  There must have been at least 50 altogether and there were probably only 200 visitors on the day.

17 May, 2008: Julius Drewe was the Richard Branson of the 1890's.  Born Julius Drew, the sixth son of a clergyman, there was retailing in his blood because his mother was a Peek but that name alone amongst all those to follow, lives on in the brand Peek Frean, makers and distributors of biscuits. Julius' first venture as a tea merchant in Liverpool was not a success but he then teamed up with a butcher named Murker whose retailing experience was put to good use when they opened their first store in London.  This was the beginning of a grocery chain that was known as "Home and Colonial".  Julius' genius was to begin the sourcing of tea from India instead of China and, with an emerging middle class, this drink was then price accessible to a whole new market.  Within six years and a hundred stores later Drew and Murker were both able to retire and live as very wealthy men for the rest of their lives. Drew was only 31 years of age.

Julius Drew was keen to pursue the life of a country gentleman.  He was at first lucky to pick up the estate of a bankrupt Spanish banker in Suffolk but then he began to research his family history.  Convinced that he was a descendant of one Baron Drogo de Teign, because Drogo is Latin for Drewe, his steps were drawn to the Dartmoor village of Drewesteignton where he managed to purchase 20 acres on a spectacular site above the River Teign.  After changing his name to Drewe by deed poll for a little more gravitas, Julius began to build his ancestral home in 1911 with the direction of Britain's leading architect of the day, Sir Edwin Lutyens.

Castle Drogo, as it is still known today, is sometimes called the last castle to be built in England. It is modelled on the style of a Norman castle but filled with the very best technology that the second two decades of the 20^th century could provide.  It was completed in 1931, considerably scaled down from the original plans of its sponsor and architect builder.  Meanwhile, Home and Colonial had metamorphosed into Argyll Foods and then all disappeared with the passage of time.  Meanwhile Sainsburys and Liptons, two rivals which began about the same time, are household names still.

Castle Drogo was acquired by the National Trust in 1977.  There is still a descendant of the Drewes living in a flat in the top storey of the castle but, when he dies, the whole property will be in the hands of the National TrustThere is still a descendant of the Drewes living in a flat in the top storey of the castle but, when he dies, the whole property will be in the hands of the National Trust.  Given the cost of its upkeep it is not surprising that the Drewe family were happy to unload the responsibility.  Recently the Trust had to waterproof the roof to the chapel that had begun to leak.  The cost was £800,000.  Given that the roof to the whole place is flat and in the same style as that over the chapel it will also need to be done.  The expected cost is £5 million.

Unfortunately the outside of the castle looks rather mundane because the granite that was used to build it looks suspiciously like concrete Besser blocks from a distance .  It took us about two hours to make our way through the 50% of rooms that are open to the public. Photography inside is not permitted.  The display arrangements are the same as that provided at Arlington but the personal effects in the house are 100 years later.  Probably the most fascinating were the kitchen, scullery and servants' quarters because they provide an insight into life in a genteel Edwardian home.  I enjoyed the outdoors more with its rhododendrons, formal garden, enormous circular croquet lawn and the long walk that was the favourite of Julius Drewe on the ridge above the river and gorge with views back over the best of Dartmoor. Over years Drewe added some 600 more acres to his estate.  Unfortunately, the weather and our energy levels at the end of a long and active week were not up to any longer walks although several excellent ones are on offer.

18 May, 2008: There was time for one more swim in the pool at Woodford Bridge Country Club before we checked out and headed north. We took a very short detour to the village of St Giles in the Wood, the other north Devon site of some Brinsmead family graves.  We had been there on a very short, wet and cold day in January 2000 but this time the sun was shining although the wind was still a trifle chilly.  It looked quite different to my mental pictures assembled from images taken back in 2000 and also from Andy Sims' website. This time I was able to appreciate that it really only consists of a central church and one row of very old houses, many of them attached to one another and facing the church to its east.  One is called "The Old Post Office".  One is a farm complete with yard, barns and outbuildings.  The dog from there gave me a hard time.  I was ignored by the dog's owner.  Judging by the architecture, these dwelling may even date back to the century of the Civil War i.e.1600's.  To the north of the church there is a 2-3 acre field that was probably once a village common but is now fenced and it contained a few cows.  Facing this were some houses that are perhaps 19^th century in origin, as are a smattering of other dwellings to the west of the church and elsewhere.  To the south of the church, separated by a road and a lane there is a new estate of house that would be all post WWII.

We were lucky to encounter an elderly woman in the church yard who identified herself as the current church warden, a post that she claimed to have held for the past 20 years.  She drew our attention to a black-covered and plastic-sleeved book in the foyer of the church that was a complete dossier of all headstones.  We attempted to "photocopy" the relevant pages.  There are not as many Brinsmeads as we had thought.  We managed to find eight headstones in a group, back to back with others in the southwest corner and obviously removed from their original sites.

We had a fine and sunny day for our trip back to Sheffield.  You don't see much from a motorway but we did enjoy the trip through north Devon on B and A roads that we had mostly not traversed before. Before we reached the M1 we diverted west of Derby and visited another National Trust property, this one called Kedleston Hall.  It was used during the filming of Pride and Prejudice.  We arrived at 4:15 pm and this was too late to go into the house but we spent about an hour instead wandering in the grounds.  The layout to the property is similar to that at Chatsworth with a dammed stream and bridge at the entrance, sheep in the fields and a neo classical architectural style for the house behind which is a 16^th century church. It was once owned by the Curzon family and they still live in the eastern wing as happens at Chatsworth.

We pressed on with the long twilight available at this time of year and arrived at Stephen Drive in daylight still.  We were held up on the A61 just outside of Chesterfield for about half an hour by a rather bad accident.  A car had swerved, unsuccessfully, to avoid a small animal, run up a bank and flipped onto its roof.  It was badly crushed. Rather sobering...

Posted May 27 2008

Merseyside June 2008

2 June, 2008: The thing that impressed me most about Liverpool was its rich architectural diversity  and the genuine warmth and vitality of its inhabitants. As we toured through the streets I must have been an obvious target because I had my camera around my neck.  But we were approached twice by strangers anxious to help us enjoy their city of which they were obviously very proud.  When we were picked up at the station by Pat and Dave, no less than two taxis took the trouble to let us into their slow moving line of traffic.

2008 is Liverpool's Year of Culture.  With sponsorship from the EEC there is an ongoing range of activities that is just beginning to hit its crescendo as the summer approaches. There is also a burst of civic regeneration involving particularly the docks precinct. This is not the first time but just one of many in the last 100 years since its heyday in the Edwardian era when Liverpool's role in world trade and travel was pre eminent. These re inventions of itself is captured in a quirky piece of moving sculpture by Richard Wilson just outside one Liverpool's underground railway stations.  With a title of "Turning the Place Over" one entire section of the wall in an abandoned building rotates with a vast mechanical arm to renew itself every minute or so. Very apt.

As a consequence of this continuing regeneration the centre of Liverpool is a fantastic hotch potch of architectural styles; Greco-Roman classic, Georgian, early and late Victorian,  Edwardian, art deco  and modern often side by side or even within the same building. This is also reflected in its two cathedrals, the only British city to boast two of these ecclesiastical structures, they are both 20^th century in origin. We visited the Catholic's Metropolitan Cathedral first, a modern concrete creation built in about ten years and completed in the 80's.  It has a central cone and an impressive surrounding with eight chapels all picked out in mood-enhancing stained glass.  However, I was less than impressed to learn that, within a decade of its completion, it has required an 8 million pounnds re fit because of architectural problems.  It is still evolving.

The Anglican's Liverpool Cathedral by way of contrast took more than 30 years to complete and its structure is much more classical cathedral in style. Built in red sandstone and red brick it is bigger even than St Pauls in London and goes by the nickname of "The Big Space".  It dominates the skyline to the city.  Yet, if you look along its adjacent street, one can see the concrete dome of Metropolitan Cathedral less than half a mile away.

I liked the second cathedral more mostly because of its classical style.  Indeed, it is good to know that such a structure is still possible in the 20^th century, and all those old skills that built St Pauls, Winchester, York, Norwich and Salisbury in centuries long gone are still around. Between the two cathedrals, on Hope St, can be found Blackburn House , now a convention centre and restaurant but once a girls' secondary school that boasts some illustrious graduates.

Right outside the Anglican Cathedral is Tracey Emmin's award-winning sculpture.  This consists of a 6-foot rusty pole surmounted by a life size robin also in rusting steel. To say that looks like an inconspicuous piece of junk is to exaggerate its impact.  I didn't even take a picture! A few streets away we saw an example of the work of one famous graffiti artist known locally as Banksey. Also scattered through the city are numerous examples of a Japanese artist's work known as Superlambanana. Yoko Ono was in town for the Festival but we missed her. Instead we visited the largest Chinese gate outside of mainland China that marks a tiny Chinese quarter (I saw only about 6 shops) and we wandered on past Paradise St where a 12-acre new retail centre had opened the day before to the acclaim of 200,000 locals.

Earlier in the day we visited the classic Beatle haunts in Matthew St including the revamped Cavern and the statue of Eleanor Rigby a few streets away.  Whilst we may have found a few of these iconic sites we would have missed many others if we had not had an enthusiastic local guide. It was Dave who pointed out the enormous importance of the trade in African slaves to the 18^th century Liverpool economy, a heritage that lead me to the International Museum of Slavery two days later as we were heading home.

Our first introduction to the architectural variety of Merseyside occurred when Dave took us to his ancestral village. This was built in the second half of the 19^th century  by the soap magnate Lord Lever to house his workers after he moved his operations from Huddesfield, now in South Yorkshire. After hitting on the novel idea of separately packaging his products and advertising aggressively using the concept of "pure ingredients" Lord Lever called the village and factory  "Port Sunlight" in echo of his most famous product. Built on reclaimed swamp, but strategically located on both a railway line and with canal access to the River Mersey, no expense was spared in its design or construction.  A competition was run to all the leading architects of Europe for a modular design of the semidetached houses and villas. When the designs came in Lever told all the architects that their design had won but then he allowed them to build only one complex each.  The result is a delightful variety of exotic designs, many with a distinctly Continental style.  I simply couldn’t stop snapping pictures. There is a church and school of course, a temperance hostel that quickly became the village pub by popular vote, recreation halls, bowling greens, tennis courts and a heated outdoor swimming pool. The crowning glory, and built in a classical style, is the library and art gallery that is dedicated to Lady Lever.  It was fascinating to hear a first hand account of life in the village from someone representing two generations of Lever workers.

After visiting Port Sunlight we were taken to Eastham, the village that was home to Pat's childhood.  There is a picturesque church there that was once the most painted in Britain. The village is right on the south bank of the Mersey so, after an afternoon tea in a wee garden café, we took a stroll through parkland for views across to the Liverpool skyline.

Saturday dawned with glorious sunshine and a cloudless blue sky.  We all went to Ness Botanic Gardens that is maintained and developed as an experimental plot by the University of Liverpool.  There was a magnificent display of native and exotic species with a dazzling array of colours, textures and forms. It has to be one of the best gardens that I have seen on this trip.  There was a wedding in progress as we left but luckily we escaped before a booked group of children arrived for a party that was to feature pond dipping as its principal activity.  What a splendid idea and much healthier than McDonalds!

The Ness Gardens is located on the Wirral, that peninsula of land to the south of the Mersey and north of the estuary of the River Dee.  This runs up to the old Roman city of Chester that is only a few miles away from where Pat and Dave live, so the hills of north Wales can be seen across the broad green acres of the estuary.

Our tour continued west to the charming little village of Parkgate.  Up until the end of the 1700's this was an important port that captured most of the trade in people and goods to Ireland.  However, all this gradually moved to Liverpool as the Dee's estuary silted up and its main channel was moved over to the Welsh side.  All that remains now at Parkgate is a row of splendid Georgian structures all of which have a distinct nautical appearance.

Dave and Pat's younger son and his 2-year old daughter joined us at Parkgate and we then all moved on to New Brighton where we met up with their other son Danny.  He is now a mortgage broker but, for some years, he managed the splendid art deco pub on the very tip of the south bank to the Mersey River.  There is a beach of sorts here and even more sand when the tide permits that runs in a broad sweep up towards the city of Liverpool.

In warm sunshine but cooled by a breeze off the Irish sea we wandered along the broad promenade.  I have never experienced such a sense of space for a waterside location in a metropolitan England.

That night we had a foursome for dinner at a local pub.  Local knowledge again proved most useful. On Sunday we had a splendid walk that began around the public golf course but continued through woods and beside a stream in a most pleasant circuit. This park is in the grounds of the former Hooton Hall, home over the centuries to the Stanley family but now sadly demolished. Dave took us slightly off the course for my final architectural treat for the weekend, a community of postwar emergency housing built largely in aluminium and asbestos. Sixty years on the residents have made their individualised homes and gardens quite smart and they refuse to relinquish them even when offered "something better".  A few of the properties have changed hands for more than £100,000.

Our route back home took us past the chocolate box Hooton church which is constructed in bands of red and white sandstone.  We stopped off for morning tea at the local garden centre.  In fact, this is more than a nursery being more of a homecraft and garden with an enormous range of high quality goods and a cafeteria where you can have a basic English breakfast for £1.99.  Dave say its very popular with all the young Mums.

It was raining by the time we made it back to the house. The good times were over.

And so it was time to leave Pat and Dave.  They are super hosts and we felt very comfortable in their home.  They dropped us off at the station at Birkenhead and we caught the underground through the river tunnel to the city.  It was a wet walk to the Maritime Museum but we spent a fruitful couple of hours there.  I learned a few important facts.  One was the enormous debt owed by the free world to the merchant navy of the Atlantic in the Second World War and the very high mortality rate that they suffered, almost one in three died.  The second fact was that the ship owners of Liverpool were responsible for transporting some 1.5 million slaves to the Americas, but this represents only about 10% of the total number involved.  England abolished slavery many years before the French.  Brazil was the last country to do so and that was 1889.

Posted June 24 2008.

Bath June 2008

16 June, 2008: I left 21 Stephen Drive as early as I thought reasonable and took bus then train to the neighbouring Yorkshire city of Barnsley where another little red Citroen C1 was waiting for us. I am really grateful to Clive at Barnsley Car and Van Hire who has been most flexible during three postponements of a rental; twice to go and work on the Isle of Man and one for the return trip to Australia for the funeral.  A couple of hours later we were in Penkridge, after a journey via Chesterfield, around Derby, around the bottom of the Pennines via Uttexeter and into the gently rolling hills of Staffordshire.  Here we spent a couple of hours with Michelle, Andrew, their three girls and 12 Koi. Michelle was my midwife assistant in the Rooms back in the 80's in Newcastle. She lived in our Steele St unit and was the owner of the little blue Corolla that was Felicity's first car. She returned to England a few years before we left Newcastle to marry on old flame when his first marriage broke up.  He practises as a GP in Woverhampton which is just down the motorway from Penkridge.  Michelle is a midwife in a nearby maternity unit.

But Michelle also owns a flat in Bath from long ago that she, with her brother, mother and father are in the process of renovation.  This trip was the fulfilment of a long promised invitation to visit this iconic English town tucked into the north eastern corner of Somersetshire.  It is also officially within the region known as the Cotswolds which takes its name from the tiny sheep pens or “wolds” which made it a source of great wealth to landowners of medieval times.  Most of the houses in the Cotswolds are built in a beautiful golden-yellow sandstone and many of those in classic Cotswold villages have thatched roofs.

So it was late on a Monday afternoon, with a set of keys in our pockets, some parking permits and directions on paper that we set out for 5 Daniel St, Bathwick.  It's just as well there was daylight saving because we made a couple of "sightseeing" excursions en route as we sought to follow a combination of Multimap and Michelle instructions in from the motorway to the flat and avoiding the central city traffic.  No 5 Daniel Street turns out to be a typical Bath residential street with rows of 4-storey Georgian houses down either side.  But it is only minutes away from the city centre, across Henrietta Park and the Pulteney Bridge over the Avaon.  No, not the Avon of Stratford-Upon, Shakespeare and all that.  There are no less than seven Avon rivers in England because the name comes from the ancient Saxon word "affa" or "river" so this is but one of them.

The flat itself is just two rooms and a bathroom on the top floor. There are good views of classic Bath from the back window.  Renovations are complete but there are no carpets, drapes nor bathroom tiles and it is furnished with only a camp table, two folding armchairs and two enormous double air beds that are really quite remarkable.  Michelle told us later that they cost £35 each including the electric motor that is used to inflate them, top them up as required or, by reversing the flow, reducing the tension in the cradle.

17 June, 2008: Anxious to explore our new environs we were up early and out of the door before 8 am this morning on a walking tour of Bath, at first self guided from a brochure left among Michelle’s collection and then, at 10:30 am, from Audrey, a local who has been providing free guided tours of her city for 34 years.  Not that you could pick that from her commentary. She sounded as fresh and spontaneous as if we were her first ever guests and her patter was both knowledgeable and entertaining.  Our first impressions were marred by the amount of uncollected garbage in the streets but they had them cleaned up by the end of the day.

Our tour took us from London Road to Alfred St, via the upper Assembly Rooms and thence to the Circus, via Brock St to the Royal Crescent, then along the gravel walk in Royal Victoria Park  to Queen Square, down Gay St  to the Theatre Royal  at the back of the Rheumatic Hospital  alongside Kingsmead Square  and finally along Bath St  from the King and Queens Baths  to the Roman Baths and Pump Room  on Abbey Square. Not surprisingly our walk with Audrey  covered much of the same ground starting with the Abbey, Guild Hall, then into the Orange Grove (named after the first family of Holland rather than the fruit), by the old East Gate (now below street level as a consequence of the Georgian willingness to build over the past) and the Weir (built on the Avon River for flood mitigation), past Pulteney Bridge (named after its builder who was accessing his devlopments on the east bank) to Milsom St ascending to the Upper Assembly Rooms and returning via the Circus, Crescent Queen Square, Theatre Royal etc.

As the site of Britain's only natural hot water springs, Bath has been a site of occupation since prehistoric.  Legend has it that Prince Bladud, the swineherd with leprosy, saw his pigs were cured of their skin blemishes after immersion in the warm mud. Following their lead he was cured of his leprosy, founded the city and became its first king.  In 2008 this story is being celebrated by a large number of sculptured pigs  in exotic costumes, scattered through the city. There are pigs that might fly, pigs in the parks, pigs in trees, gold pigs, roger pig, striped pigs, bejewelled pigs, lettered pigs, forest pigs, a world map pig, a Roman pig, an iguana pig, pigs in waistcoats  and fishnet stockings, pigs by the cathedral, pigs in shops, pigs in the shopping streets, pigs in the squares  and in the suburbs.  Sponsored by local businesses, they will be sold at the end of the year and the money raised will be donated to charity.  They certainly added a quirky charm to the place that was the equal to, or better than that of Superlambananas in Liverpool.

In 65 BC the Romans built a sacred bathing complex and the city of Aqua Sulis on the site of modern day Bath.  This was abandoned in 400 AD when the Romans left Britain, their remains were buried in silt and the detritus of subsequent settlements and not rediscovered until 1880.  Meanwhile, the city had become a fashionable resort spa in the 18^th century when first Queen Mary, wife of James II was cured of her infertility by "taking the waters" in 1687 and then Queen Anne visited in 1702. Modern Bath owes its Georgian magnificence to John Woods, the elder and his son of the same name who, with a fascination with classic architecture, embarked on a grand scheme of reconstruction between 1705 and 1800. The hot baths have seen several reincarnations over 1000 years beginning with construction of the Kings Baths in 1090 and ending with a grand reopening of spa facilities in 2002.

In the 18^th century it became popular to take or drink the waters, a rather foul concoction of minerals with a strong sulphurous element. For this purpose the highly fashionable "Pump Room" was built beside what later transpired to be the Roman remains and this is still in use as a restaurant to this day.

We did not reinspect the Roman Baths having previously done so 1999 but we did go for lunch to Sally Lunns, sometimes billed as "the oldest house in Bath".  Sally Lunn was a Huguenot refugee from France who set up as a baker in 1680, introducing the locals to the delights of French-baked brioche. It is still cooked to the same secret recipe so we tried a couple of classic dishes but found them unremarkable.  However, there is an excellent tiny excavated museum in the basement of this house.  From here we drifted to the shops at The Podium and finally to an inspection of  the upper Assembly Rooms.  These are privately owned public function rooms that were the site of grand balls and a casino in the second half of the 18^th century.  They are still used for weddings, conventions and the like.  Our route home was via the Pulteney Bridge and the Henrietta Gardens.

18 June, 2008: Because of a forecast of wind and rain we planned a day of indoor activities..  Pam took herself off to the Jane Austen Centre  whilst I inspected the Postal Museum.  Jane Austen moved to lodgings in Bath in 1801 and used the city as the setting for two of her novels although she was not enamoured of its extravagant artificiality, being a country girl at heart.  Several sites in the city lay claim to places of her residence and her father is buried in one of the local churchyards.  In 1840 the first ever postage stamp, the famous penny black, was sent from the Bath Post Office four days before its official release in London.  In the preceding century a humble postal clerk Ralph Allen had become a self made millionaire when he took a contract for all mail across the country outside of London.  With his fortune he purchased the local limestone quarries and it was his money and materials that enabled the Johns Wood to build their classic streets and squares.  The Post Office museum occupied only one small room in the basement of the old Broad Street PO (now a High St fashion store) but it was an interesting place to spend an hour whilst a steady drizzle bathed the city.  After picking up my mail at an Internet café on Puletney Bridge  for lunch we took ourselves to the Bath Abbey for a free organ recital.

Bath Abbey was in a fortunate phase of construction when the destructive whirlwind that was the dissolution of the monasteries occurred under Henry VIII.  So it remained abandoned until Queen Mary ordered construction to resume in 1617.  It is the third major church to stand on this site.  The first, a Saxon church circa 600 AD was the site of coronation for Edgar, King of Wessex and first monarch ever for the whole of England.  In circa 1000 it was the site of a massive Norman cathedral but this fell into ruin borne out of corruption until 1499 when one Bishop Oliver King began an ambitious rebuilding only to see the work halted in 1539.

A visiting organist adds to the splendour of the interior  with a free recital every Wednesday lunch hour although we thought that the young man's choice of pieces was more a reflection of his skill rather than a repertoire of organ classics that we would have enjoyed more.

From this engagement we hurried on to the Theatre Royal for a matinee performance of "Crown Matrimonial". Starring Patricia Routledge as Queen Mary, better known for her role as Hetty Winthrop from the TV series, this play was en route to London's West End and tells the story from the viewpoint of the Royal Family of the national crisis that arose when Edward VIII declared his love for the twice divorced American socialite Wallis Simpson.  The first act painted the scene of the emerging crisis, through the drama of the abdication and the thrusting of the crown onto the head of the hapless, stammering George through to the final act that was post WWII when Edward is seeking to return to England, only to find that his mother, Mary, traditional and royal to her core can never accept her daughter-in-law.

We had front row seats just feet away from all the action and from where we could study the appalling extent of Patricia Routledge's fallen arches as well as her pill-rolling tremor that implies inipicient Parkinsons.  Coming soon after our recent viewing of film about the present Queen after the death of Princess Diana I can appreciate better where Elizabeth II has been coming from.

The Theatre Royal is a fascinating and magnificent old building.  It was once the home of Richard Nash, a charismatic Welshman who became Bath's Master of Ceremonies in the early 18^th century.  Because of his flamboyant manner and extravagant clothes he was widely known as "Beau Nash" and unofficially as "the King of Bath" for almost 50 years.  When he lost his home to a gambling debt he had to move into the house of his mistress next door and from where he was heard to pronounce: "One can no more be accused of being a whoremonger for having one whore as can a man who has one cheese be called a cheesemonger".

19 June, 2008: It is billed as a six-mile walk along Bath's Skyline.  It was a typical English summer's day with sunshine, cloud, cool breeze and a few spots of rain.  We ended up walking about eight miles because I thought we could incorporate a visit to Prior Pak, country estate for Ralph Allen.  However, we arrived at this National Trust property about 90 minutes before it was open so pressed on with more pavement pounding through the estate village to pick up our trail once more.  The walk is largely through fields donated or otherwise acquired by the National Trust to the south and east of the city.  It is a splendid mix of lanes, fields, woods and dales  that provide excellent panoramas  over the city  that can bask in a golden glow when the light hits from the right angle.  The route took us up by a farm, past a stately home, to wide fields on the plateau, the city RSPCA Cat and Dog's Home, the transmitter towers and a sham castle that was erected by Ralph Allen to improve the views from his town house.

We returned via the Sydney Gardens, a favourite haunt of Jane Austen in whose time a map was required to find one's way around its complexity.  Unfortunately, since then it has been traversed first by a canal  and then by a railway line. We were back in the flat by 2 pm and a little frustrated to watch as the day got steadily better with sunshine that lasted until well after 8 pm.  It is usually the other way around with the most blue sky to be seen before 9 am. We spent the afternoon snoozing and then in some hunting and gathering at the local Morrisons Supermarket.

20 June, 2008: For the first time since arrived in Bath we took the car out today and headed towards Wiltshire's Westbury White Horse, familiar as we were with its counterpart on the Sutton Bank outside of Thirsk in Yorkshire. In fact, I was surprised to discover that this is just one of eight across England, the most famous of which is in Uffington, Oxfordshire.  The practice of cutting out a silhouette of a horse by sod removal down to chalks stone is thought to commemorate various Saxon battles with white chargers.  This one dates from circa 1740 and it has changed quite a bit over the years, the early versions being quite amateurish in appearance.  The rock had to be scoured regularly to keep it white but the last recorded scouring of the Westbury horse occurred in 1853.  In the late 1950's the form was preserved by covering it in white concrete.  This is not inappropriate because a concrete manufacturing plant can be seen within a couple of miles of its feet.

We were not sure just how close we could get so began taking pictures many miles away.  However, we found that we could drive up on an adjacent slope for an excellent perspective. From there we made our way to the top of the plateau that runs back onto the Salisbury plains.  This is the site of an ancient hill fort and it provides for splendid views over a picturesque Wiltshire landscape.

From here we drove on to a Norman church in the village of Edington that dates from the 15^th century. If all the residents of Edington were to attend the same Sunday service, which seems quite unlikely, they might fill 10% of this church.  It is truly magnificent both inside  and out.

Then we looped back towards Bath to Farleigh Hungerford Castle, ancestral home to the Hungerford family for some 300 years.  I think that I am right in saying that it is the same branch of the family that was represented in ours by Pixie.  Their history is colourful to say the least.  One wife murdered her first husband and burned his carcase in the castle ovens so that she could marry one of the Hungerfords when he returned from the campaigns in France.  Justice caught up with her after his death and she was eventually hanged for her crime.  Another Hungerford kept his wife banged up in one of the castle's four corner towers for years and years.  She was fed at night by pulley and tackle by the villagers. Another Hungerford, convinced that his wife was an adulteress and trying to poison him, went to court to prove it.  When he lost his case he refused to pay his wife's costs so went to gaol instead.

The family suffered the expected misfortunes during the War of the Roses, Henry the VIII's mercurial reign and then the Civil War as they often found themselves backing the wrong side.  Quite a few of the Hungerfords lost their heads either figuratively or in fact.  The castle and its estate was lost twice and regained by the family before one Hungerford fell into debt in the late 1600's and the property slipped into disrepair.  Thereafter it became, and still is, just the gateway to a farm.

We spent a couple of hours exploring the site and its artefacts with the assistance of an audio commentary from English Heritage.  The best preserved part is the chapel  in which a mural of St George slaying the dragon was uncovered during restoration.  In the crypt there are Hungerfords with leaden face masks, the best example of a family group in the country.

En route back to Bath we stumbled upon another gem of a place;  Bradford-on-Avon.  Never mind the 15^th century Norman church at Edington, here is a Saxon Church from 700 AD.  Many of buildings in the town also date from medieval times.  There is a very pretty stretch of river  with wildlife, a canal  here and a farm  within the town that has been taken over as public parkland.  It features a magnificent  Tithe Barn  that dates from the mid 14^th century.  We stopped off at the Canal Café  for an ice cream and the sun was still shining.

21 June, 2008: It is Saturday and our days in Bath are rapidly drawing to a close.  Clouds and showers of rain again today.  We had a late start after a visit to the Internet café on Pulteney Bridge while Pam shops. However, we were still out to the National Trust’s Dyrham Park before the house was open for inspection.

This is a fabulous property on some 2,400 acres that is run by the Trust with a beef herd.  There are also a few deer.  It was inherited by a mid ranking civil servant as a crumbling Tudor house beside a 14^th century church  when he married one Lady Mary Wynter.  Unfortunately, or fortunately for him, she died before he had finished rebuilding the huge house.  The grounds, with two fish ponds, once boasted fabulous water features and, like those at Chatsworth, were set out by Capability Brown.  They afford some splendid vistas of the house and church.  There was a detailed audio commentary for the house inspection, free to us of course as NT members.  We have certainly had our money's worth.  Cameras are forbidden in the house but I maintain that they would make a lot of money if they offered DVD's of the huge catalogue of treasures that these Trust houses contain.

We picnicked in the old dairy at Dyrham because of rain showers  and then drove on to Castle Combe, a tiny but classic 16^th century Cotswold village built in yellow sandstone. We wandered the length of its single short street, peered into a few back yards, had a cream tea at the pub and then drove home via Chippenham.  It was such thick cream that I won't feel like eating again for hours.

22 June, 2008: After packing up and cleaning the flat we made an early start on largely empty Sunday roads for a pleasant drive across Wiltshire into Warwickshire.  By 10 am we were into Stratford-on-Avon where we were delighted to discover that tours of Anne Hathaway's Cottage  were available for the discount price of £1 each.  It was an escorted tour at that price to boot.  This property is still a small farm on the outskirts of the town where Anne, the eldest of 11 children was raised by her parents before marrying William Shakespeare.  It was fascinating to be told that he almost certainly walked on the very flagstones that still make for the kitchen floor.  Our tour guide's account of the many original household articles was peppered with an explanation of how many of our common expressions arose from this era.  These include: "Bed and board" "Stop gap" "Turn the table, "Upper crust" and  "To take pot luck". The house, made of wattle and daub, is in an excellent state of preservation and its cottage garden with annuals and vegetables was at its peak of summer extravagance.

We drove on a few miles to join Mia and Robin for lunch. After selling their house outside of Birmingham just before the real estate crash, they have taken to life on the canals by living in a narrow boat.  It has been superbly fitted out by Robin and they lead a carefree life moving from place to place, all within rail commuting distance of the central Birmingham Hospital where Mia works as in HIV medicine.  She has just volunteered for 12 months in a third world country, most probably Africa.

After a walk along the tow path to settle the magnificent lunch we reluctantly had to leave.  One of the things that we forfeited when we returned to Australia was a weekend messing about in the boat and on the canals with Robin and Mia.

Ninety minutes later we were in Penkridge with Michelle and Andrew and the three girls Isobella, Rosalind and Clementine.  Andrew insisted that we stay for supper, a very tasty savoury sausage paella.  We eventually made it back to Sheffield soon after 10 pm after a very good run on the A roads that ha taken us around the base of the Pennines.  Sadly, I had to forgo the scenic route that I was planning to take through Buxton. Just like York, Thirsk, Harrogate and all those places in Yorkshire and beyond that I was planning that we should revisit we have, again, missed Buxton.

We shall simply have to come back to England again.  I love it.