Just a brief note. I need to check out of the airport Hilton soon and get on to my next destination. I've referred a question to AOL Help about the weird tags that are displaying in some of my most recent entries. I hope to get it fixed.
I'm a little behind on journal writing because Sara and I managed to fill up our days. I figure I'll catch up in the next few.
Thursday opened fairly grey and wet. We dawdled over breakfast to see what it would develop into. It started to clear up, but still looked very threatening. We decided to do a little car touring again, planning to stop places where we could get out and walk if the weather collaborated.
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First stop was <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" /><st1:place w:st="on"><st1:PlaceName w:st="on">Bodnant</st1:PlaceName> <st1:PlaceType w:st="on">Garden</st1:PlaceType></st1:place>, an estate run by the national trust. The gardens were just wonderful. Almost everyone we had spoken with had identified it as a must see, particularly given the season. The vast majority of the plants were in some kind of bloom.
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The feature of the place is the laburnum arch – more than 100 feet of arched trellis with laburnum trained over it. I had been seeing laburnum all over the place, but didn’t know its name till then. It’s a fairly ordinary looking tree except that when it blooms it comes out in bunches of vibrant yellow flowers that look something like bunches of grapes but also seem like little fountains of water. I had heard the expression dripping with blossom before, but these really showed me what it meant. So at Bodnant, we walked under this long archway with these drippy yellow blossoms hanging from the ceiling and filtering the light. They also gave off a very pleasant scent, although it did remind me of the scent of lemon towels a certain stratum of oriental restaurant trots out to the diners after a meal.
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The formal gardens around the house are in five tiers of terraces, then you get down into a whole valley floor planted with a mix of the same kinds of plants we’d been seeing in the forests and a range of exotics, all carefully placed and mixed. There are also a few historical buildings, some of which had always been on the site and some of which were brought there. All in all a stunning place to wander around, and so over the top, there was no danger of getting ideas we would think we had to replicate in our tiny garden at home.
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The place was alive with senior citizens and families. We only saw two other apparently childless but child feasible aged couples in the place.
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Next destination was the walled town of <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Conwy</st1:place></st1:City>. It must have become unimportant and economically distressed for some chunk of its history, because it still has nearly all of its walls. (If it had been more important, it would have grown over them and hence destroyed them. If it had ever had gobs of money, it would have pulled them down to recycle the stones into new, grand buildings.) You can still do the wall walk around more than 2/3rds of the town as we did, which is an enjoyable though sometimes vertiginous way to see it.
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We also toured the castle – in a state of repair that makes it particularly easy to see how the castle was meant to work as a fortification. It was very much like crawling around a life sized cutaway model. The part of it that will stay with me forever, though, wasthat they had the most ridiculous set of precautionary warnings of various dangers while touring the castle with accompanying graphics. The one for “Some spaces are dark, be sure to allow your eyes to adjust before proceeding” looked like “This castle may give some visitors a severe migraine.”
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We also toured the oldest house in town which was cute. The introductory video said the house had a near brush with being bought and carried off to <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">America</st1:place></st1:country-region>, but when we asked the people at the house which American had tried to buy it, we got very silly answers given in a way that made it clear they didn’t know and were making them up.
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Third stop was Llandudno which we never heard said twice in the same way, so I have no idea how it should really be pronounced. It is a mid sized seaside resort. I have a bad habit when car touring of pulling into the first likely looking parking spot then charging out to see where I am after. I just hate driving and especially driving through winding little town streets that much. This is a habit that has gotten me (and my traveling companions) a lot of healthy exercise and a certain amount of “What the other tourists don’t see (because it’s just a long street of dull apartment blocks)” over the years. This was no exception.
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We were driving along and passed a now entering sort of sign for Llandudno. I saw the ocean on the left and a blue square with a white P on it. Within moments, we were parked on a side street one block in from the seashore. I figured we’d arrived. We walked along the promenade, but it all seemed pretty squidgy. When we found a map board, it turned out we’d found what was essentially the back alley <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:PlaceType w:st="on">beach</st1:PlaceType> of <st1:PlaceName w:st="on">Llandudno</st1:PlaceName></st1:place>. The main beach was the other side of the peninsula.
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It’s not a very thick peninsula, and Sara didn’t want to put up with me whining about driving some more and having to figure out where else to park, so we walked the main street through residential Llandudno. I was interested to see this town. I’d heard for years how dull and cheerless British seaside resorts were, and I was eager to see whether it was true. I am glad to say Llandudno delivered. When we found the actual promenade, it was much larger than the version we’d found at first, but no more interesting. They call it a beach, but it’s nearly all stones. The block facing the beach is an almost solid overcast of 19th century hotel frontages – picture a long curve of white wall with black framed windows relieved only by the occasional extravagant cast iron entry way. Some of the hotels are different shades of white.
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The street one block further in land is solid shopping – almost all chains. Some of the architecture is glorious old Victorian excess, but nothing in any of those buildings was open. This brings us to one of my real frustrations as a visitor in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Wales</st1:place></st1:country-region>. It stays full daylight till well past 9 PM, buteverything closes up at 5 or 6 at the latest. As nearly as we can tell, the only thing anyone does in the evenings is go to dinner, then lock themselves in their rooms till breakfast. Llandudno does offer a few thrill ride attractions, most of them various ways to get up to the top of Great Orme head which borders one end of the beach. There’s also reportedly a prehistoric copper mine up there, but all these attractions and the transport to them were long closed by the time we got to town. I’m not saying I wanted to ride a cable car up to the top of a hill overlooking a boring seaside resort, but I don’t understand why I didn’t have the option.
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We had a nice Indian dinner, then walked back to our car to drive back to Betsy and lock ourselves into our room until breakfast.
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Again, no measured walking, but between the gardens, the walls of Conwy, and my unique approach to parking in strange towns, I’m sure we put more than 6 miles behind us.
Tuesday morning, we were slightly creaky from all the walking on Monday. After breakfast, Jill warned us that the weather forecast was clear for the next couple of days but called for clouding up and raining by later in the week. If we wanted to do any of the high mountain stuff, we should jump on it.
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Taking that advice to heart, but not feeling like a mountain climb, we drove to the <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" /><st1:place w:st="on"><st1:PlaceType w:st="on">village</st1:PlaceType> of <st1:PlaceName w:st="on">Llanbaris</st1:PlaceName></st1:place> and took the train up to the summit of Mt Snowdon. It is the tallest mountain in <st1:country-region w:st="on">England</st1:country-region> or <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Wales</st1:place></st1:country-region> and gives its name to this whole region – Snowdonia. The ride up the mountain took an hour. The views were spectacular for most of the way, although the pleasure of the whole thing was substantially marred by the educational soundtrack they played. First, the content was cheesy beyond the dreams of Kraft. Second, it had been recorded by a fellow with an accent that sounded as though he was going to start telling us about his Lucky Charms at any moment.
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Fortunately, we got to the top and had half an hour to scramble up to the tip top of the mountain and enjoy the view. It wasn’t crystal clear, so I don’t think we were seeing anything more than 20 miles away, but I’m confident we were seeing that far. More people had walked up than were there from the train, and we wished we had too, although we’d have been pretty beat. We scrambled back down just in time to get our seats.
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No sound track on the way down, but the wind had shifted, so the coal smoke was more or less the whole air supply to the passenger car. Views were still great, and we faced the other way on the way down, so we had a different perspective. A lot of what I wrote previously about the layers of occupation came from what we saw along the track and even some of what the leprechaun told us – I couldn’t ignore it all.
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Some of you already know I had a surprise lined up for Sara. I had been teasing her with micro hints for the last few days. I always have to be very careful giving her hints because she’s so likely to work things out. The surprise was to take her to Portmeirion, which is a fanciful collection of architecture put together between the 1920’s and 1970’s by a wealthy gentleman who thought people ought to use buildings to make the landscape more interesting rather than less so. It really is just a pastiche of architectural styles, all of them highly decorative and in the end wonderfully put together.
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For me, the interesting thing was that this village was used as the setting for The Prisoner, a short lived 1960’s television series about a super spy who is sent away to a weird internment center in which a mysterious organization is trying to in some ill defined way break his spirit. Sara introduced me to the show, which is delightfully strange. I thought it would be a good surprise to bring Sara in here blindfolded, get her to a vista where it would be clear where she was, then let her look.
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In the end, it mostly worked. In point of fact, a bunch of work was done on the village after The Prisoner had been made and they’d shot creatively to make the space look different than it actually was, so I couldn’t find anyplace that looked exactly right. As a result, when Sara first looked – after the sort of involuntary trust exercise of walking a quarter of a mile or so on my arm with her eyes closed – she thought I’d just found her a bizarre space, something like a town we’d visited in the Czech Republic, I told her it did resemble that, but there was something else about this particular space. She looked around a little more then figured it out. She actually squealed, so I felt richly rewarded for having put it all together. We had a good time poking around the village and had a nice walk through the gardens. We finished with ice cream cones on a shady bench on a fanciful square.
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No Garmin Facts, I credit us 3 miles between the gardens at Portmerion and some walking around Betsy deciding where to have dinner.
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Wednesday we still had fine weather. After seeing all those people who had walked up Snowden we were eager to try a mountain of our own. Moel Siabod looked approachable at just over 800 meters – we’d climbed more than that on Monday. The Collins guide showed it as a difficulty of 3 on a scale of 5. We figured we could do it. The recommended trail head was also a very short drive away, and I was ready for another vacation from driving.
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We found the right parking spot reasonably quickly and started up the mountain. The early part was just a walk through fields – steep in places but with very easy footing. We climbed up to a couple of small lakes and the ruined buildings of a quarry working. Our guide told us the quarry hadn’t lasted long, as the slate dug there proved not to be very usable, but they got a fair number of buildings up, all easy to pick out. They also left an impressively big flooded hole.
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While we poked around some of the buildings, two other walkers – an English couple a bit older than ourselves – caught up to us. We kept exchanging leads with them for a while, sometimes comparing notes – they had a different guide to the walk. At the base of the final ascent, they decided to take a trail up the side of mountain while Sara and I decided to go more nearly straight up. We had a good time with nearly an hour of scrambling up rocks. It wasn’t much harder than climbing steep, irregular stairs, but we could never be sure it wasn’t about to get much worse. It was also very hard to estimate how far we had left to go. I fairly suddenly climbed over a last pile of rocks and saw the summit trig point only a few yards away. So far as I was concerned, we could easily have had another hundred feet of climbing.
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Because we’d spent a lot of time picking routes and resting, we walked onto the summit from our side at exactly the same time as the couple who had taken the long way around. We took pictures of each other on the top. The views were fabulous and much more satisfying since we’d dragged ourselves up.
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The way down was quite straightforward, although one trail our guide said we should use for a short cut back to where we had parked seemed not to exist. The other couple’s guide gave a different descent path that did show on my map. It was more pleasant anyway, as it took us through a nice stretch of woods. The way down was steep, but not otherwise too bad. We did suffer from a funny affect that from just below the summit, it looked as though the walk down would be very quick since everything below us was far away and therefore looked small. It was hard to force our perceptions to get the distance correct.
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We said goodbye to the other couple who were staying at a hotel we passed just before getting back to our car. Quick drive back to Betsy and a stop in the cyber café so Sara could do her mandatory Wednesday work. We took the rest of the afternoon and evening reading in the garden at the Old Courthouse and poking around the village.
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Garmin Facts: 8.7 miles in 3:46 with 1:42 resting. 2.3 mph moving average. 1.6 overall average – lots of view looking. Climbed 810 meters.
Monday morning, we stoked up with a good breakfast at the Courthouse. The dining room is actually the old court room. One of my walking guides recommended a route that would visit a few of the mountain lakes near Betsy and let us completely ignore the car for the day. After all the driving the day before, this sounded pretty good. Looking at my map, most of the route seemed to make sense. We touched base with Jill on the way out. She was dubious of our ability to finish the route and gave us some advice about bail out opportunities and a card for the local taxi service. Having already walked further than I wanted to walk back from, I appreciated the card. She also warned us that we would find the paths unevenly marked.
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Removing any suspense, we did walk the whole way around as planned and didn’t need to catch a cab. We’re in the middle of a national park right now and are essentially here the week before the beginning of the crowded season. As a result, most of the facilities have woken up, but we have vast stretches of the park practically to ourselves. Our route started out near an almost empty parking lot just on the edge of the village. It climbed through forest with occasional evidence of mining.
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There are basically three layers of human occupation here. It started out as agricultural territory with some plowed crops and lots of sheep and cows. The higher country we’ve seen often has ruined farm buildings and field walls left over from this layer. After that, a lot of the country was given over to mining and quarrying – lead, copper, iron, and slate mostly. The abandoned mines and mine buildings we passed on Monday came from that, and the mining period left a lot of the hilltops in bad shape. Just in the last handful of decades, a lot of the mine torn land has been reforested for the most recent primary industry – tourism. <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" /><st1:place w:st="on">North Wales</st1:place> has been a vacation destination well back into the 19th century, overlapping with the end of mining. Reforesting the most ripped up areas has helped create new tourist opportunities.
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Certainly it had worked for us. The few places where the mining heritage showed through just added interest. The foliage has thoroughly taken back the hills above Betsy, and there are nice paths linking the different lake cradling valleys. Jill was of course right about the waymarking. The funniest thing is that there were a fair number of markers, but they were only in places where the trail was unmistakable. Anyplace there was a decision to make where it looked like our route could go one of several ways there would be no marks.
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Fortunately, there are numbers of roads and tracks through the forests most of which diverge and remeet. Even when the real paths didn’t quite match the map, we could always find something that kept us going in the right direction and get to all the destinations we wanted to find. We didn’t see any other walkers out on Monday. We passed or were passed by a few cyclists on some of the forest roads, which are perfect for intermediate mountain bikers and clearly attract quite a few. A few times we passed park operated picnic areas and often saw a few couples at each one.
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Our big social stop for the day was a tea break at the Crafnant Lakeside Café. When we showed up at mid afternoon, there was one woman running the place, and she was in a panic as she had us and two other customers to deal with. We ordered tea, sandwiches, and scones – traditional afternoon tea for which we were well ready after 8 or so miles of walking. While we (and the other two who had ordered before us) were waiting, we chatted with the other customers. One of them was a fellow who was born in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Wales</st1:place></st1:country-region> then moved away to the midlands to make a living and had recently moved back to semi retire. He gave us his view of what was best to see and do around <st1:place w:st="on">North Wales</st1:place>, much of which we have since done. He made me feel very good to be a visitor here. He made it clear how much the area relies and has relied on a long time for visitors for business. He also gave me the impression that the Welsh have survived for so long by figuring out how to simultaneously take things seriously and lightly.
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Eventually, our food and drink showed up. We ate at a table on the lake shore and amused ourselves watching people and birds fish. Several other parties came in with whom we visited a bit. Everyone was gratifyingly impressed that we had walked there from Betsy.
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Fed and refreshed, we walked back to the village by way of a few more lakes then a walk along one of the many rivers – I can’t remember and couldn’t pronounce or spell which one. Some of the way, we followed a rough path that clung precariously to the steep bank. Other times, we got tired of that and climbed up to a forest road that was just above that path. We walked by and got a nice view of a waterfall called <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:PlaceName w:st="on">Swallow</st1:PlaceName> <st1:PlaceType w:st="on">Falls</st1:PlaceType></st1:place>.
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Garmin Facts: 15.8 miles in 6:05 walking and 3:00 resting for 2.6 mph moving and 1.7 mph overall with 821 meters climbed.
It is Wednesday afternoon. Sara and I are in Café Active above the Cotswolds Rock Bottom shop, it’s basically a little coffee shop above an outdoor store. They’ve got ISDN dial up which isn’t broadband, but it’s a little better than regular dial. Sara is checking email and doing a little fragment of work she has to do every Wednesday.
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She showed up in <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" /><st1:place w:st="on"><st1:City w:st="on">Oxford</st1:City></st1:place> right on time. We pushed her bags into the car then wandered the city for a little. She had forgotten to bring a hat and found a nice one in a boutique. We bought sandwiches and a dressed baked potato for a picnic and ate it in a churchyard off a quiet square. <st1:City w:st="on">Oxford</st1:City> is a very pretty city, and after the north of <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">England</st1:place></st1:country-region> and the rural southwest, it was a surprise to be somewhere so busy and so full of young people.
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The drive up to <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Wales</st1:place></st1:country-region> was uneventful. We caught each other up on what we’d been doing the last four weeks. By far, this was the longest we’d been apart since we met, so it was a lively talk. Sara told me there were nice views from the car when the highway was above the ground around, I was mostly riveted to the road. We zipped along motorways for most of the trip until the highway turned into rural road about 30 miles from our destination. From there, it was something like backroads <st1:State w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">West Virginia</st1:place></st1:State> driving except the roads were narrower and most of the other drivers more courteous.
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We got into Betws-y-Coed late in the afternoon. Our host at the Courthouse Inn, Mark Henlly, showed us around the place and gave us particulars about when breakfast was and where they had tourist info. He and his wife Jill are both very well suited to the hospitality business and have been as helpful with information as they have been careful of our comfort. The building was in fact a courthouse until sometime in the middle of the 20th century. The rooms are all named for functions that were performed there. We’re in the fingerprint room. It’s a good sized room and we get the neighbor’s well tended garden as our view. We’ve been very comfortable.
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Mark and Jill had also given us restaurant recommendations in the village. After unpacking and settling in, we went for a walk that took us first across the nearby River Conwy then around the fringe of a golf course. We did some window shopping, mostly comforting ourselves with the reflection that we didn’t need anything. Had dinner in the grill room of the <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Royal Oak</st1:place></st1:City> – lambs liver just for the adventure which wound up being pretty good.
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No measured walking on Sunday, but I’m sure I ran up at least 5 miles between wandering Oxford and our orientation walk around Betsy, as we’ve heard people abbreviate the name of the village.
Saturday morning, I was able to face a short drive. I puttered a few miles and parked in the
The latter was the boyhood home of William Morris who covered the better bits of the late Victorian world with elaborately patterned fabrics and wallpapers. It was a good place to grow up if you wanted a lot of natural and medieval beauty soaked into your eyes from a young age. I sat on the ruins of the old village cross to readjust the fit of one of my boots and found myself in the middle of the marshalling yard for a large, multigenerational family expedition. There were twenty of them easily with children outnumbering adults and moving around too fast for me to get a good count. A stern woman with one child in a stroller and another on her back was trying to herd the whole bunch and looked moments from adopting Sara’s preferred herding behavior of shooting any sheep that stray.
I walked off quickly lest she try to get me into the pack and walked back towards the path. On the way there, I ran into a further outrider from the troop – woman with a child in a back pack. From the way she was looking back towards the village and sort of pacing, I figured she was with the group, but didn’t fancy the chaos, so had gotten out ahead of the main body. I was so curious, I had to ask, and she confirmed that she was with them but the tone of her voice made it clear she was not of them.
I never saw the whole crew again, so they must have gotten into a boat or driven away in cars. I can’t believe they would have made better than half a mile an hour in open country if they’d kept walking, and I couldn’t have missed them.
From Kelmscot, I walked a few more miles along to Radcot, home to the oldest bridge over the
I had an adequate meal at The Swan, sitting in the garden. The sun had come out strong, and people were peeling off outerwear and rolling up pants legs to get all the sun available. It was easy for me to bag the table in the shade. After lunch, I walked on a little bit further, but I was getting a little bored with walking along the river and about half as tired as I wanted to be. I turned around and retraced my steps. Most of the boaters were at lunch, so I had the river mostly to myself.
There were birds around in great profusion – especially swans. The swans were either mating or fighting over territory because they did a lot of charging and dive bombing at each other and general chasing around. I also saw some grey herons, lots of little birds I couldn’t identify, and I heard cuckoos who sound just like the ones in clocks except for not being able to tell time. Having the river on my left hand instead of the right, entertainment from the birds, and the absence of a chugging narrowboat engine all removed the boredom from the rest of the trip, and I enjoyed it thoroughly.
I had tea and a slice of fruitcake that was almost like German lebkuchen at a shop in Buscot. I drove around to a few towns trying to find a cash machine. Lechlade failed me, but Farringdon met my needs. I also found The Sadlers – the companion deli to Herb’s restaurant and bought myself provisions for Saturday evening dinner. The rest of last night was journal composition, a nice visit with Pat who wanted to know what I’d liked most about my stay so she could recommend it to other guests, then dinner with a very silly American series about a big earthquake in California on the television (Earthquake 10.5 – perhaps prepared exclusively for the export market, as I had certainly never heard of it). I would have preferred to see something silly and British, but the only British things on were sports and dating related game shows so vulgar they offended even me.
I am now sitting in a Starbucks in
Friday, I didn’t even want to touch the car. I had picked up a map of the area right around the farm and decided to piece together a walk out to various sights around here.
Tiny bit of background – during the middle ages, this was all church land, which basically meant that members of the clergy filled the skimming off the top and seeing to it everyone was productive role that would otherwise have been carried out by the secular nobility. The churches are all quite nice, but the vicarages are often nicer and usually bigger.
I started out walking across the fields to a village called Longcot, mostly to meet up with another path that would take me to Little Coxwell then onward to Great Coxwell. I will say little about the beauty of these villages or the fields between them, lest I become tiresome, but you can take said beauty on faith.
On the way into Little Coxwell, I had a nice talk with a fellow driving a heavy duty powered chair. Among other things, he told me I wasn’t to take all the beautiful flowering trees for granted as this was an unusually good year for them owing to a rainy March. He had to drive on to catch up with his dogs.
Great Coxwell is where the importance of the church lands story comes in because it is home to an enormous tithe barn where the church’s cut was collected. You have to call it a barn, since that’s what it was used for, but architecturally, it’s more a sort of basilica. If the doors were a little bigger, you could use it for a light aircraft hanger. The structure is all ancient wood, so the place is full of fire extinguishers. There are clear instructions that if members of the public detect a fire, they are just to evacuate and call for help, but all those extinguishers tell me they sort of hope those instructions would be disobeyed.
From Great Coxwell, I walked to Badbury Hill, another hill fort where I was back to my normal experience of being unable to see any evidence of banks or ditches or anything. It is mostly wooded now, and it is a very pretty patch of trees. The understory is solid bluebells right now. There are numbers of signs begging people not to harvest the bluebells which seemed to be working as I didn’t see any suspicious bare patches.
I walked across a few farms and along a track that was the east boundary of
Just as I got to the entrance, it started to sleet. I quick-drew my rain gear including shoving my map into my nerd carrier and putting the rain cover over my pack. By the time I reached the parking area, the rain and sleet had stopped. It was still half an hour till doors opened, so I sat on exactly the bench I’d dreamed I might find and read my book. I’ve given myself a holiday from heavy reading and am zipping through a Wodehouse novel called Ring for Jeeves. I picked it up in Middleton. I think I already own it, but under a different title. I certainly hadn’t read it in a long time, and I’m having fun with it.
The clock struck 2 over the ticket office. I went in and showed my membership card for a free ticket and brochure.
I don’t have all the details, but apparently, the UK introduced enormous death taxes on the fabulously wealthy which made it much more appealing for them to gift big chunks of their estates to public trusts in exchange for tax breaks and the right to continue to enjoy use of the property for some number of years or even generations. For example, the lords Farringdon can still live in parts of the house and they have the hereditary job of curating the art collection. I can’t even decide how I feel about this from a moral perspective, but I’ve gotten plenty of benefits out of it.
From looking at the house and collection, the Farringdon’s combine relentless precision – the recent work on the house is every bit as good as the 200 year old stuff, which I know is hard work – with a tremendous sense of fun. Easiest example of that is that the entryway has a statue in it. There’s fool-the eye-painting on the wall behind it that gives it a permanent shadow. In a country where sunshine is anything but reliable, this struck me as very witty. There were other examples, but I liked that one.
After the house, I scouted around the grounds for a while. Another example of the sense of fun was the swing garden, a pretty little space completely surrounded by big swinging benches.
I had a nice tea in the shop, the walls of which were covered with murals that combined whimsical reproductions of pieces from the art collection with portraits of members of the family and celebrities they had entertained at the house. I then groveled with the ticket lady to try to get me permission to walk out through the back road. She at least pretended to try, but came back with a no. I walked back out along the ugly, busy road.
I got one benefit. As I walked back, there were two guys practicing archery. What could be more English? There was an older fellow with a classic wooden longbow and a young man with a high tech bow. The high tech outfit was made of a combination of polymers, ceramics and metals. It had a complex counterweight system and what looked like a sight. It clearly drew much heavier than the wooden bow, because the older fellow had to arc his shots significantly to make the distance to the target while the younger man could shoot a much flatter trajectory. I sort of expected aged skill to triumph over high tech, but not that day. The older guy did get at least 3 of 6 arrows into a target so far off it took them more than 90 seconds to walk out to it, but the high tech bow put all 6 and from the remarks of a woman with binoculars who was scoring for them, most close to the center.
The rest was just easy walking back to the farm.
Dinner at the pub. I asked the bar girl whether the Hawaiian chicken was a good idea. She told me “yes”, which is a lot of why I self catered dinner again tonight rather than going back. The barmaids at the Radnor Arms pour good pints, but they are not to be trusted on culinary matters. They did have three very tasty ales in the cask, which I enjoyed, hence no writing last night.
Garmin Facts: 15.1 miles in 5:06 walking for 3 mph walking average. 240 meters climbed plus another 1 mile at least around the grounds at
Thursday I started with a laundry expedition back to the fringes of
In the fullness of time, I passed the torch on to another woman, hauled all my clean, dry clothing back to the car, and drove to Avebury.
Avebury is usually discussed in relation to
Many of the stones were knocked over and buried or broken up for building material and to satisfy pagan bashers in the church. The site was scientifically studied and surveyed several times from the 18th century onward. In the 1930’s, a fellow who’d made a lot of money selling marmalade mounted a big expedition to study and reconstruct as much of the area as possible. They stood back up any whole stone they could find and marked the positions of others. They paid numbers of villagers to move out of areas where interesting pre-historic sites were and built them a new village nearby. They also raised awareness of the existence of all the prehistoric leavings at Avebury.
While I was still looking around the village, I had a call from Sara that she was safe and sound in
I used a number of different paths to put together a rough figure 8 starting in the village, moving out to stop at an area called the Sanctuary, over by way of a village called East Kennet to the West Kennet Long Barrow (purpose built catacombs) on past Silbury Hill back through the village then up to another site called Windmill Hill (hill fort, seasonal home, and marketplace) then back to the village center. It was beautiful walking under threatening skies all day. I hadn’t quite intended to do the part of the walk that took me up to Windmill Hill. I’d been to a few of these hill forts before and not been able to see what the fuss was about. I finished my first loop and had tea and something called a flapjack – I would ordinarily call it a granola bar - then decided it was just too early to stop walking, so I headed out on the second loop. I was glad I did. First, while I was walking up toward Windmill Hill, the storm that had been threatening all day really started to menace. Huge thunderheads were rolling down from the north pushing a strong wind straight into my face. The sun was still shining from my left through gaps in the clouds, making for some fairly eerie lighting effects. I got a very real sense of unearthly powers gathering, and it just did not rain.
I’m not a generally superstitious person but the weather was so clearly ready to rain it felt as though the ancient Britons were holding it off so I could finish visiting their handiwork. So for all the rest of this wander around the Hill and walk back, you have to imagine a seething sky such as would absolutely convince you a torrent was about to start but without it getting around to raining.
The other reason I was glad I’d come was that for a change I could actually see the banks, ditches, and barrows that were meant to be there. It wasn’t hard to imagine living up there on a day with less frightening weather.
I had about two miles to walk back to the village. I stopped at the museum to ask a few questions, then at the shop to pick up a guide book. This was trying the ancient Britons a little too high. Just as I was leaving the shop, it started to barely spit with rain. It kept that up as I walked back to the car park. By the time I got the car started and out on the road it was coming down pretty steadily. It never did pour down as it had looked like it ought to, but it rained for most of my drive.
I went to the town of
Dinner at Herb’s completely spoiled my usual commentary on British cuisine. I have always said before that if you stick to basic pub food you will eat well while if you go to restaurants that are shooting for class and distinction you are likely to be disappointed. Herb’s was very casual, but everything about it made it clear it was shooting to raise the standards of cooking, and so it did. If they were operating in DC, they could easily hold pace with Obelisk. Their menu wasn’t long, but it was so varied, I asked the woman in charge what I ought to have as this would probably be my only try at them. She pointed out three dishes on the menu she would heartily recommend, but then said there was something they’d just rotated off the menu the week before that she was especially proud of. She stepped back to the kitchen to ask her husband whether he could scare that up for me and came back with a yes. It was a very nice steak wrapped in a seasoned pastry surrounded by a variety of vegetables that actually crunched when bitten. If you’re ever hungry and anywhere between
Take a little time to walk around the buildings of Farringdon, too. The poem about the pie full of blackbirds was written there, and bits of it are illustrated whimsically on some of the building facades. Good fun.
In the end, I have found something better to do each evening, including writing this tonight, so I did not subject myself to the play.
After an extravagant dinner, I finished the last few pages of
Garmin Facts: 13.1 miles in 4:30 walking for a walking average of 2.9 miles per hour. 262 meters climbed.
I am writing this, as I wrote the last chapter, on a picnic table in the farm’s back garden. I guess it must be a little cooler tonight, because the bees have already hushed. On my drive home this evening, I spotted a supermarket, and had a sudden burning desire to shop for dinner and “eat in” so to speak. I’d had a substantial lunch, details of which will follow in their proper place, so I just picked up a little bread, cheese, broccoli, and a couple of bottles of ale I hadn’t seen before. I’ve made a little picnic of these while reading and then typing away. I’m still sipping at the second bottle of ale.
My 1967 guide book to the Cotswolds recommends the Coln valley as a destination for sightseers. It is reasonably nearby – the Coln flows into the
As I did for Pennine scenery, let me try to do a condensation of standard Coln valley villages.
Each one has a church – small, attractive, and old with lots of carved wood and stone and either stained glass or clear glass that harvests the views around. Every one I tried to enter was open for the gawping and they cleverly labeled the donation boxes “for the upkeep of the church” so a heathen such as myself wouldn’t feel hypocritical for contributing.
Each village has one or two big houses. See earlier remarks about Cotswolds architecture. Sometimes the big house is out there on display. (I am wealthier than you are, nyah!) Sometimes it is largely hidden behind aged but well maintained walls. (I am so much wealthier than you are I have no need to flaunt it in obvious ways, double nyah!)
Each one has some number of scattered, smaller houses, most pretty and surrounded with extensive gardening.
A very friendly black
Actually, I’m picking it up two evenings later, sue me, I’m on vacation.
The Coln is a small, clear, fast flowing stream. Everywhere I saw it, the bottom was scattered with long plants that danced back and forth in the rushing current. It crosses through each village at some point, usually under a bridge so much larger than the river I suspect it either grows in times of heavy rain or used to. The river valley itself is quite narrow, and in some cases a village has some or all of its buildings outside the valley proper.
With those basics, let’s take me back to having abandoned my car on the right hand side of the road in the right of way – I swear this is how people park in small villages here. I pottered around Coln St Aldwyn for a few minutes, enjoying the pretty houses and so forth. I briefly played peek-a-boo with a young child through the window of the old vicarage. Once she lost interest or was carried away to safety, I walked down to the foot of the village and started to walk along the river towards Bibury.
I’ve already written elsewhere that I was getting unfairly fine weather. This day was really going over the top. At a little before 9 in the morning, the temperature was in the middle 60’s, there were only a few small puffy clouds drifting by, and there was a light breeze. I was walking west, so the sun was behind me. The whole walk unfolded as a series of vistas. It just worked out that I would walk through a narrow spot that blocked the view forward but as soon as I stepped through that, I had a sweeping view all the way up to the next narrow spot. If I’d been thinking, I’d have shot a photo at each new vista and had a fairly complete record of the walk. I strongly recommend this particular stroll to anyone who has a shot at it, particularly if you can do it early on an unusually fine May morning during a year in which the flowering trees are giving it their all.
It is about 2 miles through fields and a few small stretches of woods. Sometimes I was close to the river. Sometimes it would meander away to my right. I spent nearly an hour since I did pause to soak up scenery and take quite a few pictures. I only ran into a few other people, including a couple who I think own or occupy one of the properties I walked across. I got a sense they were trying to look a little put out to have this odd American walking across their land (quite lawfully, I was on the footpath every setp), but were in such good moods they couldn’t quite put it across.
At another point, I startled a couple of deer out of cover. These weren’t the tiny little deer I’d seen in
Enough enthusing, but I will say if I had to pick one short stretch to get across to someone why I’m over here and enjoying it so much this would be the walk to take.
At the end of it, I was in the
Next stop was Ablington. This time I did do the photo of every vista trick, with good results. The map was a little unclear as to whether one part of the path was really public or not, but I didn’t see any keep out signs, so I kept pressing forwards. I met a woman who operated a kennel and stable business who was very reassuring and helpful, although she gave me the sense that I’d gotten onto some rarely used paths. At one point, I had to dodge around a big water splash as she described it. It was a field corner that used to just touch the river bank, but the cattle have wallowed so much at that corner that they dug a broad pool. As I detoured around it, I once again exerted my strange fascination on the cows and wound up with a few dozen of them following me until the path turned a little uphill, and they decided that was too much work.
Shortly after that, I reached a spot where the track disappeared in the middle of a field. I could tell from the map where it ought to be but saw no sign of any kind of path. Because I was making this up as I went, I hadn’t programmed anything in the GPS, so it wasn’t as much help as it might have been. I wound up swimming through hip deep weeds – many of them thistles – until I found a stile that took me over a fence and onto a very well defined path. I think everybody who takes this route must do about what I did, but we don’t all flail around in exactly the same place, so the weeds just spring back up without leaving a good trace.
I popped out of some woods and crossed a little footbridge into the
I stopped for lunch at the
I set out again, well contented if a little less steady on my feet. My map showed two alternate ways onward to Chedworth, home to a celebrated Roman villa first excavated in the mid 19th century. I chose one off the map but somehow got onto the other one. It worked just as well, but I still can’t work out where I stepped wrong. I had a long climb up something called Pancake Hill. I know, it struck me as a contradiction in terms as well, but I couldn’t find anyone local to ask. As I walked along, I kept trying to remember the name of that figure of speech. I ruled out Onomatopoeia, Simile, Metaphor, and the one that sounds like a town in
The couple of miles on to the villa made a great sobering up period. It’s turned out to be far from the best Roman site I’d visited. Most of the décor of the villa was destroyed, but a lot of the systems like heating and plumbing largely survived. My favorite thing about the place is that the National Trust has to be equally respectful of the ancient history of the place and of the recent history of its excavation. Actually, the folks who dug it up didn’t do a bad job, even by modern archeological standards. They didn’t keep the kind of records that would be ideal of exactly where they found things, but they did pay attention to little bits they were digging up. Best of all, they for some reason convinced themselves, once they’d excavated the short base of the villa and one long wing, that there was no other wing, so they left a third of the building under the earth for some future expedition to dig up with methods that will surely be better than anything we have now. I say that with confidence, since the sense I got was that the Trust won’t have any cash to dig there for at least another 50 years.
The Trust staff were wonderful to me when I mentioned that I would appreciate some help finding a taxi service. I’d walked 13.5 miles by this point in nearly 5 hours. Even if I had the energy to retrace my steps, I was likely to run out of daylight. The woman in charge heard my question and said this was exactly the sort of information she wanted her team to assemble to help visitors and set people off scouting through phone books. Somebody found a company in Northleach, a nearby town that some sources even give as the address for the villa. They wouldn’t even let me use my own phone to call. I got the sense that someone else had been belittling the need for them to put together a fact book, and she was so excited about me as a piece of evidence for her case that she went into overdrive. I bought a bottle of supposedly Roman inspired bubble bath in the shop, partly as a show of appreciation, and partly because I like lavender and chamomile bubble bath.
Cab came. In 25 minutes I was back to my car. Drove back to the farm by way of Lechlade for a little provisioning stop as mentioned above. Day well spent.
Garmin facts: 13.5 miles in 4:58 walking with 2:13 gawping, resting, and eating lunch. Moving average 2.7 mph. Overall 1.9. 409 meters climbed, many of them up Pancake Hill.
At any rate, it was interesting to poke around a nearly tourist free English city for a change. Swindon does draw steam railway enthusiasts, of which
I headed out of town to the south, and found my way to
Fed and ready for the trail, I started west along the tow path of the Kennet and
This wasn’t entirely unlike the Leeds and Liverpool that I walked along around East Marton up in the
I was cranking along the tow path at about 3 and 1/3 miles per hour, enjoying the weather and the view. For much of the way, the ground to either side of the path was thick with queen anne’s lace spiced up with other wildflowers. Not like you need waymarks on a canal towpath, but it really was as though the plants were there to decorate the trail.
I wrote yesterday morning that I wanted to see how far I could go on the flat, and that was exactly the goal I started with. The town of
It was that last that got took me off the canal. Ahead and to the north, I saw one of the chalk horses. These are big white drawings of horses done by cutting out a horse shape in the chalky hillsides. There are a fair number of them scattered around Wiltshire. I think the leading theory is that they were put up at the inducement of some kind of pre-historic equestrian warlord and were intended to remind everyone who could see them that he was a big deal and that they should all keep working hard or his benefit.
Seeing the horse made me look above on the map, and it promised a number of barrows and such in some modest hills just a little way from the canal. I looked at the foot paths, and figured I could piece together a round about way back to
I headed north at the next bridge crossing at a place called Honeystreet. That took me up to Alton Barnes. At the church there, I met some very fit looking elders on bicycles. They were very excited, because they’d found a stone that made part of a fence that had crop circle type shapes carved into it – circles with various protuberances on them linked into a barbell with other circles. They proudly told me that Alton Barnes is the crop circle capital of the
Observation on these two – I’m terrible at guessing ages, but I’d be surprised if either of them was less than 65. They weren’t notably athletic looking, but they were pushing along on spiffy high tech bicycles, dressed as though for a cover of Cycling Digest or something like that. Older people here are, I believe, more willing to look sporty. Some of it may be an appropriateness thing. This attire may be viewed as the proper outfit for cycling. I also think, though, that older Americans live in fear oftrying to look younger than they are, which sells them a lot of Lands’ End and Norm Thompson (corrected motto: Escape to the Ordinary) clothing leading them to look older than they are. I claim no certain knowledge, but I do think I’m seeing the results of some kind of real difference.
Anyway, they pedaled off, wishing me safety from the flying saucers. I found the head of my footpath and walked up into the hills. I should have learned by now that what the ordinance survey people put on the map as a prehistoric barrow will look to me like just a hill, while some things that look to me far too regular to be natural are on the map as ordinary hills. I had a nice walk. The views were pretty and the air clear. I saw vast yellow fields full of what I was again reminded today is flowering rape (from which rape seed oil or, as the Canadians renamed it to avoid that admittedly ugly name, canola). Seeing whole fields of this yellow bordering fields of green wheat made the landscape look like an abstract painting. I also got to see the north sides of a few hills I’d seen from the south along the canal. There are benefits to walking higher up.
I made one wrong turn, but had gone nearly a quarter of a mile before I figured it out. On further consideration, I decided it was a short cut anyway. It meant I had a mile or so along a road, but it turned out to be a very quiet road, so no problems.
I got back to the Canal about a mile from where I’d started and spun back up to full speed for a good flat stride to the car. I got out a few minutes ahead of the 4 hour police who, if they even existed, were still pretty stealthy. There wasn’t a meter maid waiting to plant a ticket on my window turning away in bitter dismay when I showed up or anything. I didn’t mention before, but this is essentially what happened when I got back to the car in
The drive back to the farm was uneventful. I’m getting pretty comfortable with this rural driving. I drive only as fast as I am comfortable with. If anyone is trailing me who clearly wants to go faster, I pull over and let him by at the earliest opportunity. When the road is too narrow for two cars to pass at speed, I always fade over onto the shoulder and let the other guy go. Being on the left is no longer weird. It’s really just the narrowness of a lot of the country lanes, and my rules make that manageable.
The Radnor Arms is the pub in Coleshill – the village closest to the farm. I walked over there across the fields for dinner. The evening was still great weather, so outside tables were filling up fast. I saw another couple looking for a place when everything was full. I asked if they’d care to join me, since it seemed a shame to make anyone eat indoors in such weather. They wound up being splendid company.
Tom works for some kind of container and seal company headquartered in
While all the dog continuity was going on, my phone rang. It was Sara. She and I agreed to meet in
We had a wide ranging conversation, mostly about vacations and walking, but stopping at other ports as well.
Eventually, they drove off and I walked back across fields that were only starting to darken at almost 9:30 pm. It was still so nice out I left by window open and was droned to sleep by what I have since learned is a very troubling bee hive the farm owners are trying to get out from under their roof slates.
Garmin Facts: 10 miles, 3:14, 20, 3.1 mph, 2.8 mph, 163 meters climbed. Add a mile and a half for the round trip to the pub for a day total of 11.5 miles.
