We need to tell you about what we’ve been up to lately, but there’s been so many really interesting times that it’s hard to know where to start. So here’s a trip through Seven C’s…..Cornwall, Cheese, Church, Cardiff, Coal, Caernarfon, and the Cavern Club. Ok, so that’s 8 C’s, but one is a double banger….
About two weeks ago, we made it as far as Truro in Cornwall, and from there we made trips to Penzance and to Land’s End. The latter was on a bitterly cold, wet, windy day with a gale blowing icy sideways rain onto the cliffs by the famous signpost (which you can’t stand beside without handing over £5, so naturally we didn’t!) and the place almost deserted as you should probably expect in November. But despite the weather that day, we really loved Cornwall – it has some wonderful scenery, with cliffs overlooking picturesque seaside fishing villages one way, rolling farmlands enclosed within miles of stone fences the other. And speaking of fishing villages, we made the trip to Port Isaac which many of you will know better as Portwen, where the “Doc Martin” series with Martin Clunes is filmed. It is EXACTLY like it is on TV…..we had no problem finding the boat ramp, the school, the restaurant, and the ‘surgery’, and would not have been at all surprised to see the Doc himself striding down the hill in a bad mood as usual. A lovely little village with some very friendly locals to chat to (“ooo, yes, I ‘ad Marrrrrtin in my house just last summer, I did – a lovely man he is too…..”) but sad to learn that only 12 original residents remain down in the harbourside part, as most of the cottages there have been snapped up at exorbitant prices by Londoners who only visit for a few days each summer. Sad in the sense that the heart of a village is its people and they’ve all moved up to the modern houses on the hill that you don’t see on the TV, but good on them for spying the city people with their fat wallets and even fatter egos (“of course, Rupert and I have a little place in Cornwall, you know, that we motor down to every Bank holiday…..”) and making a poultice of money out of them.
A couple of days later, we stayed just out of the floods that affected the West Country quite badly, and visited Cheddar and Glastonbury in Somerset. Cheddar was the first place we’ve ever seen workmen building up sandbags to keep the rising river out of the High Street, and also the first place we’ve seen the actual cheese making process happening in front of us. Past yer eyes, you might say! The Cheddar Gorge Cheese Company (“the only Cheddar made in Cheddar”) is a small company but does the cheese making thing really well, and also does the tourist bit really well too. Not only was it probably the least expensive payment we’ve had to make (£1.95) for a tour, but it was one of the most informative and interesting as well…..and as we were watching the video, through the glass behind the TV, the cheese-maker was actually doing the work…..using traditional time honoured ways of separating the curds from the whey, of folding the cheese as it hardens, of pressing it, of waxing it and so on. And then the tasting to follow was an excellent follow up – well worth the time taken to visit.
After lunch, we went a little further on, to Glastonbury to see the ruins of the Abbey. It was once the biggest Church in England, and arguably the richest as well, until Henry VIII went berserk. Well, actually, maybe not Henry…..the young man who took our money at the Abbey (£5 from memory…..the Anglicans are better at making a dollar than the cheese makers are, that’s for sure) was obviously a history scholar, and gave us some really good insights into the story. At the risk of upsetting any English History buffs amongst the readers of this blog by getting the story wrong, the gist of it was that England was fighting some pretty expensive wars and Henry’s advisers came up with the idea of plundering all the churches around the country, to fill their war-chests. And that’s what was really behind the fact that places like Glastonbury Abbey were stripped of riches and power and left to go to ruin – and here we thought that dear old Henry had done it just so he could get a divorce. As a result of the plundering then, and the centuries since of the locals using the stones as building materials for their own houses (most of Glastonbury is built out of second hand Abbey) the Abbey itself which must have once been such an amazing sight to behold, is now just a few walls and a step or two of the original tile flooring, all amongst perfectly manicured lawns. But it does have a thorn tree that supposedly sprouted from the staff of Joseph of Arimathea when he visited about 1900 years ago (Glastonbury claims to have the longest continuous Christian church establishment in England), it does have the grave where King Arthur is supposedly buried, and it does have (actually not supposedly) a really interesting and well planned museum.
Then onto a religion of a completely different kind – across the Severn Bridge to Wales, and the rugby test in Cardiff. Again, it was raining (oh boy, was it ever) so the short walks from the Prince of Wales pub to the Millennium Stadium before the game, and the short walk back afterwards, and then about midnight, the very long walk from the bus stop to our camp, left us both quite wet and ensured the van still looked like a Chinese laundry nearly a week later! But the inside of the pub was warm and convivial as we enjoyed the company of other Kiwis and of the many Welsh people who were hoping against the odds that THIS would be their year, and the inside of the Stadium was of course dry with the roof firmly closed. And what an atmosphere! It wasn’t Cardiff Arms Park, that’s true, but what the Welsh lacked in firepower on the pitch that day they certainly made up for in the other aspects – the choirs (leading 70,000 or so people one minute in “Men of Harlech” and in Tom Jones’ “Delilah” the next), the anthems, the regimental goat on parade (see later for more details), the fireworks, and the pies which were very, very good. Oh, and Wills and Kate were there too – we have the photos to prove it!
The next day did start a little more slowly than normal, but we had been obliged to celebrate the win of course (by the way, a week later we sat, the only two Kiwis amongst about 100 good naturedly biased Poms, in a pub called The White Bear – where NZ cricketer Lou Vincent used to pull pints – in Shipston-On-Stour in the Cotswolds, and watched a very different All Black performance altogether….the celebrations weren’t quite so long-lived THAT night!). Anyway, back in Wales, we travelled up one of the valleys past Pontypool to a place called Pwll Mawr near Blaenavon. Pwll Mawr is Welsh for Big Pit, and this is the name of one the hundreds of coal mines in Wales that have long since closed, this one in 1980, but in this case it has reopened as the National Coal Museum. In a week of going to a number of excellent museums, this one was a high amongst the highs – the displays of the buildings (like the miners’ bathhouse) and of the history were truly brilliant, but the best part of all was to actually go down the mine, maybe about 500 feet or so. This is no sanitised tourist version either – this is exactly as it was prior to 1980, with us wearing miner’s lamps and oxygen emergency kits, with the seams of coal still exposed, with water running down the walls, and with the coal trucks and mining gear still in place in some tunnels. The guide was an ex-miner who’d worked in Pwll Mawr from the age of 15 until it closed, and who told a really good story. We learned so much – like the fact that pit ponies didn’t go down the mine until they were 4 years old, but then stayed down there without any visits to above ground, until they were “retired” at 13, and put out to pasture, usually blind and ready to die anyway; and we also learned that when you’re down a coal mine and everyone turns off their lamp at once, it is the darkest dark you can imagine – there is NO light way down there. And incidentally, we also learned in the museum that coal mining is not only a dangerous game but it is at its most dangerous when profits come before safety…..I wonder where we’ve heard that lately in NZ??
Where next? Up the west coast of Wales to the lovely town of Caernarfon (or Caernavon as we usually say it) where we enjoyed a fantastic frosty but sunny day as we explored the magnificent ruined Castle (built in 1283 by Edward 1 and most famous in more recent times as the scene of Prince Charles’ investiture as Prince of Wales in 1969). We found the place to be notable for three reasons: firstly just how nice it seems on the sunny side of the Castle, but how bitterly cold it was in the shaded parts; secondly how un-PC it was Health & Safety wise therefore a real pleasure to be able to go almost anywhere in the towers and battlements without barriers and “no entry” signs everywhere; and thirdly (here’s the museum bit!), what a great exhibition inside the Castle covering the history and folklore of the Welch Fusiliers Regiment. And yes it is “Welch” not “Welsh”. They’ve been in battles and have fought with distinction all over the world, from Blenheim in the 16th Century, to Afghanistan in the 21st. And it’s their regimental goat, always a billy, and always gifted to them from the Monarch’s personal herds, who is paraded at the Millennium Stadium before all the Welsh rugby tests.
And on to number 7 – after a day or two in the Snowdonia area of Wales, we headed back into England and spent a day last week in Liverpool. What a great place to visit! The day was again clear and sunny, albeit cold, but we managed to get our way around to see so much….we went to places like the Albert Docks which were once part of the nearly 8 miles of wharves and warehouses, but are now all renovated and turned into restaurants and apartments (which used to be called flats, as our brilliant guide on our city tour pointed out, until Liverpool was the European Capital of Culture in 2008 and everything changed!). The city tour was in a “Duck”, a WW2 surplus amphibious vehicle which took us around the streets of the central city and then down a ramp into the waters of the docks as well….lots of fun and a somewhat quirky view of Liverpool. We ate a meal at the Crown Hotel then stayed on for the regular Friday night Comedy Club with five very funny stand up comedians, after we ventured, briefly, down the stairs into the Cavern Club which is of course where the Beatles had their first ever gig. We also went to the Maritime Museum where they have some excellent material on the Titanic (registered in Liverpool, but never actually visited there) and we had a ride on a Ferry ‘Cross The Mersey before getting a bus back through the Mersey Tunnel. We walked around and saw the incredible mixture of architecture from the old (like the Liver Building, the Cunard Line Head Office, and the White Star Line Head Office….White Star were the owners of the Titanic) to the new (such as the Catholic Cathedral which resembles a giant tent and is known locally as either Daddy’s Wigwam, or the Mersey Funnel). Another modern piece of architecture that we visited was a huge shopping mall known as Liverpool One – the best shop in there was the one opened by Everton FC to sell their shirts and other paraphernalia – and their outstanding marketing people called the shop Everton Two. Think about it…..
So that’s it for now….a Seven C’s trip. We hope you enjoyed it…..there is a small selection of photos to be seenhere
The Moffats on Tour Blog 