Blighty Bound - Day Thirteen, off to Kernow

 

It has been a family day, and a family tree day. DW determined that a line of her dad's family hailed from Cornwall, or Kernow, England's most south-westerly county, so we decided to head down there to see some old family haunts. We took DW's dad and stepmum for the day out, too.

Cornwall is where I spent a lot of childhood holidays. Being an extremity in England, the place always seemed a bit remote, and because it sticks out into the Atlantic Ocean, it always seemed windswept. We have been back in recent years, but I haven't driven beyond Liskeard and Looe for nigh on thirty years, so the first thing I noticed was some vast improvements to the road system. It was a bit squirrelly for the first twenty miles, up hill and down dale, but once on the main A30, it was all plain sailing. That said, this was a Tuesday in March, not a summer Saturday, so we were seeing traffic at its lightest, thank goodness. Speed enforcement is a serious business in Cornwall, because the accident statistics were horrible, so we kept our speed down, not wishing to get caught by the myriad fixed cameras and the mile-upon-mile of average speed cameras. Not that it mattered, we were in no rush.

We were heading to Truro, Cornwall's largest city, its only city, and its administrative capital. But first we were stopping short of our destination, at the village of Tresillian, conveniently on the road to Truro. There was a house there listed in one of DW's census records and we knew it was still standing from looking at Google StreetView. It had been a smithy, a blacksmith's shop, and was marked on the 1892 historic map. Well, we drove past the house, but couldn't stop thanks to the busy road, but we'd seen it, which was the aim. About half a mile further on we did stop, only this time to visit Marys Pastys (sic), a purveyor of locally made Cornish Pasties. If you've never had a Cornish Pasty then I can genuinely say that you've missed a treat. It's a melange of potato, Swede (Rutabaga), onion, and a little meat (usually beef skirt), seasoned with ground black pepper and wrapped up in pastry. In my view it's best served hot, but it doesn't have to be, and can be eaten from the hands. There are many variations on the theme, but a good traditional pasty is very hard to beat, even though it tends to be flaky pastry and not shortcrust these days, and they put far too much meat in. I say that because the original pasties were supposed to be meals for working men, who would wrap the newly baked pasty in a cloth, pop it into their shirt and keep it there until it was time to eat; at the tin mine, or in the fields, wherever. Meat was expensive so there was usually very little in the pasty, but I suppose modern times require modern solutions. That may be an apocryphal tale, but it sounds plausible to me.

Anyway, Mary came good with the traditional pasties, but had no vegan offerings left in the oven. That was a triple shame because one, they didn't normally sell out of vegan pasties, two, there was nothing for DW, and three, these vegan pasties were the best, apparently, because they weren't gussied up in any way, just a regular pasty without the meat. No peas, no sweetcorn, no curry powder, just the original ingredients. Mary (it wasn't really Mary, just the woman working in the shop) suggested we drive up to their production facility in Grampound Road, about ten minutes away, because they were sure to have vegan pasties. She was right, because a quick ten minute diversion (past the aforementioned smithy again) to a little industrial estate, and DW came out of Mary's workshop armed with a couple of vegan pasties. We devoured them in the car, there and then, and they were very, very good.

Then it was on to Truro (past the smithy for a third time), which is an 'andsome town indeed, with a fabulous little cathedral right in the centre of the city. We parked up and had a wander around. Leaving the folks to finish their coffee in Waterstone's book shop, DW and I legged it up to Andrew Place, a short walk away, to look a a house once occupied by her 3 x great grandmother. The census of 1911 had listed the house as number eight, but there wasn't a number eight. We put our detective hats on and decided that number seven was actually numbers seven and eight knocked together. The houses had once been a part of the Truro Union Workhouse and were very small, all in a terrace, so I can well see how two could have been made into one, especially as number eight had been on the end of the terrace. Whether we were right or not didn't matter because we were there treading on the streets of DW's direct relations.

Truro is a lovely little city, and we decided that if we were ever forced to return to England we'd like it there, not least because some of the houses looked to be affordable. That's often the case in extremities. We're not planning on fleeing Canada, but you can never be certain of these things.

Before heading home, we went for a drive to Old Kea, another place mentioned in the Census. The drive, just a mile or two south of Truro, took us through some tiny, tiny lanes, all worthy of Devon. We were unfortunate enough to have to pass Kea School at kicking-out time, and those tiny lanes were lined with the parked cars of parents picking their kids up. If ever there was a case for a school bus, this was it, because the roads were all but impassable. Old Kea was a collection of ramshackle farm buildings and an old church tower, not particularly exciting in itself, but exciting to think of the rellies living right there in times past.

We had to negotiate the school again on the way back, with open car doors blocking the lane, people walking in front of our moving car, and a massive dump truck insisting on coming up the narrow lane when there were cars coming down it. I had to effectively park in the muddy bank to let that bugger by. Thankfully, the rest of the run back to Plymouth was uneventful. The weather had been dull and overcast all day in Cornwall, and had moved to low cloud and drizzle by the time we were on the road, but as we approached Saltash, the Tamar Bridge, and Devon, the clouds melted away and the sun shone beautifully. DW's stepmum had predicted exactly that, too. 

So nice was the evening that after we'd dropped the folks home, we decided to head for Ashburton by going across Dartmoor. The view from atop the moors was just stunning, and although the navigation system took us along some narrow lanes, even by Devon standards, some steep hills and even a ford, the run was lovely. Lots of sheep and semi-wild ponies all over the place, including in the road, and very few other vehicles. Dartmoor is a beautiful place, especially when the sun shines, and we were feeling very content as we came down off the heights to our little cottage.

That had been a lovely day in the extreme south west. This may be a small country, but there's so much to see, and we are very lucky to be able to explore, even just small parts of it.

Blighty Bound - Day Eleven, a Down Day by the Sea

 It was mothering Sunday, and as the family were concentrating on other mothers, we decided to go for a holiday down day.

A down day for us is not having anything planned, and quite possibly just sitting around catching up with ourselves. It being March, there wasn't much possibility of sitting out on the patio, but it wasn't so bad that I couldn't don my walking boots and head off for some exercise. 

We'd bought a couple of the very excellent Ordnance Survey 1:250,000 scale Land Ranger maps and I was delighted to see a marked national footpath, or trail, going pretty much past our front door.  I put some layers on, sweatshirt, rain jacket, neck warmer, gloves and hat, and headed off through Lower Whiddon Farm and the trail. Well, it's a good job that my boots are waterproof. It's barely stopped raining here since Christmas and it was certainly wet underfoot. This section of the trail was what's known as a Green Lane, a pathway that has historical vehicular rights. It's a public right of way, and it's technically possible to drive your car along it, only it's very narrow and pretty much just a muddy track, not least because it's used by tractors to access fields, and by horses. Obviously tractors can make a mess with their mighty tyres, but horses can be particularly destructive because their hooves cut up the track's surface and rain sits in the resultant cuts, turning everything to sloppy mud. So it was that I ended up picking my way along ankle deep mud and similarly deep puddles of water that stretched across the track. There's no escape, either, because this being Devon the track was bounded by eight-feet high hedgerows. Still, that's what I came for.

The pathway led down into a steep-sided, wooded valley with a gurgling stream in its base. I could have carried on down the track as it followed the stream, and very fetching it looked, if a tad muddy. But Opted to cross the stream and gain some height using the road on the other side. Because the path I'd just come down is, theoretically at least, a road, it had a ford across the stream. If you don't know what a ford is, you've never lived in Devon. It's a road that goes through a stream or river, not over or under it. There used to lots of them on little back roads here, but they're mostly gone now, but it was nice to see this one.

I headed north up the proper road, asphalt at least, if not much wider than the pathway I'd just come down. This is a feature of roads in Devon, they can be just wide enough to drive a tractor along, but it'll be all but touching both sides of the road, bounded as it will be by a bank, low stone wall, or hedgerow. There are the occasional passing places, but if you try these roads, the chances are you'll end up backing to a passing place, on many occasions. As a pedestrian, I had to flatten myself against the bank, and face the oncoming vehicle to make sure I was not going to get swiped by a wing mirror. The speed limit on these roads is the default 60mph, but you'll be lucky if you can do 20mph. The marker of these "Devon Motorways" is the strip of dirt, moss, and even grass, down the middle of the asphalt. I have to say that driving these roads is not fun.

The road certainly gained some height, and was in the 10% region for much of the time. Still, while the going was slow and I was puffing like an ancient steam locomotive, it was great to climb out of the wooded valley, through the incredibly green fields and the occasional farm yard. At the point where I was to head home, I could look down on our cottage and it's surrounding buildings from the other side of the valley, and very fetching it was, too.

The home leg was on a slightly wider road (no green strip down the middle and mostly wide enough for two cars to pass), and as was downhill, my legs felt like springs after the climb. Of course the rain caught me the, but I was prepared, even though all my warming clothes were proving a bit too warming with all the exercise. It was on the road back into the farm, back on the national trail, that I saw an early middle-aged couple dressed in expensive hiking Lycra, or Spandex, and I thought I must have looked quite amateurish next to them. That said, you can keep your Lycra, I just don't have the legs for it.

Back at the cottage, I clocked my walk statistics; only an hour and a tad over 4Km, but the uphill section had been way more exercise that I'm used to.

Back to the down day, and as the weather had looked like it was brightening up we decided to go for a walk along the sea wall at Teignmouth. I have history with that South Devon resort at the mouth of the River Teign as it's where I started school, way back in September 1963. My brother escorted me daily on the bus from Dawlish, and I have some quite vivid memories of the school, and the town. The best place to park for the walk was right opposite the site of the school, which had been the church hall attached to the Catholic Church of Our Lady and St. Patrick. The church is still there, the terrace where the school was is still there, but the school itself is not. Indeed, it's been left to re-wild itself, I suppose waiting for someone to build on it. To access the school, we used a little doorway in the retaining wall of the terrace, but it opened straight onto the busy road between Dawlish and Teignmouth, and while you can still see it, it's long been bricked up. As we made our way from the car towards the sea wall, I took in the view that I'd enjoyed from my school, oh so long ago.

The car park was Pay and Display, and payment was through the RingGo smartphone app that I'd installed a last week. Time was bought and paid for while sitting in the car, which was handy. 

We walked towards the sea, over the railway, and down past the Coastguard station. The slope down afforded great views of Teignmouth beach, looking south west across the river mouth and over to Shaldon, and the Ness, a great red sandstone cliff that guards the entrance to the estuary and the harbour.

Teignmouth's beach has very coarse, dull, red sand that will stain absolutely anything that comes into contact with it, which is why it's not a great place for a beach holiday, albeit that the green, grassy area immediately behind the beach is full of interesting diversions like Mini-golf, and other exciting things. The town's famous Grand Pier, a Victorian cast iron structure jutting a fair way out into the sea, is a very sad shadow of its former self. When I was a kid there was a pavilion thing at the end of the pier, but fire and the intervening sixty years of English Channel storms has reduced it to a few forlorn iron posts, at least where the pavilion was. The remaining structure attached to the seafront is still functioning, as an amusement arcade of course, and it pretty much mirrors the fate of so many of those Victorian piers England's south coast.

Back to the sea wall, Brunel's Great Western Railway runs right along the edge of the sea from Teignmouth, where we stood, to Dawlish Warren, and is one the England's great railway journeys. On one side are towering red sandstone cliffs, and on the other Lyme Bay and the English Channel. The railway goes through a series of short tunnels and runs on a built up terrace just above the beach. Every year that terrace gets pounded by stormy seas, and there have been some major collapses of both the cliffs and the terrace. But, this is now the main line between London, Plymouth, and Cornwall, so vast amounts of money have been spent to rebuild and shore up the railway corridor. As we walked along the wall towards Dawlish, feet from the railway, but fifteen feet above the beach, we were crunching through a layer of red sand, lifted from the beach by the sea.

It's a great walk, with views along to Exmouth in the east and Brixham in the west. The railway, even on this Sunday, had a constant stream of trains; seven heading west and three heading east. We took photos because the grand baby will be very keen to see them. I don't know how long we walked, but we went beyond Sprey Point before the rain came rushing in and forced us to turn around. There were lots of other people about, and with their dogs, which was nice too. Beaches tend to send dogs into a delirium, and those we saw all seemed to be madly dashing about. Dogs are not allowed on the beaches in the summer, so I guess they like to make the best of their time.

As we were about to turn for the car park, we had a look in the open snack bar, and what a great selection of stiff they had, not least for the vegans. We weren't in the market for snacks, but top marks to the enterprising owners who opened up on a cold March day, and were rewarded with lots of customers who were, like us, out for a stroll.

With my morning exertions, and now the walk along the sea wall, I felt I had done some good exercise.

Just to close this episode, I had remarked to Dear Wife that I always thought of Teignmouth as a rusty looking town. As we walked past the seafront buildings I realised that the pervading colour was not rust at all, but the red of the sandstone that gives the beach its distinctive hue. Teignmouth is washed in the stuff and it's only taken me sixty-odd years to realise it. 

Blighty Bound - Days Nine and Ten, Strictly Family

 On day nine, we motored over to Plymouth, then onto Peter Tavy on the edge of the moors, and the Peter Tavy Inn. It really is a little country pub as you have drive through a farm yard to get there, slaloming through the farm machinery and dogs. Still, the pub is popular, does good food and good beer, so it's worth the drive. Lunch there is becoming a tradition with the family, so I have no doubt we'll go back soon enough.

Day ten saw us heading to Plymouth, then to Torquay, for more family gathering. It was quite a nice day, too, if a little long, but we had no fear because we've booked day eleven as a down day.

Let's hope the weather gets a little better because it's been uncommonly cold (by UK standards) for the past few days.

Blighty Bound - Day Eight, Going East

 

We'd promised ourselves a couple of Family Tree days, and today was the first with a trip eastwards to the Dorset town of Bridport. DW's mother's side of the family were there in the mid-nineteenth century and we thought we'd see where the "Rellies" lived.

The weather, though, was awful. High winds and lashing rain, at least as we prepared to leave Ashburton Down. Naturally we met another vehicle at the narrowest part of the road leading to the main road, but we're getting used to that.

I opted to head a mile or so west on the A38 to Ashburton first, then to use the intersection to turn east, thus avoiding many miles more of Devon lanes and backing up to allow other vehicles to pass. You get to learn from experience here. With the rain hammering down, we took it easy on the fast road to Exeter, then headed away from the city towards Lyme Regis. That road is well known to both of us because DW's mother lived in the village of Beer, just a few miles short of Lyme. The weather wasn't the best, but we enjoyed the run through the red-soil and dumpling hills of East Devon. Back home, the biggest hills are the bridges over the highway, but here we were up hill and down dale all the time.

The drop down into Lyme Regis is steep, and the sight of the heavy seas crashing in on the shore at the bottom of the hill was quite dramatic. The climb out of Lyme is also very steep, but our fancy Volvo just gobbled up the gradient like it wasn't there. It was a far cry from me driving my first car, a turd-brown Mini, up there and wondering if I'd actually ever make it.

Bridport is a few miles beyond Lyme, both in the County of Dorset by the way, and it was a first time visit for both of us, at least I think it was. Bridport is on the A35 to Dorchester and now by-passed by a decent road, but I can't believe that my dad hadn't driven through the town with us in the car when I was a kid. We opted to drive through the centre today and were pleased that we did, because Bridport is a handsome town, with a broad and busy main street. But we'll come back to Bridport because we were actually heading to Bridport's port on the coast called West Bay, just a mile or two to the south.

I'd never been to West Bay, either, but had wanted to go for a while because it's where the TV series Broadchurch was filmed. West Bay's harbour may be small and quirky, but the cliffs either side of it are dramatic to say the least, and I'm sure that's why it was chosen a good TV show location. The cliffs certainly featured prominently. The trouble was, or maybe the good thing was, there was a Force Nine gale blowing in off Lyme Bay and the English Channel, and the waves were piling in on the beach with greats amount of spray and noise. It was perfect! We sat in the car facing the pounding waves and with the rain lashing across the windshield and had our sandwiches, recreating many a family lunch we both enjoyed as kids. It seemed almost to be a right of passage for kids from Devon to have their picnic lunch in a car that was rocking in the wind and the windows were streaked with rain and sea spray. 

Of course, I had to load another parking app on my UK phone so that we could pay to park in the storm. Still, I never once had to get out of the car, not involuntarily anyway.

Lunch completed, and my glasses covered in salt spray from when I left the car take a video of the waves, we meandered back to Bridport. I say meandered because I opted to drive the wrong way out of the village and ended up driving through a lot of muddy Dorset lanes to get back on the correct road. We did get to see a nice village or two, and a few of the many "Caravan Parks" in the area. I put that in quotes because I don't think they exist in Canada. They are collections of Park Homes, many for seasonal rental, some owned, that people take their annual holidays in. West Bay is a very popular place to visit in the summer and the Caravan Parks allow cheapish stays in the gorgeous Dorset countryside.

*I Googled "Bridport Dorset" for a photo and nearly all the pictures offered were of West Bay. but this is definitely Bridport, the market town, and not by the sea.

Back in Bridport and away from the worst of the wind, we parked up on the edge of town, using that parking app again, and walked up South Street towards the town's centre. As I said, it's a handsome little place and it's broad streets exist for a significant reason; rope making. I hadn't known until we started with the Family Tree thing  that Bridport had been a major manufacturer of ropes and nets. There must have been a glut of flax and hemp, vital ingredients of rope, that made Bridport a great place to manufacture it. When you look at an old map, there are dozens of "Rope Walks" marked, long thin strips of land where the strands for the rope was pulled out along holders to keep it off the ground, and then twisted to generate the strength of the rope. Rope making took place in the main streets of the town, hence the length, width, and straightness of the two main roads.

Of course, DW's family were involved in the rope making process, her great great grand-father being a Flax Dresser.

Having browsed some of the shops, including a brilliant toy shop packed to the ceiling with stuff old and new, we had a coffee break, then drove out along North Allington road, past an address that had occurred on a couple of Victorian census records. The street was lined with little stone cottages which I'm certain were occupied by the myriad workers employed in the rope and net industry 150 years ago. Just driving the street gave us a real sense of where DW's rellies lived and worked, thus making the trip well worth the effort.

The run home was slow as the wind, rain, and now fog, was slowing the traffic somewhat. The tree fallen across the road just outside Bridport didn't help, either. But we rolled back to our cottage unscathed, having met a big van on the narrow part of the road between here and the Expressway of course. The Law of Sod works well here.

We have a couple of other Family Tree excursions planned, so watch this space for true tales of ancestor hunting, and lovely drives out in the gorgeous south west of England.

Blighty Bound - Day Seven, An Unusual Pub

 

It was a nice slow start for us as we were expecting family guests, followed by an excursion into Buckfastleigh to the Valiant Soldier pub. 

The Valiant Soldier isn't a regular pub, it's actually a museum.

The museum's website sums it up well:

The Valiant Soldier was an active pub in Buckfastleigh which closed in the late 1960′s and never re-opened. Everything was literally left as it was and today, it’s open as a museum, giving visitors a glimpse into the past.

The current building which houses the Valiant Soldier dates from the 1700′s and the earliest mention of it as a pub is in 1813.

It had various landlords through the 19th and early 20th centuries and in 1939 its last landlord, Mark Roberts, became the tenant. In 1965 the brewery withdrew the license and Mr and Mrs Roberts promptly downed tools as the last customers left the premises, leaving everything just as it was.  The doors remained closed even after the family purchased the property from the brewery. After Mr Roberts died his wife, Alice carried on living in the upper part of the property until the mid-90′s.

When the family left the area, the pub remained untouched – the living quarters with its furniture, the bar with the optics, glasses, and brewery ephemera – even the change in the till! Also a huge number of bills, invoices, letters and photographs were left behind giving an insight into the workings of a small mid-20th century town pub.

Website here. 

DW had contacted the museum to see if they would be open in March, and while normally they would have been open one day a week, various difficulties had prevented the staff there from keeping their regular hours. However, after a bit of e-mail traffic, we did manage to secure a tour of the Valiant Soldier on an irregular day.

Buckfastleigh is a cosy little town lying in the steep folds of the Dart Valley, and has a long industrial history, despite it's agricultural surroundings. Mining, of tin and other local minerals, wool milling, and textile production were predominant. You'd hardly believe it now as the town very is quiet, largely I suspect because the main trade now is tourism, built up around the local Benedictine abbey and the heritage steam railway, both on the edge of town. It being a couple of weeks before Easter, the tourists had yet to arrive, except us of course. 

There are only a couple of working pubs left in Buckfastleigh now, but the Valiant Soldier stands as a testimony to a once thriving pub trade that saw dozens of drinking establishments, serving the workers from the mines, the mill and the railway.

The Valiant Soldier has been left pretty much as it was found. Old furniture, old flooring, old bottles, old barrels, you name it. It really is like stepping back to the 1950s. Obviously there has been some modern work to deal with the maintenance of the building (it struggles with damp, unsurprisingly), but the bar, the Snug, the kitchen, and the living accommodation have been preserved, and it's quite the experience to stand in among it.

The tour also took us into the tiny Buckfastleigh Museum, which managed to have a staggering amount of interesting artifacts crammed into a couple of rooms. As all good museums do, it informed me of a load of stuff about the area that I didn't know about. All for GBP6, too, which was quite excellent value.

If all goes to plan then we'll be heading, unusually, eastwards tomorrow, although the the weather doesn't look too promising. It'll be what it'll be I suppose.

Blighty Bound - Day Six, Tavvy

 

Today we motored over to Plymouth, picked up the family, and proceeded to Tavistock, known as Tavvy to the locals.

Tavvy is also known as "The Gateway to Dartmoor", and is an ancient Stannary town. If you have never heard of a Stannary Town, here is Wikipedia's take on it;

"A stannary was an administrative division established under stannary law in the English counties of Cornwall and Devon to manage the collection of tin coinage, which was the duty payable on the metal tin smelted from cassiterite ore mined in the region. In Cornwall, the duty was passed to the Duchy of Cornwall; in Devon to the Crown.

With the abolition of tin coinage in 1838 (following extensive petitioning by the Cornish tin industry for simplification of the taxation rules), the principal purpose of the stannaries ceased. In Cornwall, however, they retained certain historic rights to appoint stannators to the Cornish Stannary Parliament."

I'm not sure why I included that, other than the facts are mildly interesting. Next time you're in Tavistock you can proudly tell people what Stannery means.

We had come to visit Tavvy's Pannier Market, the indoor market that has different themes for each day of the week. Today we were visiting Bob's Trains' stall to see what second-hand model trains we could pick up.

But first we parked the car. It's a busy little town is Tavvy, and parking is at a premium. However, we found a place in the main car park and I set about adding another parking app to my UK phone so that I could pay remotely. Apart from the longish process, it all went well and soon I was poorer to the tune GBP3.20, but allowed to park my car for four hours without penalty. That was a result.

In the market, which was busy as usual, we consulted Bob the train man and came away with a small haul of excellent stuff. Bob and his friend (who's name I didn't catch) remembered us from our visit two years ago, which was a turn up. I suspect that we'll be back in two week's time to pick up more things that we should have bought today.

After a swift drink in a little, cramped, café run by two women who appeared not be on this planet a lot of the time, we headed back to the car and made the drive up on to the moors, and to the highest village in Devon, Princetown.

Princetown was once home to a maximum security prison, built from Dartmoor granite atop the inhospitable moors, in 1806. It's first prisoners were men captured in the Napoleonic wars. It remained in use until 2024, when major repairs, concerns about sanitation, and with the build up of Radon gas in the structure, forced its temporary closure. The buildings that form the prison are Grade II Listed, and the closure is supposed to be temporary, but I guess that time will reveal its fate.

The pub we were aiming for was closed on Mondays and Tuesdays, so we drove down off the moor in and found a pub that was open, the Rock Inn in Yelverton, and enjoyed a meal and a drink.

Apart from a quick stop at a Marks and Spencer Food Hall on the way home, that was pretty much that. The weather behaved until we were on our way back, and we achieved what we had set out to achieve, so that was good.

Tomorrow sees us at Buckfastleigh, and another pub, although a pub with a difference. Stay tuned, dear reader.