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.