Roger’s Rambles

One of the motivators for me to set off on my journeyings was David Dimbleby’s TV programme, A Picture of Britain, which dealt with the art and artists associated with different regions. The visual aspects have not disappointed, as I hope some of my photographs show. Also, I’ve remarked before on how this trip is making new connections in my mind between people, places and history.

What I have not talked about much is the literary connections I’m making. They’re not hard to find, indeed there are books about the subject, but I have not taken much notice of them before. Nonetheless, they add another layer of linkages to what I see, another dimension to explore.

Where I am at the moment gives a good example. I’m staying at a five-van site at Mosspaul, in Roxburghshire. It’s behind a restaurant, formerly a coaching inn and before that, reportedly, a monastery.

Behind the inn on the other side is a ‘bothy’. These are traditional small cottages or bunkhouses for communal use such as for walkers or agricultural workers, often left unlocked. This one is now a private house. The owner, Dave, earns his living from making wooden jumps for use at gymkhanas. It’s quite horsey around here.

The inn sits on the border between the old Scottish counties of Roxburghshire and Dumfries. These names officially disappeared in 1996, the two counties being swallowed up by Scottish Borders and Dumfries and Galloway respectively. There are signs for each on the roadside, either side of the inn and facing each other, showing that you’re entering the relevant county. The odd thing is they’re about 100 yards apart. Presumably the inn is in no-man’s land.

In the lower part of the sign for the Scottish Borders is the message that it’s “Scotland’s Leading Short Break Destination” (their italics). The sign for Dumfries and Galloway informs people that it’s “First in Scotland”. (Not if you’re heading for England it isn’t.)

Who dreams up these dopey tag lines and, more to the point, what chump thought them necessary? You see them everywhere, sitting grinning under the formal name of some place or official body.

Just as well there isn’t a place called Forsyth. Its civic leaders would probably have the local council’s vans painted with the slogan, “Nice to see you. To see you, nice.” (Despite his Scottish-sounding name, ‘Brucie’ comes from Edmonton, north London.)

The inn is in the Teviotdale valley, being surrounded by grass-covered (and sheep-covered) hills, through which run both the A7 road and the Mosspaul Burn. And that’s it. There’s nothing else to see — just road, green hills, sheep, a stream, and the inn and bothy. It’s not the sort of place for people who need urban stimuli.

Two miles south of the inn, the Mosspaul Burn joins the Blackhall Burn to form a rivulet, Ewes Water. Despite its name, this is nothing to do with ovine micturition. As if to reinforce the point, the first word is pronounced “ooze”, not “use”. It flows into the River Esk at Langholm, known locally as the “Muckle Town”, i.e. the big town.

At one time the inn was called Halfway House because of its situation between Hawick (”Hoyick”) to the north and Langholm, slightly closer at 10 miles’ distance to the south. In the days before motor cars and smooth, hard-surfaced roads, travel was slow, arduous and damned uncomfortable. Reaching such a spot would have lifted the spirits and eased the nether regions.

Famous visitors to the inn included William Wordsworth, inevitably accompanied by his sister Dorothy, and, more than once, the young William Gladstone and his wife. Another famous guest was Sir Walter Scott but then he lived not far away.

Miss Wordsworth described the place thus in her Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803:

We saw a single stone house a long way before us, which we conjectured to be, as it proved, Moss Paul, the inn where we were to bait [eat]. The scene, with this single dwelling, was melancholy and wild, but not dreary, though there was no tree nor shrub: the small streamlet glittered, the hills were populous with sheep, but the gentle bending of the valley, and the correspondent softness in the forms of the hills were of themselves enough to delight the eye.

It’s much the same today as when she visited over 200 years ago (apart from the modern road — and the telephone wires, the electricity pylons and a dark green blanket of Forestry Commission evergreens to the south-east of the inn.) Her brother, if brought back, would doubtless take vociferously against all the appurtenances of modern life you see now.

When I was at Keswick, I bought a modern paperback version of his Guide to the Lakes, first published anonymously in 1810. It tells you much about the area — it’s a good guidebook even now — and much about the man. It even has a chapter titled: “Changes, and Rules of Taste for Preventing their Bad Effects”. He hated the introduction of the railway to the Lakes, so I wonder what he would have made of this mode of transport (left), especially its livery!

Opening the Carlisle to Edinburgh mainline railway in 1862 took away the coach traffic from Mosspaul and the old inn closed in 1864, falling into ruin after that. It was replaced by the present building in 1900, mainly to meet the needs of the growing army of leisure cyclists. These days it’s motorists who call.

Next time I shall dilate further on the theme of writers in Britain, starting with those in this part of the Borders.

Keep right on to the end of the road

So sang Harry Lauder (an Edinburgian). Well, I shall. I’ve been travelling for two years this month and have been using the motorhome for six months. I’m still enjoying both and will keep doing so as long as I can. I may one day arrive at a fixed “happy abode”; meanwhile, this mobile one will do me nicely.

I mentioned some weeks ago how little Ayrshire seems to spend on keeping its roads in good condition. What the authorities there do spend money on is speed cameras. One local road, the A77, has a 29-mile stretch overseen by the SPECS System. It has been described as the longest speed trap in Britain. The system cost nearly £800,000 to install.

The usual ranters criticize the use of these cameras by pointing out the low income from speeding fines since the system was installed. That’s like complaining that vaccines have been a waste of money because there are now so few cases of the disease they’ve prevented. It’s Daily Mail-style ‘logic’.

From what I saw while staying in Ayrshire, the existence of these cameras is a strong deterrent to speeding. Compared with, say, Cheshire, there are far fewer vehicles whizzing by at lunatic velocities and much less tailgating.

Ayrshire’s cameras are probably also helpful in reducing the number of accidents, although trustworthy statistics on this are hard to come by. The maker of SPECS (no, not Specsavers) quotes a 49% reduction in deaths and serious injuries since their installation. It implies that the cameras are the only or main cause of this fall. Without knowing the trends on similar roads without them, one cannot rightly say.

All the same, the human and financial cost of accidents is high. The Department of Transport estimates the cost of a death on British roads at £1.5 million and for a serious injury at £167,360. (I love the lopsidedness of the precision in the latter figure.)

On that basis, the Ayrshire system has to prevent just one death that would have occurred otherwise and it will have more than paid for itself, fiscally and morally. It’s probably achieved at least that, so I’m in favour of it.

Don’t think I’m being holier than thou here. I often speed and always have done so but not in towns or other slow zones. (They’re keen on 20 mph limits in Scotland, by the way, especially near schools.) My view is that, if you get caught, it’s your hard luck or the result of inattentiveness. Just cough up the fine or attend the class and don’t whine.

Mind you, some of the roads in Ayrshire are so rough they are their own speed limiter.

It’s someone else’s fault

I mentioned ranters above. In The Scotsman a year ago, a director of a so-called think tank said this about urban average-speed cameras: “They will turn drivers into speedo-focused cruise missiles, watching the clock permanently rather than watching the road…” That’s thinking? You could say the same about the presence of speed limit signs.

Elsewhere, a different buffoon said that he and other drivers now leave the A77 where a new, 50 mph limit starts and instead “divert” through adjacent country roads and villages where they can drive faster. His argument was that any increase in accidents on these roads would therefore be the highway authorities’ fault. That’s the kind of excuse terrorists put forward for killing hostages.

The way people like this prate about their freedoms, you’d think the right to drive at high speed was enshrined somewhere in an annexe to Magna Carta.

I used to own an old Range Rover and belonged to a couple of on-line forums about them. It was both amusing and worrying to see the ferocity of the responses if someone in the press should mention how dangerous bull-bars are. Down would come the red mist, out would go reason and away would go all sense of proportion.

From this, a visiting Martian would also deduce that it’s clearly a Briton’s right to mow down and potentially kill other people who dare get in his way. Why not mount some machine guns on the bull-bars? That would clear a path.

Watching my language

When I was on Skye, I stayed at the Kinloch Campsite in Dunvegan, in the north west of the island. It’s next to Loch Dunvegan, and just a mile or so from an archetypal baronial castle, Castle Dunvegan, ancestral home of the Clan Macleod.

Getting the hint about name of the place yet? It means either Beagan’s fort (dunno who he was) or the fort or hill of the few (dunno who they were). In Gaelic, it’s rendered Dùn Bheagain. The name’s pronounced something like ‘doonvaygan’ and has nothing to do with brown vegetarians.

Gàidhlig or Gaelic — pronounced ‘gal-ick’ (but it’s ‘gaylick’ dancing, coffee, etc.) — is mostly found in the northwest of Scotland but fewer than half the people on Skye speak it, even though there’s a national college of Gaelic at the other end of the island. The Outer Hebrides (Skye is Inner) has proportionately more speakers, Gaelic being the official first language of the Council of the Western Isles. All told, only about 60,000 people in Scotland speak the language.

There are many incomers on Skye — I kept meeting English shopkeepers, for instance — and I doubt that many of them bother learning it. The observant among them might pick up a smattering from the bilingual road signs erected throughout the Highlands in recent years. (The one pictured left wouldn’t be be much help, though! Fàilte (’fawl-sha’) means “welcome”.)

Speaking Gaelic is tough going for southerners. It involves a lot of throat clearing and r’s trilling (they can’t touch you for it), neither of which feature in ‘Oxford’ English. Some weeks ago, on the mainland, I went into a tourist information office to ask about Acharacle, which has some interesting oak woodland nearby. I soon found out that I should have gargled at the same time to get anywhere near the right sound.

Spelling seems chaotic, possibly because there are only 18 letters, 13 of them consonants. Who would guess that Stob Coire Sgreamhach, a peak in Glencoe, is pronounced ’stob corry screevach’. It means peak of the dreadful or fearful corrie. (I used to live next door to a dreadful Corry but she moved away years ago, thank heaven.) The literal meaning of ‘coire’ is cauldron or kettle.

Gaelic is not the same as Scots, although it has naturally influenced it. Scots is a Germanic language that developed from a Northumbrian dialect of Middle English, the language of Geoffrey Chaucer. (What is now Cumbria was once ruled from Scotland but by Anglo-Normans.) Robert Burns wrote in a version of Scots he called Lallans, i.e. Lowlands.

Collins publish a small dictionary of the Scots language under their handy Gem imprint. “In colour” it says on the front, so I looked up ‘tartan’. Like everything else, it was defined in black and white.

That’s as much linguistic blethers (nonsense) as I’ll inflict on you for now but for a couple of small items. The specific name of this blog is, of course, Roger’s Rambles, but a Scot might describe it as a Sassenach’s stravaig. To stravaig is to wander or roam aimlessly.

Sassenach means lowlander but is often applied solely to the English. Originally, it meant Saxon and is thus akin to the Welsh word, Sais (’seiss’). Gaelic and Welsh are both Celtic (’keltic’) languages, of course, as are Manx, Cornish, Breton and Irish. The Scots emigrated from Ireland about 2,500 years ago.

England has relatively few Celtic place names left; most places carry names bestowed by the Romans, Anglo-Saxons or Normans. One that remains is Penge. Who’d a’ thought it?

Doggy style

When did Alsatian dogs become transmuted into “German Shepherds”? Despite its ambivalent history, Alsace is still in France, so far as I know. And why don’t people at least say German Sheepdogs? German shepherds are bipeds answering to “Franz” or “Otto”.

By that logic, Dulux paint would be advertised by Old English Shepherds. “‘Oy foind it goes on a treat’, says Jethro.”

It’s been two months since my last posting, which I find hard to believe. I’ve been so engrossed in what I’ve been seeing, doing and photographing that the weeks have sneaked by. My apologies for the delay.

The result is that I now have far more to tell you than I have time to write or you would want to read. Instead, I shall give you a condensed account of where I’ve been and what I’ve done. No lustrous flowing prose, therefore, but bullet points and headlines.

Luss, Loch Lomond, near Glasgow

Highlights:

1. Visiting the Falkirk Wheel, a modern equivalent of the Anderton Boat Lift in Cheshire, which I saw last year. Clever, stylish and imposing.

2. Seeing the ornate frontage of the former Argyll Motors factory at Alexandria, now a shopping gallery.

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Also good: Two local walks, one through an old slate quarry and the other through the village’s glebe field.

The site: Excellent. Right on the waterfront and handy for Luss village. Nice folk running it. (Camping and Caravanning Club.)

Glen Coe (aka Glencoe)

Highlights:

1. The magnificent mountain scenery surrounding the site. I thought the view at Keswick was dramatic but this was even more so.

2. A half-day Land Rover tour of Glen Coe and the neighbouring Glen Etive (not as spectacular or overbearing but more beautiful). It was led by one of the local rangers from the National Trust for Scotland (NTS), which owns 14,000 acres of both. I learned much — and in a shorter time than I’d ever have on my own — of the geology, wildlife, history, land use and social arrangements in the Highlands in former times.

3. Taking the short ferry ride at Corran to see the oak woods bordering Loch Linnhe — a change from the Highlands’ omnipresent evergreens — and a visit to Strontian. It’s the only place in Britain after which a chemical element is named. Yes, strontium. The ore was mined there.

Also good:

1. Lots of off-lead walking for Jenny along the logging road behind the site.

2. Seeing the memorial to the people slain in the infamous massacre of the Macdonalds in 1692.

3. Neptune’s Staircase at Fort William, a set of 13 locks at the southern end of the Caledonian Canal.

4. The views of Ben Nevis from Corpach, a couple of miles from there.

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The site: Good. Next door to the NTS’s visitor centre for Glen Coe. Would have been excellent but for the noise from people who should know better. The assistant managers’ dog was always barking. One of the managers thought everyone would enjoy her weekly attempts to find the right key in her (theoretically) private karaoke sessions. I’ve heard more agreeable noises from cowsheds. (Camping and Caravanning Club.)

Dunvegan, Isle of Skye

Highlights:

1. Wonderful views up the sea loch adjoining the site, with some glorious sunsets.

2. The rococo rock formations at Quiraing — high, steep and jagged.

3. The hulking mass of the Cuillins, a range of 20 closely-spaced high peaks. They’re a magnet for mountaineers (so you won’t see me on them. I’m SSL — strictly sea-level).

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Also good:

1. The Museum of Island Life at Kilmuir.

2. The view from the Millennium stone the villagers erected above Dunvegan.

3. The ruined old church on the way to it.

4. The gardens of Dunvegan Castle, ancestral home of the Clan MacLeod.

The site: Excellent. A small private site handy for the village. Unlike the peripatetic managers of club sites, the owner and his assistant were full of detailed information about the locality and its history.

(At one club site, the assistant managers didn’t know the name of the next village, three miles away. They’d been there “only” two months.)

Kinlochewe, Archnasheen, Wester Ross

Highlights:

1. The adjoining Beinn Eighe National Nature Reserve. Beautiful views and lots of good walking.

2. Watching a cuckoo flitting through the woods and scrub at dusk. It allowed me to get quite close.

3. Seeing Gruinard Island, where the Government tested anthrax as a biological weapon during the 1940s. It didn’t look anywhere near as bleak and threatening as I’d expected. That part of the coast is remote, quiet and lovely.

Also good: Ullapool — a pretty little place, like a fishing village in Devon or Cornwall.

The site: Excellent. Well laid-out and compact. Friendly managers. (Caravan Club.)

Dunnet, near Thurso, Caithness

Highlights:

1. Visiting Dunnet Head, the most northerly part of mainland Britain, and Duncansby Head, not far away, which is the most north-easterly. The lighthouses on both are by the Stevenson family — five generations of lighthouse engineers and one novelist, Robert Louis. (I naturally went to John O’Groats but it’s mostly tourist tat and you have to pay to use the public toilets.)

2. Sitting in the van and watching gannets punch holes in the water off Duncansby Head. I’ve seen it on the telly often enough but that doesn’t convey their size or their speed as they plummet into the waves like feathered mortar bombs.

3. The fishing harbour at Scrabster. Plenty of colourful (and, of course, niffy) boats, which you could go near, and a pair of seals patrolling for scraps from them. There are lots of ‘-bsters’ locally — Scrabster, Brabster, Ulbster, Sibster, Lybster and Mybster. I couldn’t find out what the ending means.

Also good: On the way to the next site, stopping at the RSPB reserve at Forsinard. It’s in the Flow Country, a huge expanse of peat bogs and small, dark pools (lochans dhub).

The site: Excellent. Just a few yards from a lovely sandy beach and a community forest. (Caravan Club.)

Tarland, near Aboyne, Aberdeenshire

Highlight: It rained much of the time, so there’s only one: The stone circle at Tomnaverie Hill, a couple of miles from the site. It’s about 4,500 years old and gives a view all the way to the snowy peak of Lochnagar.

Also good: Walking in Drummy Woods, a couple of hundred yards from the site.

The site: Excellent. Handy for Deeside, Glenlivet and Balmoral. (Camping and Caravanning Club.)

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Cobleland, Aberfoyle, Stirlingshire

Highlights:

1. Seeing my son and his fiancée, who came up to Glasgow for the bank holiday weekend. We went to Stirling (castle and Wallace Monument), then to Callander. It was famous years ago as the location for the original TV series of Dr Finlay’s Casebook. At lunch in a pub in Drymen (good place for one, eh?), we watched a procession of kilted Scotsmen swirl in and out from a wedding reception. It’s a fine outfit if you’ve got the haunches for it.

2. The endless carpet of bluebells in the woods surrounding the site and their heavy, spicy scent. Lots of other wildflowers, too, including the enchanting little Wood-Sorrel pictured left.

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Also good:

1. Balquhidder, a tiny spot where ‘Rob Roy’ McGregor is buried. (Throughout my Scottish travels, I’ve found the Undiscovered Scotland site to be consistently helpful and informative. Its compilers deserve congratulating.)

2. En route to the next site, calling in on a friend who lives in an old house overlooking Loch Earn, near Crieff. Jim’s supplied me with computers and advice on using them for years.

The site: Useful. Next to the River Forth in Queen Elizabeth Forest Park. Lovely location and only three miles from Aberfoyle but needs money spending on it. The internal roads are badly potholed, some of the pitches are too cramped and the toilets and showers are looking old. It’s the dearest site I’ve stayed at this year and I expected better for the money. (Forest Holidays — a joint venture between the Camping and Caravanning Club and the Forestry Commission.)

And now for something only slightly similar

I’m presently staying at the Camping and Caravanning Club’s newest site, at Oxwellmains, near Dunbar, East Lothian. It opened this year and is roomy and well appointed, with a fine view of the Firth of Forth and Bass Rock. The sun sets right by this and has given everyone a wonderful show most nights.

The site, which was formerly a mile or so to the south-east, has been constructed on restored overburden from the nearby limestone quarry. There are tiny trees in tubes everywhere.

Where it was is now a large hole in the ground from which Blue Circle extract the makings for cement. It sounds grimly industrial but there’s no smell and little noise. I like that sort of thing, anyway.

One consequence of the local geology is that the area is full of chalk-loving plants (calcicoles, in the jargon) such as weld, campions in all shades from pure white to crimson, bird’s-foot trefoil, yellow rattle, black medick and viper’s bugloss, with its dramatic spikes of blue blooms with red anthers. It’s like being on the Sussex downs but with far fewer people. Everywhere you go there are larks singing above you. Delightful.

It’s a bit of a trek to the “nearby” beach (with another Stevenson lighthouse adjacent) but there are plenty of paths hereabouts for pedestrians and cyclists, as well as many unofficial shortcuts across fields. More on this place next time.

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Phew!

This has been for me a reconnaissance of the Highlands, much of which I’d never been to before. I liked the area immensely — magnificent scenery; plenty of wildlife; historical connections everywhere; friendly and quietly-spoken people; solitude when I wanted it and good roads, most of them with little traffic. I’m thinking of going back at a more leisurely pace after the emmets and midges have left, probably in late August.

Craigie Gardens

After just over a week at Maybole (see yesterday’s entry), I transferred to the Caravan Club’s site at Craigie Gardens in Ayr. This is in a first-rate location within easy walking distance of the town’s shops. The pitches are large, widely-spaced and grouped in bays of a dozen or so. As a result, there is plenty of privacy but, at the same time, a feeling of community. Both were lacking at Maybole.

The site is largely hidden from view by mature broadleaved trees, a reminder of the gardens after which it is named. These were a small part of the land attaching to Craigie House, a few hundred yards away.

A local baronet, Sir Thomas Wallace, built the house in 1740 as his residence. Its grounds extended eastwards along the banks of the adjoining River Ayr and north to include the present Ayr racecourse.

After just 50 years, ownership of the estate passed to another Ayrshire family, the Campbells. They had it until 1939, when Ayr Town Council bought it. Eventually, the house became part of what is now the University of the West of Scotland, where it is its management training centre.

(Little of this detail is on the Web; I have yet to find a good online source about old Scottish properties. The centre’s caretaker, Gordon, kindly copied off some information sheets for me, from which I have extracted this summary.)

Near the house, only a couple of minutes from the caravan site, are some formal gardens that lead to a riverside path. This follows the river to its source 30 miles to the east, at Glenbuck. I didn’t go that far, but two weeks ago I took Jenny for a stroll eastwards along the bank to the next road bridge and back along the other side.

It was a wonderfully warm day, a contrast to the cold and windy weather we had been having before. Spring was on the way, with the smell of ramsons on the air in the wooded areas, willow catkins waving their yellow dusters in the sunshine and hawthorn coming into leaf. Near an overhanging tree, I saw a salmon or large trout leap clear of the water after a flying insect. All this was within a mile of the centre of a town of over 45,000 people. On another day, even nearer the town, I saw a heron playing its usual game of statues on the riverside.

Ayr

The town itself is a mixture of the brightly new, the run-down remains of recent industry and reminders of an ancient past. Its charter dates from the early 13th century. (There’s more historical information on the Undiscovered Scotland site.)

I won’t go into detail about the town — it would take ages — but I found it jaunty, informal and upbeat. There are too many empty shops and businesses for it to be regarded as economically healthy but neither did it have the depressed, beaten look that Maybole has. Compared with Keswick, say, it is less dependent on tourism and not so middle-class.

Ayr is situated where the River Ayr meets the sea and has an excellent beach, covered in fine sand. This unfortunately blows about in high winds at the height of dog’s face, so Jenny wasn’t thrilled. It also has a working dock, always a winner with me, although it was pinioned behind security barriers.

One half-buried treasure is the Auld Kirk*. Tucked away on the south bank of the river, behind the high street shops, this small, squat church was built in 1654 with money partly provided by Oliver Cromwell. He gave it in recompense for annexing the real old church, built in the 12th century, of which only the tower remains. Cromwell also built a fort for himself at the harbour, from which he governed northern England and much of Scotland and Ireland.

Prominent in the church’s graveyard is a white-painted tablet commemorating the deaths of six local Covenanters. These principled people were hanged — martyred — in 1666 for not accepting Charles II as head of their church. The things people do to each other in the name of religion.

To this day, the Church of Scotland remains separate. As one Web site neatly put it, the Queen might be head of the Church of England but she is just a member of the Church of Scotland.

*Anything of any antiquity in Scotland seems to be labelled “Auld” or “Aud”. As with tea “shoppes” in England, offering traditional “fayre”, modern spelling is infra dig.

Trips from Ayr

I’ll mention just two. The first was to Glasgow, 35 miles to the north, to visit the Burrell Collection. I had heard good reports about it from family and friends, and it wholly justified them.

The building that houses the collection sits in a large park at Pollok, south-west of the city centre. It’s undistinguished externally but shows its rightness of design inside. There, it provides a well-lit, airy space in which to show off its contents.

And such contents. Sir William Burrell was a wealthy shipowner who collected art throughout his life, from the age of 16. In 1944, aged 83, he gave all 8,000 items he’d amassed to the city of Glasgow. It took the city council until 1983 to find a suitable location and build a gallery to house the collection.

Only a small part of the total is on display at any time. The result is something you can go round in a couple of hours while feeling neither rushed during your visit nor saturated after.

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What lifts it above the ordinary, though, is the range and quality of what’s on display. Highlights for me included a small collection of Degas paintings, a hunt scene by Cranach the Elder, an early Rembrandt self-portrait (do these ever fail to impress?) and a panel from a 15th-century triptych of the adoration of the magi, improbably set inside a Flemish house of the period.

It’s not just paintings. There is sculpture, embroidery, furniture, tapestry, armour, glassware and even reconstructed wood-panelled rooms. Also, there are exquisite examples of Chinese and Egyptian art.

I visited while there was a travelling display on show from the British Museum, called “Ancient Greeks: Athletes, warriors and heroes”. Much of it was vases. Apart from inspiring some lovely piano music from Satie, they do little for me. What reached across the millennia and touched my heart was a simple stone slab listing the names of fallen soldiers. The desire to memorialise those who give their lives in pursuit of some military objective, even if pointless or silly, seems so modern yet clearly is not.

To the Immortal Memory

So goes the toast at Burns suppers worldwide every January. This year, the drams would have been poured quicker and sunk swifter because it was the 250th anniversary of the birth of Robert (”Rabbie”) Burns — Scotland’s national poet.

The Scottish heritage industry has been in overdrive for months, promoting something called “Homecoming Scotland 2009“, designed to lure people back from the Jock diaspora. As you can imagine, genealogical research services feature heavily in this.

You don’t have to like poetry to be familiar with some of Burns’s work. If you’ve ever sung “Auld Lang Syne”, heard someone (perhaps Kenneth McKellar) sing “My love is like a red, red rose”, read the sentiment “Oh would some power the giftie gie us, to see ourselves as others see us”, heard the tale of Tam O’Shanter or read the description of a mouse as a “Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim’rous beastie”, then you know some Burns.

He was born in Alloway, just three miles south of Ayr and nowadays a suburb of it. There, I went to the Burns National Heritage Park. (If you think that sounds bad, there’s a food shop on a farm near Maybole called The Burns Country Smokehouse. Historical authenticity guaranteed.)

The park includes the imposing Burns Monument (which could do with a lick of paint inside) and the “Tam O’Shanter Experience”. The latter offers “laser-disc technology [how dated that sounds] and theatrical effects”. You can’t say you haven’t been warned. I gave it a miss.

You can also visit two of the (real) elements of the Tam O’Shanter poem — Kirk Alloway and Brig O’Doon. It makes for a pleasant stroll, especially on the warm, sunny day I had. All it needed to make the poem come fully to life (apart from moonlight, that is) was Malcolm Williamson’s uproarious musical version of the tale.

Incidentally, the “Cutty Sark” (short skirt) that Nan the witch wore is commemorated in the name of the famous and beautiful tea clipper moored at Greenwich. That’s not such a coincidence as it might appear. The ship was built in Dumbarton, on the Clyde, for a Scottish owner.

And, finally

Seen on a Web site last week….

Although being part of Great Britain, Scotland has a history and culture all of its own. Recently getting its own government the Scottish are a very proud raise, and rightly so.

The Flour of Scotland, no doubt.

Well, I’ve made it to Scotland at last. I’ve been here three weeks, transferring from Keswick on a beautiful day. Getting north was smooth and easy, thanks to the M6, and traffic was light.

Once I was off the motorway, progress was far from smooth. I left the M6 just north of the border, at Gretna, and headed west on the A74. This has the worst-maintained surface of any ‘A’ road I have travelled on in Britain.

Admittedly, a big and well-laden van like a motorhome soon tells you about imperfections in the road but even a chauffeured limousine would have been pitched about by the endless ruts, pots and patches on this route. The authorities in Ayrshire seem not to spend much money on keeping their roads in trim.

I’ve been to Scotland before on holiday and business, and enjoyed it every time, but have not been here in the van. Except for the road surfaces, the experience so far has been very pleasant.

These are the Lowlands and the countryside is open and rolling, a contrast to the ruggedness of the Lake District. (I haven’t finished on that subject, in case you were wondering, but that’s for another time.) Where there are drystone walls in the south, here there are wire fences.

Meet the locals, and others

Some of the towns and villages are looking tired and shabby. It’s more than the present recession that’s done for them but, despite this, the people are friendly, helpful and cheerful, always ready with and for a joke.

The accent is sharp and strong but intelligible to this Southerner but it’s not always locals you meet. I fell into conversation one evening with a fellow dog owner from further north. I understood about one word in five of what he said. Lots of nodding and smiling from me.

I met him again the next night. “Stella wee nap”, he said. It took me a while but I finally got it — “Still a wee nip [in the air]“. More nodding and smiling.

There are plenty of Irish people here, too, the links being historical. (I’ll spare you the local geology and history lessons. The former is simple; the latter is as knotted, tribal and bloody as that of any Balkan state.)

My new optician is Irish, for example. My spectacles had been in an wobbly state for some time and gave up the struggle a couple of weeks ago, soon after I arrived at my last stop, Ayr.

That evening, Jenny and I were exploring the town and noticed that the local branch of Specsavers was open, so we went in. Gareth, the assistant manager, was happy to meet my dog and happier still to sort out my ocular accoutrements.

I chose the frame then and went back the next day for testing. (Eye tests are free for anyone of any age in Scotland, even the English. How civilized.) I picked up the new pair a fortnight later. All is sharp again.

The staff in the shop impressed me with their helpfulness and efficiency. I also like Specsaver’s prices, which are at least a third less than I’d pay in Oxted. One for the recommended list.

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Maybole

My first stop in Ayrshire was at Maybole, about 10 miles south of Ayr. Another Irishman, Thomas McAuley, runs the site. He owns the place and did much of the work on it himself, including building a new toilet block. There is hot and cold water on tap and also tepid running radio. The local commercial station’s effluvium is piped into the building, with no escape possible. I now know by heart the special offers at “Ayr’s premier carpet showroom”.

The site is just outside the town of Maybole, which has come down terribly in the world. It was once the capital of the earldom of Carrick, home to the Bruce family. This included King Robert I of Scotland, better known as Robert the Bruce, the famous arachnologist.

There is a 16th-century castle, formerly the town house of the Earls of Cassillis. Their main residence was four miles away at Culzean Castle (”Cullane”), a stately pile designed by Robert Adam and now in the care of the National Trust for Scotland.

The castle at Maybole is an unattractive turreted building that looks as though some mediaeval tourist pulled off a piece of Carcassonne and brought it home, squashed, in his luggage. It sits incongruously in the high street, opposite the post office. Like many buildings in Scotland, it’s covered in pebbledash, which doesn’t help it look appealing. (The official term is “harled”, which means the same thing but doesn’t sound so plebeian.)

Maybole was also once famous for shoe making. In the late 19th century, large factories filled and surrounded the town, producing tens of thousands of shoes a week. The factories have now all gone and there is little visible evidence of their existence. This Web page tells you more. Like the page on the castle, it’s from an admirable local Web site.

Today, Maybole is notable mainly for the number of shuttered shops you see there. It’s a sad come-down but not unusual hereabouts. There are some interesting-looking ruined castles and abbeys nearby but you couldn’t get into them until April. It’s the same with many museums.

Excursing from Maybole

Maybole is only four miles from the coast and the Firth of Clyde. A dozen miles away, to its south, is the fishing village of Girvan. This has a fine sandy beach, some working docks and a boatyard, so there was enjoyable walking to be had.

I went to Girvan mainly to be near enough the uninhabited island of Ailsa Craig to get some good pictures of it. My luck was out, as it was obscured by haze, but I had seen it from a greater distance from several other points on the coast. The island is now an RSPB bird sanctuary, notable for its gannet population.

A few days later, acting on a tip from an online friend, I went to Kelburn Castle, about 40 miles to the north. It’s next to Largs, which sounds like an ailment of livestock involving the overproduction of phlegm but is actually from the Gaelic for grassy slope. Ayrshire must have been short of these at the time.

The reason for my trip was harling, i.e. pebbledashing for the posh. Two years ago, it was discovered that the concrete skim put over part of the castle’s walls was damaging the structure underneath. Historic Scotland, the Caledonian equivalent of English Heritage, said the concrete should be removed in the next two years. This was in 2007.

Short of money and keen for publicity, its owner, the Earl of Glasgow, decided to recruit some Brazilian graffiti artists to brighten the place up. The bureaucrats agreed and the result is as you see left. (Why Brazilian? Because their graffiti artists make ours look like constipated infants.)

There was a dismissive documentary on the BBC at the time. (Your browser might need some extra software to show it.) I’ve no idea whether the scheme made any money but it was worth doing. It’s audacious, astonishing and utterly brilliant. The walls are due to be stripped next month — the two years are up then — so I’m glad I saw this remarkable work in time.

There’s not much about it on the Web, unfortunately. The Graffitti Project’s own Web site is these days nothing but adverts. Its search tool doesn’t even recognise “kelburn”. A sell-out. There is, though, this speeded-up video of the artists at work. By the time I got to the end, I was half-expecting to see Benny Hill scuttling around the castle grounds pursued by scantily-clad lovelies waving aerosol cans of paint.

My final outing from Maybole was to the Dunaskin Industrial Heritage Centre. This is 10 miles to the east, in the Doon Valley near Dalmellington (not to be confused with the Doone Valley in Exmoor). It’s a former iron works that was later converted to brick making. The larger structures remain but in an unsafe condition. There is also some rolling stock standing forlornly on view.

I say ‘forlornly’ because the museum closed down three years ago, having run out of money. You might say its operators had done askin’ for support (sorry!). I was able to get in because the gates were unlocked for a local brass band that was practising in one of engine sheds. (No, I’m not making this up.)

In effect, I had the place to myself and, in some welcome sunshine, was able to fossick about contentedly. The sound of the band occasionally wafting my way added a surreal touch. It was one of those rare afternoons when time slowed down and you could step off life’s merry-go-round for an instant. Lovely.

Next time, it’s Ayr.

Mr Pooter lives

This extract from a trade magazine for professional photographers made me giggle:

I did a coast walk report for Country Walking, and the editor asked if I would be their Hertfordshire correspondent.

Not only was this sentence in the body of the article but it was also in pull quotes, as I show it here. Either the editor of the trade mag is a sadist or he has no sense of humour.

I’m now in Keswick, having moved here from Ravenglass just over a week ago. This is a former mining centre that became a holiday resort with the opening of a rail link — since closed — from Cockermouth to Penrith in 1862. Before then, in the early 1800s, it had been popularised by the ‘Lake poets’ — Coleridge, Southey and, chiefly, Wordsworth.

Keswick is a charming town, whose heart is the market place and its 19th-century Moot Hall, based on a German design. There are more outdoor pursuit shops here than you can shake an alpenstock at. They include branches of the major multiples, such as Blacks, Cotswold and Millets, but chief among them is a local shop, George Fisher. This occupies a large, five-storied corner building that formerly housed a photographic business. My friend David likens it to Grace Brothers.

I went there last week for some new shoes, having worn out the previous pair. There was an impressive range on offer and the assistant went to great trouble to get a good fit. I found out later than the price I paid was the same as on Amazon, so it seems one is not penalised for good service.

The shoes are Scarpa’s Enigma XCR. What could be enigmatic about them is beyond my imagining. (The “XCR” is a waterproof material.) I’ve long thought the maker’s name could usefully be spelt “Scarper”, although that might be more apt for running shoes. All a bit daft but at least I wasn’t engulfed by the blizzard of initials and waffle that I faced when I bought their predecessors (see near the end of this entry).

Another shopping pleasure is visiting the local branch of Booths. This is a small chain of food supermarkets in the north of England that occupies a similar place in the supermarket hierarchy to that of Waitrose elsewhere. Its bread counter for example, offers a wider choice than the specialist baker in town, called Bryson’s. (This, though pleasant, is not a patch on the peerless Bothams of Whitby, of which I have fond memories from last year. Bothams also do excellent hampers, I’ve since found out.)

The Keswick caravan site is run by the Camping and Caravan Club, as was the one in Ravenglass. It’s much larger — 250 pitches — and more open, with a greater space between caravans.

I was feeling hemmed during my last week at Ravenglass, the place’s 60-odd pitches all being full for half term. However, that site’s managers could give lessons in customer service to their colleagues at Keswick. The managers here are pleasant enough but are too ready with excuses for inaction. I prefer people who match Margaret Thatcher’s description of Lord Young: “Other ministers bring me problems, David brings me solutions.” (It’s not often you’ll find me agreeing with her!)

What could scarcely be bettered here, though, is the site’s position. It’s a mere 10-minute stroll from town, yet sits on the northern shore of Lake Derwentwater. A short walk away on the lakeside is a short promontory called Friars Crag. According to John Ruskin, the art critic and local sage, this afforded one of the three best views in Europe. That might be overstating matters but it is certainly fine. It was cloudy when I went but I can imagine the view being wonderful on a better day.

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The town

Keswick (”Kezzick”, originally Cesewic, meaning a place where cheese is made) has about 5,000 permanent residents. It is surrounded by high hills (’fells’) and has Derwentwater to its immediate south. The town straddles the River Greta and adjoins the Derwent.

It’s near enough the perfect sort of place for me — compact yet convoluted*, with magnificent countryside around it (including more dog-walking land than I could cover in years), a lake on its doorstep, some fine parks (one, Fitz Park, running alongside the Greta), a good theatre, an old cinema, attractive buildings and streets, a couple of supermarkets (Booths and a Co-op), launderettes, lots of interesting small shops (including bookshops), a market twice a week, three museums, art galleries, a Fiat garage (for the motorhome), plenty of history and associations with literature and the decorative arts — and all within a few minutes’ walk of the caravan site. The people are friendly and cheerful, but neither nosy nor pushy.

*Without having the slightest wish to live in France, I’ve always identified with Cyril Connolly’s words about his Paris hotel, which he wrote in the London Journal in 1929:

I have a room for 400 francs a month and at last I will be living within my own and other people’s income. I am tired of acquaintances and tired of friends unless they’re intelligent, tired also of extrovert unbookish life. Me for good talk, wet evenings, intimacy, vins rouges en carafe, reading, relative solitude, street worship, exploration of the least known arrondissements, shopgazing, alley sloping, café crawling, Seine loafing, and plenty of writing from the table by this my window where I can watch the streets light up… I am for the intricacy of Europe, the discrete and many folded strata of the old world, the past, the North, the world of ideas. I am for the Hotel de la Louisiane.

Keswick is ideal for street worship and there are some interesting alleys to slope around in. I’d hate to be here in high season, though; it must be bedlam. You can see how reliant the place is on the tourist trade as you walk down the older streets near the centre. Almost every third building is an hotel, guest house or B&B. On the positive side, it also means there are plenty of eateries and takeaways, covering the usual range of national cuisines.

One place, the Rembrandt, advertises itself as “a traditional English eating house”. (Its name is a good start, don’t you think?) The four dishes at the top of its list of main courses are mushroom stroganoff; spinach & ricotta cannelloni; mushroom, brie and cranberry Wellington; and Cajun chicken strips. Very yeomanlike.

The main year-round employer here was the Cumberland Pencil Company, which set up in 1832. Graphite was discovered in the local hills in the 16th century, which attracted German miners to the area, invited over by Queen Elizabeth. They stayed, also mining lead, silver, copper and iron.

A form (allotrope) of carbon, graphite is useful as a dry lubricant and is the basis of the ‘lead’ in pencils. As you’ve probably guessed, the mineral’s name comes from the Greek for writing, graphein.

Last year, the pencil company left Keswick. Its American parent, Acco, fell out with one of the local authorities over a planned replacement for the old factory, built in the Art Deco style in 1934. Acco snatched up its bat and ball and stalked off to a new factory in Workington, where it employs some of the workers from Keswick. A small museum remains on the site.

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Farewell Ravenglass

I enjoyed my stay on the coast and am glad I went there at a quiet time of year. To me the attraction of Ravenglass lies in the estuary and the banks of the River Esk, around which is plenty of good walking. Most of the time it was deserted and tranquil, with only the sound of calling shorebirds.

You would occasionally hear one of the two-car mainline trains rattling up and down between Barrow and Whitehaven. Also, on some days, there would be a great “boom!” every so often as the Army fired its large guns at the artillery range at nearby Eskmeals. Otherwise it was peaceful and conducive to quiet reflection. Jenny discovered a liking for mussel shells, which she’d pick up from the extensive beds laid bare at low tide. The crunching noises didn’t intrude, oddly.

On my last full day in Ravenglass, I took a ride on its famed narrow-gauge railway, La’al Ratty. This takes you at a gentle pace up to Eskdale in the fells, the train being pulled either by a diesel or steam locomotive. I got one of each — diesel up and steam back — both gleaming and obviously well cared for. The carriages were less so.

I enjoyed the run without being as excited by it as the writer of this Web page. An addiction to hyperbole is, I suppose, an important qualification for the job of brochure writing.

Whitehaven

I drove up the coast to Whitehaven one day and parked near the harbour. These are proper docks, the working variety. They’ve been prettified a little at the shore end with half-hearted bits of art, some of it already looking tatty, and have been marinated in one corner. However, they largely remain as they were — foursquare, rugged and built for heavy wear and heavy weather.

There is the bonus that they haven’t (yet) been sealed off from the public. You see none of the high fences, gates and hutches for ’security’ that so many other working docks have gone in for. The result is good walking that the locals were enjoying when I was there, helped by a new sea lock that allows a complete circuit on foot of the inner harbour.

Sadly, like many once-busy docks, there is little commercial activity today. There was a handful of fishing boats but large expanses of empty quayside otherwise. I watched a scallop trawler come through the lock gates and then tie up. It had plenty of space to choose from.

This would not have been the case even 30 years ago. Before then, in the late 18th century, Whitehaven was for a short while the third busiest port in Britain, behind only London and Liverpool, mainly exporting coal. It stayed busy right through to the 1980s. The port was also the fifth busiest in the slave trade, although the tourism people don’t talk so loudly about that.

They would much rather tell you about the exploits of John Paul Jones (who had worked on a slaver and hated the trade). Born in Scotland but raised and trained in Whitehaven, he migrated to Virginia in 1773. Five years later, during the American war of independence, he led a raid on Whitehaven harbour. There, he spiked the guns in the local fortifications and burnt three ships. He had planned more destruction but the rest of his crew had meanwhile asked one another if anyone fancied a pint and had sidled off to a local pub.

In commemoration of the event, billed these days as the last hostile invasion of Britain, the local council has installed this piece of sculpture. It’s of one of Jones’s crew, presumably sober, in the act of spiking a gun. If that’s how he really did it, I’d be surprised if he had intact thumbs at the end of the expedition. I prefer to look at what I’m hitting.

(Spiking was a quick and effective way of disabling a cannon or similar gun. You hammered a metal spike firmly into the gun’s touch hole and left it there. This prevented a gunner from igniting the gunpowder charge that lay behind the ball or whatever kind of shot he was using. The spike had to be drilled out by hand — no Black & Deckers in those days — a slow business.)

Local historians also boast about Whitehaven’s town layout, done in a grid pattern in the late 17th century. Much of it survives but not in the freshest condition. Like other mining communities along this coast, such as Workington and Maryport, it has not fully recovered from the loss of the industry — a common story, alas.

I’ll tell you more from Cumbria next time. I’m here for another 10 days.

I’m in the Western Lake District, staying in the little coastal village of Ravenglass. The caravan site here is well equipped and friendly, and has Sneck Lifter and other local beers in the shop. I’ve only been in Cumbria once before, when I drove through it on the M6 motorway, so am enjoying looking around.

Ravenglass is a tiny place, so small that some sources describe it as a hamlet. There are only around 350 people living in the parish of which it is a part. Most villagers occupy a twin row of houses that runs north and south along the main street, called Main Street.

This street is narrow at each end because it’s easier to stop errant livestock in a confined space. There was a yearly market here until the 19th century, the charter dating from 1208. The southern end of Main Street leads to water, as the picture shows. There is these days an annual celebration of the charter, called the Charter Fair.

It used to be that a place with a market was referred to as a town but that would be stretching matters here. Ravenglass lacks many of the usual town amenities; there is no bank, library, school, doctor, dentist, vet, greengrocer, baker and so on. There are two licensed hotels, a pub, a small post office cum general store and a trinketeria.

However, and what makes the place popular with tourists and day-trippers, it also has the western terminal station of the Ravenglass and Eskdale Railway, known locally as the La’al Ratty (”little narrow way”). The diesel unit pictured is about 5 feet high.

The ‘Ratty’ is a narrow-gauge system, set up by enthusiasts in 1915, and is successfully managed by volunteers today. One of the founders was Wynne Bassett-Lowke, whose surname I remember from Meccano Magazine half a century ago. (Hell’s bells! Writing that makes me feel old.) The train runs on tracks laid down in 1875 for the now-defunct slate and iron ore industries. That service was known as Owd (old) Ratty.

There is a small museum at the Ravenglass station, which lies next the normal-gauge BR line from Barrow-in-Furness to Whitehaven. A former mainline station building is now The Ratty Arms. Make of that what you will.

At the other end of the tourist line is a new visitor centre. Every attraction should have one, it seems. (This visitor’s centre is somewhere near his navel but, for some reason, not many people go there.)

I went to the station last week and asked at the office for a timetable, which the local Fat Controller cheerfully gave me. I asked him when the next train would be. “14th February” came the answer. “I’ll not bother waiting on the platform, then.”

Invasion territory

Like the much larger Southampton, Ravenglass sits on an estuary formed from the confluence of three rivers. They are the Esk, Irt and Mite. (Jumble those last four words together and you get “ekstirminated”. Thought you’d like to know that.)

There was a thriving port here from ancient times until the estuary silted up in the 17th century. It was frequented by the usual crew of marauders and traders from Ireland and Scotland, as well as vessels from mainland Europe. The Romans used it as a defensive point for their northern border, these days called Hadrian’s Wall, and maintained a garrison here for 300 years.

There is some debate over the name they gave the place, many sources suggesting Glannaventa, Glanoventa, Glannoventa or Clanoventa. Modern scholars, it seems, prefer Itunocelum, meaning “port or seaside market”. How dull.

There was even debate over the identity of the ruined bath house the Romans left behind, shown left. Until recently, this was believed to be of more modern origin and was known as Walls Castle.
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Two other local attractions

Just a little way inland lies Muncaster Castle — a real, if somewhat squat, one. King John gave the land it lies on to the Pennington family in the same year he granted the market. In its grounds is something grandly called a Sino-Himalayan garden. This is full of rhododendrons (-dendra?) and other plants from the hills of Himalaya and nearby regions. Apparently the climate at Muncaster is similar. A public footpath goes from Ravenglass to Muncaster, so you can enjoy part of the gardens free. There is also a collection of live owls for those who like looking at captive animals.

Not far north of here is the atomic energy establishment, Sellafield, known also in the past as Windscale, Seascale and Calder Hall. I think they keep changing the name to confuse terrorists — or voters. (Much the same thing in some eyes.) It’s a brisk walk away; you’d certainly come back glowing.

Two days ago, I went on a recce to Keswick, which I had planned as my next stop. This is the Lake District proper and I can see why people who know the area rave about it. There was snow on the higher ground and the whole looked like something from the Alps.

I immediately booked into the local Camping and Caravanning Club site, which I shall move to in 10 days’ time. Meanwhile, I shall continue my coastal wanderings. I’m glad I’m doing it this way round; I think the coast would have been an anticlimax after staying in the high country.

And, finally…

Did you ever start reading something and straight away know you’d lose the will to live if you went through to the end. Here’s an example, from a computer industry group:

“Not directly telecoms-related but there is one issue with regard to users’ acceptance/interest in the idea of utilising The Cloud – or as I have started calling it, the Information Exostructure.”

Is your pulse racing yet?

That’s just the first sentence of this email. For full numbing effect, try reading it aloud in an E.L. Wisty voice. Who needs sleeping pills?

Sorry there has been such a long gap since my last posting. I explain why below.

Well, that’s one way to do it

The reason for the gap goes back to late November. I had enjoyed staying at the five-van site I mentioned then. (It’s Brook House Farm, Bostock Green, Cheshire; call 01606 592156.) Here’s the view from alongside my caravan one moonlit night.

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I was on my way to visit my friends David and Pamela, in Barton-upon-Humber. They have a large house and had kindly invited me to park my van in the courtyard for a few weeks while we depleted Lincolnshire’s stocks of tonic water and gin.

It was a lovely day, bright and dry but breezy, and I was enjoying the journey. Cruising along the M62, I overtook a lorry at the crest of an incline. As I went by, I was hit by a strong side wind. The van started snaking and, because I was going downhill by then, the outfit began gathering speed.

One normally gets out of snaking by taking one’s feet off the pedals and steering out of it. I’ve done it several times, as probably have most caravanners. Here, I had to choose between doing that at what by then was 80mph (and increasing) or trying to slow down.

Braking in such situations usually leads to jacknifing, as happened here, but I reckoned it better to lose some speed and risk that than have a prang at a much higher speed.

After various wild swoops, and the unusual sight of my own caravan trying to overtake me, backwards, I went off and into an upward-sloping grass verge. Car and van both toppled over and came to rest on their roofs.

I suppose I should have been frightened while this was happening but my main memory was of anger that I hadn’t been able to control the situation. I was swearing forcefully as we hit the bank.

Aftermath

Two following motorists had seen my antics and stopped. They helped me get out the car and called 999. (Thanks again, chaps.) Nobody else was involved and I suffered just a slight graze to one elbow; the dog was unscathed. My guardian angel was working hard that day!

The emergency services arrived and went into their polished routine. I stood watching them, feeling guilty at all the work I was causing everyone and the delays other motorway users were experiencing.

It occurred to me that the financial cost of all this must have run into many thousands of pounds. The social cost was equally huge — and it was just me involved and there were no medical services needed. Quite a sobering thought (and, no, I wasn’t breathalysed, not that it would have shown anything).

It made for an interesting afternoon.

David and Pamela, bless them, came out to the breakdown depot in their big Hymer motorhome and over the next couple of hours loaded my possessions into their van. Both my vehicles were clearly write-offs. What a mess!

I spent the next three weeks at their place, putting my life back together. We managed a couple of outings, including one to Spurn Head, which I had always wanted to visit. Here’s a picture of one of the two lighthouses on it.
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On the road again

There were one or two silver linings in the cloud I’d created, in that I was beginning to tire of the rigmarole of setting up and taking down a big caravan every time I went to and left a new site. Also, the 4×4 towcar was giving me only 20mpg or so on its own. Heaven knows what the towing consumption was.

Car and caravan were insured separately and, after some telephonic nagging, I got a good and speedy deal on each. With that money and a little of my own I was able to buy a small motorhome.

It’s a Trigano Tribute 650, pictured left, which I bought new from Danum Leisure in Doncaster. It was made in Italy and is based on a Fiat chassis and running gear. This rather scruffy page from the importer’s Web site gives more details. I didn’t pay that much money, by the way.

The van’s a pleasure to drive and easy to get around in, now I’ve got used to the length (20 feet, all but). A reversing camera was a good investment, especially as there are no rear windows! It’s comparatively frugal with the diesel and narrow enough to go down most roads. My site set-up and take-down times have halved, and will fall further with practice.

Making good

Turning my head upside down raised a lot of dust inside my skull that had lain undisturbed for years. It’s taken a while for that to settle, some of it in new places, which I is why my mind has been on matters other than blogging for the last couple of months.

How I now feel was summed up by Otis Redding, in this song that was playing on my iPod as I was drafting this piece:

I can see clearly now the rain is gone
I can see all obstacles in my way
Gone are the dark clouds that made me blind
It’s gonna be a bright, bright sunshiny day.

Amen to that. And sod the recession. I feel, as always, proudly protuberant.

Travelling

Oh yes; that. Since leaving David and Pamela’s place, I’ve been to Kettering, Surrey (for Xmas) and Bridgnorth in Shropshire. Presently I’m in Ravenglass, on the coast of Cumbria, which I’ll tell you about in a day or two.

I move to Keswick in a fortnight to see the district’s lakes, with the next stop being Scotland. After turning south again for the last two winters, I’m determined to get there — and before the midge season starts.

The day after my trip to Shropshire, it was sunny again. This has been such a rarity in the later part of the year that I just couldn’t stay in. I usually make a list of places to visit when I go to a new caravan site. On the list for this stay was the Malverns, so off we jolly well went.

I had been there some years before but remembered little of the detail. I do recall metaphorically genuflecting at the gate of the Morgan Car Company at Malvern Link and scanning the horizon for A.E. Houseman’s‘ Blue Remembered Hills but that is about all. (No Shropshire lad, still less horny-handed son of toil, Housman was there probably referring to the sight of the Shropshire hills from his childhood home near Bromsgrove, in Worcestershire.)

During my drive this time, I kept coming across notices proclaiming that I was on something called the Elgar Route. I rang the local council and learned that this connects the composer’s homes in the district. As this list shows, there were quite a few of them. The helpful woman I spoke to then directed me to one house, at Lower Broadheath, which has a museum to him. In fact, this was his birthplace.

Arriving at the location, I was surprised at how self-effacing it is. There is no grand entrance, merely a discreet signpost from a small side road among a group of houses. This prompted the thought that I might be visiting something shabby, amateurish and unworthy of its subject.

I was utterly wrong, I’m pleased to report. Once I turned the corner and entered the car park. I saw a smart new building with a tall glass front, which turned out to be the museum. This was built in 2000 with the aid of Lottery money (yes, that again). Behind it, out of sight to the left, is the cottage where Elgar was born.

Inside the museum is a collection of displays of photographs, scores and other memorabilia. As at most attractions these days, there was a voice-over machine you could carry around with you. Against each display are two numbers. Keying the first into the player yields a short narration of what you are seeing.

When you dial in the other number, you hear a portion from a representative piece of Elgar’s music. I knew most of what was being offered but one piece I had not heard before. It was his violin sonata. I liked the short extract supplied, so bought a CD of the whole work from the shop. This was the Maxim Vengerov version, paired with two Brahms sonatas, all of them played with vigorous beauty.

As well as the displays, the museum holds an archive of books, scores, notebooks and so on, and an educational area. You pass through the main area to get to his birthplace (or, as the museum’s Web site has it, “The Birthplace Cottage”). This is a small and pretty and sits in a small and pretty garden. Even though it was October, many of the flowers were in bloom. These included a sweetly-scented yellow rose, Arthur Bell, near the house.

To one side of the front porch of the house is a wooden bench. I was therefore able to luxuriate in the sensations of sitting — eyes closed — in the unseasonably warm sun, smelling the sherbety aroma of the roses while listening on headphones to Dame Janet Baker singing “Where Corals Lie” from Elgar’s Sea-Pictures and all where he was born. Complete immersion!

Inside the house is a busy clutter of furniture, bric-a-brac, photographs, paintings and, unexpectedly, a chemistry set. It turns out this was a hobby of Elgar’s.

The tour of the house rounded off my visit nicely. I thanked the staff and left. I then took Jenny for a short walk around the car park, which is planted with several different kinds of apple tree. She enjoyed grabbing at windfalls in the grass and tossing them in the air. (She has this year shown a previously unexpected taste for autumn fruits in general. Blackberries have been a favourite snack.)

It was an afternoon well spent and I drove back to Herefordshire in a serene mood. Although not exactly Andante. Nobilmente e semplice (”At a walking pace, nobly and simply”), as Elgar instructed for the expansively Edwardian opening movement of his first symphony, neither was my pace rushed.

Take a letter, Miss Pelling

A friend who has physical difficulty in typing had reported success with using Dragon NaturallySpeaking dictation software. (Strange name — it sounds like a character from an old Stan Freberg sketch.) I have no problem typing but liked the idea of the promised increase in speed.

I bought the software from Amazon, who delivered it first thing next day. Installation was a bit tricky until I read the small print on the Web site and then all went smoothly. The program is faster than I expected and more accurate. It allows me to dictate at a slow conversational pace. There are still mistakes while we get used to each other, as you’d expect. NaturallySpeaking learns from corrections you make, so accuracy improves.

If you use a word or expression it doesn’t know, the software guesses, much as a person would. When I dictated “Maxim Vengerov”, for instance, what appeared on the screen was “vaccine finger off”! Perversely, it got Elgar’s tempo instructions right first time.

Had the Vengerov error been made by a human, it might be classed as a Mondegreen. Follow the link for an explanation and some entertaining examples. (I thought it was “You and me and Leslie”, too.)

I used the software for most of this posting and would liken it to painting your text on to the page. For a slow (but touch) typist like me, using the keyboard is more like chiselling out words from a piece of rock. The blank page can be as obdurate as any lump of granite.

NaturallySpeaking will format pages and also understand the commands for widely used software, such as Microsoft Word, Excel, Outlook and Internet Explorer. This, of course, makes it even more useful for the physically handicapped. I prefer the keyboard or mouse for those actions.

The “Preferred” version of the software, which I bought, will also work from recorded sound files. I keep close to hand in my car a small and light Olympus voice recorder. If I think of something interesting or see something I want to remember, I make a note of it at the time. Converting those voice jottings to text is another chore I look forward to automating.

Vorsprung durch technic (”progress through technology”), indeed, although I’m using audio rather than Audi.

(There’s a longer and more business-oriented version of this review on my work blog, Office Jotter.)

Landmarked

My visit to Shropshire was a trip down memory lane. Nearly 10 years ago, my wife, mother and I stayed at the 14th-century gatehouse at Bromfield Priory, just north of Ludlow (see left). This is a Landmark Trust property, one of half-a-dozen we’ve stayed in.

The Trust rescues old buildings and turns them into short-term lettings, while taking care not to override each property’s design and history. As well as the usual utensils, crockery and linen, it provides guests with plenty of reading material on each building and the locality’s history.

You often find the visitors’ logbook entertaining reading. At The Old Hall at Croscombe, Somerset, the book contained a long description, complete with drawings, of how the building was years before, by someone who grew up there. This feeling of continuity and community is common at ‘Landmarks’. I’m a fan.

For some reason, the Landmark Trust’s Web site is secretive about what properties are where. Perhaps it’s keen that you buy its handbook instead. Although this is informative and well illustrated, the Trust could meet uncommitted Web site visitors halfway.

To the rescue some years ago came Matthew Somerville, who regularly reworks the information in the Trust’s vacancies guide to create something more helpful, here.

The gatehouse at Bromfield and the church behind it are all that remains of the priory, which was established in the 12th century. If you’d like details of it, the compendious British History Online site has plenty.

The church, which sits just behind the gatehouse, was incorporated into the home of a later owner but separated again in the 17th century. A short while later, the ceiling of the chancel was extravagantly decorated with the painting you see in the picture left (which is deliberately brighter than in reality). It’s a lovely church, in a quiet and beautiful area.

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Keeping it in the family

Much of the land thereabouts is owned by Viscount Windsor and his family. Their estate, Oakly Park, covers about 8,000 acres immediately north of Ludlow. They are descendants of Clive of India, who bought the park in the late 18th century.

As well as the village of Bromfield, the family has for many years owned The Clive Restaurant, just a few hundred yards away on the other side of the main road. We ate there once. Although I don’t remember the menu, I do remember the table coverings, which were brown paper. On each table, there were also boxes of wax crayons.

Diners were encouraged to scribble and draw as much as they pleased. This released the inner infant in most of us and craftily distracted us from the wait for food, which always seems too long when you’re hungry.

Next to the restaurant is a new venture, also owned by the family. The Ludlow Food Centre is a stylish and upmarket shop for produce and cooked food, much of it from the estate farm and local suppliers.

Ludlow has the reputation of being a town for foodies, and this place is no doubt aimed at them. The interior is cool, spacious and well lit. Although there was not a huge range of goods, I bought a few bits and pieces, all of which I enjoyed. They were not cheap but neither were they as eye-wateringly expensive as those from a certain bakery in Nailsworth, Gloucestershire.

Back in the lumpy stuff

Leaving Bromfield, I went north to up the A49 to Church Stretton. This is a pretty and busy market town, and is the gateway to the Long Mynd (see the panoramic photo left). The name means “long mountain” and is apt, the Mynd being 8½ square miles of sandstone upland with steep valleys and alarming road edges.

My wife, mother and I decided to go there one day but discovered — too late to turn back — that the mountain was covered in fog. We couldn’t see where we were going or who was coming towards us. I have never driven with such quiet passengers before or since. This time it was bright sun but I was still glad I was driving on the side with passing places rather than next to the edge, as before.

I did not linger at the Long Mynd but drove over it to my real destination, the Stiperstones. This distinctive hill is composed of quartzite, a white metamorphic rock created nearly 500 million years ago by subjecting sandstone to unimaginable temperatures and pressure.

During the last Ice Age, which ended only 10,000 years ago, much of the quartzite at the summit shattered and was scattered around the slopes. You can see some of the results on the left.

It was stiff climb to the bare rock, which glistens in the sun, but the view made it worthwhile. I saw six other people. Most of the time, all I could hear was the wind, the cawing of jackdaws and the clucking of red grouse.

Shropshire has many such beautiful high places to explore — Caer Caradoc, The Wrekin, Wenlock Edge — but not on this occasion. Perhaps next time.

Finally, a word or two on names. You may be familiar with Salop, the alternative name of the county, This is a Norman contraction of the longer name. Shropshire itself means “Shrewsbury district”, or did about a thousand years ago.

If you meet an old Salopian, therefore, you’ll be talking to someone of advanced years from Shropshire. If, on the other hand, you meet an Old Salopian, you’ll be talking to former pupil of Shrewsbury School. He might, of course, also be an old Salopian. (These days, I see, “he” might even be a she. About time.)

I’ll talk about Worcestershire on the next upload.