To the Cotswolds: Stokesay, Wigmore and the Angry Frenchman

We’re going to bore you with a little treatise on money. Veteran overseas travelers can skip this part.

I had done some traveling in earlier years to Mexico with my first wife, to a little shrimping village on the Sea of California only 60 miles from the AZ border, and the steady tide of US tourists there had influenced the local economy so much that dollars and pesos were more or less interchangeable. The locals liked getting dollars anyway; the Mexican peso was, and still is, a pretty fluid currency, and despite the hue and cry you hear about the ailing, deficit-battered US dollar plunging into irrelevancy, trust us – the Mexican travel industry still loves the greenback. Most of the beach vendors we encountered simply priced their cheap sunglasses and Chinese-made “authentic” Mexican jewelry in dollars. That was about the extent of my experience using foreign money.

But the English, having stoutly rejected via referendum their entry into the Euro-zone by keeping their pound sterling currency (most places over there seem to take Euros, but I got the sense they did so only grudgingly), expected to get paid for hotel rooms and dinners with their own money. So at the advice of my sister, we had converted about $750 into pound sterling ahead of time at my local bank. Easy enough, I filled out a little form and gave them a pile of dollars, and couple of days later I stopped back and picked up the Bank of England notes.

While there, I also had a good chat with one of the young banker types there about how to pay for stuff in the UK. Use cash as much as you can (as a bank customer, the cash conversion didn’t cost me anything; they merely converted at the daily exchange rate), but most hotels and tourist trade vendors will take plastic as well. Some of the smaller vendors – local shops and bistros, smaller B&B’s – don’t always appreciate plastic, since they have to pay a fee on the transaction, and some may not even have a card swipe at all. The banker told me that one of his other customers had reported some nasty experiences they had in the French countryside trying to pay for stuff with credit cards, but as far as he knew, England was a bit more tolerant. Still, he advised, have plenty of cash – but not too much. Conventional wisdom says it’s not a great idea to have loads of cash on your person, or even in a hotel room, when you’re traveling, and anyway the immigration folks get a little suspicious of foreigners bringing in too much cash (not that anyone actually checked us at Heathrow...). Most of the local banks over there will convert your dollars into pound sterling, but they charge a fee.

He also advised lifting the security check against the cards I did plan to use over there, one little item I hadn’t thought of. A sudden rash of overseas purchases against a credit or debit card with a history of none would throw the bank’s fraud protection systems into Code Red zone and the cards would be shut off, and getting them turned back on might take a little longer than a toe-tapping hotel cashier would appreciate. 

And by the way, if a hotel says they’ll take your MasterCard, no problem – except the issuing bank will slap on a 3% surcharge to convert the funds (never mind, of course, that the money isn’t actually real). Not a huge deal on a $50 dinner, but add that up over a two week stay – hotels, car rental, tourist trinketry, everything – and you’re suddenly throwing pretty decent change into oblivion. Traveler’s checks were free to me through my account at the bank, but not everyone takes them, and they seem to be lapsing into obsolescence.

Bottom line, he said, someone somewhere is going to make something off you converting credit dollars into credit pound sterling once you’re over there.

So we had this in mind and paid for as much as we could with cash, and by Day 8, we were running a little low. Sharon got up early Saturday morning at the Abbot’s Mead and headed into town to convert some of the US cash we had into British money at one of the money-changing shops we had spied on our walk the night before, while I slept in. She said she got a decent exchange rate – I took her word for it.

First stop on that Saturday was Stokesay Castle, an hour or so south of Shrewsbury (from which we managed to depart without incident…). 

 Technically not a castle, as it is only lightly fortified, Stokesay was originally a manor house on land owned by the powerful Lacy family, while fortifications were added there by later owner Lawrence of Ludlow, a wealthy wool merchant from Shrewsbury, in the late 13th century,  and an elaborate residence building and gatehouse added in the 1500’s. The Elizabethan structure is what captures the eye first, an imposing structure with its burned-yellow plaster walls and timber framing, laced with wood carvings of varying condition (some obviously weathered, some not).

The residence rooms were generally in very good condition, with some staggeringly detailed carved wood trim and wall facades.

One room featured an interpretative display case of artifacts found on the castle grounds over the years (horseshoes, a pipe, various building artifacture) and a nearby plaque explained that, in fact, some the little captioning signs beside those artifacts were actually inaccurate…but they left the signs anyway, as they were in and of themselves, historic. Odd thing, we thought.

We also climbed the stairs to the south tower

 and walked around a bit on top, taking in a decent view of the surrounding southern Shropshire countryside... 

...and the car park.

We also spent some time at the neighboring church and churchyard: St John the Baptist,Stokesay. The church has medieval roots but was largely rebuilt after the Nasty Business of the mid-17^th century. Excellent churchyard.

Then...this again....

...until we made it to WigmoreCastle. 

Not sure which of us found this one first in our  pre-planning, but the few pictures we saw didn’t do the site justice. Perched on a high hill above the hamlet of Wigmore and grandly overlooking the Herefordshire countryside, Wigmore looms like a sullen, dismembered phantom, its walls crumbling against the passage of centuries, wildly overgrown with native flora. 

The walk up to the castle site was more like a nature path, barely visible in the weeds and tall grasses, until leading to the base of the inner bailey and a steep climb to the top.

The site was founded by William fitzOsbern, a close confidant of William the Conqueror, in 1070, and it passed into the Mortimer family a few years later, notably owned at one time by Roger Mortimer, son of Anne of York who has gained some recent notoriety as the sister of King Richard III and from whose descendent DNA sampling was used to validate the discovery of Richard’s remains at Leicester.

The castle is a very eerie place. Sections are reasonably well defined – archways, windows, curtain wall, a couple of chambers – but mostly the site is a hillside with irregularly skeletal building ruins. 

With the exception of one woman coming down from the site as we were approaching, we were the only ones there. We couldn’t help but speculate what the place must be like under a silently black nighttime sky.

It may have been the most relentlessly atmospheric place we saw in UK.
  

While many of England’s castles have been cleaned up and structurally reinforced to make them easier on the tourist, the Wigmore site was privately owned until the 1990’s and found by its new protectors, English Heritage, to host a number of rare plants and animals. Heritage decided to simply leave the ruins as they were, adding only modest access enhancements such as stairs, fences to keep folks out of structurally dubious archways, and interpretative signs. As it has a somewhat difficult approach and little remains of the structure itself, it is not visited often – Heritage doesn’t even bother with a visitor’s center or admission booth, and a casual visitor to the hamlet who misses the tiny sign pointing the way to castle site would never know it was there.

We also took a tour of St James, the church erected there by the Mortimers in the late 11^th century. Very spare, desperately quiet. The church was built on the site of an earlier Saxon church and has been little changed since the 1300’s.  

Nice churchyard, too.

I think we saw one other person in the town itself, an elderly gentleman in a beret walking his dog.

Back on the road.

We pulled into the Rose and Crown hotel in Chipping Norton while it was still light. They put us in a pretty decent room, but the wifi (which had become our primary tool for plotting our next days’ activities) was dead as a stump, so Sharon went back downstairs to Reception to get us moved. They offered to move the bags for us to a room located more or less right about the hotel lobby while we were out getting dinner, but Sharon insisted on helping.

While Sharon was supervising the room change (I wasn’t terribly helpful in this enterprise), I milled around in the lobby, which reminded me of a dentist’s office waiting room, and started a conversation with a French doctor who was plunking away furiously on his laptop. He was a plastic surgeon spending a few weeks in the Cotswolds area trying to set up a satellite practice – the hotel lobby had become his surrogate office, though hardly by choice. His room didn’t have wifi access either, which he complained somewhat bitterly about. That, and the hotel was a dump, the staff were dreadful, and the food was overpriced and marginally insulting. We'd only been there an hour, if that, and I kept reminding myself that, being French, it wasn’t likely he would appreciate English cuisine (or much of anything English for that matter), although he was certainly polite enough to us. 

I mentioned, and probably shouldn’t have, that they were going to move us to a room with wifi; I don’t think that improved his mood very much. He had been there two weeks, and planned to endure one more week before heading back to France. He sounded a little as if he had been sentenced to this hotel.

Oh well. He recommended we hit the Blue Boar for dinner, “the least bad food in this town” he promised us, so we headed out in the evening, duly armed with a star-and-a-half recommendation for dinner. 

We headed down to the church a few blocks away, but the light had grown thin by this time, so we decided to hold off shooting the place and just strolled around the town for a bit. 

Chipping Norton is one of the larger towns in the Cotswolds, but that isn’t saying much. We basically walked from one end of the town, excluding the surrounding residential areas, to the other in about 40 minutes – little shops, a few money-changing stores, a tea house or two. A modest English town, pleasant enough, but you’d be hard-pressed to see it as a tourist stop. Which was fine by us.

We popped in the Blue Boar – a noisy Saturday night was in full swing – and we seated ourselves in the far back, on the covered patio where we were actually allowed to smoke, since the section was technically outdoors. We wolfed down decent dinner and a few ales, and headed back to the hotel, which was all the way across the street, 80 yards away…if that.

Our new room had wifi. Crisis averted, it was time to konk out.