Sitting out in the grassy beer garden beside the Old Malt
Sccop in Lapford, rural Devon. Overcast, fairly cool.Our first morning here, 7 days into England 2019.
I should have gotten my hoody, but Sharon is still sleeping, or semi sleeping, since
I made some noise trying to get out of the room,
The cattle are honking at the
farm next door, the sheep are grazing peacefully 100 yards away. A light rain
just now chased me onto the patio, semi-covered.
The pace has been fast, so this is the first chance I’ve had
to scribble some notes. We’ve done somewhere north of 1300 miles so far, and we’ve
done pretty well hitting sites. A few missed due to time or distance, or simply
choice, but overall we’ve done well.
The driving has been exhausting, especially the medium sized
towns where the roads get tangled and the GPS gets confused, which has happened
more often than I remember from past trips.
Today is Exeter, at least at this point that’s the plan, and
we’ll be taking the bus.
The hotel here is a pretty nice facility – an obvious
community drinking spot, appears to be part old coaching inn and part reformed
farm house. Already chatted up with some locals – where are we from, dogs,
travel logistics – and everyone is friendly, and a little curious. I’m not sure
many Yanks find and stay at this place. It’s pretty much in the middle of
nowhere.
Watched the Netflix doc about the Fyre Festival last night - a few thoughts come to mind.
Plenty of schadenfreude has been slung around about instagram-hypnotized scenester millennials dispensing thousands of piasters (in some cases, 10's or 100's of thousands) to attend a completely implausible music festival in the Bahamas, goaded on by clever social media marketing images of slow-mo super models splashing around on a pristine Caribbean beach and winking suggestively over their mai-tais.
And frankly, yeah, it's a struggle not to giggle at the dissolving whoosh of hipsters' bored money into a bottomless black hole.
But really, c'mon, there have been scams as long as there have been people (in the interests of full disclosure, I fell for one myself, more than thirty years ago), and this one - although cinematic in its sweep and audaciously catastrophic in its finale - is really just another in the proud tradition of lying for cash.
Someone said The Dream was this way
We have little sympathy for the scammed in this case, a lot more for the locals who worked their tails off futilely, didn't get paid and probably don't have trust funds backing up their dubious life choices, but as for whether or not this is a deeper commentary on a social-media driven society where image in everything, the fact is that illusion is ALWAYS the central component of a scam. Social media is a just a firehose for the bullshit.
The other thought is that music festivals (which I personally have no beef against - they can be fun, community enriching and socially bonding events) are extremely hard work to pull off, and the prevailing notion proposed by the chief perpetrator (and current ward of the Federal Corrections facility in Otisville, NY) of this comic dumpster fyre (Billy McFarland) that a positive attitude and dedicated team work will overcome the basic logistics of payroll, crowd management and resource control was, for me, maybe the most infuriating part of this event. I know the guys who do the Arise Festival in Loveland, and they work their asses off every year to put this event on. Counting porta-potties and measuring chain-link fencing isn't as sexay-time as filming models splashing gleefully around in turquoise waters.
Lastly, I still appreciate Trevor Noah's commentary on Fyre: "Yeah. White people love camping...unless it's a surprise."
Two years and change since our last installment here, and on the last day of 2018, we woke up this morning thinking that, for some strange reason, this would be a good time to dust off the old blog and start gnawing pointlessly away at the bandwidth again.
It'd be a bit pointless to "get all caught up", as it were, since a lot has happened since our last attempt to revive this enterprise. We completed another trip to the UK last year - in 2017 - and we'll start planning this year's trip in a few months. Southwest, with another few days up in York again. We've already marked off a few spots, and will start a 2019 map soon.
Donald Trump is still president - not feeling much like commenting on that at the moment, but we likely will if we keep this going. Suffice to say, it's been as stupid, chaotic, troubling and destructive as a lot of us feared, and most observers think this will be a monumentally important year in the Worst Reality Show Presidency Ever.
For now, I'm shaking off a night of vacation-grade sleep, watching the temperature dropping into the low teens under gloomy morning skies, and trying to reconcile the fact that a 12 day stretch of vacation is ending after tomorrow. I'm mostly okay with it, resisting my usual regret that I didn't do everything I had hope to do with all the time off. I find myself increasingly focused on my management of time. I turned 60 last April - I suppose this is a logical consequence.
Anyway...hi again, and let's see what 2019 has to offer.
As is probably common for featherweight bloggers, our 2015 UK trip blog dissolved into the dark swamp of Real Life distractions and uncertainties about the way forward. No excuses.
So we are left with two daunting issues - the first being that the 2015 UK trip is fading from memory (well, the little day to day stuff that we like to include), and the second being that we've actually gone BACK to the UK since then, for a whole other two week adventure.
So do we struggle through 2015 and start up 2016? Do them both in a maddeningly random, chronologically entangled manner, just do 2016? Give up completely?
We'll land on one square or another shortly. We will. Honest. Too much good stuff from both to walk away...so there, we've already dispensed with the 'Give up completely' option. Progress.
When we chatted with Christopher, our chance encounter friend outside the hotel in Nottingham, he asked us casually where we were headed next. We told him we had two nights booked up in Tirill. He didn't know where that was.
"Just outside of Penrith," I said.
He didn't know where that was, either.
Our choice of lodging for the Cumbria leg, the Queen's Head in Tirill,
Queen's Head - Tirill
was merely a function of geography and proximity. Furness Abbey, one of the great monastic sites in Britain, had been on my list since our first trip in 2012, but it was located inconveniently in the extreme northwest of the country. We found Tirill by just doing a scan of little villages that would put us within striking distance of Furness and a clutch of castles in the area. There wasn't much in the way of lodging, until we looked deeper in the Lake District, where the accommodations became more expensive and more obviously biased toward caravan (RV) parks and holiday cottages - not our thing.
Tirill is actually one of three villages - the other two being Stockbridge and Thorpe - which, in essence, comprise a single, somewhat scattered entity outside the town of Penrith. Sparsely populated, the place is a barely a murmur in the yawning expanse of sheep country...peaceful and, if not exactly idyllic, at least pastoral and unhurried. It also had a car-park, a bonus amenity we had come to appreciate as a not-to-be-taken-for-granted feature of historic inns.
We checked in, the stiffly polite lady at the bar showed us up the absurdly steep and slightly creaky stairs of the 18th century converted brewery and to our room. Sharon had gotten into the habit of immediately checking the wi-fi; it didn't really work, but we figured we'd be downstairs in the pub most of the evening anyway and we could plan the next day's route from there. Had the place been a Best Western or some other modern hotel deal, we would have said something. Out here, there wasn't much point.
We dropped off the bags in the room, went downstairs for a couple of pints and took them out to the smoking area, thankfully sheltered from a healthy rain. Chatted with a 30-ish guy about The North and the Scottish referendum on independence from the UK. The argument seems to go something like this: the Scots feel like their income from North Sea oil was appropriated by the UK to fund England's generous social programs, with disproportionately meager benefit extending back to the Scots. For their part, the English regard Scotland as economically unviable without membership in the UK, and that independence would create a kind of trickle-southward economic malaise. Plus, y'know, the Scots are...well, Scots. 'Nuff said, right?
Consistently impressed by the durability of ancient quarrels and side-eye stereotypes between the various peoples of the British Isles, we'd be heading toward the borderlands in a few days to prowl the historic record of more impactful friction between the English and their barbarous neighbors to the north. But as far as the referendum, we had no pony in this race. The guy himself, an Englishman with family and some roots in Scotland, admitted he saw both sides of the argument, leaning somewhat toward Scotland staying in the UK. One of the Inn's staff girls came out for a quick smoke - he asked her what she thought about it. She just smiled and shrugged.
******
There were a couple of guys loading in kegs of beer through the cellar door in the morning, right in front of the smoking patio. The older guy, well into his sixties and built like a oak, wished us a good morning and asked where we were headed. "Furness Abbey, outside of Barrow," I called back. "Hello then, that's where I live !! In Barrow. Lovely place."
The beer truck bore a Coors Light logo. I told him we live pretty close to the Coors brewery, in Colorado. He seemed impressed with that, even if he wasn't quite sure where Colorado was, and even somewhat less impressed with the product itself, conceding it was actually fairly popular in the pubs around there.
"I don't drink the stuff," he said. We don't either, I said, as if apologizing.
******
Sharon set the GPS and we took off. About a mile down the road there was a sign that said "Ancient Church" and an arrow pointing down a narrow lane. "Ack !" I shouted, but Sharon said we didn't have time, we'd try to hit it on the way back. The sign retreated in my rear view mirror.
The two laned A592 wound its way around Ullswater, one of the Lake District's namesakes, and became tortuously narrow along the forested lakeshore. Compact cars pulling compact pop-up campers, cyclists cheating death, tiny French hatchbacks with roofed kayaks (hey, kayaks !), climbing over blind curves that relaxed and constricted with diabolical randomness. This was not an easy drive.
Eventually the road starting climbing as we approached Kirkstone Pass. We were stuck behind a bus, sliding pass endless miles of drystone fence walls. A cyclist was drying off at the top.
This was an England we'd never seen before; rolling treeless hills patched with gloomy banks of limestone, uncountable sheep grazing on the tundra in the light rain. And mountain passes. What ?
The sun came out and we started to see gulls, a sign we were approaching the seaside town of Barrow, where the beer guy lived.
******
Furness Abbey - Cistercian - c.1123 AD
Furness is one of England's great monastic sites. Founded in 1123 and one of the wealthiest of the Cistercian monasteries, Furness has been a romantic ruin of English lore for centuries. Wordsworth came here. So did Robert the Bruce, in 1322 - the abbot paid for his lodging and put him up, mindful that the Scots, when irritated, had a habit of sacking and looting anyplace less than welcoming to their arrival. On this visit, they did pillage the neighboring villages, and partly destroyed nearby Cartmel Priory, but Abbot John Cockerham managed to save Furness by (nervously) hosting Robert and his boys for the night.
More mutton, Bob? And please don't burn our abbey down.
Built from sandstone, Furness seethes with a ruddy red in the sun (and by now, the sun was out). The grass was a little wet as drifted across the site.
At the center of the church ruin, a robust tangle of bracing and industrial scaffolding crisscrossed the ancient walls. Furness is in the midst of a ten year stabilization program. When the railroad went in a few decades ago, running just past the trees bordering the site, the tracks changed the drainage pattern. The abbey itself, remarkably, was actually constructed atop a series of timber rafts, which had survived more or less intact for better than eight centuries. But once the drainage pattern changed, the timbers started to rot and the surviving walls cracked as the place began to sink.
I was having a hard time wrapping my mind around this idea; a meticulously detailed ten year program, monitored weekly, to preserve an almost 900 year old monastery ruin with hardware that looked like it came from an airport construction site. The preservation of these ancient sites, which the English take very seriously, is a game of millimeters, drawn out over years.
The ruin itself was beguiling and seemed to glow in the summer sun. No one was there, but the place felt busy anyway. The place is evidently teeming with ghosts, including that of a headless monk. On horseback.
In the visitor's center, a display case held a bishop's crozier, that curved doodad thing at the top of a staff. The item was found in 2012 in the church section of the abbey ruin during digging for the stabilization footers. They also found a ring and the skeleton of its wearer, probably a 14th century abbot who was short, overweight and probably suffered from diabetes. They weren't certain whether the crozier was related to the abbot - they think the crozier was older, as the carving depicted St Michael, who was a more commonly venerated saint in the 12th and 13th centuries - but the ring certainly was, likely a bit of bling presented to the guy upon his consecration. They could tell the abbot was portly by how wide the ring was, and they gauged his general health (he died in his forties) by analysis of his bones. They don't know who he was - buried in the church, though, meant that he was probably big swish.
Crozier
Abbot's ring
I asked about the crozier. Although cleaned up a bit when first unearthed, it was still encrusted in some places; it looked like a restoration job left half-done, a toothbrush's scrape away from being all new again. The girl explained that the archeologists removed as much they could safely, and left the rest for future generations of archeologists, when (presumably) the technology for doing such things improved and the work could be completed without damage to the object.
Maybe this is a common practice in archeology - leaving stuff in the ground, or half-cleaning up artifacts with the anticipation that future archeologists with better tools can do it better. The mission to embrace and know the past is a measured one in English archeology. Time plays tricks in the English soil, and you don't always defeat it.
The longest driving day of the trip, which had started at the Westminster Hotel in Nottingham at about 7 in the morning, had pretty well taken its toll on both of us.
I had been cautious not to feel too cocky in advance about the England-by-car thing; it was our third trip, and yeah, the cadences and weird sightline geometry of most roundabouts had started to feel familiar, and the drive on the left thing was second nature, and I had stopped worrying about driving 9% below the limit more less everywhere, it felt like Britain had forgiven me with a sigh and shrug for my timidity.
But driving through Bradford sucked, as did the frantic had-to-pee fiasco in Watford the day before, and I was tired and grouchy as we started to ease into the countryside of Cumbria. But one stop was left.
Shapp Abbey, and sheep
Shap Abbey was one of those "if we have time" sites we had identified on this, the longest single leg of The Journey, and while I probably would have felt fine enough to push onto the hotel in Tirril, I was also eager enough to squirm out of the car for some fresh air and renewed bloodflow to my lower extremities. It was also close - less than twenty miles from the hotel - so, why not? We were losing our light but probably had time, and the glowering skies were withholding of rain.
Founded about 1200 as a Premonstratensian mission, Shap isn't the kind of monastic ruin that's likely to end up on any tourist's "must see" list. English Heritage doesn't even bother collecting an entrance fee. Cumbria is best known as the county of the Lake District, an expanse of rolling mountains (or, perhaps better described by a Coloradoan, very broad and steep rocky hills), punctuated in the valleys by tight and picturesque villages. The English come up here for holiday recreation, boating and camping and hiking; the tourists come for postcard-y photo ops of shimmering lakes and 16th century villages.
The Church tower, c. 1500 - Shap Abbey
The abbey is located at the bottom of yet another steep country lane, barely a car's-width wide, and the ruin itself is a fenced off parcel largely contained within a private farm.
South aisle of the church - Shap Abbey
Chapter house and clergy grave - Shap Abbey
We strolled through the ruin quietly, an occasional sheep breaking the hush. Some abbey ruins gently insist on a hushed reverence, but Shap did so passively, exuding a sullen melancholy that I think took us both a little by surprise. By monastic ruin standards, there's little left of the place; its notable feature being the cracked and gently listing tower, dating to about 1500. And while Heritage dutifully describes the site's original layout, not much is written about the monastery itself, save an obscure little tome written in 1963 and published by Her Majesty's Stationary Office. It was always small, modestly profitable in its day, and was barely missed when Henry's commissioners came for it in 1540. The abbot and his canons were given pensions - bought off, as was common for abbey clergy who surrendered to Cromwell's platoons without a fuss. (Those who resisted usually got the Worst Haircut Ever.)
We had the place to ourselves, shot some pictures. Sat awhile in the chilling late afternoon air. Alone in a place that was used to loneliness. And we went back to the car, and drove away.
We were both glad we stopped here, knowing we'd probably never see the place again.
I wasn't much looking forward to morning rush hour traffic in Nottingham - but we had a long day ahead and not much choice.
Loaded up the Mercedes and up Mansfield Road we crawled toward Church Rock. The cemetery gates were open, but it was a right turn against busy traffic and I just wanted no part of it. Standing the evening before in the light drizzle at the cemetery's locked gates, we had actually discussed strategy for parking the little blue rascal - instead of trying to turn into the cemetery, we'd actually hang a left and head up Mapperly Rd, at the Victorian Church of St Andrew. An impressive CoE building, but clearly a Victorian enterprise that we didn't have the time to visit, and probably wouldn't have anyway.
Hung another left at Cranmer Rd, behind the church (doubtlessly named after Thomas Cranmer, the Tudor-era Reformation figure executed by Queen Mary for heresy, and regarded today as something of a martyr for the Protestant movement), swung around and parked the car. Someone's cat watched us pile out of the car from across the street.
Church Rock Cemetery - Nottingham
Church Rock Cemetery is a sprawling municipal cemetery, tightly packed and draped over a series of swales and gullies. Impressive stonework, and even in the brilliant sunshine of the morning (yes, the sun came out), the graveyard's weird alcoves and cul-de-sacs teased a sense of mystery about the place.
Church Rock Cemetery- Nottingham
It was actually a difficult cemetery to shoot, the sense of scale being continually thwarted by the heaving topology of the place.
At the bottom of a steep walk was an enclosed amphitheater, embracing a number of ground-level stones and a few bricked up alcoves.
Church Rock Cemetery - Nottingham
We climbed down to shoot some pictures, and happened to spy a ramshackle encampment in one of the alcoves, its resident awake and tucked back in shadow. A Polish gangster maybe, but likelier a homeless person. We knew he was there, he knew we were there, but we ignored each other. Apart from that, we were the only ones in the cemetery.
The drive out of Nottingham was easier than I had feared; we caught a break when the GPS had us slip perpendicular and past Mansfield Road and guided us down a few minor, streetlight governed side roads until we reached the on-ramp to the M1.
Roche Abbey was next, unfinished business from our 2013 trip and an easy hour up the M1. We managed to make a wrong turn (we were perfecting the art of getting lost in defiance of a very good GPS), but eventually found the steep cobblestone road down to the English Heritage site. Like many abbeys, at least the ones in the countryside, Roche is tucked into a wooded valley beside a stream, not altogether easy to find.
There was a small car park outside the site, the same one we had parked at in 2013. I pulled into a space and a older gentlemen in a beret walking his dog came up to my window and spoke to me. His accent was impossibly thick, but with a little translation help from Sharon, possessed of an inexplicable gift for being impervious to dense rural English brogues, I gathered he was cautioning me against parking here, as cars in this little area were subject to break-in's by local kids. Hooligans.
"In the middle of the day?" I asked.
"Criminals keep a schedule?" he countered. Well, yeah....if breaking into cars is your thing, you do it when there are actually cars to break into. Roche closes at 5PM, and there'd be little reason to park down here after that.
So we pulled out and proceeded down the narrow lane to the gated site itself.
Roche was founded in 1147 as a Cistercian mission, passed through a number of hands and suffered near-total destruction in 1538, during Henry VIII's maniacal Dissolution. Plundered by Henry's commissioners and locals alike, the site nearly dissolved into the forested countryside until the 1920's, when it was excavated and cleaned up.
Roche Abbey
Set deep in the narrow valley, elegant in its skeletal dignity, it will never be considered one of the must-visit's of England's several dozen medieval monastic sites; for us, it was a gem.
The next leg took us northwest toward Skipton Castle. Sharon set a route that would take us around the south side of the industrial town of Leeds, but it did take us more or less directly through Leeds' small satellite city Bradford. A tangle of fast, busy roads with tricky last-minute moves and jammed with impatient delivery truckers, it was probably the hardest single day's drive of the whole two weeks.
Skipton Castle
We had had our doubts about Skipton. An extraordinarily well preserved medieval fortress, founded in the late 11th century, the castle is now a privately owned tourist attraction. Privately owned castles can be a hit-or-miss proposition. Sudeley Castle, which we visited in 2012, was a disappointment - crowded with vendors and costumed performers, the place felt like a Tudor-era theme park, and it was a turn-off.
Lady Clifford (1590-1676)
But Skipton was a more subtle and intimate experience, an intriguing stroll through narrow hallways, yawning banquet rooms and tight stairways, all wrapped around the Conduit Courtyard. Besieged in the English Civil War by Cromwell's forces before finally surrendering in 1645, Skipton was spared the worst of the Parliamentarians' usual slighting, with only the roofing removed upon their departure.
...and her Yew tree, planted in 1659
It is said that the castle's owner, the feisty and stubborn Lady Anne Clifford, planted the Yew tree now standing the courtyard as commemoration of the the castle's restoration after Cromwell's departure.
Got dragons? Coat of arms in the Conduit Courtyard - Skipton Castle
Skipton Castle interior
Counter-intuitively, you have to park up the steep hill from the castle, and walk down to it. It was late afternoon by the time we made our way back uphill to the car, and we spied the bumper-to-bumper traffic down toward the town square with exhausted dismay. Deep in the reaches of sheep country of North Yorkshire (its name actually derives from the Old English, sceap), Skipton is a deceptively sizable town, and what we were looking at was a kind of rural rush hour. The GPS had anticipated our heading back through town, but forget about it. We made a left out of the car park instead; our little Garmin, by now accustomed to our willful non-compliance to its perfectly reasonable demands, dutifully traced a new route for us through some minor country roads outside town, until we were properly headed toward Cumbria.
