Getting screwed in Thornbury, Missing Swindon and Dennis The Eager Archeologist

“Oh dear,” said Front Desk Anna, as we greeted her the next morning to check out. “I’m afraid I have some terrible news.”

Well, that’s it, I thought. Some tragic yet casually overlooked traffic infraction, a sudden swoon of non-cooperation by my credit card company, Interpol mistaking me for a long-hunted international jewel thief. Hey, it’s happened before…

 “You have a flat tire.”

Hardly a surprise, and dutifully confirming my suspicions about the behavior of inflation-challenged tires in England. My first thought (well, second, after imagining swarms of uniformed Interpol infantry dragging me off to some Brezhnev-era gulag) was, hey, if this is the worst that happens to us on this trip, we’re doing okay.

Anna called Thornbury Tyre (she said her Mum worked there – I didn’t ask what she did) and asked Mike to come ‘round and have a look. We squared up the paperwork on the room (gulp) and headed pack to get the luggage. Mike showed up in the company van, found the jack (I had no idea where it was), jacked the thing up and gave the tire a spin.

“Ah, yeah. Right there,” he said, pointing to the head of a screw embedded snugly in one of the tire treads. 

I asked if he could fix it; he said no, we’d need a new tire. The car came equipped with what they promised was a full-sized spare, but the thing was about yay-big and not meant to be driven over 30MPH, and we were on the other side of the country (admittedly, across England’s narrow southern waist) from our ultimate destination, the EuropCar office in Chelsea.

So, how much?

Mike called in to the office. Good news: they had one. Bad news: £125. About $180 for a glorified doughnut. We didn't have much choice, so we said sure. He headed back to the shop and returned 20 minutes later with a replacement. The rental car company should reimburse us, he assured us, and of course they didn't ..  

We chatted a bit while Mike replaced the tire. He was from Charfield, coincidentally, and we mentioned we were just up there the day before, prowling around the old church and churchyard. He hadn't been to the States and said he’d love to go sometime, especially Vegas. The place gives me a headache, I told him, but if you’re into pretty girls, gambling and lots of partying, it’s tough to beat Vegas. He flashed a knowing smile. “Sounds good to me, mate!”

One of the laundry girls came out to watch the proceedings; she had been to Florida with her family some years before, and said she loved it. “Everybody was so friendly there!” she said enthusiastically, which for some reason struck me as odd. It was obvious to us that neither of these young folk made anywhere near enough to contemplate another trip to the US soon.

Mike didn't have a card swipe with him, so we said goodbye to Buckingham’s Summer Place and followed him into town to square up on the tire (sorry, “tyre”). In the parking lot, Sharon punched up the next few churches and our last abbey, and we headed southeast, ultimate destination Hilperton.

Thornbury to Hilperton (where???) was more or less a straight shot southeast, but we months earlier made a mental note to avoid Swindon at all costs, which wasn’t terribly far from Hilperton (where???), just across the massive M4, and where we could have gone through had we picked some destinations in that direction. Allegedly one of England’s most famously dreary cities (and the home to Andy Partridge, founder of XTC), the thing about Swindon we desperately wanted to avoid was the Magic Roundabout, a gleefully Machiavellian traffic-circle obscenity constructed in 1972 and one of the scariest places to operate a motor vehicle in the entire UK. The outer ring of traffic moves clockwise, while an inner ring moves counter-clockwise, connected by a paradox of multiple mini-roundabout fractals that promised, in no uncertain terms, unbridled terror for me. We mentioned it a few times to some of the locals when the subject of the driving came up, and they all agreed: go there, risk doom.

No doom for us, at least not in Swindon. We headed south.

Langport is a small town south of Bristol, where we found another CCT church, the ancient All Saints. Dating from the 12^th century, the church is a Grade 1 listed building and one of the best medieval churches we found off the beaten path. Like many of the others, we visited the place quite by ourselves.

Nearby Langport, and the real reason we came this way, was Muchelny Abbey, the scattered ruins of a 10^th century Benedictine Abbey. Henry’s Dissolution fairly stripped the place clean, leaving only the Abbot’s House and the monks' barn-ish lavatory (yes, the lavatory) intact. 

Abbot's House, Muchelney Abbey

Monks' lavatory, Muchelney Abbey

The museum portion of the property was located in the Abbot’s House, where we met Dennis, a jovial red-haired bloke of about 50 or so, the English Heritage concessionaire and ticket-taker on duty that day. Dennis was usually stationed at another property, but was filling in for someone else, and he seemed unnervingly happy to see us. I kind of wondered if, since there isn't much left of the Abbey itself, the place doesn't get a busy tourist trade, and being a Tuesday, it must have been especially slow.

We took the tour through the Abbot’s house and on our way to go out and look at the Abbey ruins themselves, we got to chatting with Dennis. A degreed archeologist, he just about flipped out when we told him that Avebury was on our schedule for the next day. Grabbing one of the Heritage free maps, he started circling and arrow-ing all sorts of Neolithic sites in the southwest of England. “You must go here,” he enthused, “and since you’ll be close these two sites are also utterly beguiling…or you could head north and try this, no one ever goes there and it’s utterly magical…oh, and there, and there…” Sharon had a keen interest in the Neolithic sites, and I did too, but at this point we had a few sites left to visit – churches mostly – and there was no practical way we could get to all these stone-circle sites. 

But clearly, he was pleased – flattered, even – that we were going to Avebury instead of Stonehenge and expressed our interest in Britain’s Neolith past. I thought to myself, this is a guy, in a tidy and spotless English Heritage uniform (well, a logoed sport shirt and slacks), who really, really needed to be out on the Wiltshire Plain under a glowering summer sky with a spade and bucket getting history under his fingernails…not cooped up in an office handing out brochures and minding a car park. 

There are lots of people in this world who truly and deeply know their calling… but scientists have a special passion for their chosen field that just seems to resonate more joyously and harmoniously.

The Abbey, the Church and Hilperton in the next installment. (Had enough yet?)   

In the Shadow of Henry

ThornburyCastle was a kind of crescendo for us. We’d been doing the country the hard way – driving it – and not really going out of our way to splurge on fancy dinners and excessive tourist stuff. Pretty much no shopping, snacking on bags of chips (er…"crisps") from gas stations, sipping warm diet soda in the morning, eating with the locals, walking around cemeteries. Except for the cameras, we probably didn’t beam “Yank tourist” on the streets of York (and there were plenty of tourists there) or Shrewsbury or anyplace else. That’s the way we wanted it. I spent most days in a t-shirt and ill-fitting jeans.

Thornbury Castle wants you to dress up. It kind of demands it – actually, it quite literally demands it if you choose to have dinner there. No sneakers, no jeans. No t-shirts. Look nice, sire, and we’re not asking.

I can’t remember the last time I had my car valet-parked. Maybe never…but we pulled into the courtyard in front of the barely signed reception entrance, and a valet guy was on us before I even turned the vehicle off. We told him we’d get the luggage ourselves, and of course I didn't even ask where the car would be. The reception desk was squeezed into a narrow hallway, barely two persons wide – odd thing I thought; for so grand a property, you’d imagine some cavernous Great Hall with chandeliers and stoic looking long-dead bewigged noblemen gazing down disapprovingly at you. 

A cheerful young blonde girl named Anna behind the desk retrieved our reservation, introduced us to their mascot suit-of-armor beside the desk, and followed us back outside again and over to the car, parked outside what appeared to be the laundry facilities. We came back through the archway and up a stone turret staircase into the Howard Room, named after the family who took the property over in the 19^th century and saved it from slow death by neglect. You met the Howards in our last episode – one of Britain’s Great Families. Well…we were staying in their room.

The room itself was about half the size of my single-floor house, and we’re not kidding. Two stone fireplaces, one of which was actually burning (gas), 

a huge four-post bed, 

a great armoire by the door with the date 1708 carved at its top.

 (Impressive…but did they really date their furniture?) 

And quiet as a tomb, owing to the fact that we were in a turret, only one other (unoccupied) room anywhere near and the walls being three feet thick in limestone.  If you held your breath, the only sound you heard was the faint hissing of the gas in the fireplace.

We opened a window for some reason, and I wandered over to the table near the bed. On it, right in the middle and perched regally on a silver serving platter, they had left a half-filled carafe of …well, I didn't know what it was, and while I assumed it was complimentary, I kind of wanted to be sure. But I didn't really want to call down to the desk and ask – seriously, how lame is that?

Fortunately, Sharon wanted to shower and wash her hair, and she couldn't find the hair dryer. Perfect excuse. Hey honey, while you’re at it, ask them what this stuff is and if I can drink it. (Sherry, and please enjoy with our compliments, came the reply…we toasted to being unapologetically over our heads…)

All this was very nice, but we still had some light and there was a jaw-dropping church right next door, St Mary The Virgin. 

The oldest building in Thornbury, the church dates to the 14^th century but like many other parish churches, it sits atop the foundation and retains some building fabric from an earlier, 12th century church. During their visit to Thornbury Castle in 1535, Henry and Anne Boleyn attended services here. Large and regal inside, the church has many memorials to important citizens interred here between the 16^th and 18^th centuries, and the churchyard was one of the best and most varied of any we saw in England. 

You got the feeling that this place – certainly more than the castle itself, which is basically a luxury hotel run by a foreign company – represents the heart of Thornbury’s history and community.

We ambled back across the historic bridge between the two properties and wandered around the castle grounds, even drifting off into what appeared to be the ruined remains of the stables (maybe servants' quarters), knee-deep in brambles and peppered with building detritus, some ancient and some not. 

Seemed odd – a neglected and overgrown portion of an otherwise immaculate and brochure-perfect property.  I think we were attracted to this corner of the property by the skeletal building and its overall neglected state. The ruined-abbey thing had obviously worn off on us – staring at the passage of the time, unvarnished by high-priced hotel consultants.

We headed back to room just as it was starting to rain. On the way up the turret, I caught a piece of graffiti on the turret wall. We think it says ' I C 1703'. 

Back in the room, Sharon dropped open the ironing board and gave my slacks a good press. She dressed up as well. 

They took us to the Baron’s Sitting Room outside the main dining room, a somewhat somber chamber bedecked with Tudor portraits and shelves of hopelessly forgotten books, with a bar station squeezed in at one end. I presumed this was a reading room at some point in the castle’s history. 

The impeccably uniformed serving attendant – don’t know exactly what to call her, since the term “waitress” just doesn’t seem to fit – showed us over to a little table surrounded by absurdly comfortable chairs. She sounded French to me, and I said a few words back to her in French. My periodic lapses into accented English and foreign European tongues drove Sharon crazy – she is monolingual, but knew well enough that my attempts at sounding worldly and clever were pretty lousy at best, and a pretentious indulgence at worst. And they were.

They brought out some appetizers, and we ordered our dinner. I ordered a lamb dish of some sort, Sharon ordered salmon. The serving attendant (see, even that sounds weird…) came back and escorted us into the surprisingly not-grand Tower Dining Room, a hexagonal chamber where a handful of other tables were already occupied with diners. The folks at the big table next to us seemed to be celebrating an elderly man’s birthday; the men were all in suits, the ladies shimmered in old-school, understated bling and carefully coiffed hair styles.

As we were finished with dinner – a haute-cuisine thing that I wouldn’t presume to critique; it was very nice – we headed back to the sitting room, where our serving attendant (last time, I promise) poured drinks for us.

And she got to talking. Turned out she wasn’t French at all – she was Polish, and had learned English from an Italian boyfriend many years before. Somewhere in her late forties, she got to talking about her daughter and ex-husband, both of whom still lived in Poland. She was still on speaking terms with her ex, but her 18 year old daughter had run off unexpectedly the prior spring and disappeared from view for a period of several months, an understandably worrying thing for the woman. The daughter  had surfaced by phoning her father a few weeks prior, explaining that she was jobless and living with some guy in Amsterdam, had no intention of returning to Poland (probably ever) and had no idea what she was going to do. They were even considering a move to America.  

The woman, relived her daughter was at least okay, seemed fatigued and melancholy over the whole affair, and seemed to blame herself for it. Maybe it was the move to England ? Or the divorce ? We did learn that there is a healthy subculture of Eastern European émigrés in the UK, especially in the hospitality industry – in a sclerotic economy (and it’s only gotten worse since then), this influx of low-wage labor foments some tension amongst younger, and especially jobless, Brits. We heard this directly or indirectly several times on this trip. The US has its own issues with immigration; some of the less charitable editorializing we heard on the subject of the Poles, the Czechs, the Romanians, the Slovaks sounded eerily familiar.

We headed back to the room. By this time, it was raining pretty hard outside – the decision to stay in and have dinner at the Castle was the right one, and if it was going to rain, better it be at night, and better that we be embraced by the walls of a 500 hundred year old castle, then during the day while we were out crawling through roofless abbeys and graveyards.

We hit that bed, sank three quarters of an inch into it as our last descent into inexcusable luxury, set the timer on the TV (force of habit – I never understood British television in the thankfully limited time I exposed myself to any) and we were both out in 2 minutes. 

Tomorrow - Avebury, Hilperton and missing Swindon.