Saturday 28th July
The Somerset Dash
My old mate Tony Marshall asked if Julie and I could look after their cats while they went to Tuscany for their summer holiday: out of the English frying pan and into the Italian fire. At the time it was thirty degrees in London and about thirty-five degrees in Italy.
Tony and I both worked as IT Trainers for a small company called Prince in the early Nineties. We taught people how to use Microsoft Office in the days when Microsoft ruled the (software) world and some people got genuinely excited about spreadsheets.
His house is in Martock in south Somerset and is exceptionally lovely. It’s a sturdy Ham stone residence with walls two feet thick that is at least three hundred years old. Martock itself is a pretty little town close to the A303 and both close to – and a world away – from Yeovil. All the villages around here are very old and very petty, the Roman Fosse Way ran close to Martock, and many of the villages have quaint names like Huish Episcopi, Shepton Beauchamp and Norton Sub Hamdon.
Julie and I drove down to Martock on Saturday evening when the A303 was quiet, it only took two hours and we didn’t have to queue at Stonehenge.
Sunday 29th July
Montacute and Ham Hill
Half of June and all of July had been stupidly hot, but the weather broke on Friday night in London, just in time to cloud over completely for the much-heralded Blood Moon. That’s nothing to do with vampires and werewolves, but an eclipse of the moon when it turns red.
The weather on Sunday in Martock was drizzly, so we decided not to travel far and go indoors. Montacute House is about ten minutes drive away and is a late Elizabethan mansion built by Sir Edward Phelips, who was the Master of the Rolls to Elizabeth I. So to clarify, he didn’t actually get his hands dirty with the building, he wasn’t no brickie. Also, he didn’t work in Greggs and make Rolls, he was a top lawyer to Queen Elizabeth. Since it’s practically built on Ham Hill, it is built of Ham stone, a lovely fossiliferous limestone that’s been used since Roman times.
Montacute is a large and well-furnished house with lovely formal gardens. The Long Gallery has been converted into an art gallery, with many pictures borrowed from the National Gallery. I was particularly impressed with the portrait of Prince Rupert, the very epitome of a dashing cavalier. He was very good looking with his frilly shirt and long wavy hair, and wouldn’t have looked out of place in the Blitz Club with Spandau Ballet. I thought he looked remarkably like the actor playing Louis XIV in the TV series Versailles.
You can only admire so many portraits and settees, so we retired back to Martock for a cup of tea and a snooze on the squeaky leather armchairs. Thus refreshed we sallied forth again to Ham Hill, which has a big Country Park and fabulous views of the Somerset countryside. At the war memorial, there are great views to over Somerset, with the A303 rumbling at the bottom beneath the hill. Ham Hill was an ancient Iron Age hill fort and later a Roman fort. It also has a stone circle, but that was built in the 21st century by machines. We heard rock music close by and followed it to the Prince of Wales pub. In a marquee in the garden, a band called Powercuts were playing “classic” rock very loudly and not particularly well, but I enjoyed them long enough to drink a pint of Tribute.
Monday 30th July
Glastonbury and Wells
Glastonbury is most famous these days for hosting the music festival. I am (as you all know) a hip and happening guy, and went to “Glasto” in 1983 to see UB40 and the Fun Boy Three. I just turned up at the gate and bought a ticket. I believe it’s more tricky to get in these days. The town itself is attractive in a different way, in that it feels like a Seventies theme park. There are many (too many) shops dedicated to “alternative” lifestyles. Basically, hippy shops that died out everywhere else during the Eighties. If you like crystals, tie-dyes, yoga and incense, then Glastonbury is the place for you. Also, there is no shortage of over-priced fudge, biscuits and cider; but this is the West Country after all. There was even a street vendor flogging wands, unfortunately, they had no guarantees of effectiveness.
The best thing about Glastonbury is the walk up to the top of the Tor. It is a hill that rises out of the Somerset Levels (the local swamp) which is topped by a church tower dedicated to St Michael, the patron saint of socks and underpants. It was breezy at the top, but there are fabulous views of the Quantocks, the Mendips and much of the Levels. The town below was once called Avalon, named after an album ancient hippy band called Roxy Music.
We ate our tuna rolls for lunch in the car park in the town centre near the Abbey. As we ate our fish delights, Mr Liam Kinseley (NVQ in Plastering Level 2) scraped our car down the side while parking. He left his business card under the windscreen wipers with an apologetic note on it, which was nice. But he will be receiving a bill for the paint job.
UPDATE – It cost £180 to fix by a nice man called Jason from Chips Away.
Wells is about five miles from Glastonbury and is a very different type of place. It is the smallest city in England because it has a beautiful cathedral and a population of about ten thousand people. You can tell it’s quite posh because of the up-market clothes shops and distinct lack of McDonalds or Poundland. The cathedral is beautiful, but then again have you ever seen an ugly cathedral? It has a wonderful arch inside which look like it was built yesterday but is eight hundred years old. A choir from Albuquerque were rehearsing, apparently, there is a different choir every week taking advantage of the acoustics.
In the High Street, we had our first Cream Tea of the week. It’s high in carbs, fat and sugar and that’s why it tastes so good. Wells looks familiar because it where Hot Fuzz was made, starring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost (who now lives in Twickenham and I see him in the White Swan)
The city is quiet and old and a lovely place to spend a few hours pottering around the shops and seeing the historic sites. There is a big moated Bishop’s Palace, which looked interesting, but we were too mean to pay to get in. We have National Trust cards that get us into a lot of old houses for the price of our membership, so we are reluctant to pay to go into others.
As you’ve probably worked out from my earlier mention of tuna rolls in the car park, I’m careful with my money, possibly even stingy. But money saved on cheap lunches comes back as extra money on the pub.
Tuesday 31st July
Knackered in Cheddar
When our kids were small children we had a holiday at Butlins in Minehead, and had a day trip to Cheddar to see the famous gorge and caves. So on Tuesday, we drove back to Wells and then just beyond it into the Mendips to revisit them. Google Maps took us a very weird route across the Levels but delivered us safely to that cheesy paradise.
FACT – in the USA in 2015, 3.4 billion pounds of cheddar cheese was produced. That is an unbelievable amount of cheese, but then Yanks eat cheese with everything. They even put it into an aerosol.
We parked up and bought our extortionately priced tickets for the Cheddar attractions from the Marquis of Bath, whose ancestors stole it off the locals not long after 1066. The mean bastards don’t even do a reduction for poor pensioners like me. I can barely afford to buy a decent Malbec these days! The first attraction is Dream Weavers, which weren’t nothin’ to do with dreamin’ or weavin’! It was a trail through caves with projections on the walls explaining about the people who live in the cave during the Neolithic Period. So that was quite good but a bit too poetic and magical bollocksy for my tastes. A little further up the Gorge are the main caves, known as Gough’s Caves after the man who opened them up. Mr Gough and his sons dug out lots of mud to clear the caves and put in floors and lighting to make them accessible to a public attraction. As soon as his lease ran out, the good old Marquis of Bath got them back and has been milking it for the last hundred years.
Goughs Cave is very impressive with several different chambers, stalagmites, stalactites and reflecting pools, all the stuff you expect from a cave. I’m pleased that they didn’t do that thing where they try to make you believe a rock looks like a witch or a rabbit or a VW Golf or something. I can never see those things like I could never see those Magic Eye pictures.
After emerging into the daylight I fancied a stomp around some hills. So we walked up Jacob’s Ladder about two hundred steps to the beginning of the Mendips. It isn’t a ladder, it’s a very long staircase, but you are cream-crackered at the top! Geddit! Jacobs! Cream-crackered! Oh, suit yer selves.
From there it’s a three-mile walk around the top of Cheddar Gorge, quite a strenuous three miles, not a stroll. It’s all up or down, with very little along. That up and down is mostly over rocks, tree roots or nasty loose soil. There are some amazing views, but on balance it isn’t worth it. Julie threw a wobbly a couple of times, but there was no way back to the start apart from walking. It was March or Die. At the end of our death march we visited the very lovely Gorge Cafe and had another Cream Tea, which made everything better for as long as we were eating.
On our way home we stopped at the Lime Kiln Inn at Long Sutton for a pint, very nice and well deserved. The beer was instantly soaked up by the cream and carbs and sugar to make a very flatulent mixture, bang goes the ozone layer.
Wednesday 1st August
Dipping into Dorset
Having made two consecutive journeys up to the north of Somerset, on Wednesday we stayed local (ish) and went to a manor house called Lytes Cary, which is a short drive up the A303. Lytes Cary is a medieval manor house which was restored in the 20th century and given to the National Trust. It’s a small house compared to many NT properties but it has lovely gardens and a good cafe. In my mind “National Trust “and “Nice Cafe” are unbreakably linked, like Tony the Tiger and “they’re grrreat”.
I did start to suffer from old house burn-out having been to a glut of NT places. I could no longer get interested in Jacobean oak panelling or Flemish tapestries of men in camp Roman outfits. In days of old they seem to like showing ladies with one breast out, but never show men with a single bollock dangling beneath their togas.
There is always charming elderly middle-class folk guarding the rooms and giving helpful information. I like to test them with awkward questions like “Is that the second or third Duke, and is it painted by Kneller or Lely?” which makes them rapidly leaf through their folders of useful information to find the right answer. They must have enormous patience standing in rooms all day waiting for some child to touch a Chippendale chair so they can tell them off.
Having exhausted the delights of Lytes we drove on to Sherborne. When I say “we”, I mean Julie since we can’t both drive the car at the same time, obviously. I’m better at navigating and like looking out the window for interesting birds and passing celebrities. I spotted Mark Ellen, former editor of Q magazine, putting out his bins in Teddington yesterday. Julie had never heard of him, but she never watched Whistle Test religiously like I did.
Sherborne is just into Dorset and is a very pretty town with a big abbey church and a posh public school. Consequently, there are lots of teenagers around who look like they might be from Singapore or Leningrad. Actually, I made up the bit about Leningrad, I don’t know what they would look like. It’s a perfect place for a slow mooch around overpriced galleries and gift shops. Our house does not have much shelf space for accumulating knick knacks, so we don’t have many. Having said that, I’m a bugger for a nice fridge magnet, and our LG fridge freezer is covered with them. If I feel the need to hide from spies, I will get into the fridge and bamboozle them with the intense magnetic field.
The best way to re-energise in Dorset after window shopping is to have yet another Cream Tea, good for the stomach and good for the soul, but bad for the digestion and waistline.
Thursday 2nd August
Over the hill and back to the pub
My friend Andy lives in Blandford, which is about an hour’s drive from Martock, so he drove over to see us with his partner Amanda and their little dog. I’m not a “dog person”, so I can’t remember its name, but do remember that it was a yappy Jack Russell. We met them at the Prince of Wales on Ham Hill, and the weather was fine and sunny and ideal for a hike around the park. Some of the country park is uppy downy old quarry workings, but most of it is huge open fields with grand views of Somerset spread out below.
Dog owners always think that their dogs can understand English and have conversations with them like “come on Boris we have to get home for daddy’s tea”. I have also noticed that they refer to dogs as girls or boys, which is an anthropomorphic step too far for me. It would be much more entertaining if owners spoke like Ripley in Alien 2, “Stay away from her you bitch!”
After a healthy yomp around the park, we returned the Prince of Wales pub for some lunch in the garden. As I was eating my sandwich, two people rode their horses into the garden like it was a normal thing to do. They dismounted and took the saddles off, while the horses walked around the garden benches grazing. Andy’s little bitch didn’t like the horses and barked at them, so she had to be removed in case an annoyed horse stepped on it. The horse riders were dressed in jeans and tee shirts and behaved as though grazing their beasts in the pub garden was perfectly normal, maybe it is normal for Somerset.
Our friends departed and we drove to yet another historic property, Muchelney Abbey. Most of the abbey was destroyed by Thomas Cromwell’s henchmen during the dissolution of the monasteries, but the Abbot’s house remains. The house is well restored but mostly empty apart from the English Heritage shop where samples of mead were available, something for nothing is always welcome.
In the village of Mulchelney I had a look in the pottery which was featured in a leaflet I picked up in Wells. The pots were brown, heavy, and looked like the monks would have used then five hundred years ago. I looked at the price sticker and decided that my Tescos stoneware was perfectly adequate and actually more attractive. At such a time the only sensible course of action is to have another cream tea, so School Farm got the benefit of our custom and I stuffed my face with more heart-attack-on-a-plate. Roddas Clotted Cream has probably taken years off my life expectancy.
Friday 3rd August
Watchet you Dunster!
I fancied going to the seaside for my annual dip in the chilly waters around our fair isle. The Dorset coast is closest, but we visited that extensively in 2016, so the next closest was North Somerset, the Costa Del Butlins! The last time we visited north Somerset was 1994, when we took Tommy aged four and Josie aged two to Butlins at Minehead. Even back then we were fully paid-up members of the Guardian-reading metropolitan elite, so going to Butlins was an unusual choice that would cause tongues to wag at our NCT group. We had a marvellous time, and Josie enjoyed herself so much she projectile-vomited over our chalet. I still have happy memories of the variety shows and the distinctive (and very reasonably priced) Butlins Bitter.
It’s a long and windy drive through Taunton to get to the north coast, but well worthwhile. Our first destination was Dunster Castle, a few miles from Minehead. It is beautifully located on a hill surrounded by lovely gardens and woodland, and it made me grateful for the punitive Death Duties that forced the aristocratic former occupiers to give it to the National Trust. The actual Norman castle was knocked down by the forces of Oliver Cromwell, and what remains is the mansion that the Tudor lords built in the grounds. Having seen a few old houses already this week, we toured the house quite quickly. Lovely paintings and furniture and all that, but boy did those nobles have an inflated sense of their own self-importance! My favourite bit was the watermill, but I do love any sort of moving machinery. I bought some muesli from the shop, but quite honestly it wasn’t as tasty as Alpen.
Just outside the gates of the castle is Dunster village, which is very pretty and suitable for a Disney film location. In the past, it was probably occupied by milkmaids and the bastard sons and daughters of the lords, but today is entirely souvenir and gift shops.
We made a very brief visit to Dunster beach, about thirty seconds is enough time there and continued on to Minehead.
We had tea in the cafe at the West Somerset Railway, a steam heritage railway with twenty miles of track between Bishops Lydeard and Minehead. Julie looked at her phone while I watched the engineers fix an engine boiler to a chassis with a big crane. I do like a good steam engine, and the WSR has some beauties.
On our way back to Martock we stopped at Watchet a few miles along the coast from Minehead. Its impressive harbour was once used for shipping ironstone excavated from the Brendon Hills to Ebbw Vale steelworks across the Bristol Channel, it is now a marina. The village has a few pretty streets and a characterful cider pub called the Pebbles Tavern. You won’t get Kopperberg dancing-around-your-handbag fruity ciders, but you will get some excellent local brews that should be consumed with caution.
Saturday 4th August
Tint’n’ull swings
By the end of our week in Somerset it felt like we had seen every site on historical interest within forty miles. That wasn’t true, but we had got a bellyful of old houses and dead aristocrats posing with their guns and dogs. Still, it’s a lot better than Italy when most of the pictures in galleries or houses are either:
- Jesus
- Mary, or
- Mary and Jesus
We had enough curiosity left for one last National Trust blow-out, Tintinhull Gardens. The main reason we went was that it was very close, and no doubt would have a nice caff. Tintinhull is a very pretty village built of Ham stone which looks very prosperous. The big house is a lovely 17th-century mansion with some well-maintained gardens originally set out by a gardener called Phyllis Reiss. It’s certainly a lovely place to spend a couple of hours sniffing roses and trying to steal raspberries without being spotted. There is a small wood with a swing suspended from a tree. I sat carefully on the swing and it didn’t immediately collapse, so I went back and forth a few times. I then felt a bit queasy, so I think my swinging days are over (in more ways than one). Tintinhull is quite a mouthful, and I’m told the locals sensibly call the village Tintnul. I
looked on the map for CaptainHaddockhull and Snowhull, but they don’t exist.
In the afternoon I cooked a veggie curry and tidied up the house ready for the return of Tony, Sarah, Lucy and Alice back from Italy. When they returned we ate dinner in the garden and Lucy entertained us on the piano.
Somerset is a lovely county and is well worth visiting, rather than just driving through it on the way to Cornwall. It has a massive advantage in that it’s only two hours from London and it doesn’t rain as much as Cornwall.
timharnesstravels 