goodbye CC

Thursday 29 Sep 11
So tomorrow we leave Chipping Campden. We’ve chosen to spend our two penultimate nights at Beddgelert, in Snowdonia National Park, Wales. We’d kept our options open and booked a B&B there via email just yesterday (got the last room at our preferred option). Our last night is booked at Manchester Airport, at the rather swish Raddison Blu, just a five minute stroll, via air bridge, to the check-in counters, at which we need to present ourselves at 7:00am on Monday.

We’ve thoroughly enjoyed our stay here in Chipping Campden, and have struck excellent weather, especially in the last few days and today. Digging through the photo portfolio we noticed a few more pics we think worthy of posting and there are a few anecdotes of likely interest also.

Firstly, there’s the Olimpick Games. That’s not a mis-spelling for these games were inaugurated in 1612 in Chipping Campden and ran more or less annually until 1853 when (so I’m told) a powerful member of the clergy decided that too much fun was being had and managed to briefly stop the frivolity. But they’ve been revived since 1951 and such events as shin-kicking and sack racing, and probably a bit of horizontal folk dancing, are back on the agenda annually. The event is held where it has always been held, at nearby Dover’s Hill, a ten minute uphill stroll from the village. Next year is the 400th anniversary of the Olimpick Games (to be held Friday 01 June 2012) which year coincides with the rather younger Modern Olympic Games to be held in London. If you’d like to visit Chipping Campden a visit coinciding with their Games, especially in 2012, would result in some interesting experiences I’m sure.

This place is genuinely ancient and a lot of value is placed, rightly in my opinion, on retaining the look and feel. Because it’s such a pleasant place to dwell and because of its proximity to London, real estate here is far more valuable than in the villages all around. Until it’s pointed out, you don’t notice that there are no “power” lines visible. The Britons’ love of the “telly” however has resulted in concessions being made, as antennae to receive free-to-air TV are ubiquitous.

Also, many of the older roofs are covered in roughly split and shaped stone, not, as I had thought, slate. Apparently this stone was sourced locally, dug out of quarries in large slabs, kept soaked, in pits, for months during summer and then exposed to winter frosts which would freeze the soaked up water and hopefully split the stone. One roof in particular has the same stones which were placed on it about 700 years ago.

And now some pics of general interest

I think it’s rare that evening dining outdoors, at the end of September can be experienced in comfort in Britain. We were the first into the restaurant, at 6:30pm and by the time we left there was a good crowd.

It’s such a beautiful day today that we’re going out to lunch, hopefully at the Churchill Arms in nearby Paxford, where we intend to sit in the sun and try the cider and the ploughman’s lunch as the Brits like to do on these not-to-be-missed opportunities.

Chipping Campden is a great place to stay, and bring your hiking boots to enjoy the countryside.

bath time

Bath, what an intriguing yet banal name for a city. We’d thought on this trip that we might get the opportunity to visit this place at last after having previously driven past, in 1984, due to time constraints.

And better still, on the way were a couple of other intriguing places: Bourton-on-the-Water and those two other villages which sound as if they should feature in an Agatha Christie novel, Lower Slaughter and Upper Slaughter.

So we set off on Monday morning, Mary navigating this time, for the journey down to Bath, via B-o-t-W, and back via the Slaughters. Probably 50-60 miles each way, on a bright, clear day.

Mary’s comment:
We drove to Bourton-on-the-water on my brother Peter’s recommendation from when he stayed there many years ago. It’s a lovely place but there were no trout visible in the stream whilst we were there. And the water level was very low. Some of the ducks were standing up! It is a lovely place however, but as a base for a week, this spot of Chipping Campden has a lot more going on.

With only a couple of minor navigation problems (many, many, small roads and weird place names) we rolled in to Bath at about 11:30am and parked the car in the Long Term carpark just south of the Royal Crescent for a rather hefty £5.40 for the minimum four hours. From here it was an easy walk downhill to the attraction most important to us, the Roman Baths.

Mary’s comment:
Bath was great. I was surprised at how easy it was to find our way to a parking area and then to walk to all the attractions. I know of Bath from Georgette Heyer’s regency novels which Peggy Ford and I used to devour as teenagers. It was amazing to walk the same streets that she was talking about in her novels all set in the 1700s. There was also a Jane Austen house with a dummy dressed in Victorian clothes outside the door of the place where apparently she’d stayed. A bit kitschie I thought. (Like all those Mozart impersonators in Vienna and the pretend gladiators outside the Colosseum in Rome!)

Back to Kev
Bath is a city now because a hot spring emerges from the earth there. Before Roman times the ancient Brits congregated around the spring, (evidence: numerous flint arrowheads found around it) but the surrounding area was marshy and bounded on three sides by a river.

The Romans, who arrived about 2000 years ago, treated the spring as something magical but that didn’t stop them from transforming it into a tourist attraction. (Monty Python: “What did the Romans ever do for us?”) And of course it provided employment opportunities for hundreds of locals and colonizers for about 300 years. With the withdrawal of the Roman culture the location seeped back into the past, the building blocks were plundered and the springs built over until rediscovered as a potential tourist attraction only in the late nineteenth century.

I must say that the present management of this major World Heritage Location has done a marvellous job of hitting the right balance between allowing public access and presenting the facts. Disneyland it isn’t, but it doesn’t hesitate to use modern technology to get the message across. The £10.50 each (aged person concession price) was well worth it, I think. More info here.

We could easily have spent much longer examining the engineering (much of it still performing its original function) and artworks left by the Romans but we left after 90 minutes, aware that we had to eyeball a couple of notable relatively modern pieces of architecture before finding our car again and then wending our way back to the north.

Mary’s comment:
Then we set off for the Slaughters. Upper and Lower Slaughter are two extremely picturesque villages here in the Cotswolds. Very quiet however but with trout (Kev: or grayling) in the streams in both places and many people (artists) painting by the stream. There was an art exhibition on so I investigated and came out with a few purchases.

Mary’s comment:
This last couple of days have been bright and sunny and quite warm. We’re down to short sleeves and Kevin has put on shorts for the first time (Kev: in the UK, anyway, this holiday, and only briefly, in the Volunteer Inn).

We’re off to one of the six pubs in town now for dinner. It’s a balmy Tuesday evening in Chipping Campden.

Location:Chipping Campden

country walk

The village in which we’re staying, and the several other villages nearby, have been here for at least several hundred years. Before wheeled vehicles such as horse-drawn carriages became commonplace, and even after that, people moved between villages on foot, or guiding a pack animal. They needed to trade and socialize so the narrow paths they developed became essential parts of the human infrastructure.

Most of these paths remain today, throughout the UK. The public are allowed by law to continue to use them, even though most now border-on or pass through private land. While the locals use these foot paths routinely, visitors use them also, relying on guides, printed maps, sign posts or obvious signs of foot traffic to travel between and around villages and their watering holes.

Mary and I have been doing a little exploration of the countryside on foot so thought you’d like to see some of the local paths and what can be seen as they are travelled.

Before setting out on a footpath journey some preparations are necessary. Firstly, clothing and footwear need to be up to the task. Rain may be likely at any time and many of the paths have muddy sections, not to mention the spiky blackberry bushes, the steep-banked streams and the ploughed fields.

Then, unless a competent human guide is available some navigation aids such as map, compass, GPS, smartphone (only if wireless signal available), binoculars, and the skills to properly use them will be necessary. Although the paths are quite well marked at intervals, a map will be needed to at least help you decide which paths to take and how to find the starting points of the paths within villages. Direction knowledge is important for confirming that you’ve just taken the path that you’ve selected on the map.

This is a public path journey Mary and I completed on Sunday.

While we carried a paper map, we didn’t use it as I photographed the map and viewed it on a compact digital camera whenever I needed to check navigation. I also used a hand-held GPS which is a good substitute for a compass. Remember that prominent landmarks are not always visible and the precise location of the sun in the sky not always obvious so a GPS or a compass are really important.

Whenever a path comes to a fence there’s a stile, one of several different, dare I say it, styles. Mostly they’re rustic and made of local timber but sometimes they’re made of steel. They’re designed to allow a competent and agile human to cross the fence easily but to baffle livestock.

The great enjoyments of such a walk for us are the achievement of getting from village to village on foot and the sights seen along the way, usually unavailable to people travelling in a car. And of course the well-deserved pint at the pubs encountered.

Of course nav checks are needed frequently to ensure the correct track is chosen because sometimes there’s a choice of several nearby, all leading in different directions.

Mostly we got it right, however and were rewarded with some unique scenes.

By the time we’d reached Paxford we’d already done nine km, up and down hills, across ploughed paddocks, through hedges and over several stiles. We were in need of sustenance. Fortunately the Churchill Arms was open. We were welcomed with open Arms.

After a light and mostly liquid lunch we set out on the last stage by road and across fields, startling several pheasants on the way and making a slight detour due to the apparent non-existence of one of the important tracks marked on the map. Finished distance: 14.8 km.

We have plenty more walks available and intend (read “hope”) to get through several more before our time here is up. Next intended blog: a visit to the Roman Baths at Bath.

Location:Chipping Campden

around Chipping Campden

Chipping Campden is our base for the next few days. It’s a town whose history goes back about a thousand years but whose oldest building still standing and in use has been around a mere 700 years. It’s a town whose citizens honour the values of the past by ensuring that new structures are visually compatible with the old and that new practices do not overwhelm those of the past. It’s a town without a McDonalds and a KFC, and as far as I can see, without even a service station where I can refuel my 21st century car. But the cars are allowed in the town and several hundred spend the night here every night. And a main road with most modern facilities is not far away.

There seems little doubt that many of the locals are wealthy. Perhaps they are just weekend people who arrive from London on Friday and leave on Sunday but during the weekend there are plenty of Audis, Beemers, Benzs parked in the limited spaces or visible through narrow lane ways in the back yards.

The town is surrounded by agriculture. As we look out through our kitchen window a ploughed field is central to our view, no more than 100m away. If you walk away from the village in any direction you will quickly come across open fields and sheep.

Thatched roofs are common, although not universal. And all thatched roofs are enclosed in wire netting presumably to deter nesting by birds and other creatures.

But the Cotswolds limestone is ubiquitous. It is paler than the stone found in Scotland, Wales and Yorkshire and it reflects sunlight in a pleasing way.

Most of the main street buildings are genuinely ancient. Even the grocery store is housed in a main street building in which I could easily bump my head on a cross beam, and I’m not tall. But some of the newer buildings try to pretend they’re old. Our apartment, for example, has exposed “beams” on the ceiling which are held up by screws and also has a fake fireplace which would be a fire hazard if someone tried to light a fire in it. The apartment seems to have a genuinely ancient floor, however, which slopes downward toward the north. But the doors all fit, and the external walls are all made of Cotswold limestone blocks.

We’ve yet to come up with a favourite view, but we’re working on it. Every day we’re here brings new discoveries. Next blog we intend to tell you about walking in the countryside around the village.