Uffington

We had a delightfully lazy late start this morning, before sitting down to discuss what to do for the day. I had been dying to see the Uffington White horse, which is a giant neolithic chalk-drawing of a "horse" in a hill in the Somerset countryside. Mum and dad were keen to see it as well, for reasons I will get to soon - but Pip decided she'd rather stay in the gatehouse for the day, and get some schoolwork done. So three of us set out in the car about 10 o'clock.

28 years ago, in 1981, mum and dad were slumming it around Europe together. One day they set out enthusiastically in order to go and see the white horse. It hadn't occurred to them until they arrived at the site that a chalk drawing under several feet of snow would be invisible. They then tried to go and see Wayland's smithy to make up for the horse, but mum gave up in disgust after the first half k or so, once her boots had become caked in mud and doubled in weight. So - dad had once seen Wayland's smithy, and none of the three of us had ever seen the horse. We had high hopes as we drove along this morning, following the brown signs that pointed to the viewing spot.

I began to get edgy as we approached Somerset, along English backwater roads - there was a thick white fog beginning to settle on the hills above us. By the time we arrived at the start of the walk and paid the parking machine, the world seemed to have shrunk to about 50 metres in diameter. We opened the creaky gate into paddocks full of ghostly sheep, and set out along the trodden-down grass footpath that disappeared into the mist.

There was only one other man there when we arrived, and he set out in a different direction across the fields. I watched his shape become faded and indistinct, and then he disappeared into the mist. Once we passed the gate, we could have been walking through neolithic England for all we could tell from our surroundings. It was just us and the sheep, and what we hoped was the right footpath.



On we went, through another gate and further hilly paddocks. We passed a couple looking for a lost beanie, and then they too were swallowed up by the sheep-filled fog. Our footpath wandered around the spur of a hill, and then quite suddenly the ground was falling away incredibly steeply on our left, into a gully that seemed bottomless and full of grey mist. Apparently during summer the locals hold "cheese races" here. No, really - they're ever bit as silly as they sound. Someone rolls a wheel of cheese down this hellishly steep valley-side, and people throw themselves after it to try be the first to catch the cheese. They start out by running, but pretty soon everyone's rolling and falling over each other, bruising sides and breaking limbs. Is it any surprise that in the history of cheese-racing, the cheese has never been caught? This strikes me as one of the best demonstrations of why tradition ain't always a thing worth keeping.

Anyway, we rounded the top of the slope very cautiously, and came through a final gate, and suddenly - aha! Bold white lines at our feet where the grass and topsoil had been cut back from the chalk of the hill underneath. We were standing above the horse, right up close. The fog had lifted just far enough that we could make out the entirety of the horse when we stood at its middle, although with the distorted perspective it took us some time to figure out which end was its head. However, once I realised I was looking at its eye, suddenly the design "clicked".



I walked from the horse's nose right down to the tip of its tail, trying to figure out how anyone could carve something so precisely without the help of computers and satellites. Because the thing about these sinuous lines cut into the hill is that from the surrounding countryside, they resolve into the foreshortened shape of an animal that looks part-horse, part-dragon. The horse was made to be seen from a distance; its lines don't make quite so much sense up-close. The cuttings curl around a bunch of low hummocks; you can't even *see* the entirety of the horse when you're standing at the site. I was keen to see the design from the hills opposite, but that depended on the weather.

The fog still seemed very thick to me, but dad was adamant that it was beginning to lift as the sun came further up. We decided we'd put off trying the horse's lookout until later in the day, when the fog would have had the best chance to disappear.

We left the horse, and it ebbed silently into the greyness as we walked away. It was a slightly sinister feeling to turn one's back on something so ancient and obviously powerful - I got to wondering if those lines would still be there if nobody but the sheep stuck around to watch them. The valley the horse lies above is sometimes called "the manger", because of a local legend that says on moonless nights the horse wanders down the hillside to graze. I got the half-delighted creeps.

Further up the next hillside is an old hill-fort called Uffington castle. It's also neolithic, so don't be fooled by its name - all that remains is the circle of the fortification's earth wall and the deep ditch surrounding that. As we walked, groups of sheep broke away from their flock and followed us a few feet behind. Each time we turned around they'd freeze and look shifty, but if we carried on a little further there'd be faint "baaaa"s behind us and the little squelches of hooves on muddy grass. One group of sheep charged down the ditch and pelted right up the other side behind dad, baaaing victoriously once they reached the top of the wall. They lost interest in us after a while, and joined the flock of sheep grazing in the centre of the fort.



We walked back in the direction we'd come - and then up to a path leading along the ridge behind the horse and the hill fort. This was the way to Wayland's smithy, an ancient barrow or passage tomb (like Newgrange, only long and thin). The path had turned to sticky, caking mud, but mum was quite happy - she tells me it wasn't a patch on the thick mud of the first time she visited. There was a very old hedge growing on either side of the path - I'd say this was one of the few hedgerows that wasn't torn up when modern ploughing equipment became popular in England. It wasn't until farmers had demolished a lot of them that people realised hedgerows were important ecosystems for little birds and animals.

The path went rather a long way with empty fields on either side, and was above the level of the mist. Not long after we'd found the start of it, a big strung-out group of pairs of schoolchildren passed us with maps, asking us in Harry-Potter-esque accents if this was the way to the horse. I think they were in some orienteering challenge; the front few pairs were running as hard as they could through the mud in order to get somewhere, /anywhere/ first, and further down the line the boys were leaping from behind piles of soiled hay and ambushing each other with manure-pats. I overheard one redheaded boy say "blimey, there's supposed to be a CASTLE around here somewhere - we can't possibly miss that!"

After a few kilometres we reached a ramshackle little gate and a path beyond, that led to a circle of trees in the middle of a field. And in the circle... there was the dolmen, with the earth built up behind it. Surrounded by flat ground carpeted with red leaves. For those of you who had really boring bedtime stories, or didn't grow up reading Susan Cooper's books, or "Puck of Pook's Hill"... Wayland is the mythical blacksmith who could shoe any horse. His legends are older (I think) than some forms of the King Arthur legend, and he's in the same sort of vein as Herne the Hunter - wild and potentially dangerous beings who sometimes offer help to humans, but who are not at all obliged to. The legend associated with the barrow at Uffington is that some nights, Wayland would manifest there. If you left your horse tethered to the entrance stone, and left the smith the right amount of gold... you could return in the morning to find your horse shod.



Of course, the smithy is really "just" an old passage tomb that's fallen in. And the legends are terribly old and fragmentary. But I like to let my sense of wonder run away with me: there were holly and ivy planted together just by the gate - ten points if you can explain why that's significant, and 50 points *with reference*. And... I found horse prints in the mud as we were leaving. Wheeee!



We left after not-very-long, because there were a few more things we had to fit into our day yet. To hurry mum and I up, dad strode ahead of us and met us halfway back with the car. The fog had lifted a long way, so the three of us detoured via the closest Uffington horse lookout - and found that the school group had ended up triumphantly at the same spot. And there, stretched rampant on the opposite hill, was the horse-dragon! Some of the school group were cheering, while others took turns rolling down the smaller hill. I felt like cheering, too. I'd grown up seeing pictures of this place, and now I'd seen the real thing. It's not the best vantage point (the horse's head is a little hard to pick from this angle)... but I was deeply and happily satisfied.



We drove back through Somerset, stopping for lunch at the Rose and Crown - the same pub that mum and dad had eaten in on their ill-fated sightseeing day 28 years ago. Rural England seems not to change at all, really. I had creamy potato soup, and my parents shared a "ploughman's lunch". The bearded man sitting at the bar had a very new puppy tethered to his stool on a leash, and he was slipping her biscuits while he sipped his pint of beer.

We drove on again, through more miles of green and hilly countryside. I saw a few more chalk-pictures in the distance as we passed; these were more recognisable as horses, but far more "tame" and modern; not so wild and fierce as Uffington's. Uffington's horse was to these, as the flesh-eating horses of Greek legend were to Thelwell's ponies.

Our road passed farmhouses, sheep, farmhouses, and then monoliths - we'd driven into Avebury stone circle. It's just like that - you drive complacently along, and then suddenly there are a ring of house-high rocks surrounding the road you're on. We drove out the other side, parked, and returned on foot to take a proper look.

Avebury is comparable to Stonehenge - just bigger, and without further rocks balanced on top. Mum says she's always thought of Avebury as being a sort of "female" counterpart to Stonehenge's "maleness" - and I see what she means, now. (Yes, my mother and I are folklore-mad hippies only a few steps away from joining the druidic cult and going skyclad. Don't let it bother you - dad and Pip never have).



Anyway, Avebury consists of a huge ring of standing stones, many of which are balanced on their pointiest ends and seem to defy any laws of physics that I'm familiar with. They're all different shapes, too - though just rough-hewn, not carved. I was enthralled; each one seemed to have a different "character" to the last. You can walk right up to the stones, even touch them if you're brave or disrespectful enough. As we wandered through and around the circle, the sun was going down and the stones were washed in pink and orange light. By the time we wandered back to the car, the stones were baleful silhouettes over our shoulders. I don't know how anyone could bring themselves to sleep soundly in the houses in the middle of that circle, at night. Rah. Where might you wake up?



We had blown our timing (though the day was worth it!), so the drive back was through the dark. It was alright at first, but then the navigation got tricky (so many roundabouts!), so I sat in the passenger seat to be "seeing-eye-Ele" again. We took a few wrong turns, so by the time we were back on the final stretch into Bath - again, that awful stretch down the hill without streetlighting - the fog had blown in again, twice as thick as the morning. We must have driven at about half the speed limit in those last miles, but we didn't care. Mum and I were both in terror-struck fugue states, I think.

We got home safely, though, and sat and wobbled for a bit until mum's nerves recovered. Pip was pleased to see us after spending the day doing homework. Dinner was pizza (which seems to have become our fallback). Mum and Pip and I stayed up late watching rather a good BBC adaptation of the Arabian Nights, while our boots dried out on the apartment's heaters. I regained feeling in my feet for the first time in several hours, which was quite a relief.

Trust my dear sister to blow the day's carefully crafted mystique, mind you. I tried to explain the Uffington horse to her by showing her my photos and sketching what the design looks like... but unfortunately my sketch looked more cute than majestic. Pip promptly named the horse in my picture "Cindy" and drew a horseblanket and scarf over the top of it, so it wouldn't look so cold in all that fog.

O tempora, o mores.

Bath

Breakfast was served at 8 in the dining room, on a table spread with beautiful crockery and every condiment known to humanity. We fell upon the fresh fruit salad like hungry wolves (vegetarian wolves, k?). After that came a plate of smoked salmon on scrambled eggs, and toast with French jam after that. I had another pot of tea all to myself; I have declared to the rest of the family that I'd like my Christmas present to be a two-cup teapot. Pip declared we'd each receive one gift agreed upon by the other three family members this year, you see.

After breakfast we packed our things ready to move to the gatehouse for our second night, as originally planned. We then set out to walk to the city centre, but went the wrong way. That meant that dad got a chance to see Bath's rowing club, though. Somewhat different to his home club! Once we realised we were in a different park to the one we thought was shown on the map, we chucked the idea in and caught the park-and-ride bus into town. The idea behind those is rather clever, actually: to save congestion in the middle of the city, there's a dirt-cheap bus service that runs from huge carparks on the outskirts of the city - commuters can park for the day and catch the bus to work instead of trying to park in town. I've seen this in quite a few English cities, now.

Anyway, we arrived in the centre, and set about trying to find a post office. We must've asked directions 4 or 5 times, but the building was incredibly elusive. Finally Pip and I saw "POST OFFICE" written in grand sandstone letters on a large building, but on closer inspection it turned out to have been turned into a department store. The girl behind the perfume counter laughed when we asked her where the "real" post office was, and with her directions we finally found it squashed into a little alleyway. Pip and I went and window-shopped while dad stood in the queue. Lots of dubious fashions on display - good for a gawk! Pip and mum were also very happy to see the streets Jane Austen wrote so much about. I'm in a little bit of disgrace here, though - I've not read any of Austen's books yet. I have the feeling Pip is going to force-feed me "Pride and Prejudice" when she's done rereading it.



Next stop was Pultney bridge, which has shops built out along either side. They're each only about 2 metres wide inside - there was a cafe, a florist, and a shop that sold tiny dolls-house furniture pieces (from almost any historical period you could ask for). We climbed down the stairs to river-level, to discover that the streets running along the river have a sort of arcade hidden beneath, flanked with columns. That's all in disrepair, now, though - I think it could be made into an attraction with shops and cafes if the local council (or whoever) were to fix the area up. It's only blocks away from the famous Abbey, which we went to walk around next.



We walked on, until we came to the Roman Baths. This is the site where the Romans discovered what they (and the locals before them) believed to be a sacred spring, and promptly built a temple and hot baths on the site. To tour the site is fascinating - Pip, mum and I all hired audioguide machines, which gave more information than most of the signs up around the place. The main hot bath was done up in the 19th century, when the Roman ruins on the site were unearthed - now it's got statues of Roman emperors lining the balconies above, and is a little over the top. Still, when you get down to the lower level, the original Roman pool remains pretty much intact - lead lining, original drainage system and all. The water's fairly scummy now (it leaves an orangey-red residue along the drainage ditches, and in the deep pool it's a tarnished green colour) - you can't bathe, but Pip and I dipped a finger in. It's as steamy as ever.





Nowadays you can see most of the rest of the Roman temple complex as well - it's below street level, so you just have to imagine it as it would have been when it was open to the air. There were some fascinating things on display, like the "curses" thrown into the sacred spring. These were a sort of "favour" asked of Minerva/Soulis, the goddess thought to be responsible for the spring - you scratched your request onto a thin sheet of lead or pewter, and threw it into the water. The translations are often very funny - someone asking help to find a lost glove, for instance. Lots and lots of people asking for thieves of their various belongings to be damned for all eternity, or to have their ears fall off. The funny part was the seriousness with which these requests for retribution were delivered, and over such petty things as a stolen cloak.

We three females spent a long time wandering around looking at all the displays - Roman mosaics, tools, luxury items, headstones... and at the remains of the baths. I'd read about the Romans inventing heated floors, but to see an original example in front of me was kinda cool. Hot air was blown around stacks of clay tiles holding up the paved floor, thus:



Finally we left, for poor dad's sake - he'd found the place interesting, but hadn't wanted to read every sign like we three had (whoops). The exit to the baths takes you out through the Pump Room, of Georgian novel fame - which is now a very pricey restaurant. The interior was sumptuous, but still managed to be elegant in a distant sort of way; that seems to go for most of Georgian upper-class fashion and architecture, from what I can see. I must admit it doesn't do awfully much for me... seems too far up itself.

The Pump Room's other, err, "attraction" is that since the baths' sacred spring was rediscovered in the mid-19th century, visitors have been able to sample the site's "healing waters". The room gets its name from the pump with pushes water through a highly-decorated fountain at one side of the room. A woman stands in front of it, filling glasses and offering them to visitors. According to my audioguide around the baths, the Duke of Wellington once described the taste of the water as being "like warm flat-iron"... I have to agree. It tastes so awful, it MUST be good for you!

We left the Pump Room, and wandered around the streets of inner Bath, which are without exception built of honeycomb-coloured sandstone. We stopped for lunch at a shop that sold pasties, and we ate those sitting outside, battling the savage pigeons for the crumbs. Next it was off to the Assembly Rooms, which are another mainstay of Jane Austen's books, mum tells me. The ballroom was what impressed me - huge, very high to allow room for the chandelier, and with crisp-white plaster mouldings across the ceiling. The walls were painted eggshell-blue. I tried to dance a waltz across the room with Pip, but she wouldn't be in it. Apparently in Austen's time the dance was thought very improper. Tee hee.



The Assembly Rooms also house the Fashion Museum, which Pip had been very keen to see - a collection of outfits and accessories dating from the modern day back to the mid-1600s. Dad was mildly interested, so he took a quick look through - but we all agreed that the three of us would ring him when we were done looking, and he could go to a pub in the meantime. So that made everyone happy! The exhibits were interesting, and a lot of fun - many of the pieces were displayed out of chronological order, so that comparisons could be drawn between each piece. Pip and I went through reading each sign, and picking out our favourites. I fell in love in with one dark blue riding habit from the 19th century with a zig-zag pattern around the hems, but Pip was more interested in the evening dresses. The cabinet showing a history of women's underwear was particularly interesting, and there were replica corsets and crinolines around the corner that you could try on over your clothes. I can't believe how uncomfortable some of this getup must have been...



Eventually we came to the end of the exhibits, and met dad out on the footpath with perfect timing - no phonecall needed. We headed back for Apsley house on foot, so as to see a few last sights of the city. The "Circus", for instance, which is a ring of terrace houses that represent some of the first town-planning in the country. After seeing York, Lincoln and Sheffield, I wasn't too surprised to learn that town-planning was a relatively new idea. Each of the buildings in the Circus has a frieze running above the doorway, and each frieze contains carvings of bizarre symbols (snakes eating their tails, crossed spades and spears, all sorts of plants in bouquets) that might be coats-of-arms, and might be completely arbitrary. I wish I knew which, but there were no explanations! Our other architectural stop was the Royal Crescent, another famous arc of terrace housing for the very, VERY rich. Again, Georgian design left me feeling cold. Everything about it seems so... repressed.



We reached the local supermarket as it was getting dark, bought soup for dinner, and toiled up the hill with fairly sore feet. We moved our things into Apsley House's gatehouse, which has been turned into a self-contained apartment. Not as plush as the 5-star rooms in the house itself, but every bit as comfortable. Lovely and warm, too. We had dinner once dad figured out for us how the stove worked, and then we slept.

Chester to Bath

We had a disorganised start this morning, because I had gotten my times for breakfast mixed up and made Pip and I late. Still, we wandered out to see Chester in daylight. There is a particularly garish clock set up in the town centre, and when I had stopped to photograph it the night before, a man had stopped me and said "if you like the view, go up on the city wall tomorrow morning - there's a man who sits up there and sells his drawings of Chester". Well, I doubted I would want to spend money on views of Chester, but I thought I ought to have a look after the random recommendation. We climbed the staircase to the level of the clock, and sure enough there was a man just beyond us, hanging up his prints on the fence.



When I went up and took a good look, there was a hilarious surprise - the artists drew views of Chester, alright, as well as the surrounding countryside, and various famous English landmarks. But he put a spin on each picture, by inserting Dr Who characters into each scene. The idea is tacky, I'll admit - but I am a huge fan of Dr Who, and the drawings were well-done, and it seemed kinda pop-arty. I struck up conversation with the artist (name of John), who grinned sheepishly and admitted that he'd "sorta made a living from Dr Who pictures". By this stage mum and Pip had joined me, and when he discovered we were Australians, he grinned again and asked us to hold on one moment. With a flourish he produced two pictures from his portfolio folder - the first one of Daleks at the Sydney Opera House, and the second of Cybermen climbing the Harbour Bridge. I was so taken by the first one that I bought a print. I love the weirdness of blending English pop culture with somewhere so close to home. Pip bought a view of the Chester clock, with Tom Baker and David Tennant raising their eyebrows at one another in front.

We strolled on, going further than we had the night before. We took a look at the site of the Roman amphitheatre (Chester's a Roman town originally) - it was interesting, but not very well-preserved. There's a road straight through the middle, for instance.

Back in the town, Pip bought herself a scarf at a little street stall. When we started retracing our steps so as to be off and driving again before midday, it suddenly became apparent that Pip had dropped the scarf somewhere behind us by accident. Argh! She and I rushed back towards town, with mum and dad following more slowly behind us.

Unfotunately we couldn't find the scarf - someone must have picked it up quite quickly. Pippo was upset, but dad took her back to the stall to buy another (happily it hadn't been an expensive thing to lose). Mum and I decided to wait at the point where we'd all caught up again, on the upper level of the shops. But something had been lost in translation in the rush, and after half an hour there was still no sign of dad or Pip. We had both the working phones, as well. Eventually mum and I began walking back to our B & B out of desperation; we were getting later and later, and we had wanted to be in Bath before dark. Happily the other two had come the same way, and were waiting for us on the bridge out of town. We bundled into the car, and finally drove out of Chester, into Shropshire.



Mum was excited to be driving through the area, because A. E. Houseman is one of her very favourite poets, and he wrote mostly about the area where he'd grown up ("A Shropshire Lad"). Unfortunately in the scramble she had ended up as the driver, and there was nowhere to pull over and swap. Yet another bungle on our part - we seemed cursed today. The final straw came when my blood sugar levels went belly-up and I started feeling carsick. We stopped at the first roadside pub we came to, in a place called Lembotswood, and I wobbled around the carpark until my stomach had settled. Judging by the historical photographs in "The Pound"'s loos, Lembotswood has remained exactly the same for the last hundred years - it's just gained cars. The pub's roof is thatched, complete with birds made of straw above each gable. We went in and had a drink each, and watched the tallest of the waiters expertly navigate the low ceilings. I thought one of them was going to knock himself senseless several times, but he'd mastered the quick duck under each roof beam, even when carrying drinks.



The last few miles into Bath, I swapped seats with dad. He can't see well in the dark, and someone had to help navigate by reading signs in the falling dusk. Well, the trip was fairly scary and horrible in the dark - we were following very good directions provided by our hosts for the night, but the roads into Bath are windy and narrow, and have no streetlighting. We descended the last steep hill into Bath, and inched around the edge of the hospital. Finally the sign for Apsley House came into view. We prised poor mum's hands off the steering wheel, and went inside to check in.

Here came the crowning mini-crisis of the day - mum had accidentally booked the wrong night, and our hosts were expecting us to be staying in the gatehouse the night after. Thankfully they soon figured out what had happened, and generously offered us rooms for the night in the main house, and at the cheaper rate - even though it really hadn't been their fault. Poor mum only asks a travel agent to help book flights, because she likes to organise car hire and accommodation herself. She had been juggling so many different things on our long and complicated itinerary that it was little wonder a changed date had slipped through the cracks. She was embarrassed, but I'm just impressed that she makes so many other things WORK, without making mistakes...

No harm done in the end, though, and a serendipitous result. The rooms we had been given for the night were sumptuous - mum and dad had a four-post bed, and Pip and I had an enormous suite of rooms to ourselves. This is probably the first and last time I'll ever stay in 5-star accommodation, and it was kinda fun. Pip and I made sure to sample all the exotic soaps and shampoos that were arrayed in our gigantic bathroom. She got the double bed, and I slept in a little side-chamber of my own. You should've seen the embroidery on the fabric of the curtains. Whee...



At the suggestion of our host, we went out for dinner at an Indian BYO restaurant not far down the hill, named "The Desh". I had chicken Biryani, but each of us shared our meals around the table. I'm afraid I got tipsy on wine, and we headed back for bed soon after we'd eaten. Good grief, those beds were comfortable!

Back to England

We were up early and left for the ferry wharf at 7. Our taxi driver was very jolly, and told us all about how he and his wife had loved Torquay so much they'd bought a holiday house there. It took us a while to figure out he meant Turkey, the country - NOT a place in England. And here we were, thinking we'd had a handle on the Irish accent!

With no Nigel, the ferry trip back wasn't very eventful (unfortunately there's nothing but open sea to see on the way). I was so heavily doped up on "Kwells" travel sickness pills that I slept mostof the way. We picked up a new hire car at Holyhead, and set out through Wales once more. The Irish sea was on our left this time, and I had much better views of the Snowdon mountains. The area near where we were driving is a national park, and if the mountains are anything to go by, it must be beautiful. Alas, the walls of the motorway obscured most of the view I might have had.



We did stop in Conwy, however, because dad had heard of castle ruins there. Conwy is just inside the Welsh border, and the castle "ruins" dad had heard of turned out to be a near-complete English keep (yes, English - a medieval attempt to keep the Welsh in line). It was spectacular! Almost everything is still standing, though the roofs and floors between levels have disappeared. It was a fascinating experience, because the place gives you such a complete picture of what it would have been like to live in a castle. I don't mean that they have tacky reconstructions, either - nothing at all but signs. It's the mere fact that you can wander up the towers, into the king's chambers, the chapel... around the walls, into the cellar of the great hall to see the huge fireplace on the wall above you. I had a ball trying to picture each room as it might have been, filled with people. There were good views of Conwy and its bay from the tops of the walls, too. I could see fishing boats pulled up on the shore.





Lunch was a hurried trip to a bakery before our parking ticket ran out. Afterwards, we drove out of Wales and into England once more. By early evening we had reached Chester, our stop for the night. Our guesthouse (named "Homeleigh", god help it) took a bit of finding, but we finally arrived and trekked up two sets of very narrow stairs to deposit our luggage in our rooms. The rooms, incidentally, were very comfortable. The bathroom door stuck a little, and to Pip's delight I managed to get stuck in there after taking my bath.

She rescued me, though, and the lot of us set out to explore Chester and find food. The interesting thing about the heart of Chester is that the shops are on split levels - one row lines the footpath, with a walkway at roof-height to service shops above. The buildings themselves are lovely, and fairly old - most of them seemed to be 17th century and half-timbered. I would guess any new developments in Chester are heavily restricted to make the structures conform. The Christmas lights had been strung out, and even though they were twee, I found the inner streets charming.



Mum and I were accosted by a woman handing out pamphlets, but it turned out the papers offered discounts at a nearby restaurant, provided you ate before 7pm. We decided it was too good a deal to waste, and walked into "Grille".

Well... when we were greeted at the door like long-lost friends, and a man took our jackets, we realised we were in the sort of restaurant we normally avoid, in order to refrain from going bankrupt. Still, true to their pamphlets, they served us food from the cheap menu, and treated us as though we were were paying hundreds each. I asked for the fish of the day, and... ohhhh. YUM. Monkfish wrapped in bacon, on spinach an potato mash, with tomato and lemon sauce. One of the best meals I've ever eaten. Dessert was choc-truffle torte (not something as base as "cake", y'see...).



We waddled "home", somehow managed the stairs, and retired to our rooms to digest. I spoke briefly with Pat on the phone, before sleep.

Sheffield 3

My sister is developing a mania for British post-boxes. Annie explained to her that the monograms on the side tell you which monarch's reign they were set up during, and so far we've found "contemporary", Victorian, and even Georgian post boxes. The attraction to Pip, I think, is that they come in different shapes and sizes.


Today was a "downtime" day in order to get some practicalities sorted out. We caught the tram to Cathedral station. After Yorkminster and Lincoln, Sheffield's cathedral came as a shock; it's only the size of a parish church. Gives you an idea of how fast this city just exploded in the Industrial Revolution.

Mum and Pip shopped around Fargate for more long-sleeved tops (funnily enough, it's COLD here) while I looked around for some kind of phone deal. After making dad promise not to snarl at the shop assistant (it's their job to be evasive to a certain extent, and politeness stops that so much more effectively), we went and negotiated with a girl in the T-mobile shop. Result: £10 phone with plenty of credit. First thing I did was to make contact with Pat after a week of total silence. I made the call standing just outside a huge Primark store where Pip had been scouting for the cheap "foonky taahts" described by our hostess in Manchester. The conversation between Pat and I was only a tiny snippet - I had to catch up to my family, and Pat had to sleep.

The family then set out for the Millenium Gallery, and after a few wrong turns up slum alleys (you don't need to scratch deep to penetrate the shiny bits of Sheffield) we arrived and met dad's old friend Barry. We all had a nice lunch in the gallery cafe together; the conversation was mostly dad and Barry's catching-up, as Pip and I had never met Barry before, and mum just the once. As a result, we three females left dad and Barry to be able to talk without being hindered by poor Barry's politeness. We went to see the gallery's wintergarden briefly, as well as a mini-exhibition exploring John Ruskin's theories about art. Remind me, someone: I must hunt down some of Ruskin's books. He seems a total idealist; I think his ideas would be fascinating.

Next stop was Sheffield central library, for internet access; and then back to the gallery cafe to collect dad and say our farewells to Barry.

As dusk was falling the four of us deliberately boarded a tram traveling in the wrong direction, so as to see a little more of Sheffield and make the most of our day-tickets. It was interesting to see Sheffield's suburbs, and to see the numbers of buildings being put up on the outskirts of the CBD.It's impossible to turn a corner in Sheffield without seeing at least two big cranes silhouetted on the horizon.

We eventually switched trams and headed "home" again to Coniston, where Pat rang at a more reasonable hour and we talked for the first time in a week. I slept very contentedly.

Gainsborough

We got up extremely early this morning (5am or so) and breakfasted so as to be in time to be in Gainsborough to see the tidal bore at 7 am. Even though we waved goodbye to Macolm and Barbara around 5.30, we managed to miss the tide, probably only by around 10 minutes or so. Mum was rather disappointed, but Pip and I thought that seeing the sun rise over the river Trent more than made up for missing the tide.

We discovered we had several hours before anywhere opened, so we drove around Gainsborough and snooped. For most of mum's side of the family (through her grandfather - my great-grandfather), Gainsborough is the ancestral stomping-ground. Only one Kirkby seems ever to have left Gainsborough, and then only to pursue his love to Australia. Well, we drove past what we think was the same house said great-grandfather lived in, though it's been fancied-up since. A tiny semi-detatched, and yet he lived there with 5 other family members.


We also saw Marshall's Yards where world-famous tractors were made, and where my great-grandfather served his apprenticeship as a boilermaker. Today it's a large carpark, and the old sheds have been converted into cosmetics shops and hairdressing salons. Interesting irony, there.

By this stage it had passed 9 o'clock, and we visited The Canute for "second breakfast", to Pip's hobbity delight. There's an idea among some historians that king Canute made a show of trying to stop the Trent's tidal bore, and not the ocean at all, despite the way legend has it.

At 10, Gainsborough Old Hall was open for admission. It's a building that's been on the site since Medieval times, and all the subsequent owners have merely added their own architectural quirks to the place, instead of knocking it down and rebuilding. Thus there are half-timbered Tudor rooms grafted onto stone towers that date from hundreds of years before. The most fascinating rooms were the kitchens - Medieval period, and some of the best-preserved in the country. The chimneys were enormous, and I was amused to see that the kitchenhands' sleeping quarters were nestled in close to the main chimney for warmth.


We left the hall and set out for Sheffield before midday; luckily there was no trouble with the Gainsborough longing, and we didn't have to blindfold mum, or tie her to the mast. The drive went well until we actually reached Sheffield city itself. We got rather hopelessly lost (I suspect this comes of "saving money" by using a 30-year-old street directory, ho-hum) - and matters were not improved by Sheffield's roads. The city is really just a town that got too big for its boots, far too quickly, when the steel industry took off. As a result the houses are crammed even closer together than in some of the older towns we've visited... and every second street in this suburb seems to be one-way. (Pat? Sunbury has nothing on this place.)


We did find our B & B, though... "Coniston", which is a nice place run apparently singlehandedly by Deborah, our hostess. The room Pip and I are in has a bay window that looks right out across Hillsborough (our suburb of Sheffield). Sheffield seems an unbeautiful city - the hill we face is covered in slate-roofed houses that make it look scaly, or armoured.

Dad lived here for three years or so in his twenties, when he was a lecturer in Sheffield university's engineering department. Around midday he took mum and I by car to show us the grounds of the uni and where he used to live; all while we waited for our clothes to finish at the laundromat. The sightseeing was interesting (having worked at home's uni for a year, I like comparing campuses)... but the drive to and from was an entirely different matter.

It started off a little nervewracking, as mum was helping navigate a place she'd not even studied on the map; and because of the aforementioned problems with Sheffield's streets. What I haven't mentioned is that these streets were never built for cars. You're lucky if the road you're on has two car-sized lanes - and even then, parked cars have nowhere but the middle of a lane to sit. This results in a lot of instances of having to drive in the wrong lane, with careful gestural negotiations between you and any oncoming traffic. A dip of the headlights can mean anything from "you stay there, I'm coming through", or "no, you first"... to "what in God's name possessed you to buy a Landrover, you tosser?" To top it off, Sheffield is built across five rivers, which makes for a LOT of hills. And a place name like "Hag Hill" sounds like bad news to begin with, no? Try hill-starting on it, in a heavily-laden manual. The clutch nearly burned out.

The stress became greater and greater, particularly on the trip back to the laundromat. I couldn't decide whether it was better to keep my eyes open or closed. I must admit, I wasn't thinking "dear God, we're going to DIE", because that would have required rational thought processes in place of blind white panic. By the time dad stopped illegally and left the two of us so he could find somewhere to park, it was a choice for me between kissing the solid ground I was at last standing on, or bursting into bemused tears. I'm sorry to say I took the latter course, but at least I managed NOT to be sick. Believe me, that was a substantial achievement.

After retrieving the washing we returned to Coniston, where the shower had run out of hot water. Nothing can reduce me to homicidal rage quite like a cold shower does, and with that on top of everything else, I fear I threw a tantrum. A quiet one, but a heartfelt one. Whoops. Pip was wonderful, and cheered me up with hot chocolate.

I recovered after a short while, and we all went out for dinner with my uncle Ray and his partner Sheila. Sheila told us all about her work at the uni, and Ray told us about how difficult life is for an agnostic organ player (think about it). Believe it or not, he has his own pipe organ installed in his apartment.

Dinner was lovely, but went late, and by the time we'd caught the tram back to Hillsborough and climbed the hill, Pip and I fell into bed almost comatose.