The Big Sou'wester (110303 - 200303)
| Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self. Cyril Connolly, 1903 - 1974. |
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I don't like thumbnails - I always have to click on them to find out whether or not I really wanted to see the picture. If you're of a like mind you won't mind a short wait while these photographs open up? And aren't we always being told to "take a look at the bigger picture"? Now's your chance! |
Our journey down to Somerset was so windy I thought that there was a real danger simply from trying to control our direction of travel that I might develop some biceps.
The whole UK's weather forecast was gloomy when we set off on this 1000 mile trip, but we had bright sunshine for most, if not all, of every day.
So let that be a lesson to you.
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Our first night was spent at Minehead on our first ever Caravan Club (CC) site. (We'd been looking for sites in the Glastonbury area, but found none open). Being CC members makes their sites no less expensive than any others, but all the club's own sites are of an extraordinarily high standard.
This fabulous sculpture indicates the coastal path (and in the background is Butlin's). I'd been to Minehead only once before - from Penarth on The Waverly, a Clyde-built paddle-steamer. |
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Next morning on the outskirts "The Best Junk Shop in the West" was closed so we walked around the very handsome medieval village of Dunster, bought pasties and scoffed them while watching a flurry of helicopter-like long-tailed tits and a goldcrest.
I'd been looking forward to the famous Porlock Hill (1:4). We shot up it in second (apart from a drop down to 1st for the lefthand hairpin). The van complained bitterly that I'd promised it a steep hill.
Show me a proper hill, it alternately snarled and pleaded,
Come o-o-o-o-n, third, try third, let's try third!
From the top we trundled along looking across the Bristol Channel at sunny South Wales. Well, I didn't look, of course, I was concentrating on my driving.
With a 1:50,000 map I'd have noticed the earthwork, tumulus and Roman "fortlet" all marked along this stretch.
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Countisbury Hill at Lynmouth is another well known steep one. Next time we'll have a look at the
visitor centre
in Lynmouth in which one can find out about the 1952 landslide. After 9.1" of
continuous rainfall
much of the town was swept away and 34 people killed. And I'll have to take a ride on the water-powered
railway up to Lynton, (situated 500ft almost directly above Lynmouth!). Jo isn't very good at steep hills and big drops and it was fortunate for me that only on, I think, day 5, did she seem to notice that those "V"s on the map indicate steep hills. |
We drove to The Valley of Rocks, eye-catching enough (in this locality), and then trundled further along the north coast on very skinny roads on the side of steeply sloping woods, almost cliffs.
Once away from the woodland we saw lots of hedge-laying going on and in a peculiar style - the laid hedge absolutely flat because, I suppose, there's no need to lean it upwards when the hedge is already on top of the very high earth and stone banks traditional in this area.
At some point I found myself thinking about an ancient radio comedy programme in which an old man in an exaggerated, smugglery accent is cursing, "Them Doones".
I mentioned it to Jo and as if by magic the next thing I knew we were looking down into the top of Doone Valley (as in Lorna & Co.).
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A very pleasant rolling, swooping run brought us to Barnstaple then along "The Atlantic Highway" over the super new bridge at Bideford, me trying (not very hard), not to bore Jo with tales of tandeming from Lands End to John o' Groats with Matt Betts in 1997.
At Clovelly the visitor centre was closed so we didn't have to pay £4 each nor, out of season, did we have the choice of exploiting a donkey for transport. Here's the street >>>> (there's only one, except for the out of the way steep back lane which goes to the hotel at the bottom. For the tourists' sake perhaps, the policy seems to be to pretend that road isn't there). A chap was moving furniture into a house and dragging / sliding it down the cobbles on a wooden sled, many of which were stacked around the place. |
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As we left Clovelly a couple with a VW T4 Transporter camper asked us where we'd found a site. We hadn't even looked for one, of course. Hell, it was only 5pm, but we had our useful CC book, (it includes their Certificated Locations and quite a few other commercial sites). He seemed anxious and said that Bude was an hour away. It wasn't really and shortly afterwards we found him doing a steady 40mph for no good reason and burned past.
What a laugh it must be to own a campsite, close it for the "winter" and still leave up all the directional signposts. We spent a long time looking around Bude for an open good one.
You might be thinking that your T3 looks pretty damn good as you trundle towards your campsite, but then you park it up amongst the SUVs, monstrous great caravans, Peugeot / Citroen / Renault / Mercedes and other "motorhomes" and the T3 does start to look like something out of a museum.
Especially on a Caravan Club site - you just have to fend off the slightly(?) patronising smiles.