Category Archives: Life-enhancing experiences

Palimpsest of the Peak 1

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Chatsworth House, Derbyshire

Chatsworth House, Derbyshire

About fifteen years ago Andrew, 11th Duke of Devonshire, commissioned an extensive archaeological survey of the Chatsworth estate, a summary of which was published as John Barnatt & Tom Williamson, Chatsworth:  a landscape history (Windgather 2005).

It’s a revelation.

Chatsworth has, of course, been repeatedly written up, ever since the Bachelor 6th Duke produced his privately printed Handbook of Chatsworth and Hardwick in 1845.  The recent survey pulls together a full review of the archaeology and the estate’s enormous archive, backed by the evidence of maps, illustrations and modern photography.

This reveals a layered chronology of a significant area of the upland Derbyshire Peak back to prehistoric times.  In particular, since the mid-eighteenth century much of the landscape has been undisturbed, leaving evidence of prehistoric, medieval and early modern agriculture and industry that has been obliterated elsewhere in the county.

The shadowy presence of the great landscape designer, Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, who is mentioned only once in the entire Chatsworth archive, is made clearer because almost all payments in the estate accounts were addressed to his “foreman” or contractor, Michael Millican.  Their work in creating the naturalistic landscape that stretches from Chatsworth House to the horizon began in 1759, financed to a great extent by the 4th Duke’s lucrative copper mine at Ecton in Staffordshire.

Another recent discovery is the complexity of the patterns of drives and roads around the estate.  It seems that the eighteenth-century landscape was primarily designed to be seen from and near the house, and largely enjoyed on foot, rather like the characters’ explorations of Mr Rushworth’s Sotherton property in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814).

During the early Victorian period, the time of the Bachelor Duke, the park was crisscrossed with wide drives, carefully contrived to give advantageous views.  Many of these have since been grassed over and largely forgotten.  It seems that in the Bachelor’s time visitors were encouraged to enjoy the mature landscape in the comfort of a carriage.

When I take groups to Chatsworth, particularly visitors from outside the UK, I make a point as the coach climbs the steep road (realigned in the early nineteenth century) from Beeley Bridge (1759) of explaining that everything within sight – buildings, grass, trees, water – is in fact contrived by man.  And you wouldn’t get planning permission for it now.  Especially as it lies in a National Park.

The portal for information about visiting Chatsworth is http://www.chatsworth.org.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2016 The Derbyshire Derwent Valley tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Last resort in Norfolk

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Former Grand Hotel, Mundesley, Norfolk

Former Grand Hotel, Mundesley, Norfolk

As you drive along the tortuous coast road through the Poppyland area of north Norfolk, after passing through Overstrand, Sidestrand and Trimingham you may notice on the horizon two large Victorian hotels looming incongruously over the landscape.

This is Mundesley, a former fishing village that was aggrandised into a resort in the mid-1890s as the railway at last penetrated to this remote corner.  The station opened as the terminus of a line from North Walsham in 1898.  In 1908 it was extended through to Cromer Beach.  Its three platforms, each six hundred feet long, were never remotely necessary.  It closed in 1964 and is now virtually obliterated.

The East Coast Estates Company was established in the 1890s by an architect with the unfortunate name of Mr Silley.  Streets were laid out on the West Cliff and given the name Cliftonville.  Two brickworks opened.  The Clarence Hotel (1891), which is now a care home, and the Grand Hotel (Herbert John Green 1897), which is apparently being converted to apartments, stare out to sea, grandiose statements of opulence and unfulfilled ambition.  The Manor Hotel, built around an earlier dwelling to a design by John Bond Pearce in 1900, remains in business – http://www.manorhotelmundesley.co.uk.

Indeed, the most successful enterprise in Mundesley was the Sanatorium, opened in 1899 with an initial capacity of twelve patients, a fine timber prefabricated building by the Norwich architects Boulton & Paul.  This became the Diana Princess of Wales Treatment Centre for Drug and Alcohol Problems in 1997 and closed in 2009:  see http://www.derelictplaces.co.uk/main/showthread.php?t=18049, which links to http://www.derelictplaces.co.uk/main/showthread.php?p=182326#post182326.

One of its early patients was the golfer Harry Vardon (1870-1937), who laid out the Mundesley Golf Club [http://www.mundesleygolfclub.com] in 1901.  He was treated for tuberculosis in the Mundesley Sanatorium in 1903-4, during which time he achieved the only hole-in-one in his entire career.

Of the holiday towns along the Norfolk coast, Mundesley really is the last resort.  Though the population of this quiet place has continued to grow through the twentieth century, the visitors were always thin on the ground.  That’s its unique selling point.  It has a beautiful beach, beach huts, a quiet village atmosphere.  It’s the ideal place for an away-from-it-all British seaside holiday.  No tat.  No razzamatazz.  The real thing.  Enjoy!

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on seaside architecture, Away from it all:  the heritage of holiday resorts, Beside the Seaside:  the architecture of British coastal resorts, Blackpool’s Seaside Heritage and Yorkshire’s Seaside Heritage, please click here.

Taking the train for tea

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Isle of Man Railway, Port St Mary Station: loco no 12 Hutchinson

Isle of Man Railway, Port St Mary Station: loco no 12 Hutchinson

My Isle of Man host John and I watched the Royal Wedding, toasted the happy couple in Sauvignon Blanc (because the island – or at least the island’s co-op – had apparently run out of champagne) and wondered what else to do for the afternoon, rather than watch Huw Edwards busking while waiting for something to happen.

We caught the steam train one stop, from Port St Mary to the end of the line at Port Erin, and went for tea at the utterly seaside Cosy Nook Café [http://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Restaurant_Review-g616277-d1863309-Reviews-Cosy_nook_cafe-Port_Erin_Isle_of_Man.html], walked back up the hill and took the same train back an hour later.  For £4.00 return, rather than £3.20 on the bus.

It is of course a delight to travel, even for a few minutes, in a wooden railway compartment with windows that let down on leather straps.

Even more, it’s satisfying to be able to use a Victorian heritage line as practical transport.

As we watched the red locomotive and carriages chug off towards Douglas, I remarked that this railway wasn’t designed to be cute.

When it opened in the 1870s this was practical modern transport, scaled down to the geography of the island.  It opened up towns like Port St Mary and Port Erin, and enabled people to travel across the island quickly and relatively cheaply for the first time.

The system of four lines, run by two companies, survived because it worked, and because the manager between the wars surreptitiously subsidised the steam trains from the revenues of the bus routes.

The routes to Peel and Ramsey eventually expired in the 1960s, and the remaining Douglas-Port Erin line was in effect nationalised in 1977.

It’s now heavily marketed as a tourist attraction, which rivals the bus-service in speed though not in frequency.  When the TT annually blocks the island’s road-system, it provides a much-needed commuter service.

Meanwhile the Peel and Ramsey trackbeds remain substantially intact as footpaths [see Walking the Manx Northern Railway].

Details of the Isle of Man Railway services services appear at http://www.iombusandrail.info/imr-steamrailway.html.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2014 Manx Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps, a chronology and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

No mushrooms – ever

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Grindleford Station Café, Derbyshire

Grindleford Station Café, Derbyshire

One of the finest, and simplest, eating experiences in Derbyshire is the full breakfast at the Grindleford Station Café.

Grindleford is the first station westwards on the Hope Valley Line, which carries passenger services between Sheffield and Manchester.  This line between Dore and Chinley was a late link in the Midland Railway network, opened in 1894.  The station building, like others on the line, is a standard design, built in timber with stone footings and chimneys.

Its interior has been altered, and for well over thirty years it has housed one of the truly great hikers’ pit-stops.  Whether you walk, cycle, motor-cycle or drive it’s a rest-and-be-thankful port-in-a-storm.  You can of course reach it by train with no more effort than walking the ramp up from the platform to the bridge;  if you’re really decadent you can arrive by car.  (The station is a mile north of the village of Grindleford, on the B6521 road to Fox House.)

It was founded and driven by Philip Eastwood, a man who affected a truculence which would have been noticeable in the grumpiest eateries of Lower Manhattan.  His notices are legendary:  “Don’t even think of asking for mushrooms”, “Unaccompanied children will be sold into slavery”, “This is a serving hatch, not a gawping hatch” and “If you want to be a fire guard, join the fire brigade”.

Inevitably, some innocent customers took exception to this, but astute reviewers recognise that nobody builds a successful business by hating customers.  Review comments on http://russelldavies.typepad.com/eggbaconchipsandbeans/2004/07/grindleford_sta.html describe the service as “charmingly grumpy”, “curt but helpful”, “so awful it was wonderful”.  The place is so special its Wikipedia entry contains irony: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grindleford.

Philip Eastwood Snr died in 2007 at the age of 63, dancing at a party, and his son, also Phillip, then aged nineteen, promptly gave up his business-management degree-course and his plans for an athletic career to take on the family legacy, much to the relief of the rambling community.

The café continues, and Phillip Jnr has added to the notices, but long-standing visitors will sense that the new management has a gentler temperament, and some of the heart has gone out of the truculence.  A Sheffield Telegraph writer [‘Station café still on track’, January 13th 2009] even spotted one that ended with the words “Thank you”.

For cholesterol-on-a-plate breakfasts and lunches with chips piled high there is nowhere finer anywhere in the Peak District.  Don’t use the loo without making a purchase, and if you want to check if the hair-dryer’s still working, ask for mushrooms.

Update:  Phillip and Kulbir Eastwood celebrated the forty-fifth anniversary of the Grindleford Station Café on October 27th 2018:  https://www.thestar.co.uk/news/how-much-loved-grindleford-station-cafe-has-survived-for-45-years-1-9410432.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2016 The Derbyshire Derwent Valley tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

No sign of Mrs Rochester

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North Lees Hall, Derbyshire

North Lees Hall, Derbyshire

North Lees Hall, near Hathersage in Derbyshire, is a highly significant building, built for the Jessop family of Broom Hall who belonged to the sphere of influence of George, 6th Earl of Shrewsbury, custodian of the captive Mary, Queen of Scots and long-suffering husband of Bess of Hardwick.

Many of the Earl’s associates built “high houses”, with tall turrets, gridiron mullioned windows and skied chambers and galleries.  The plasterwork at North Lees Hall includes the arms of the Rodes family of Barlborough Hall;  other families with Shrewsbury links and comparable houses included the Sandfords of Thorpe Salvin Hall and the Hewitts of Shireoaks Hall.

Because North Lees Hall was more or less continuously let from the mid-seventeenth century until after the Second World War it was hardly altered, but at times unoccupied.  Sometime before 1792 the tenancy came to one Thomas Eyre, whose descendants stayed here until 1882. Their occupation had an interesting effect:  a whole procession of scholarly visitors assumed a quite spurious connection with the ancient and prolific Catholic family of Eyre.  The resulting legends are extremely attractive.

A more famous connection came from the 1845 visit of Charlotte Brontë, who is often assumed to have based Thornfield Hall at least partly on North Lees in writing the novel she entitled Jane Eyre – “…three stories high, of proportions not vast, though considerable…battlements round the top gave it a picturesque look. Its grey front stood out well from the background of a rookery.”  She may have taken her heroine’s family name from the occupants, and named the nearby fictional village Morton after the actual landlord of the George Inn, Hathersage.

After the Second World War the house was neglected, and at one stage was used for storing grain.  It was converted it into holiday accommodation by Lt-Col Hugh Beach.  It was purchased by the Peak Park Planning Board in 1971, and in 1987 it was leased to the Vivat Trust, who restored and reopened it as self-catering holiday apartments in 1989.  A further restoration took place in 2002, and it is now let as a residence.

Other sites associated with Jane Eyre are described and illustrated at http://walk2read.com/books/jane_eyre.html.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2016 The Derbyshire Derwent Valley tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Living in a pineapple

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The Pineapple, Dunmore Park, Scotland

The Pineapple, Dunmore Park, Scotland

Some time ago, I stayed with some mates for a week in the Dunmore Pineapple, near Stirling, one of the most appealing of the many delightful holiday experiences provided by the Landmark Trust [http://www.landmarktrust.org.uk/].

I don’t like the pseudo-architectural term “folly”, because the builders of strange buildings usually had (indeed, have) their own reasons for spending their money as they wish, but the Pineapple is most certainly one of the oddest architectural statements in the whole of the British Isles.

The Pineapple marks the entrance to the south-facing 6½-acre kitchen garden of Dunmore Park.  The sixteen-foot-high brick retaining wall on the north side incorporated furnaces to heat glasshouses to grow expensive, exotic and highly prized fruit which marked the wealth and status of an aristocratic host.

The lower part of the structure, incorporating a scrupulously correct Palladian archway entrance, was built in 1761 for John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore (1732-1809).

He became the last, contentious royal governor of Virginia between 1771 and 1776, and ultimately returned to Scotland, having lost control of the colony.

Because the two halves of the structure, the garden entrance and the pineapple, are built from exactly the same stone and there is a 1761 date-stone, some historians have assumed that is the date of the whole structure.  Atop the cool classicism of the entrance, the octagonal gazebo segues into the pointy doors and windows of eighteenth-century Gothick, and then simply sprouts into a forty-five-foot-high pineapple.

It’s likely that, in conformity with the sailors’ custom of placing a pineapple on the gatepost on returning home from the tropics, Lord Dunmore had the elaborate and skilfully constructed pineapple gazebo built above the entrance to his kitchen garden sometime after his return in 1777.

The pineapple itself is a superb piece of craftsmanship, with each of its leaves individually drained to prevent frost-damage.  Folly it certainly isn’t.

It’s a diverting place to stay, even though you have to step outside to get from bed to breakfast, and the foxes tend to grab their breakfast from the dustbin.  The interior of the octagonal gazebo is entirely circular in plan, which my guitar-playing mate proved has resonant acoustics.  You could probably hear his eighteenth-century amplification a mile down the road in Airth.

Bridge over trouble waters

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Chain Bridge, Berwyn, Llangollen, Wales
Chainbridge Hotel, Berwyn, Llangollen, Wales

Take the steam or heritage diesel train out of Llangollen, and get off at the first stop, Berwyn. Leave the station at the Llangollen end of the platform and dive down a steep path to an attractive suspension footbridge called the Chain Bridge, which was out of use from 1984 until it was restored by Llangollen Town Council and Llantysilio Community Council in 2015. 

The original bridge, to a different design, was built by a mine-owner, Exuperious Pickering, to connect with the Llangollen Canal and the Holyhead Road in 1814.  This was replaced in 1870, shortly after the railway opened, by Sir Henry Robinson, owner of the Brymbo Steel Works:  this second bridge was destroyed in a flood in 1928 and replaced by the present strengthened structure the following year.

Alongside is the Chainbridge Hotel, one of my favourite retreats, for its setting, its excellent hospitality and – most of all – its outstandingly professional and friendly staff team.  

An attractive Victorian black-and-white revival house is attached to an uncompromising sixties block of comfortable bedrooms and public rooms.  

It’s an extremely narrow, cramped building, simply because it sits between the rapids of the River Dee and the watercourse that takes water from the Horseshoe Falls to feed the Llangollen Canal.

These constraints are actually virtues.  The ground-floor dining room and bar offer close-up views of the ever-changing patterns of water on rocks.  The river-view bedrooms have balconies looking across to the railway, so that at regular intervals the  whistles and the quiet clatter of railway carriages carries across the valley.

Pick a quiet time of year, and you could be anywhere in the world, surrounded by trees and water.

It’s a wonderful place to unwind.

We’ll keep a welcome…

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Llangollen, Denbighshire

Llangollen, Denbighshire

Whenever I stand on the fourteenth-century bridge over the River Dee in the centre of Llangollen, it feels as if Wales starts here, though the actual border is several miles to the east, beyond Wrexham and Ruabon.  It’s a particularly welcoming town, an irresistible stopping-off point on any journey into the Welsh hills.  There are lots of set-piece tourist sites, some of which will feature in subsequent articles, and plenty of opportunity for rest and recuperation in a break of journey.

July is the month of the Llangollen International Musical Eisteddfod [http://www.llangollen2010.co.uk] and the Llangollen Fringe [http://llangollenfringe.co.uk]:  these may be an attraction or a reason to avoid crowds, depending on taste.

A particularly spectacular place to eat is the Corn Mill [www.cornmill-llangollen.co.uk] built in 1786 but originally founded by the monks of Valle Crucis Abbey in the Middle Ages.  It overlooks the rapids of the River Dee and faces the station of the Llangollen Railway [www.llangollen-railway.co.uk], which offers a 7½-mile ride up the Dee Valley to a terminus at Carrog, taking just eighty minutes for a return journey.

Whenever I have time to kill in Llangollen I end up browsing in Maxine’s Cafe and Books [http://maxinescafellangollen.moonfruit.com], located in a former cinema.  Beyond the shop-front café up a succession of stairs there are endless shelves of unexpected and tempting titles that easily stretch a quick visit into a whole morning or afternoon.

Other diversions within easy reach include the Llangollen Motor Museum [http://www.llangollenmotormuseum.co.uk], the medieval Valle Crucis Abbey, now administered by Cadw [http://www.cadw.wales.gov.uk/default.asp?id=6&PlaceID=140]
and – beyond it to the north – the spectacular A542 Horseshoe Pass road, built as a turnpike in 1811.

 

Australia explored

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Monument to Robert O'Hara Burke & William John Wills (d 1861), explorers of the Australian Outback, General Cemetery, Melbourne, Australia

Monument to Robert O’Hara Burke & William John Wills (d 1861), explorers of the Australian Outback, General Cemetery, Melbourne, Australia

As I flew out of Australia, wishing there were such things as child-free planes, I started to read Manning Clark’s A Short History of Australia (1963;  Penguin 2006), which for its periodic sentences, its allusions to the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer and its finely poised irony deserves the epithet “magisterial”.

By reading the historical context I’m slowly beginning to understand a little of what I’ve seen.  I begin to see how each of the states came to adopt its own attitude to the others, how development was bedevilled by inter-state disagreements, from differing railway gauges up to the vehement present-day disputes about water distribution, how the different “interests” of the emerging nation – colonialists, convicts, settlers, squatters, Protestants and Catholics – set up a network of snobberies that governed politics for generations, how the utter inability to reach out to the Aborigines and the effects of the explicit early twentieth-century policy of “White Australia” are still not fully resolved.

I can’t presume to make judgements about any of these matters, but as I become aware of them I see how fascinating this great nation has been and is.

Almost without exception the Australians I met were charming, open, keen to share the delights of their country.  I talked to a man in a coffee shop who came from Dundee, was demobbed from the British Army in Malaya, came to Australia for a couple of years and stayed:  he’d travelled from Brisbane to a sports event in Melbourne on his pensioner’s entitlement of four free rail-tickets a year, and was looking forward to a cruise from Fremantle to Plymouth, England, which he said would take the Biblical forty days and forty nights.

Post-1960s multiculturalism now means that people of any ethnicity may be in fact Australian.  An African taxi-driver compared at length the land-use in Western Australia with Kenya and Uganda and the resultant effect on lifestyles.  An Indian lady in a lift described the weather as “muggy”, and when I remarked that was an English expression said her grandparents were indeed English.  Oriental hotel receptionists greet you with “G’day”.

Over my three weeks’ travel I’ve come to associate the Australian accent with honesty, cheerfulness and an interest in other people.  In my experience, it goes with unabashed eye-contact, straightforwardness and a desire to please.  To me it’s inimitable:  at least, I can’t work out how to change a simple syllable like “No” into “Niye”.

I can’t wait to come back.

 

Exploring Australia 12: by rail from Melbourne to Sydney

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Central Station, Sydney, Australia

Central Station, Sydney, Australia

Taking advice from the invaluable The Man in Seat 61 website [http://www.seat61.com/Australia.htm], I’d booked an ordinary economy ticket for the train from Melbourne to Sydney.  The Man in Seat 61 points out, and illustrates, that the seating is identical in both economy and first.  My fare, for a twelve-hour journey, was A$110.70 [approximately £70].

Although the incoming train arrived and departed an hour late and lost a further half-hour getting out of the Melbourne suburbs, the on-board service compensated for the genuinely unavoidable delays.  The female train captain made meticulous announcements after every stop about the continuing delay, sometimes as little as seventy-odd minutes but usually ninety.  Each time she apologised, citing a signal failure on the incoming journey and track maintenance “which is necessary for your safety and comfort”:  I assume also that our train had lost its path, as railwaymen say, and was fighting against other traffic running to time.  We arrived at Sydney Central at 9.30 pm, exactly twelve hours after our departure from Melbourne.

The buffet car was a dream, with efficient staff and meticulous PA announcements.  The idea of a “Devonshire cream tea” (the complete tea, jam, scones and cream version) as a mid-morning refreshment took a little time to sink in.  Otherwise, decent airline-style cooked meals, interesting orange and poppy-seed cake, reasonable tea and excellent coffee filled the intervals of the day.

This was the most visually interesting journey of my odyssey across Australia.  The landscape was verdant heading east out of the state of Victoria.  We passed Australian backyards, small towns fronting on to the railway tracks and farmyards.  It was noticeable that the sheep stations loaded their stock on to road vehicles, not the railway line as they do in the more remote areas of Western and Southern Australia.

Some stops stood out as landmarks on the journey:  Seymour, clearly a historic railway town with a large steam museum, a town which I thought by the PA announcement was called Manila or Vanilla but turned out to be Benalla, a place with the strange, delightful name Uranquinty and the major settlement, Wagga Wagga, which the locals call “Wogga”.  Some railway stations have original or authentic signage at Junee and Moss Vale – “Ladies’ Room” and “Telegraph Office”.

After Junee the entire character of the journey changes.  The line becomes double track, and crosses the mountains by wiggling up and down hills continuously:  there is hardly a straight stretch for many miles, and often the line ahead is visible at right angles to the direction of travel.  At one point the two tracks diverge wildly, crossing and recrossing at the Bethungra Spiral.

This is working rail travel.  Passengers got on and off at each stop, unlike the set-piece Great Southern luxury trains.  The largest and loudest man in Australia helped fellow passengers with their puzzle books, in between phoning his relatives ahead with repetitive news of the delay.  I chatted to a young man from Surrey who was working his way round the world driving combine harvesters in preparation for managing his father’s farm on his return to the UK.  Outside the window, train-spotting kangaroos sat by the track, with that odd limp-wristed stance as if they’ve just finished washing the dishes.

The arrival into Sydney Central, cathedral of the age of steam, is an apt overture to a great city – an engaging contrast with the airy, modern steel and glass of Melbourne Southern Cross.

A nice taxi driver took me on a brief tour of Sydney before depositing me at my hotel, which I discovered the following day is three minutes’ walk away.  At that time of night, after twelve hours on a train, I’m more than happy for someone to hump my luggage and drive me around for five minutes for A$8 [about £5].

There’s a well-edited 2018 film of the northbound daylight XPT journey at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMztI752wWI.