The title of this post will only have meaning to those of you who managed to watch Australian television during the late 1970s and early 1980s, but I feel it captures the scope of what I did, this third day of my trip in the United Kingdom. It was extremely tiring and absolutely worth it.
I awake at stupid o’clock. My body is being very stubborn on this point. Fatigue, never too far away at the best of times, seems to want to hang around, and I am hoping it gets better before the dig starts. After writing some more blog, and generally just sitting around waiting for the sun to rise and be at a time where I could talk to my family on Skype.
After a breakfast of bacon, scrambled eggs and toast, I was ready to face my day. The accommodation here is nice and cosy, but I keep getting impression that I am holed up in a nursing home. All the other guests are much older than me, and they all have fruit and porridge for breakfast, and some of them don’t look all that well. It’s the impression I am getting of Paignton as well – this is a tourist town, but it is designed to cater for young families (lots of kids and parents), or the near dead (scooters and wheelchairs everywhere). There’s a few teenagers and early twenties people here, and I suspect it’s because there is nothing for them to do.
Also, I think due to the extremely heavy meals here (and huge), everyone seems to have obesity as a sort of national competition. I suspect, however, that it’s precisely because this is a resort town that it attracts these sort of people. Certainly everyone I have seen in the country towns appears to lead a normal healthy lifestyle.
My first trip led me out to Berry Pomeroy Castle, one of the listed buildings managed by English Heritage. This was once a medieval fortress situated on one side of a valley. It was them partially converted into a huge manor house before the family that bought it ran out of money, and left it half built. It then burnt down.That’s a pretty short summary of it. I started one of those automated listening tours where they give you a radio guidebook on the history, but I soon abandoned it. It was one of those guides where they try give you facts in the guise of entertainment (actors doing the roles of people who might have lived here) and that is incredibly annoying.
Berry Pomeroy – reputedly the most haunted in Britain. It was certainly haunted by school children.
You enter through the marvellous gatehouse,pictured above, into a central courtyard from which you can see a lot of the buildings that were erected by the rich owners. The picture above also shows the low medieval wall and tower, which are all that remains of the medieval fortress.
The Tudor mansion that is part of the castle
The lands were bestowed upon Ralph de Pomeroy by William the Conqueror in the late 11th Century, whereupon his descendants built the medieval fortress in the 15th century, and the lands remained in the hands of the Pomeroy family until they ran out of money. The lands were then purchased by Edward Seymour, who was later executed for treason, which just goes to show that negative gearing is not always a viable economic strategy.
The tranquility of the place (marred by the excited piping and running around of school children) really does add to the experience as you wander about the empty rooms. All of the inner floors are gone, so you can’t really get up to see what it would have been like to have been in the building, but you can enter the north east medieval tower and go down the stairs into the base of it. It’s a scary and claustrophobic experience, not the least because the stairs are very steep. I did remark to the guy from English Heritage that I suspected more defenders died from falling down the stairs than ever did defending the castle.
Killer stairs – shot from the basement of the medieval tower. It’s much darker inside that the photo indicates.
Berry Pomeroy overlooks a valley where you can hear the river running below. In it’s heyday, from the top floor, you would have had breath taking views of the Devon country side, but for me it’s seeing the medieval fortifications that made it for me. You can walk along the curtained wall and see the slits where the cannons would have been in place. You can imagine being a soldier on that battlement during the English Civil War, wondering if the forces of Cromwell might attack at any moment (the owners were Royalists). There’s no evidence to say the castle ever saw combat, however.
Saying goodbye to Berry Pomeroy, I briefly spoke to a couple coming into the castle. This was to be my real first social contact with English people outside of the Bed and Breakfast owner. Naturally, they turned out to be Australian. Just one of those annoying ironies, I guess. Nevertheless, I pressed on to my next destination, a place called Buckfast Abbey.
After I incomprehensibly giggled at the name, I took myself there in fairly short order. The abbey is actually the home of Benedictine Monks, and this roused my curiosity. As mentioned previously, I am not a religious man, but the thought of seeing actual monks sounded pretty cool. Naturally, I had a secret wish they were like Shaolin Monks and would show me some awesome kung fu moves, but I suspect the closest that the monks I saw come to kung fu is sprinkling salt on their porridge in the morning. Still it was free to get in, and the impressive Abbey is worth a look, hand build by a team of 6 monks in the 1930s, on the site of an older abbey.
It’s even more impressive when you find out its built entirely out of Lego bricks.
The inside of the Abbey is what you’d expect. Lots of grand architecture, gilded whatsits and lady who hates hats.
Hat Hatred Lady: “Excuse, sir, please don’t take photos where people are praying, and can you remove your hat for Jesus?”
Me: “No…”
…is what I would have said had Assertion Demon not buggered off on a holiday to Majorca. Naturally, I succumbed to her request, but I was doing it for her because she was polite about the whole thing. Something really irked me about the “…for Jesus”, as if common politeness and human decency isn’t enough. I really don’t understand it, so secretly, in my heart, my hat was still on my head.
Still, the Abbey is worth a visit. The grounds are lovely and peaceful and it has a gift shop, which I always find hilarious in some way, as it seems to me that it takes all of the wonder and unreality out of the place. Still, I guess the monks have to eat somehow, since it’s not like they can go and kung fu up a deer or anything.
I’m not sure what any of this means, but it’s a great piece of art.
I soon left the Abbey, bypassing the gift shop and into my car, off on my next short trip down to Totnes to see the mott and bailey castle there. This sits atop a hill overlooking the town of Totnes, where much of the medieval infrastructure is in place. The first thing you think when you wander into town is the words”Diagon Alley” (I personally think J K Rowling based it off this town, since so many of the references in her Harry Potter books are actually towns around here). All of the buildings you see in the photo are circa 500-600 years old.
Could not find a wand shop for the life of me.
The second think you think when visiting Totnes is “where did all these fucking hippies come from?” – they are everywhere, sitting in doorways, wandering through the markets, scavenging from bins (I did actually witness this), and I felt all of the atmosphere of the place somewhat tarnished by it all. As Tony (the proprietor where I am staying) put it:
“It’s the Glastonbury of the south west.”
I don’t know much about Glastonbury, so for my family back home, I’ll just say “Think Kuranda”.
I then wandered up to the castle proper. I was the only one there, so I got to experience it in silence, and walk the battlements of the castle proper. It’s a steep climb, and for someone of my suspect athletic ability, it was steep and arduous. But I made to the top without need of a sherpa, and was able to take in the surrounding landscape.
The Macchu Pichu of Southern Devon – Totnes Castle.
The view between the crenellations of the castle. You can see for miles in any direction.
At some point I came down from that high point of town, and made my way back to my car. I am so very happy I have the GPS, but it sometimes tells me to go the most awkward routes, because it calculates them as being”the best”. So I found myself driving slowly through Diagon Alley – and apparently this is ok, as cars go through there all the time. So glad I chose the Volkswagen Golf instead of Stretch Hum-Vee I had my eye on.
On my way to Dartmouth, to see the castle there, I stopped off for lunch at a place called The Old Inn. I am not sure why it is called this, since the owner told me it was rebuilt after burning down in 1884, so really it’s The New But Still Pretty Old Inn. However given that I’ve seen so many bizarre names for pubs (some of which I suspect are related to unhygenic rural practices), I was willing to let this one go. The meal was a standard cod and chips, however the portions would have supported the economy of a small African nation. I could only get through half of the meal (and the pint of Diet Coke). It WAS delicious though.
Inside, it looks exactly like an English pub should, right down to the dart board and friendly dog.
I had a brief walk around the churchyard of the town ( of which the pub and it seemed to be the only buildings around). I couldn’t help but muse if these were the graves of people who ate at the pub, and that I was about to meet a grisly, if satiated, end. This did not turn out to be the case, so after a few photographs, I was away again down to Dartmouth.
Nothing like what is, technically, a stroll over some rotting corpses.
I finally got to Dartmouth, and found the location of the castle. There is actually two of them, located on either side of the harbour. As Dartmouth (on the river Dart, flowing out of Dartmoor – the English are nothing if not practical) was and still is a very large port (less though for trading), the merchants decided it would be a very good thing to protect their own ships and setup a pair of fortresses at the mouth of the bay.
Dartmouth Castle – across the water you can see the other fortress which is now a holiday home. This is not a joke.
The castle is more of a traditional fort than actual castle, as evidenced by the stuff you find under the ground. I took these photos so that my boss would read this blog, and he would neuter me if I didn’t.
62 pounds of loud kaboomy goodness.
Personally, though, it’s this that freaked me out the most. It’s a small passageway behind the cannons where some of the folk would be, I suspect to fire the cannon and protected them from the shock. It’s low, cramped, unlit and I went to the end and found it VERY claustrophobic.
The most terrifying experience so far. You can see I was shaking.
After this, it was getting late, so I drove back to my Paignton digs. But I had one more thing for the night to do – Kent’s Cavern.
Almost good.
Kent’s Cavern is a series of limestone caverns that run for about 3 miles under Torquay. I decided that, rather than a day tour, I would do one of their nightly “Ghost Tours”. It might be even more fun – you can tell where this is going right?
The tour consists of about 20 minutes of “actors” being “ghosts” and a woman telling stories as characters of the evil and creepy goings on in the caverns over hundreds of years. There were blokes in masks and monks costumes you could see standing off in the distance, and then the lights would go out, and then come back on a few seconds later and the monk would be standing inches away and then scream at you before running away. This worked on me exactly zero times. It was SO cheesy. I could have told them a hundred technical and theatrical things they could have done to scare the poop out of people.
Because it was a ghost tour, I took no photos, since it would have ruined the “ambience”. It’s a shame, because the caverns themselves are incredibly impressive. They are cold inside, and your breath comes out in misty vapour. The floors are wet, and there is impressive stalactites and stalagmites everywhere. When they do turn the lights out, it’s dark. Like, can see nothing dark. It would be great if you could just wander through an experience it for yourself.
As I left the caverns at the end of the tour, I reflected on the end of a long and fascinating day. I walked up the slope to the door which is the exit to the caverns and into…the Gift Shop. I kid you fucking not, there is a door built into the cave exit, and it leads directly into the Gift Shop. I bought nothing, as this topped off the experience for me. As I walked back to my car, I heard others on the tour saying exactly the same thing as I was thinking.
I went to bed when I got back, and slept the sleep of the mostly satisfied.