41. Castleton and Buxton

CC Sites
July 4th to July 6th

One night and the question is why? Why did I come here? Why did I come for only one night? Did I subconsciously want to go pot-holing or rock-climbing? I don't think so. But there is nothing else to do here, except perhaps to go on a pub crawl. Castleton is half the size of Billingshurst and it's got six pubs. It's a lovely village at the heart of the High Peak, set at the end of a valley before it goes into a narrow pass over the top towards Kinder Scout. It's a centre for spelunkers but I managed to survive my stay without spelunking.

The drive over was quite unpleasant, largely because of Chesterfield and it's appalling signage. I needed diesel and air, but couldn't actually get into the filling station at the Tesco superstore because it was so busy. Then by mistake I managed to get into the covered car park of the store, which, given the height of the van and no height restriction signs anywhere, was really scary. I got into a fury and stormed off back the way I had come to the Sainsbury's superstore. I got my diesel but no Tesco Card points. I needed the A619 from Chesterfield to Bakewell, but it disappeared when it got to Chesterfield. There were no signs to Bakewell at all, so I went down a wide dual carriageway called the “Great Central Way”. It had obviously been designed as an urban through-way for the town, but was completely empty. I soon discovered the reason; all the traffic was sitting in jams on other roads around the town. I discovered the revived A619 after I had driven through the town centre and thought I was escaping when I encountered my own personal bête noir; lane arrows on the road. This is how it works; you see an arrow on the road showing you should be in the left-hand lane if you want to go straight ahead and a bent arrow showing you should be in the right-hand lane if you want to turn right. So, which shall I choose? Well, I don't know, do I, because they haven't given me a sign telling where the two choices would take me. They wait until I make my choice and then give me the sign or write the information on the road, where I can see perhaps some of it peeping out from under that giant artic.

All this changed the indifference I felt towards Chesterfield to something much more toxic.

On the way I saw a road sign to Eyam. This was the village with the remarkable plague story. In 1665, when the plague was raging in England, although largely confined to London, a tailor ordered some cloth from London and it was infected. When the first villager died, the others, in an amazing act of altruism and self-sacrifice, decided to seal-off the village and quarantine themselves to save the spread of the plague. In all, 260 villagers died but the contagion was successfully contained. Good story. There was an excellent TV drama about it a few years ago. The BBC could show it again if they could find time amongst all their cooking and property programmes.

I walked into Castleton, bought the most expensive loaf of bread in the world and counted the pubs. That really was the extent of the excitement to be had. Walking back I saw a sign saying “Footpath to Hope” (Hope is the next village up the valley). A walker was just coming to the end of it and he looked very cross and disappointed. Perhaps the sign the other end says “Footpath to Despair”.

The setting of the village is quite beautiful. Look up in three out of four directions and you see hills, really quite high, green and rounded and soft pillowy-looking. In some places the meadows had just been mowed almost right up to the summit. It was quite warm and there was the sort of frowsy, laid-back atmosphere you get in the West Country or Kerry or Brittany. I got back home just before the skies opened, and it was still raining, banging on the roof AND WAKING ME UP AT THREE THE FOLLOWING MORNING.

On to Buxton on Saturday morning, a fabulous drive. A roundabout route because the more direct route through Chapel-en-le-Frith goes through the Winnatts Pass, a graveyard of caravans and motorhomes. I passed through Tideswell, where the church of Saint John the Baptist is known as “The Cathedral of the Peak”. I soon saw why. It is exquisite, just like a cathedral in miniature and the lovely stone village matches it. Tideswell, and the next village, Miller's Dale, are mentioned in Flanders and Swann's great song “The Slow Train”. Every time I play it I hear the little devils cackling as they pop another coal on the fire burning eternally under Doctor Beeching's fat backside.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6OHD2uCpfU

After Blackwell I picked-up the A6 which made its way into Buxton along the narrow, gorge-like, heavily-wooded Wye Valley. The river, clear and fast-running over a shallow rocky bed, runs alongside the road for most of the way. This must be the most beautiful major road in Britain. Well, maybe the A9 in the Highlands. A fabulous drive.

The site is about two miles south-west of the town on the Leek road and sits in a limestone quarry in a country park. The bus service is non-existent, so tomorrow I will walk through the country park to the town, which, according to the warden, will take me about forty minutes. In the meantime, I've been writing this and watching the first stage of the Tour de France in Yorkshire. 230,000 people at the start in Leeds this morning and an estimated 800,000 in total to-day. Such fantastic enthusiasm and some brilliant TV coverage. I've just seen Hawes and the entrance to the site where I stayed. 

At this point I should apologise, dear reader, for not having written for a while. I've been rather unwell for a while now and have spent most of the last week lying-down. It's very difficult to type while you are lying-down. There, that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it. Bit better to-day (Sunday, July 13^th) so here goes.

The walk into Buxton through the country park was very pleasant. The park is riddled with lime-kilns and the houses built by the lime-burners from the burned-out kilns. Kilns and houses and the piles of spoil are now just mounds against the hill, covered in vegetation. The Duke of Devonshire, who seems to own most of the world around here, planted the woods in 1820 to hide the lime workings overlooking the town. The path through the woods brought me to a car park at the top of the town and I carried on down through Buxton's quiet leafy avenues to Pavilion Gardens, a lovely public park with boating lake, sunny seats and shady footpaths. On the boating lake a fine model yacht and a remote-controlled speedboat were happily avoiding each other and the many circling ducks who seemed totally oblivious to them. I walked along the side of the gardens on Broad Walk, which is flanked by impressive stone three-storey buildings, originally the houses of the super-rich who came to take the waters and now mostly doctors' or dentists' surgeries, insurance brokers' offices and the offices of charities.

Pavilion Gardens

 

I reached the Old Hall Hotel at the end of the park. The very common plaque “Mary Queen of Scots slept here …..” That flaming woman slept in so many places and spent so much time sleeping I don't know how she had the time to cause so much trouble.

The main street, pedestrianised, is quite scruffy, given that I was expecting a Guildford High Street in a posh town like this. Then I spotted the new shopping centre. Ah. I didn't go into it, but walked up the steep Terrace Road to Higher Buxton, the old town. Not much to shout about here, and I made my way back up the hill to the top of the woods. I needed a long rest and took it on a wooden bench dedicated poignantly to a young local man killed in the army.

A bit of an anti-climax, then, Buxton, but I wasn't on top form myself and possibly didn't do it justice. One boarding house on Broad Walk bore a sign calling it “Buxton's Victorian Guest House” and I had a feeling that Buxton wanted to think of itself as a Victorian town.

 

A long journey tomorrow.

40. Staveley

CC Site
July 2nd-3rd

Yorkshire is a big county, big mass, high gravity. By the time I had reached its escape velocity I was going so fast that I was catapulted clean past Leeds and Sheffield and landed in Derbyshire, seventy-two miles further south. Staveley is four miles from Chesterfield and the site is two miles from Staveley. Here we are right bang in the middle of what used to be the York/Notts/Derbys coal field. The site itself is on the reclaimed, beautifully landscaped Ireland Colliery, once one of the biggest in Britain. Now, you would never know there had ever been anything here but lakes, fields, hedges and trees. Astonishing!

I remember driving through this area in the early 'Seventies. I used to drive up and down the M1 and A1 twice a week after our company moved up to Washington, Tyne and Wear, from Horsham. I used to stop off for a rest at Junction 26 or 27 or 28, which was about half-way. As soon as you stopped you could smell the coal in the air. It was so thick you could almost see the coal dust in the air.     

Some time later our company was negotiating to buy a file foundry in Sheffield (engineering files, for shaping metal, not those paper things that the Metropolitan Police keep losing). Had this deal gone through the company would have moved to Sheffield from Washington and I had a look at Chesterfield and the edge of the Peak District for places to live. Choosing Chesterfield would have been a mistake, although I believe Emlyn Hughes used to live there. Forty years later I was going to have a closer look.

 

I spent my first afternoon getting the Blog up to date and then went to bed. Waking later I watched an old Wycliffe, which was about the Beast of Bodmin. That reminded me of the Beast of Bolsover, Bolsover being just five miles to the east. Dennis Skinner, possibly the last of the old Labour left-wing, eighty-two years old and still, incredibly, in the Commons as member for Bolsover after forty-four years. He must be very lonely in the House amongst all those designer suits, Rolexes and political correctness. Now his old mate Chris Mullins has retired, who does he have a pint with?

Off on the bike this morning to Chesterfield via the Trans-Pennine Trail which passes close to the site. It's a great trail, well-surfaced and eight-feet wide, but is very badly signed. In fact, you have as much chance of crossing the Apennines as the Pennines. After re-tracing my steps twice I ended in another old colliery, the Arkwright. I had to retreat again and climbed up a footpath on to the A632 Bolsover-Chesterfield road. Luckily there was a pavement all the way into the town.

Chesterfield is probably just fine, but it suffered in my eyes in comparison with Harrogate. Harrogate has style and class, Chesterfield has a twisted spire on its parish church. It's a bit worrying when the main asset of which a town boasts is an aberration, a deformity. It has a big central square and this, and most of the rest of the town for that matter, was filled with the regular Thursday flea market. My cycle ride was twenty-six kilometres there and back and I'm not entirely sure the arriving was worth the journey. I enjoyed the ride itself, though. On the whole, I would probably not make a detour to visit Chesterfield gain. It certainly has a twisted spire on its parish church though.

39. Knaresborough

CC Site
June 29 – July 1

Just a short trot along the A59 through Harrogate. Knaresborough is a quaint little town on the River Nidd three miles outside Harrogate and the caravan site is at Scotton, two miles outside Knaresborough. I was very early, so drove into Knaresborough and had a good look round. The river passes through a rocky gorge at the bottom of the town and there are some lovely stone houses with balconies overlooking it.

Just across the bridge as you leave the town is Mother Shipton's Cave. Mother Shipton was a fifteenth-century lady who foretold, apparently, lots of forthcoming events such as iron ships and the Spanish Armada. The website claims that the cave is Britain's oldest tourist attraction. The main attraction is the Petrifying Well where objects left in the lime-saturated water are turned to stone. The website says “It takes between three and five months to petrify a teddy bear.” Now, I can't even begin to imagine the degeneracy of a creature who would want to petrify a teddy bear and I'm hereby declaring a fatwah against anyone who does. I thought of holding my clenched fist in its waters and then punching David Cameron very hard on the nose, but they wouldn't guarantee that the petrification would wear-off and I decided against.    

It was quite hot by now and I spent the afternoon relaxing in the sun and reading. The bird-feeder again is a great success, mobbed by tits and finches and by a small bird I couldn't identify. A pair of blackbirds waited at the feeder's foot to pick-off seeds dropped by the smaller birds. Although the birds were only about ten feet from me they weren't disturbed.

"Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens", as Schiller said. "Against stupidity the gods themselves struggle in vain" In my case they can struggle until they are blue in the face. I went into Harrogate and found that I had left the camera at home. I wandered around, noting all the things I wanted to photograph, did my food shopping and then went back to the bus station to catch the bus which would drop me outside the site. It was very hot and unfortunately I fell asleep and missed the bus. I got a bus to Knaresborough which dropped me at the end of the road to the site. I had thought it was less than a mile to walk and set-out with a swagger. It was very hot and my bags were very heavy and it was two miles and my swagger became a stagger. You see what I mean; the gods have no chance with me. Doh!

 

So the next day I went to Harrogate with my camera and had a lovely time. It really is a cracking town, one of the best. In fact, someone told me it had been voted “The Best Place in England to live” or some such award. The bus takes forty minutes to do the three mile journey, but it's well worth it. Buses like this remind me of the old Guinness advert, my facourite of all time, where the young bloke is trying to dance his way up to the bar but keeps getting repulsed by gravity or something. The music is great, too. Da DA da, da DA da da DA da da DA da. And so on. This bus got nearly to the town when it shot off down a lane and went into a technology park with Harrogate College and a big shiny glass pyramid building. The pyramid, if you think about it, is a perfect metaphor for a company. A big floor at the bottom with lots of toilers and then progressively smaller floors as you proceed upward until at the pointy top there is room for only one. At last the bus broke free and made its way across the Stray into the town. The Stray is a huge common (very like Clapham Common, in fact, but without the muggers) and its common status is protected in perpetuity. A bit like Horsham's football ground was before they built houses on it and left the club without a home. Sorry, I was in positive mood until that slipped out.

 

I saw the queue outside Betty's Tearoom and counted the blue rinses through the window. Actually, there were lots of young people in there, which was nice to see. I spent the book token Matt had given me for my birthday on Rod Liddle's recent book “Selfish Whining Monkeys” which is very entertaining. Because of my shrinkage I also had to get myself a pair of trousers and a pair of shorts. I've lost six inches round my waist since Christmas and when I wear my old trousers and shorts have been going round with all the spare material bunched-up at the back, looking, I imagine, like Quasimodo with his hump having slipped.

 

Like everywhere else, Harrogate is festooned with Tour de France bunting, but with one notable difference. The bunting here is made from tiny knitted jumpers. I was so impressed I went to the Tourist Information and asked the lady who had knitted them. “Oh, just local ladies”, she said. “How many are there?” I asked. She had no idea, but said she had knitted nineteen herself. Well, I told her I thought it was a brilliant idea and I hope she was pleased. Well done, the Local Ladies of Harrogate and Knaresborough.

 

I saw one strange thing. Someone had gone to the trouble of painting an old bike but they had painted it blue. Blue?

I was enjoying myself sitting in the sun on the wall outside St. Peter's Church in James Street and having my lunch. It's quite a wide street and totally pedestrianised, but I noticed that most people were walking on my side of the street and getting too close to me for comfort. I thought this behaviour strange, thinking they just wanted to be close to me, but then noticed they were all engaged in Chugger Avoidance. Poor chap, it's a dark and lonely job, but does anyone really have to do it? There must be a more honourable way for charities to raise money, surely?

 

The magnificent Odeon Cinema

 

I love Harrogate. I first went there in 1965 and have been since, but not for quite a few years. It just gets better.

Wonderful. I managed to catch the correct bus this time, too.

38. Bolton Abbey

CC Site
June 26^th - 28^th

Such a short journey (eight miles) I'm not even going to describe it. I still managed to go the wrong way, though.

Nice small site in a wood on the road north from Bolton Abbey back to Grassington. Got a pitch opposite the toilet block and on the edge of a copse. The van next door has the most comprehensive bird feeder imaginable, so it was with some misgivings that I assembled mine. Wow! Within two minutes it was mobbed. Even a greenfinch and a tree-creeper. A robin has taken to coming into the van to hoover my carpet, hopping right up to my feet as I sit at the table. The third time he flew into the cab and took a fright, flapping at the driver's door window. I managed to catch him and pop him outside, but haven't seen him since.

The TV here is analogue (they have a digital signal into the site so weak that they distribute it as analogue). It makes you realise just how crummy TV was before digital. It's blurry and the TV can't tell you the name of the channel you are on. You see, some things do get better, so just look on the bright side.

I put Wimbledon on for the first time. Two gents called Raonic and Sock were playing, which reminded me I must go into Mountain Warehouse In Harrogate and get some raonic socks.

I am losing interest in the World Cup. I find this to be a feature of my getting older; I can't seem to maintain an interest in anything for very long. Unless Cook resigns, is sacked or has an incapacitating accident soon I fear my interest in cricket will go the same way.   

I had planned to go into Ilkley on the first day and Skipton on the second, but let the cold, damp, grey day get on top of me and spent the day in bed reading a Sjowall and Wahloo and a Maigret. I did lower myself to have a shower and do my washing-up. The Simenon, “Maigret in Court”, is his best, I think, because it shows his defining qualities, his doggedness and his compassion. In her review of the book in the Sunday Times, Muriel Spark says “In a great courtroom drama, Maigret has to explain why he does not believe that Gaston Meurant was capable of slitting his aunt's throat for money and smothering a small child. But in saving him from the gallows, Maigret must expose some dark secrets about Meurant's life. A painful story of an oppressive domestic tragedy and the compassionate insight of a remarkable detective. A truly wonderful writer ... marvellously readable - lucid, simple, absolutely in tune with that world he creates of run-down hotels, cold, dark barges, quayside canal-taverns, lurking prostitutes, pot-bellied burghers, taciturn youths, slippery barmen”. I've read many detective writers now, but I always return to Maigret. With his acute understanding of human nature for me he is the Master.

The Winter Gardens, Ilkley

So I stirred myself the next day and went to Ilkley on the bus, and I didn't take a hat. What a smashing little town, wide streets, elegant stone buildings and a small outbreak of cast-iron canopies à la Harrogate. The railway station, a terminus, is a gem. The old goods shed behind the buffers has been turned into a very comprehensive M & S Food shop and there is a nice old-fashioned coffee bar. Outside there are lots of tables and chairs for a Pizza Express.

In the nineteenth century, Ilkley was a dormitory town for Bradford and Leeds and there are trains direct to both cities. It's genteel but not stuck-up and has a pleasant feel to it. It has taken to the Tour just like Hawes and Grassington and there is bunting and be-ribboned and painted bikes everywhere.

There is also a nice, circular Booth's supermarket, which I had visited six or seven years previously with Katie, my daughter. Booth's is a northern phenomenon, more Lancashire than Yorkshire, and is probably about equivalent to or just a shade better than a Waitrose. I remember buying some bottles of Yorkshire beer here to take back for John O'Neill, the old farmer who was our neighbour in Ireland and who had worked much of his life on the land in north Yorkshire. Many Irish men came to Britain during the war to fill-in for the men who had been conscripted and most of the Mayo men went to Yorkshire.

From Ilkley I got the bus west to Skipton on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales National Park. Skipton is bigger and livelier than Ilkley. It even has its own small House of Fraser department store, Rackham's. This being a Saturday there was an excellent street market and a flea market in the Town Hall and these and the weekend had attracted hordes of trippers from Leeds and Bradford. I bought the world's greatest olives stuffed with garlic from a nice man on a Greek stall. After being there for half an hour it suddenly dawned that I had come here with Katie as well.

 

The Leeds and Liverpool Canal

The Leeds and Liverpool Canal goes through the town, right next to the bus station and I snapped some nice narrow boats. Unfortunately, I got very tired and, when I got back to Ilkley and found I had three hours to wait for a bus, decided to take a cab back to the site. The cabbie estimated £12, which was more than my pocket money for the week, but needs must. When we got there it was £18 and the cabbie got a very small tip. The tip I really wanted to give him was “Don't tell porkies”.