So here we are again, safely home in north Essex, and I had better bring my account of our travels to an end, since I'm certainly not going on about them after today.
The Soldiers of Gloucestershire Museum This regimental museum charts the history of the Gloucester regiments, through the centuries and across campaigns, mergers and name changes. It makes a pretty good attempt at summarising over three hundred years of military activity as pursued by one section of the British army. You can tell it is a good museum in that I found it interesting, and military history is not one of my specialist things. It is housed in the old customs house in Gloucester docks, a sensible use for an attractive building.
Gloucester Waterways Museum The canal museum occupies a former warehouse on the other side of the docks. It is managed by the Canal and River Trust, and is a sister museum of the canal museum we went to in Ellesmere Port a few years back. It has the usual things you would expect in a canal museum, with maps and photographs of the canal system, a mock-up of a lock gate (with trickling water), old British Transport Films films about canals, sections of model canal boats, collections of painted ware and so on. We would have liked a little more about how the business of hauling cargoes by canal worked, since canal museums nearly always seem to focus on firstly, the physical infrastructure and history of how the canal was built (usually late, over budget, and frequently with a bankruptcy and supplementary fund raising in the middle), and secondly, the day to day social conditions of the boatmen and their families (children not being able to attend school regularly, cleanliness as an outward symbol of respectability despite nomadic lifestyle, and so on). However, it is a good canal museum, if you like canals, and has an old (possibly the oldest in Britain) steam tug parked outside, though it was not steaming when we were there. We did get to take a short trip on the museum's authentic Dunkirk Little Ship, built for tourist service on the Thames and pressed into military service at the start of the war.
As part of a separate expedition we went to look at Saul junction, the point at which the Gloucester and Sharpness canal meets the end of a waterway that once went all the way to Lechlade, linking the Thames and the Severn. We met a passionate volunteer who told us how plans were afoot to reopen it. Certainly it would be jolly nice to be able to get all the way from St Katherine's dock to Gloucester across country by canal boat. Afterwards we discovered in the museum that this part of the canal network was never a great success even when new, because the engineers had not made enough provision to have water in it. That is a drawback in a canal.
Gloucester Cathedral The cathedral is very, very beautiful, with great round columns to rival Tewkesbury's in the Normaneque nave, while later additions were made in the Perpendicular. The East Window is a splendid expanse of Medieval glass, the largest in the world when it was installed, and I liked the modern glass in one of the side chapels. We even managed to find the memorial to a friend's uncle, who was a bishop of Gloucester. My only minor complaint about Gloucester cathedral would be that it was being used to host a temporary exhibition of modern sculptures, same criticisms apply as at Hidcote, though not quite as bad, the cathedral being so large and magnificent that it could more or less shrug them off.
Gloucester Folk Museum The folk museum is housed in a timber framed Tudor building which is objectively speaking the best thing about it. The Systems Administrator was rather resistant to going, having somehow got the idea that it would be full of conceptual art. In fact it was like most small provincial museums, rather full of assorted objects that local people had donated, and with a random scattering of cuddly toys in an attempt to appeal to children. It did not have as much information on the Severn eel and salmon fisheries as I was expecting, but I forgave it for that because we did discover that Gloucester used to be a major centre for pin making. I never knew that, and can now add it to my mental collection of centres of obscure industries (brushes in Wymondham and cast rion grand piano frames in Burnham on Crouch). Plus, the woman on the desk said that Tuesday still counted as part of Heritage Weekend, so entry was free.
Gloucester Warwickshire Railway This steam railway has been extended in recent years, and now has enough track to run half hour long trips terminating at Cheltenham racecourse, with building in progress to extend it at the other end as far as Broadway. We chugged down the line in carriages that seemed faintly familiar from childhood trips to Woking, drawn by an engine that would originally have hauled coal wagons in south Wales so was not strictly accurate, but hey, it was a steam locomotive. They run a pretty full timetable through to the end of September, then I think ease off to weekends only for the winter. It is staffed almost entirely by volunteers, and the guard on our train was very amiable. You get a view en route of some Medieval ridge and furrows, and once you have got your ticket can spend all day riding up and down, if you've a mind to. We did not, because we were going on to:
Snowshill Manor This National Trust property is absolutely bonkers. I'd have realised that, if I'd read the National Trust guide more carefully. I focused on the guide to Cotswolds gardens, which made it sound like a pleasant smallish Arts and Crafts garden that would make an interesting pendant to our visits to Rodmarton Manor and Hidcote, not necessarily one you'd drive miles to see, but worth stopping off there if you happened to be visiting something else (like a steam railway) only three miles up the road. I didn't really register that there was a manor house, though the National Trust book does say that someone called Charles Wade purchased it to house his collection. Too right, all twenty rooms of it, while Charles Wade slept (in a Tudor box bed) in a modest cottage in the garden, bedroom decorated to look rather like a chapel, while his wife slept (in another box bed) up a teeny tiny staircase in a room called Unicorn.
The twenty rooms of Snowshill Manor (we only saw nineteen of them, because one is shut since the weight of visiting feet caused the ceiling of the one below to start crumbling) are full of stuff. Model ships, clocks, helmets, carpenters' tools, inlaid curio cabinets in turn full of things, children's toys, bicycles, a dozen sets of what I think was Mongolian armour, about twenty spinning wheels (why have one when you can have twenty?), embroidery, tribal textiles, portraits, a set of model carts from virtually every county in England (they were rather good). The National Trust says there are twenty thousand objects in the collection. Charles Wade started collecting when he was seven, and I don't think he ever stopped.
The model houses in one of the cart sheds were fun. He built a Cornish fishing village to stand by the pond. Volunteers have started to reconstruct it, though the SA spotted early signs of delamination and said that they couldn't have sealed the ends of their ply properly. But overall there were too many things. Way too many things. We walked through the nineteen rooms, and fled to the comparative peace of:
Cleeve Common This is a vast expanse of unimproved limestone grassland on a hill above Cheltenham racecourse. Gloucestershire's largest common and the highest point in the Cotswolds. It is a great spot for wildlife and people alike, home to some rare flowers (though all I spotted were a few things that looked like small campanula and some thistles that might or might not have been rare, I have no idea) while we clocked kite boarders, dog walkers and a golf course. It is very sparse and bare and gives you the idea that you could walk for miles, though we only walked as far as the remains of a hill fort and some unique exposed rock strata, because we couldn't work out the route round the golf course, and time was getting on. You can park almost at the top of the hill, so enjoy the ridge walk and the views without the slog of climbing six hundred feet first.
Westbury Court Garden This Dutch style water garden is unique twice over, as a surviving eighteenth century garden of a type that was generally swept away by changing fashions (the owners of Westbury couldn't afford a new garden), and as the first English historic garden restoration. Yew hedges, canals and a couple of brick pavilions make a charming formal scene, while the planting is all done using plants that would have been in cultivation in English gardens at the time. The most exciting plant in the garden is actually the four hundred year old holm oak, which has a splendid vast and knobbly bole. Sadly the yew has suffered from phytophthora in recent years, exacerbated by periodic flooding, while the box hedges have got blight. Westbury came to the National Trust without any financial endowment, and faced with environmental challenges one fears its future is not as secure as it might be.
The Dean Heritage Centre We plunged on into the Forest of Dean, and soon felt a long way from the chocolate box tourist spots of the Cotswolds, although still in Gloucestershire. The heritage centre is well done, and tells you quite a lot about the history of the forest and its people and industries. They were a bolshie and enterprising lot, not shy about tearing down the odd sawmill as graziers resisted attempts at reafforestation after the Napoleonic wars, and I did not know that the world's supply of Ribena is made in the Forest of Dean. The heritage centre does its bit to keep some old skills alive, and still sometimes make charcoal by the traditional method, though all we saw was a big sooty circle on the ground. I was pleased to see the pair of Gloucester Old Spot pigs, who initially remained coyly in their sty, revealing nothing but an ear and half a snout, but then came out for a good scratch.
Chepstow Castle We ventured over the border into Wales for a tour of Chepstow Castle, which is large and well preserved, dating from just after the Norman conquest and expanded over subsequent centuries. It was still in active use as late as the English civil war, which is probably one reason why so much of the fabric remains, rather than it having all been recycled by the inhabitants of Chepstow. Very good if you like castles (we do).
Tintern Abbey From Chepstow it's a short drive up the Wye valley to Tintern and its famous abbey, as painted by Turner, immortalised in poetry by Wordsworth, and so on. It is a fine abbey, and was mercifully free of special events (unlike our tour of Whitby Abbey which was conducted to a soundtrack of My Boy Lollipop). It is beautiful and melancholy, and I felt sorry for the monks displaced at the time of the Reformation, notwithstanding my reservations about Anglo-Catholic ritual.
Waddesdon Manor We squeezed in one last piece of garden sightseeing and value from our National Trust cards on the way home, and stopped at Waddesdon, the Rothschild chateau outside Aylesbury. Have a careful look at the website, you will see it is branded Rothschild and not National Trust, as is the property. The Rothschild influence and millions are still brought to bear, though it was bequeathed to the National Trust in 1957. The Victorian parterre is a marvel, as is the apiary complete with live exotic birds (not all of them very rare, but a small anxious dove was one of only a hundred left in the world, having been extinct in the wild for thirty years). There is a good rose garden, still with some roses, a splendid tropical mound with cannas, castor oil plants and blood red dahlias, and parkland stretching beyond the formal gardens. It is one of the Trust's most heavily visited properties, and they have just invested in a huge new car park at a discreet distance from the house, linked by shuttle bus for those who don't want to make the fifteen minute walk across the park. A twentieth of the cost of the car park would probably go far towards solving poor Westbury's drainage problems, but the Trust has four and a half million members, and they want their facilities.
Gloucester docks I never knew that Gloucester had docks, not that I thought that it hadn't. Turns out it used to be a busy port, helped by the building of a canal to bypass the last seven or eight winding, treacherous miles of river. A fine collection of mid nineteenth century warehouse buildings survived, and are now mostly turned into flats, though you can get a view of the original floors if you go to the canal museum. It makes a good base for a holiday in that part of the world.
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