We're going home tomorrow, and like Thurber's drawing of a dog with really short legs, which ended up that way because he doodled it on a telephone answering pad and ran out of space when he came to do the legs, I can see that my reviews of the attractions of Gloucestershire and the Welsh borders are going to get shorter and shorter.
Tewkesbury Abbey My father recommended that we go and see Tewkesbury Abbey, and Simon Jenkins gives it five stars and nearly two pages of text in his guide to England's thousand best churches. Its website (I still find it mildly incongruous that churches have websites, but they mostly do) said that it opened until six on Sundays, so we thought we'd have time to stop on the way back from Hidcote and Kiftsgate Court. What the website had made rather less clear, though I'm sure it was on there somewhere, was that choral evensong would start at five fifteen. The bells rang for us as we approached the abbey's squat, golden, Norman tower, which was on the one hand lovely but on the other hand did not bode well, and sure enough as we walked through the door a tall man tried to press service books into our hands, looked agonised when we said we were there for the architecture, and said that we could stay but absolutely mustn't walk around while the service was in progress. I've been to a wedding in Italy* where normal tourist activities continued throughout the ceremony, but they are clearly more fastidious in Tewkesbury.
The abbey is very, very beautiful. It has massive circular pillars and a great vaulted roof with lavish bosses. I indicated to the Systems Administrator that I wished to sit through the service to give me time to look at these things, and hear the seventeenth century organ in action, and get a sense of the building being used for its original purpose of religious worship.
On the last census form I ticked the box marked No Religion, but my lack of religious faith is far more specific than that. I am a Protestant agnostic, while Tewkesbury Abbey is Anglo-Catholic. Seen from my perspective, their service is quite extraordinarily peculiar. There is a theatrical amount of incense swinging, a great deal of genuflecting, and most of the time the huddle of people in robes conducting the ritual don't seem to take any notice of the congregation at all, but busy themselves bowing and kneeling to each other and to points around the altar, putting an extra robe on and taking it off again. If there is a God I suppose he or she might be pleased by all that, but I wouldn't count on it. However, each to their own.
Towards the end of the proceedings my phone, set to vibrate, gave the morse signal of four vibrations, followed by a pause and one more, that told me I'd missed a call and someone had left a message, then did it again. From the way I saw the SA slide phone out of pocket to check it at much the same time I knew they must be trying to get hold of us, which meant it was almost certainly the house sitter and not good news. I checked the message after the service, and it was the house sitter, to say that the black cat had died.
The message said he was willing to bury it if we wanted, so we called home to discuss that, and went back to Gloucester without ever seeing the six chapels around the ambulatory or the tombs.
*As a guest, not as a tourist.
SS Great Britain Onwards and upwards. It was a shame about the cat (the call came on my birthday, just to add to the pathos), but the holiday had to go on, We caught the train to Bristol in order to pay our respects to Brunel's great iron ship. I saw it once before, years ago, when one tiny patch of the hull had been restored and all I can remember was feeling distinctly underwhelmed. The SA had never been. Nowadays you can walk under her, on her and in her. She is remarkable in many ways, launched in 1843, the largest ship of her time, the first to be built out of iron and to have a screw propeller. After suffering storm damage in the southern oceans she ended up in the Falklands, first as a floating warehouse and then derelict, before being brought back to Bristol in a recovery operation that was remarkable in itself.
She sits in a dry dock, so visitors can walk around the hull and see the replica propeller and balanced rudder (equal areas in front and behind the rudder shaft, to minimise the work of steering). The hull below the waterline is enclosed by a roof with a skim of water for visual effect, and an airtight seal so that the atmosphere in the dock can be kept to a maximum of twenty per cent humidity. This prevents the iron plates, which are impregnated with salt after their long decades at sea, from rusting any further. Above the waterline where the salt impregnation is not so severe, the conservators have managed with a combination of cleaning and preservative paint (just as well otherwise she would have to live in a vast bubble).
The interior has been fitted with replica decks, cabins, galley, and everything, including a full sized model engine, the decks have their full complement of furniture including a chicken coop and a cow, and she has been re-rigged to her original design, after a varied history which saw an extra deck being added when she served a stint as an emigrant ship, and the rigging altered when the engine was stripped out and she became a vast windjammer carrying cargo. Walking around her today you can get a pretty good idea of how she would have looked on her maiden voyage to New York in 1845.
Thoroughly recommended to all who like Isambard Kingdom Brunel, or ships, or both.
Alney Island You may have seen aerial shots of this on the TV in 2007. You may not have known it was called Alney Island (the name means alder island island) because your attention will have been on the electricity substation, that was within two inches of being over topped by flood water and cutting off power supplies to the whole of Gloucestershire and a chunk of south Wales. The island is formed by a division of the river Severn, and is one of England's largest river islands. It is now a nature reserve, and you can walk along the banks of the Severn, or take the cycle path across the middle, either of which will lead you to an historic bridge by Thomas Telford.
The walk to the bridge is not honestly the best walk I have ever been on. The riverside path proved difficult to pick up at the Gloucester docks end, so we took the cycle path, which turned out to be flanked by a herd of grazing cows. I am cautious about cows, and this lot had horns. I told myself that they must be generally placid to be allowed loose on a cycle path, and that since they didn't have calves and we didn't have a dog it would be fine, and it was, but I'm still not awfully keen on sharing public spaces with cows. Later on I found a notice that made it sound as though they might have been a rare breed of cow, but that didn't make them any less large, or horned.
Alney Island is a real edge land. I'm sure it is good for wildlife, but the human eye cannot escape the lines of pylons, or the ear the constant roar of traffic from Gloucester's ring roads. We met one cyclist, and one young couple who I thought must have led sadly deprived lives if the best place they could find to go and sit in the grass, her head in his lap, was by a cycle track in a cow infested meadow over-run with pylons and traffic noise, but there you go. The SA professed surprise that there were not more people out, and I suggested it might be because objectively speaking Alney Island was not very nice.
We found the bridge. It sits alongside the new ring road, now unattached to any road itself, marooned in the rough grass. It is a handsome bridge, in an austere way, which is how I always think of Telford. It is called the Over bridge, not because it goes over the river but because Over is the name of the place where it is, and was opened in 1832 after a three year delay, because when it was finished and the wooden supports removed, the stonework slumped by a foot and they had to wait and see if it collapsed any further. It didn't, and remained in use for road traffic until 1974. It is built of Pennant sandstone, quarried in the Forest of Dean, and I am indebted to a useful book on the Landscape of Gloucestershire by Alan Pillbeam and not even Wikipedia for that last piece of information.
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