South of Bournville and a few miles west of Stratford and less than a mile from the River Avon, in the peaceful Warwickshire countryside, lies the little village of Binton. It is just a few houses (very nice ones, though!), farms and a church. There is no longer a pub and no railway station, shop or Post Office. The church is Victorian and dedicated to St Peter.
This quiet village seems an age away from the icy cold blasts of the Antarctic continent. Nevertheless here in Binton’s satisfying little church is a further link with a theme that seems to crop again and again during this centenary year of Captain Scott’s ill-fated expedition. This village was one of the last places visited by Scott before he set out for the Antarctic. The reason was that his brother-in-law, the Rev Lloyd Bruce, was rector of the parish.
My friend had discovered that the church contained a set of windows designed and manufactured by Charles Eamer Kempe in memory of the Expedition and illustrating stages of the journey.
There’s a small exhibition telling the Scott story and illustrated with photographs, commemorative stamps and other memorabilia.
My friend discovered the existence of the memorial window so near to Stratford in John Timpson’s ‘Timpson’s England : a look beyond the obvious’. She, like me, is always out to discover hidden gems and the unusual whenever she travels around Britain and abroad.
On Friday I accompanied a friend on a trip down Memory Lane. We drove down to Birmingham to visit the Bournville area which surrounds the Cadbury’s chocolate factory and where the world famous Cadbury World Experience is located.
Selly Manor
Minworth Greaves
Our first port of call was Selly Manor and Minworth Greaves. These are two ancient buildings that were moved to their present site by George Cadbury in 1907 (SM) and Laurence Cadbury in 1932 (MG) and now operate as a museum and wedding/events venue. Selly Manor, the museum, appears to lay on lots of activities for children both during the school term and during the holidays. In the house there are many objects that may be touched. Hands-on history lessons. I’m sure children had made these heavenly-smelling pomanders!
Sweet-smelling pomanders
Something for everyone!
Minworth Greaves, thought to be 750 years old, was saved from demolition in 1932 and transported from Sutton Coldfield to its present site by Laurence Cadbury. It serves as the visitor centre (tickets, shop) for the museum and may be hired as a super venue for weddings and suchlike ceremonies.
The two buildings are surrounded by well-tended gardens of herbs and flowers and box hedges and shrubs.
My friend lived and grew up in Bournville and after visiting the museum she took me took a walk around the planned suburb and we inspected a number of other landmarks in local area.
Belmont was the former home of two interesting people. During the 18th century it was the home of Mrs Eleanor Coade the lady who devised a formula to mass produce architectural embellishments and statuary of the highest quality which she named ‘Coade stone’. And between 1968 and 2005 it was the home of novelist John Fowles and it was here that he finished his most famous work “The French Lieutenant’s Woman”. Lyme Regis is the setting for the book. It was through his generosity that Belmont was left to the Landmark Trust. The Trust’s website explains why further funds are needed to restore the house and make it habitable for future holiday lets through this unique organisation:
“Belmont stands empty, decaying and at risk and urgently needs funds to enable its restoration. The Grade II* house is a fine, early example of a maritime villa, a new building type that sprang up in the second half of the 18th century with the rising popularity of seaside holidays. Today the fabric of the building is deteriorating, the parapet is sagging, there are rotten wall plates and lintels, the stone skin is coming away and water is trapped behind impermeable cement render.”
Lyme Regis is a delightful and interesting little seaside town on the Dorset coast. Each year for the past five years I have spent a week at nearby Branscombe in Devon and on each occasion I have visited Lyme at least twice. On three occasions I’ve been fossil hunting (without any luck!) for Lyme lies within the World Heritage Site Jurassic Coast.
Lyme has a promenade and sandy and pebbly beaches. You can tell which is the sandy one by the numbers of people crammed into the small area where huge amounts of sand were imported from Normandy. A lot of effort; but it has made a huge difference. I’ve never actually managed to get onto the beach as there is always so much more of interest to me. There’s a High Street crammed with shops – many of them small and individual and very many of them selling or in some other way connected with the fossils that are Lyme’s trademark.
The Philpot Museum is well worth a visit, or several. Fossil Hunts are organised from the Museum. Lyme Regis has a colourful little harbour/marina protected from the sea by the famous Cobb – mentioned in Jane Austen’s ‘Persuasion‘ and featured in the film of Fowles’ ‘French Lieutenant’s Woman’. By the Cobb is the fascinating Marine Aquarium. There is good food to be had from the small cafes along the promenade, to the Town Bakery, to Hix Oyster and Fish House.
Lyme Regis : The quintessential seaside resort for literature lovers everywhere – Jane Austen and Beatrix Potter visited it. John Fowles lived in it.
Belmont, Lyme Regis : “Mrs Coade made it; John Fowles loved it. Now it must be saved.”
Yesterday I heard on the national BBC Radio 4 news that there was to be the unveiling of a plaque in memory of Captain Lawrence Oates in Meanwood Park in Leeds.
My interest was piqued as many years ago I visited Selborne in Hampshire where the Lawrence Oates Museum is located in the attic area of Gilbert White’s The Wakes.
As I work in the library on Saturdays I was unable to attend the unveiling but I went along today – parking nearby at Waitrose – and visited the park to view, along with many other visitors, the plaque and information boards.
Lawrence Oates’ connection with the Meanwood area of Leeds has long been commemorated by a stone plaque on the gatepost of Holy Trinity church and there’s a brass plaque in the Leeds Parish Church, which I have yet to see.
From the Oates Collection website :
“Captain Lawrence Oates (1880 – 1912) Captain Lawrence Oates is best remembered as the brave Antarctic hero who was chosen to be part of Captain Robert Scott’s team to undertake the epic journey of discovery to the South Pole 1911-12. The ill-fated expedition turned into a race for the pole when the explorers learnt of the presence of the Norwegian team led by Admundsen. Scott’s team suffered inadequate food supplies, severe weather conditions and failing health so Oates sacrificed his life in the hope of saving his comrades, leaving the tent in a terrible blizzard with the famous last words “I am just going outside and may be some time.” His body has never been found.”
Did you read The Jackdaw of Rheims at school? We did. And it all came back to me last Monday when I visited my friend Sarah’s family in Kent. Sadly, Sarah died in November 2008. We’d known each other since our first days at university in 1970 and met up several times a year ever since. Sarah’s parents and other family live near Canterbury in Kent and one of my reasons for travelling down there for a birthday treat was to visit them and talk with them about Sarah and our friendship.
It was the snowiest day of the winter but I was not deterred from my journey. Luckily Sarah’s brother was clearing snow at his parents’ home and kindly turned my car round in the drive. After my initial welcome Andrew took me in his steadfast farm Landrover to see the Ginko tree that had been planted in Sarah’s memory and on to the area of woodland on the farm where her ashes had been scattered.
After a few moments’ quiet contemplation Andrew offered to take me to visit his own home and meet his wife Sue. Tappington Hall near Denton is a lovely old house tucked away down a farm track a few miles from his parents’ place. Sue and Andrew offer bed and breakfast on an informal arrangement. They were expecting two Canadians that evening and hoping that they would find it warm enough. I think Canadians are probably used to snowy weather!
Of great interest to me was the fact that Tappington Hall was the former home of The Reverend Richard Harris Barham (1788-1845) alias Thomas Ingoldsby of Tappington Everard in Kent. Sue and Andrew have a vast book collection which includes many versions of Barham’s Ingoldsby Legends. Unbeknown to me until I opened one of the books was that The Jackdaw of Rheims poem is one of these Legends.
Barham was ordained in 1813 appointed to the parish of Westwell in Kent and later to the living of Snargate and Warehorn, on Romney Marsh. He and his wife and children later moved to London where he was appointed to a post at St Pauls although he kept his Romney Marsh living as well.
His writing and journalism took off when he got to London and he was published in several periodicals including Blackwoods and Bentley’s Miscellany. He seems to have enjoyed mixing in literary circles in London, knew Charles Dickens and Richard Bentley and was a founder member of the Garrick Club (1832). Probably he is best known for
” … his Ingoldsby Legends, which began to appear in 1837 in Bentley’s Miscellany. Under the guise of Thomas Ingoldsby of Tappington Everard in Kent, Barham ‘discovered’ old documents which provided the basis for his tales. In effect, most of these are reworkings of other narrative sources, from medieval chronicles to Kentish legends and Sir Walter Scott. The mixture of crime and the supernatural, in both verse and prose, is given a comic and grotesque dimension, immediately appealing to Barham’s readers.”
Extracted from : The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
The Legends passed through very many editions some with illustrations by such artists as Tenniel, Cruikshank, and Rackham and Sue kindly showed me several of these. Many of the editions were best sellers in their day.
On the Sunday night before my visit to Barham and Tappington I stayed at a B&B between Sittingbourne and Faversham. I was delighted to find a selection of Persephone Books beside my bed at Dadmans – even though I had read them all.
A further selection of Kentish books made up the library at Obriss Farm. There is no shortage of reading materials at Landmarks.
Members of my online reading group are scattered far and wide around the world. I have been lucky enough to meet many of them here in the UK and also when I’ve been on holiday abroad. My nearest group ‘neighbour’ lives in Carlisle about 100 miles away and luckily we have the famous Leeds-Settle-Carlisle line to assist us in our efforts to meet up every so often. On Thursday I made the trip north. As you can imagine it’s a full day trip – but well worth it just to visit Carlisle but the added bonus of meeting up with a friend makes it doubly so. I was lucky in other respects as well. The weather could not have been better, blue skies and sunshine showed the scenery at its best – you could even see snow on the Lakeland peaks in the distance.
All the trains ran to time, although on parts of the journey the L-S-C train moves very slowly. During all this time with just the odd glance out of the window I was engaged reading Claire Tomalin’s ‘Dickens: a life”.
We met up at the station and went straight for tea/coffee at John Watt’s. Watt’s is primarily a Coffee Shop but I was pleased to note that they serve loose tea by the pot. Having just checked the website again I notice that they are tea blenders as well as coffee roasters. The over riding smell in the shop/cafe is roasting coffee and although I don’t drink it I have no objection at all to the smell. Teas and coffees are only half the game – they sell every kind of tea and coffee requisite accessory imaginable plus high class chocolates of all kinds. I couldn’t resist asking where the Christmas decorations had been hung – there didn’t appear to be any free space at all.
We visited two bookshops. Handily placed was The Oxfam Bookshop (most towns have one now) just two doors down from Watt’s. And then we moved on to Carlisle’s piece de resistance for bibliophiles The Bookcase. It’s a many-roomed shop filled to overflowing with books. The owners are up to date with secondhand book prices but we found lots of the old orange Penguins in pretty good to excellent condition for just a couple of pounds each. I bought an unread copy of Monica Dickens’ ‘My Turn to Make the Tea’. (The copy on the far left of the picture.)
My friend and her husband have not long lived in Cumbria. They moved over from Northumberland in 2010. I was taken back to their new home for a lovely lunch and inspection of house and garden. Suddenly it was time to head to the nearby quaint old station at Armathwaite where we said our ‘Goodbyes’ and I headed back to Leeds arriving with just one remaining chapter of the life to read.
Transferring stuff from one year’s diary to the next’s made me think I might make a note here on an event/category from each month of 2011 up to my starting this blogging lark in August. One event with one picture is quite a tough call – especially in the summer months – but I will give it a go.
January 2011 : Landmarking with Milady
The year started well with my usual London Landmarking Trip but this January I was fortunate enough to get a double dose of London Landmarks. I stayed in the 45A Cloth Fair property for 3 nights and visited friends at the Hampton Court Georgian House on one of the days. There is so much to see and do at Hampton Court that we have booked our January 2013 London stay at Fish Court in order to experience more. If you stay there is no extra charge for visiting the Palace. On the other day at Cloth Fair we took tea at the recently totally renovated Savoy Hotel – an out-of-this-world experience from the moment your carriage arrives to the moment you are driven away.
February 2011 : Milady gets culture
An early wet and windy two night excursion to Cambridge led to the wonderful discovery of Kettles Yard. Our trip was planned around a visit to The Scott-Polar Research Institute whose museum had just re-opened after extensive renovation work. But interesting as it was to see the exhibits at the SPRI the highlight of my visit was Kettle’s Yard. We even went there twice. On the Thursday afternoon of our arrival we took a walk from the hotel and ended up at the house that is Kettles Yard. It is like walking into someone’s home – you ring the doorbell and are welcomed, photography is no problem, you may sit and look at the books and the place is crammed full of art and artefacts of what I suppose is called the modern era. It was on this visit that we heard about the Friday Lunchtime Concerts so from the SPRI we headed back to KY and joined a winding queue of keen concert-goers and enjoyed with them a chamber group of student musicians.
March 2011 : Milady gets Culture
Photograph: Robert Workman
At the end of March Out of Joint brought their play “A Dish of Tea with Dr Johnson” to The Carriageworks in Leeds. I’d read quite a bit a bit about Dr Samuel Johnson and visited his house in Gough Square in London so was intrigued to see this well-reviewed piece. I was not disappointed. It is quite short, full of fun but with some pathos and there is also the most wonderful dog actor who must have been standing in for Johnson’s cat, Hodge. I would have loved to have seen the performance actually at Dictionary Johnson’s House but this was the next best thing. Highly recommended although I think the tour is finished now.
April 2011 : Landmarking with Milady
Friday 29th April 2011 must have seen the high point of the year in Britain – The Royal Wedding of HRH Prince William and Miss Catherine Middleton. That very day I had booked (long before the wedding date was announced) to spend the May Day Holiday Weekend in France at Gif-Sur-Yvette the former weekend home of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor just outside Paris and now managed as a holiday let by The Landmark Trust. I was visited there on one of the days by my good friend MN and we spent a literary day visiting Alexandre Dumas’ The Chateau of Monte Cristo at Port-Marly and La Maison Litteraire de Victor Hugo at Bievres, Île de France. It was such a good trip that we’ve booked to go back again next May so I’ll be posting in more detail then.
May 2011 : Milady Visits
Window shopping at Didier Ludot in the Jardin du Palais Royale
On 12th May the Optimist celebrated a special birthday! And on that very day we were booked to travel – in style, I might add – by Eurostar train from Yorkshire to Paris to attend our nephew’s wedding in Vincennes, just outside Paris, on the Saturday. What a fab weekend we had – lovely hotel quiet but right in the centre of Paris, lovely weather, except that it rained on the Sunday as we were leaving, excellent company and good food and wine with some “flanez” and pavement cafes thrown in for good measure.
June 2011 : Milady Reads and Visits
In Spring 2011 Persephone Books published a reprint of Adam Fergusson’s “The Sack of Bath”. On June 16th there was an Afternoon of Walks in Bath led by Caroline Kay, of the Bath Preservation Trust, and Adam Fergusson. We met at The Circus cafe for a lovely two course lunch and were then taken on a walking tour to view the effects of City planning policy on Bath during the 1960s. The walk ended at The Museum of the Building of Bath where we were served tea and cakes. But before all those pleasures I had the great pleasure of spending the morning with my online reading group friend Carol who lives in Bath and took time out to show me all the bookish delights of that city – of which there are very many. It was one of those days where looking back it seems impossible to have fitted so much into a mere 7 hours.
July 2011 : Milady Steps Out
On 30th June I set out with my sister on my first long distance walking trail – Wild Edric’s Way in Shropshire. The ‘holiday’ was organised by a local company with the delightful name of Wheely Wonderful Cycling Holidays which deals mainly in cycling holidays but with some walking tours also on their books. I say ‘holiday’ but at times it was jolly hard work! We walked from the Stiperstones to Ludlow over 3.5 days. Approximately 40 miles was covered in total with 4 overnight stops. For the most part it followed the route of The Shropshire Way which coincided also with The Kerry Ridgeway and Offa’s Dyke National Trail. There were several places of interest on the route – churches at More, Churchtown and Ludlow and castles at Clun, Stokesay and Ludlow. We met other walkers and some lovely B&B owners along the way. I was glad to have done it and it felt like quite an achievement but I was not sure whether I wished to repeat the experience. However, the further away it has become the more I think maybe I would indeed like to do another such walk in the future.
Each year I spend a special day with a friend during the run up to Christmas. In the past we’ve gone on a hike and had a lunch or combined with something cultural. Last year we hiked along the River Wharfe and ended up with lunch at The Devonshire Fell Hotel at Burnsall. In previous years we’ve been to The Yorkshire Sculpture Park where it’s possible to walk for a few miles before taking lunch in their lovely light and airy first floor restaurant. This year was no exception but instead of the walk/hike part we took the train to Manchester and visited The Manchester Art Gallery which is currently showing a Ford Madox Brown exhibition; subtitled “Pre-Raphaelite Pioneer”. Earlier this year I met with friends for an Art Fund visit to the city which included a tour of The John Rylands Library and should have included a visit to the Ford Madox Brown murals in Manchester Town Hall. However another event took precedence over ours and we had to make do with a ‘Behind the Scenes’ tour of the town hall.
During the 1990s I did a course in Victorian Studies which included a Victorian Art module. I can’t say that I love the Pre-Raphaelites but I did find the study of nineteenth century paintings interesting because they are laden with symbolism. Ford Madox Brown (1821-1893) was never a member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood but he did influence them through his ‘primitive simplicity’ style of the age before Raphael.
Emma Hill (Study for The Last of England) 1852.
Ford Madox Brown produced a prodigious amount of work in many forms and media. There are some beautiful sketches and drawings and several very famous paintings many of which are from the Gallery’s own collections, from the University of Manchester’s Whitworth Gallery and Birmingham Art Gallery. The most famous and featured here are Work and The Last of England (above).
The exhibition is divided into themes around FMB’s life and work including: The Artist and His Family, The Early Period, The Change of Direction, The Landscape Painter and The Portrait Painter. Perhaps of most interest to me was The Storyteller theme where the drawings and paintings depict characters from literature as in his King Lear series of drawings and his paintings of the origins of literature – Geoffrey Chaucer reading the ‘Legend of Custance’ to Edward III and his Court and Wycliffe Reading his Translation of the Bible. There are illustrations from the works of Lord Byron; significantly his Manfred on the Jungfrau and from Victor Hugo’s poem ‘A un passant’ – The traveller.
On our way out of the gallery we caught sight of a new Grayson Perry exhibit so looks like I may be making a trip back to Manchester in the new year. Who knows?
And as we left the gallery the heavens opened and we made a mad dash for the tapas bar – Evuna – a couple of streets away where our weather woes were soon forgotten!
On our way home though we did express our relief to each other that we had chosen to spend our day in a gallery rather than on the hills – we got wet enough without!
I’m really looking forward to reading this book. But it won’t be until the new year as I have a number of others to get through before I start on Lucy Worsley‘s ‘Cavalier: a story of chivalry, passion and great houses‘. I heard Ms Worsley speak at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in August this year. But even before that I was a fan of her ‘If Walls Could Talk’ shown on BBC television in the spring. In this fab programme the lovely Lucy trots around our modern day homes pointing out all the historical details and stories of the evolution of our bedrooms, living rooms, bathrooms and kitchens from the earliest times until the present day. She even volunteered to dress up and play various roles in order to represent to us the differences between previous generations and our own.
For many years Lucy Worsley (she is now Chief Curator of The Historic Royal Palaces) was based at Bolsover Castle in Derbyshire and over ten years she researched the story of William Cavendish and his family and the result is ‘Cavalier’.
Bolsover Castle itself isn’t really that far away from me – about 60miles south straight down the M1 motorway.
“First, forget the idea of castle. Seen from the M1 Bolsover may look like a fortress but it is rather a fairytale palace on a hill” says Simon Jenkins in one of my ‘bibles’ “England’s thousand best houses“. As you can see we chose a very atmospheric day to take a trip to Bolsover and give it the once over. The fog should have lifted but try as it might the sun just could not get through all day.
The Riding House from the Shoeing House – complete with cardboard cavalier!
After the obligatory cup of tea in a very nicely appointed cafe and a quick glance round the English Heritage gift shop we switched on our audio guides and made our way falteringly towards the castle itself, stopping every so often to listen to the character actors and narrator tell us more about Bolsover and its creator and inhabitants. Once through the huge entrance gate (or tradesman’s entrance as it was called on the audio guide) you’re in an impressive courtyard.
The Riding House
The first building on the left is called The Riding House Range and it contains “the finest surviving example in England of this rare, specialised type of building” (Bolsover Castle guidebook, also written by Lucy Worsley). Like the famous act by the white stallions of the Spanish Riding School in Vienna this huge room was for training horses in the art of “manege” (circling, leaping, jumping). William Cavendish, 1593-1676) was the cavalier responsible for the greatest part of the building and development of the site at Bolsover. He had two obsessions – women and horses – and Bolsover was his “pleasure dome”.
The great oak roof of the Riding House
In the stables is an exhibition about the history of Bolsover and its place in English history, an excellent 15 min. video about The Little Castle and even a large model of it. We seemed to gain enough information from this room to make the audio guides superfluous.
Walk-in model of the Little Castle in the Stable
A walk around the Terrace Range, (with all the usual appointments of chambers and kitchens etc) and from where we should have had (but for the persistent fog) a long-ranging view over the valley and down towards nearby Hardwick Hall, lead us quickly to the romantic Little Castle itself.
Terrace Range and approach to The Little Castle
Here we saw for ourselves the incredibly preserved and restored artwork: the Pillar Parlour, the Star Chamber, the Marble Closet, the Bedchamber, Heaven and Elysium. This final chamber with elaborately decorated panelling depicting the heaven of the gods and goddesses of ancient Greece appropriately overlooks the garden and its Fountain of Venus.
Bolsover, I’ll be back on a sunny day to walk the terrace, admire the view, picnic in the gardens and relax in full view of your Venus fountain!
We have a print hanging on our sitting room wall called River Dart by Terence Millington.
The River Dart at Holne
Devon is one of our favourite holiday destinations and this week we’re staying near the lovely Stannary town of Ashburton. Our cottage is on an estate that borders the beautiful River Dart. There’s a path from our cottage that takes you right down to the swift-flowing river which borders the Holne Chase estate.
The River Dart near New Bridge
This 42 mile long river rises as 2 branches – East and West Dart – in the Okehampton area of Dartmoor. The two branches join on Dartmoor at Dartmeet and from then on the single river slips past our cottage ‘home’, flows swiftly down under Holne Bridge and then runs parallel with the road and the railway line towards Totnes, from where for the final 8 miles the river is navigable.
At Steamer Quay, Totnes
It was at Totnes, on a beautiful November morning, that I boarded the Dart Venturer for a gentle cruise down the river to Dartmouth.
Sharpham Vineyard
Not far from Totnes is the Sharpham Estate, an award-winning vineyard that hugs the right-hand bank of the river for about two and a half miles.
We passed three villages: Duncannon, Stoke Gabriel and Dittisham, Agatha Christie’s former home Greenway (above) and Sir Walter Raleigh’s boat-house. As the boat glided through the still waters it was fascinating to look out for wildlife along the banks – we even spotted a seal bobbing in the water. Bird life included egrets, herons, swans, a cormorant, a buzzard and masses of Canada geese.
As we neared Dartmouth (and its opposite neighbour, Kingswear) the river broadens and we watched naval cadets (above) from the nearby Britannia Royal Naval College for Officer Training (below),
and saw empty and forlorn looking boat building yards that had supplied the nation with over 400 craft during the Second World War. Have a hanky ready if you want to watch the following video about the demise of Philip’s.
At Dartmouth we disembarked from the cruise an hour and a quarter later at the only railway station in Britain that has never been served by a railway line. It was built in anticipation of the railway reaching the town but local efforts to prevent it crossing the Dart were successful and in the end the line had to terminate at Kingswear.
miladysboudoir 
