Just to round off the posts about our weekend in Torquay (before the next weekend actually hits!) here are a few of views of Brixham.
We had been before and the roads are somewhat exciting around the harbour - very narrow streets with at least one hairpin bend that requires you to try your best, then reverse and try again! Single-track streets that are two-way etc. etc. Anyway we chickened out and went on the bus. This made it more relaxing and used less fuel which was a bit hard to come by that weekend anyway!
The harbour is lovely. A typical fishing harbour, with pastel painted cottages lining the hills behind and to the sides of the cove.
This is the unlikely landing point for William, Prince of Orange who led The Glorious Revolution to become King William III and deposed King James II who it was feared would lead Great Britain back to Catholicism. It is called the Glorious Revolution because it was mainly bloodless (though I'd be willing to bet someone got a bloody nose over it somewhere...) However the fact that he turned up from foreign parts with a dirty great army and was suddenly given the crown of England could justify the thought that there had been an invasion. It may have happened to have been a convenient time to be invaded but when he jumped onto the quay at Brixham and gave his speech the locals were probably a bit bemused. He couldn't speak a word of English...
"Woss he say?"
"Dunno - it's all in foreign innit? Oy! You! I'll buy your fish, how much a pound? Talk in English can't you? Ow! Me nose! I thought this was supposed to be a bloodless revolution?!?"
His imposing statue is either less than flattering...or the nose has fallen off at some point. William III of England was the son of Dutch ruler William II of Orange and Princess Mary of Orange, who was the daughter of King Charles I of England. In an effort to totally confuse readers William III (not William II) went on to marry Mary (not Mary his Mum) but Mary, his fifteen year old cousin, daughter of his Uncle James, the Duke of York. They ruled England jointly as King William III and Queen Mary II (the first Mary being Henry VIII's daughter, Bloody Mary).
Fran decided to go for a look around the shops whilst I walked around the harbour taking the odd (sometimes very odd) photo and reflecting a little on royal inbreeding which just a decade or so later would lead to the most severe case of Habsburg Chin in the person of King Charles II of Spain whose ancestors had spent eight generations in happy incestual relationships. Keep it in the family then... There was a notably unmodern ship in the harbour, so I went to have a nosy.
It was a replica of Francis Drake's ship, the Golden Hind, in which he sailed around the world. (I mean in the first one...not the replica.) In fact there's another replica in London and they look nothing like each other. This is possibly because it's hard to build a replica when we haven't a clue what the boat looked like. What we do know are the measurements of it and the fact that it is highly likely that there was a pointy bit at the front, a window or two at the back and a deer's head stuck on it somewhere as otherwise it would have been called something else.
"'Ere - wossat on 'is boat?"
"Aw no... it's Bambi's mam, ain't it?"
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