Thursday 22 Feb 1996. We left Poole and drove to Weymouth where the sun came out for a while to cheer us up.
By the time we got to Weymouth it was dinnertime and the town was surprisingly crowded. We even had to queue to park the car. The cafe we had visited on a previous visit was full and we ended up with a somewhat disappointing sandwich in a dockside pub that was crammed full to bursting.
Once twin towns of Weymouth and Melcombe Regis, to either side of Weymouth Harbour, they were rivals for the use of the harbour to such an extent that Queen Elizabeth I got so tired of the steady streams of complaints and petitions by one against the other, she united them as a single borough through an Act of Parliament in 1571. Despite Melcombe Regis being the main centre, the new borough became known as Weymouth. In the 18th century the town was patronised by King George III. There is a statue of him in the town and at Osmington, four miles to the north east, is a chalk cut hill figure of the king riding a horse. Perhaps unfortunately for the town, it shows the king riding away from Weymouth.
The harbour was a major embarkation point for some half million Allied troops to board for the beaches of Normandy on D-Day in World War II. At the time we visited it was the port for ferry crossings to the Channel Isles.
Havelet is a roll-on roll-off car ferry. She started life as the Cornouailles with Brittany Ferries in 1977 and later transferred to British Channel Islands Ferries as Havelet operating for them between 1989 and 2000 between Weymouth (later Poole) and the Channel Islands. A bit unstable, she had aft sponsons added in 1990 at which time her rear deck was extended towards the stern, making a longer ship. In 1992 travelling out of Cork and bound for Roscoff in Brittany, she was struck by a large wave and in danger of sinking, but managed to right herself and return to Cork for repairs and reports. The only damage found was to the cars she was carrying. In 1994 she transferred to Condor travelling between Weymouth and the Channel Islands in which role she is pictured. Subsequently she was sold to Prekookeanska Plovidbla, the parent company of Montenegro Lines in 2000 and operated between Bar and Bari being renamed Sveti Stefan before being scrapped in 2013.
The sunshine was somewhat illusory - the cold drove us back to the car and the car drove us seven miles to a hill just outside the county town of Dorchester. Maiden Castle is one of the largest and certainly one of the most impressive iron age hill forts in England. Despite a complex system of zig-zag paths that attackers had to negotiate to reach the gates whilst the defenders threw all sorts of nasties at them, the Romans succeeded in storming the place after bombarding it with rocks with their siege engines.
It was windy and bitterly cold. Miss Franny opted to stay in the car whilst I trudged uphill, bent almost double against the wind and cold. I found the ramparts guarded now as they would have been when the fort was still inhabited - by companies of highly trained 'battle sheep', more commonly known as 'battering rams'.
Get back in the car you silly old fool! Hey - less of the old. I was only a silly middle aged fool then...
No comments:
Post a Comment
All comments must be passed by moderator before appearing on this post.