Tuesday 29 August 2023. We have no excursion today as it's Andrew's day off so we have a free day in Sidmouth.
We walk (slowly!) up the hill to Connaught Gardens. These were developed from a cottage garden of the 19th century and were bought and developed by the local authority following the death of the own in the 1930s. The gardens were opened by the Duke of Connaught, the third son of Queen Victoria in 1934, by which time he was in his 80s.
I sat and sketched the view from the western end of the gardens where a set of white-painted steps, known as Jacob's Ladder, reach down to the beach far below. It is a shingle beach but traces of sand can be seen just at the edge of the sea. A teenaged girl was jogging up the stairs, along past my bench and then down the cliff path to repeat her circuit. "Wow, that's really cool!" she said. And proudly I suppose it must be if I can impress teenaged girls at my age...
A few spots of rain stirred us into walking back down the hill into town. We had seen a sign for a toy museum and went to have a look. I used to have one of these Merit games as a very young boy. I know I'm bigger now but even so I was surprised at just how small it was! It worked by magnets on the end of a plastic concertina scissor contraption like a trellis attached to the bottom of the lever and a fixed point somewhere between the lever and the playfield at the bottom of the box. This meant that moving the lever would magnify the movement of the magnet.
We came out of the museum back into rain and went to look for somewhere to eat. We found a little cafe in a courtyard where we have eaten before. It had obviously changed hands as there was a distinctly Asian look to the decorations, very exotic! We had a scone with jam and clotted cream each - utterly gorgeous. By the time we came out it was fine again and we walked down to the seafront and along to the cliffs at the eastern side of the Promenade, turning in to walk along the River Sid.
The weir. The path diverted through a small park onto the streets of Sidmouth.
The Swan Inn has stood here since around 1770 and is described as a traditional back street pub.
We turned left past the pub and thus came to one of the town's main shopping streets. Unable to drink alcohol any more because of the pesky medicals, we did the next best thing and went into the Old Ship Inn, now a Costa Coffee but I can remember it being open as a public house.
It dates from the 1300s (the Blue Placque says "1400s") and has known smugglers, rowdyism, so many unwashed bodies that the street outside stank so much it was just about a no-go area and rumours of a penny hang room upstairs - a room with a rope tied taut from wall to wall over which people could hang for a penny to go to sleep - and a report that someone once tried to enter with a dancing bear which caused great consternation amongst the customers!
A newspaper report of 1859 tells of the landlord being summonsed to court after a constable had visited one night to find 30 men, women and boys in the tap room with a man playing a fiddle and "girls of bad character" and people dancing. The fiddling (I'm thinking of the chap with the fiddle but...) and dancing went on until the early hours of the morning and the landlord was summonsed to appear in court. Apparently despite all these people on the premises the poor constable could produce no evidence of complaints or witnesses and the landlord got away with a fine of just two pounds, including costs!
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