Axbridge Tadpoles

Friday 15 July 2005. I've been giving a day's workshop in Weston-Super-Mare and am heading homeward. Having promised Miss Franny that I'd try to get some clotted cream I stop off in Axbridge just around 5 o' clock and buy some tubs.

King John's Hunting Lodge was built for a wool-merchant's house around the year 1460, just a tad after King John's death in 1216... At one time in its history part of the building served as the King's Head pub. In a time before the vast proportion of the public became literate, pubs had signs to denote their name. The sculpture of the King's Head on the corner of the building is a replica, but the original according to Wikipedia is still kept inside. The building is now a museum.

The town, named for a bridge over the River Axe, has a long history, being listed in a contemporary Anglo Saxon document as one of King Alfred's burghs.

The church of St John the Baptist is 13th century and whilst built mainly of limestone, the steps are a conglomerate commonly known as pudding stone where rounded pebbles of various colours have been cemented together into large blocks or faces of stone as a natural process by a contrasting finer-grain cement or binding.

Just around the corner from the foot of the church steps are the town wells. Curious to see if they were still fed by spring water, I went for a closer look...

Oh yes, very appetising. The tadpoles in particular seemed to be thriving! I was lucky in that the one and only grocery shop had a couple of tubs of clotted cream left. It was 5:30pm and I had a five or 6 hour journey home. It was scorching, but in the car it was freezing as I had to have the aircon on full to keep the clotted cream refridgerated!

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Old Photos Jumble

Here's a bit of a mixture for you! Over the past few days there's loads of old photos gone through the scanner and many of them were one-offs or have specially interesting stories to them.

The first one was taken in 1986 I think. Blackpool Zoo orang utan Azimat had a baby daughter called Victoria. Vicky is now the grand old mother of the orang utans at Blackpool and has a glorious smile for visitors - she was trained to show her teeth as she had dental problems when young!

From the same year, here is the old Manxman. As the name suggests she was the ferry to the Isle of Man and as such was featured in one of George Formby's most famous films. It was No Limit made in 1933 and featuring the Isle of Man TT races. George played George Shuttleworth who crashed his bike but was given the chance to ride for a team and won not only the race but the girl - Florence Desmond who apparently couldn't stand him... or perhaps the way his missus stood by with a look of wrath and a tape measure every time they had to film a screen kiss!

The Manxman is shown in Preston Docks where for several years she served time as a nightclub. Wonder whether the ghost of George used to sing "Riding In The TT Races" in the main bar...?

I could almost have left this one uncaptioned and asked you to tell me what it was!

It is in fact the view down the toilet of Skipton Castle. As you can see, they preferred a long drop! The bar across guards against anyone trying to climb up the toilet to break into the castle during a seige. Not a nice job, but the tactic worked well and was a tried and tested way of sneaking into castles! Phew... what's that smell?!?

And lastly, this is Axbridge near Cheddar in Somerset. A few of us had gone down to Blagdon for a computer system course and we stayed at one of two pub/hotels in the village.

The date was 4 July 1990. Ring any bells? We sat in the bar watching England being knocked out of the FIFA World Cup in the semi final. Gazza cried and my mate Pete and I took our pints and sat in a deserted but very warm square until I decided to get the camera and take some photos.

Talking of ringing bells, our hotel was right next door to the church and the clock tower kept striking every quarter hour until two o'clock in the morning then started again at six!!!

A Glass of Tadpoles?

There's a gorgeous little village close to Cheddar Gorge in Somerset. Axbridge village centre is in the form of a market square - or market triangle to be more truthful, around which is gathered a couple of pubs, one or two shops, King John's Hunting Lodge and the church, looming over the rest from its perch on a hill.

By the church wall is this curious feature - the old village well where in times as yet untapped (sorry!) the villagers went for water. Very few old wells still exist in such good condition and I couldn't resist going for a closer look.

Yes, well... I put my water bottle back in the car unfilled... I suspect the village folks would have kept it a little cleaner and free from tadpoles when the wells were in daily use, but I couldn't help remembering the bit in the film Back to the Future III where Marty is offered a glass of water which turns out to be slightly more brown and cloudy than he was expecting! We take water very much for granted these days when we can just turn a tap in our kitchen and cool, clear, decontaminated water flows on demand. The good old days? I don't think so!!!