Wookey Hole and Cheddar Gorge

Friday 23 February 1996. It's the last day of our holiday and we are heading for home today.

On the way north though, we'll stop a couple of times in Somerset. Our first stop is at Wookey Hole, where there is a large cave system that you can go through and also a fine collection of old amusement penny slot machines. The guide showing us around the caves was very funny. The fairground museum had some old roundabout or carousel carved animal figures.

The carvings included this carved but unpainted horse's head.

Then it was back to childhood with a flood of nostalgic recognition as we entered a couple of rooms filled with old penny slots. We bought a handful of big old copper pennies and lost ourselves in the 1950s and 60s, playing these machines which filled every seaside arcade before electrics started to replace mechanics.

You just can't beat a good old whirring sound and then the CHUNK-CHUNK-CHUNK as the reels of a one-armed bandit came to a stop, one after the other. The Beromat was a German-made machine and a staple of arcades for many years. And look! I won tuppence for a cherry on the first reel!

Then there were the games where an eye for the movement of the ball, a bit of skill and co-ordination, and a grasp of the Laws of Physics helped you win... or otherwise... Allwins, Payramid (featured here) and other machines where your pennies dropped and bounced off a series of pins whilst you tried to get one into a winning cup or slot.

Our pennies ran out - when was it ever any different? So we got back in the car, resigned to the fact that our holiday had come to an end. Or had it? "Come on, we'll drive down Cheddar Gorge and head that way towards the motorway."

It was deserted. And it was once again well below freezing point. We stopped - the only car in sight - and looked briefly into the cave opening but without being in the slightest bit tempted to go in to explore it. Those caves run for miles and can flood too, if water manages to stay in liquid form...

I'm not sure about inside the cave, but outside it was far too cold even for water to run down the cliff face and be able to reach the ground!

Return to England South Coast, 1996 Index Page

A Weekend in Somerset, 23-25 May 2015

A few articles set around a weekend visit to Somerset during which we met up with old friends not seen for some time and visit Glastonbury, Cheddar and Wells.

Click each picture for the associated article. A link at the end of each article will bring you back to this index.

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Miss Franny's Fabulous Fridge Magnets

The last time I showed some of Miss Franny's fridge magnet collection was way back in July. This time I show some of the UK places commemorated on the bits of plastic that disguise our fridge.

This one covers the entire county of Somerset and was bought this year when we spent a long weekend with friends near Wells.

Whilst I'm not going to put up photos of every place mentioned on it - actually there are some places we haven't been yet on it - I'll cover the top right and the one below it. We've been to Cheddar lots of times taking photos of the same unchanging scene every time. The thing that changes is the style of cars in the car parks, so... guess the year!

Weston-Super-Mare was a regular holiday destination place during my early teens. We first went in 1967 but it's a while since we stayed there. I think the last time I visited was in June 2004 whilst on the road for work and whilst it was a June evening, it was cold and dull so that I remember the weather more than the town.

This one is for a very specific place. The British Museum in London is a fascinating place to wander round and anyone with an interest in history and cultures will find time going very fast indeed when you are in there.

I remember it with the open courtyard, but for quite a while now it has been roofed with glass. This looks even more spectacular from outside provided you can view it from a vantage point such as the 17th floor of the Centre Point building.

The King Arthur magnet could have come from any corner of England, or from the centre of it. So many places claim to be the site of his birth, his battles, his city of Camelot...

I even wrote my own version a few years ago which is available for Kindle e-readers.

The fridge magnet came from Tintagel in Cornwall, where the famous castle remains are a few hundred years after the historical Arthur was supposed to have lived. Tintagel features in my book as the home of Merlin.

A 3D sculpted fridge magnet from the Prince Regent's opulent and exotic Royal Pavilion at Brighton. A real mix of styles it comes across as an Indian palace from outside and a Chinese one inside. Well worth a visit.

My photo was taken one night whilst I was travelling for work and due to run a workshop at Brighton University the following morning.

The Polperro fridge magnet shows the entire county of Cornwall and therefore makes finding Polperro quite hard unless you already know where it is!

It's one of my favourite places in the whole of England and despite the fact that it seldom changes, my camera always gets a thorough work-out when I'm there!

A look at foreign parts in the next article about Miss Franny's Fabulous Fridge Magnets!

Cheddar Gorge Sketches

Sunday 24 May 2015. Once we had left Glastonbury it was raining and we decided to try our luck at Cheddar, knowing that if it came fine we could wander up and down the road from the gorge through to the village and that if it was wet there were plenty of cafes to sit in and watch somebody else getting wet...

If you are a regular reader apologies, because you will have seen this sketch before. It was just about fine by the time we had driven slowly up the hill and found a parking space in the third car park above the top show cave. I decided to leave the camera in the dry and we walked down the hill in search of somewhere to have a quick snack.

We knew Mary was cooking a meal for us that night again and we didn't want to have a full meal, but Miss Franny was fancying a clotted cream tea. In the event we should have had one between us as the cafe we ended up in served up the most huge scones! But I like a fruit scone and Miss Franny likes plain ones so perhaps one of us would have had to feel disappointed anyway.

The cafes were all fairly crowded and we were halfway down to the village when we found one with space to sit. It had a framed collection of tea cards (collectable cards from packets of leaf tea from the 1930s) hanging on the wall at the side of our table with glamour photos of Hollywood starlets of the day on them. I counted 54 cards but only knew five of them - and was proud of my achievement, given the rather short periods of relative fame most of them had. Hedy Lamarr was there and Sonja Henie, the skater. But the other three were only familiar for a single film such as Anita Louise - she played Titania to James Cagney's Bottom in the 1935 version of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Looking her up on the Internet Movie Database, I found that the only other thing she did that I could remember was the 1950s TV show My Friend Flicka.

I dashed this one off earlier today for this blog post, knowing I hadn't any fresh photos. "Dashed off" might not be a totally apt description if I'm honest, but it didn't take me hours on end either... I included a cyclist riding up the gorge because there was a cyclist staying in one of the other rooms at the B&B and she had cycled all the way up the gorge the previous day.

We had a look round the village shops - is it me or have several cafes turned into souvenir shops? Anyway, there was even one with a few Edwardian penny arcade machines in it. And Miss Franny decided we hadn't got a fridge magnet of Cheddar (with all the ones we have got how can she remember???) so we came back with a fridge magnet as well. The fridge is full, I'm thinking of swapping the kitchen cupboards for ones with steel doors...

And just to finish off, because I know you will be wanting to know whether Anita Louise was a bit of a babe or was totally hideous - I can reveal she was a bit of a babe... And no, I can't remember who the other two starlets were that I recognised... Anita Louise at IMDB.

Somerset Weekend Index

The Excitement is In Tents...

Friday 6 August 1993. During the 1990s our usual type of holiday involved lots of canvas, lots of giggling and quite often lots of rain and squelching underfoot... We booked just such a trip with my parents, daughter Gill and one of her friends and headed south towards Sidmouth.

We had started gently for a change. Normally we would have just got up early and driven all the way down, but we must have been feeling a little wanton and giddy because we set off on the Friday, rather than Saturday and spent one night in a cheap B+B in Cheddar. Cheddar Gorge is a wonderful place but almost dead at night. Even at 5:00pm we were wandering around through deserted streets, looking at closed shops until I started to doodle the above sketch, upon which people started to materialise out of nowhere, looking over my shoulder and whispering excitedly amongst themselves...

"What is it?" "Do you think that bit could be a giraffe?" "Doesn't look much like those sewerage works to me"..."

An entire family of five people stayed watching every nervous quiver of my hand until I had finished half an hour later. Now, as mentioned previously, Cheddar doesn't offer much in the way of entertainment at night, but... By 1993 I was just about at the stage where my sketches could be identified as an approximation of the scene before me but I was still very nervous about it and dreading turning out a miserable mess of unrecogniseable cartoony images. Please folks, have a look, offer a word of encouragement and move on. Come back later if you want but please don't hang over my shoulder with your ice cream cornet wetting my ear!!!

Saturday 7 August 1993 finds us setting up our new (to us) 3-bedroom tent on a campsite close to Sidmouth in Devon. Both Dad and I had a Ford Fiesta at the time (we had only had ours three days before this trip!) and whilst you could just about get five people in one, taking six people, with a tent and luggage as well was not an option so we drove down in both cars and had to use them both to potter about Devon for the week. Camp sites tend not to be measured out to the exact inch and the woman from the tent on the next pitch has paced out both hers and our pitches and ordered hubby to complain because ours is bigger... Going to be a fun week for him then!

Sidmouth is a small town on the south Devon coast with a rather refined air about it. The infant Princess Victoria, well before she became Queen was sleeping in a bedroom facing the sea when her window was shattered by a shot that was aimed (so the culprit claimed) at a seagull. I'm not sure who the miscreant was except for the fact that he probably had a large white splodge on his jacket... Whilst it wasn't illegal for the general public to carry weapons at the time, quite what he thought he was doing wandering around Sidmouth beach with a gun anyway is not, as far as I know, recorded... "Fishing" would have seemed a lame excuse, even to the fledgling police force Sidmouth may have had at that time

Sidmouth centre hasn't changed a great deal over the years. It has old pubs, old-fashioned shop fronts and a church a short distance from the seafront. Queen Victoria has since moved on though so don't set your expectations too high.

All along the promenade runs a small wall, around 6-10" tall (I'm not there now so I can't measure it!) which separates the coast road from the Promenade walk. It normally has a row of people sitting on it, as to park your bum on a deckchair draws the immediate attention of an aging deck chair attendant in a once-white jacket and with a smoking ticket machine who will charge you for half a day minimum use but won't save your place if you get up after 5 minute's rest to cross the road to get an ice cream. It may have changed since 1993.

Sidmouth isn't a huge town, so we'll have a look at either end of it. A leisurely stroll from one to the other won't take much more than twenty minutes. At either side, the town is flanked by sandstone cliffs that either withstand the battering the sea gives them twice a day, or collapse suddenly with a cloud of red dust, fragments and dirty great chunks of rock that might put you off your dinner or even breathing if you find yourself under them.

These are the cliffs at the western end of the Promenade. If you approach via the beach or low Promenade wall it is a precarious thing to do at high tide. If you approach from the road, you arrive there on a level with the top of the cliff, through a small park and then descend down a series of wooden steps that, when climbing up, will make you question the wisdom of the attempt! We had a short sit on the benches on top of the cliff whilst on the next bench were a middle-aged couple still in the seaside uniform of the 1930s. He had on a suit and tie and she had a quite severe floral dress with a white wide-brimmed sun hat. He was reading The Times newspaper. "There's still no mention of them apprehending that villain who shot at and broke young Victoria's window..." he remarked. "Oh Herbert, don't be so ridiculous - go and get me some whelks..."

Twenty minutes later, here we are at the other end of Sidmouth. Approaching the eastern end of the town and Promenade we can see one of the original wooden lamp posts with the ornate lantern housings. Sidmouth was one of the first towns to install electric street lighting and they have preserved the original design of lamp post and deserve some credit for that.

At the eastern end is Salcombe Hill, where the sea has direct access to the cliffs and where the River Sid flows out into the sea. This access of water makes erosion perhaps a little quicker than at the western end, not that screams of anguish will occur every day, but just read any warning notices. Our campsite is on top of these cliffs a bit further west and inland - I don't want to drop in on anyone unexpected like...

Return to Sidmouth and Devon Holiday 1993 Index Page

Ice at Cheddar Gorge

After leaving Wookey Hole on 23 February 1996 we drove to Cheddar and down the famous gorge.

Come on, keep up... what do you want? All these memories in order???

Anyway Cheddar Gorge was absolutely deserted. No cars. Nobody on foot. Not even a car park attendant wanting money for parking in one of the many deserted lay-bys.

The temperature had dipped considerably and even with the heater on in the car we were concious of the cold.

We stopped near a cave and got out to peer in and to stretch our legs. Phew! It was cold!

In fact it was so cold that water running down the cliff face had frozen and there were huge patches of ice clinging to the sides of the gorge.

We drove down further towards the tourist attractions but they were all shut. Even the shops were shut.

Had been, in fact for some time perhaps, because one of them had a string of bells hung outside with all the rest of the Christmas decorations and the bells were electronically ringing out Good King Wencelas the sound carrying all the way up and down the deserted street giving a quite eerie rather than cheery effect.

It was our last call of the holiday. A holiday that had taken us in order to:

Portsmouth
The Isle of Wight
Poole
Corfe Castle
Wookey Hole Caves and Museum

We had also been to Eastbourne, Bognor Regis, Brighton and Bournmouth during the holiday - a measure of how cold it was and therefore much better to be in the car than outside!

Large Versions of the Photos: car at the cave, ice on the cliffs