Kotor, Montenegro

Friday 23 August 2024. The approach to the port is up the most southerly fjord in Europe and we were already moored by the time we got out on deck. The scenery is outstanding though.

From where we are moored we can see Kotor's magnificent medieval walls climbing up the mountainside, but not the town itself. The ship's tenders are pressed into service to take us into the city and we collect our tickets after breakfast and wait for our group number to be called. There's still a bit of waiting on the staircases to be done but I manage both that and the transfer to the bobbing up and down of the tender boat without mishap.

The city itself is jam packed with people and is more of an ordeal that a pleasure. We walked through as best we could, coming out at the southern gate for a breather and to catch any available shade in the heat of the day. There was precious little. Most benches were out in the glare of the sun and I sat having swivelled my cap to protect the back of my neck from burning as best as I could, looking for all the world like a little old man desperately trying to appear hip. Or whatever the term is these days... Other old men were passing, hunched over their beer bellies and drawling "Hey man! How's it dribblin'?" ... "Far too frequently..." seemed to be the correct response.

Kotor is a medieval city with walls surrounding it, leading high up into the mountains above on each side of the city before meeting at a point making an almost impregnable barrier to any invader from land. We made our way back through the crowds - far more people than previous visits - I checked and they were in mid-October... Coming out near the pier where the tender boats were waiting I decided a drink wouldn't wait and we found seats in a small courtyard and ordered a Coca-Cola and a Sprite. I do miss the days when I could order a glass or two of wine, but long drinks took the edge off our thirst.

We made our way back to the ship and Deck 12 to our customary table and the sketchpad came out again. We couldn't see the city, but the very edge of the city walls can be seen on the right-hand edge of the drawing. This is probably my favourite sketch of the week. The mix of scrub and vegetation against the bare rocks of the cliff face gave me a challenge and the red roofs and line of boats give added interest at the bottom. I had a few more onlookers from behind apparently - unless they speak I don't see them, but Miss Franny told me after that there had been a steady stream of people.

That night as we got into one of the lifts someone suddenly said "Are you the gentleman that does those beautiful paintings from the side of the ship?" and I had to pause just in case there was someone else who did better ones...

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Shrewsbury, St Mary's

St Mary's church at Shrewsbury in Shropshire is an ancient church but now a redundant one - which means it is no longer used for Christian Worship.

We visited in early December 2022 and, as always when I visit somewhere without researching it beforehand, I probably need to return at some point as there is a lot that I missed! It sits on a small railed island of grass and gravestones in the centre of Shrewsbury town. Without a wide angle lens I found it difficult to get a decent photograph of the exterior, but you can make out here that it is built of two different colours of sandstone: red and white.

A church has stood on this site since around 960 CE, a Royal Peculiar founded by King Edgar the Peaceful who reigned from 959-975 and kept under his own jurisdiction rather than under the diocese of Lichfield. The present church was built from the mid 12th century onwards, the original walls being replaced by arched aisles to either side of the nave and new walls created making the church wider.

The roof of the nave is of oak and carved with angels, birds and animals. It was carved and installed in the 15th century and survived the fall of the spire which crashed though it in 1894. The restoration was so successful that the only evidence of damage is some slight staining from the lime cement of the spire. It is rather dark inside the church though - I wasn't able to spot any evidence of this at all. The spire is England's third tallest spire at around 500 feet (154.2 metres).

There are other examples of carving to be found inside both in wood and stone. There was a few people inside looking round and a couple of people acting as helpers, more than as guides. We spoke with a lady who told us a little of the history of the church and was proud of the fact that Queen Elizabeth I had visited the church twice during her reign (1558-1602).

"Have you heard of Benbow?" she asked. "The Admiral?" I asked in return, a little surprised. I had assumed he came from somewhere down south for some reason, probably because of the pub in Penzance which featured in Treasure Island. However whilst Long John Silver may have been a fictional character, Vice Admiral John Benbow was a real officer of His Britannic Majesty's Royal Navy. He was born in Shrewsbury in 1653, joined the Navy at the age of 25 and had a distinguished career fighting against the French and pirates variously.

In August 1702 he was stationed in Jamaica and was involved in a battle with the French Admiral du Casse. This is a complicated tale - Benbow was deserted by some of his ships and their captains subsequently came to trial by court martial, but during the battle Benbow was struck in the leg by a chain shot. This would not just "break his leg" as some reports have it; it would absolutely shatter all of the bones in his leg and whilst he was able to attend the court martial of his rebellious captains, he died of his wounds at Port Royal, Jamaica on 4 November 1702.

There is another monument here which has a strange story behind it. Robert Cadman was a steeplejack, stuntsman and daredevil of the early 18th century. His favourite trick was to attach a rope to the top of a church tower and slide down it for vast distances, across rivers or castle courtyards wearing a wooden breastplate that had a groove for the rope. He did this successfully at Lincoln flying from a tower of the cathedral down to Castle Hill, at Dover, flying from the castle to the harbour, and at Newark from the church tower.

In 1739 he planned at Shrewsbury to slide from the spire of St Mary's down to Gay Meadow across the River Severn. Attaching one end of the rope to the spire, he then attached the other end to an anchor in the meadow. Then he climbed up the rope from the meadow all the way up to the top of the spire, performing tricks and feats of balancing as he went. Here he put on his wooden vest and lay down along the rope which nestled in the groove in his breastplate. On the way down the rope broke. He is buried here at St Mary's and a placque memorial can be found on the tower by the west door.

The real treasure of St Mary's is its glass. It has a collection of medieval glass from all over northern Europe. Sadly this is subject to more than its share of vandalism. One of the helpers told us this magnificent window had only recently had damage repaired when it was broken again to allow someone access to the church and who then broke another window from within to get out again...

When the sun is shining, as it was when we visited, the stained glass casts patterns of colour all over the lower levels of the church interior. This being December, there was a sale of Christmas cards for charities in the aisle of the church.

The organ has four manuals and dates from 1912. It is built into the crossing and under the organ we can see through the north transcept to St Nicholas' chapel which contains the church's only remaining plasterwork from the 13th century. Until the Puritans came along all the interior walls would have been plastered and painted. There is a balcony at the back of the church where a Puritan minister apparently cursed and harangued his congregation from behind so that they would face forward and concentrate on their prayers!

I spotted a face high up in the dim corner of the Trinity chapel above the grave of a Crusader. This was testing my camera to its limits. The photograph has been enhanced greatly in terms of brightness! There's a Green Man somewhere up in the roof, but I'm not exactly sure that this is it...

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Corfe Castle in the Rain

Thursday 22 February 1996. Thursday was as rainy as Wednesday had been sunny. But never mind, we make the most of it and visit Corfe Castle, somewhere we haven't been before.

Even in the weather the castle is an imposing sight. The earthwork belongs to a castle from centuries before the Norman stone castle. This was the scene, in 978, of a royal murder as Edward, the boy King was stabbed in the back by an assassin in the pay of his step-mother who wanted her own son, Æthelred II (The Unready), to be king. "Unready" in this case has a different meaning to the modern use of the word. Made up of shortened forms of two Anglo Saxon words Æthel - noble - and red (ræd) - advised - the epithet originally meant "ill-advised". However he wasn't called that until around 1180 and as he died in 1016 it may be true but it may not be how his contemporaries thought of him.

Apart from the castle we wanted to find the shop that was the inspiration for one of Miss Franny's Liliput Lane cottages, Purbeck Stores, seen above and below.

She started with a couple of cottages and then it grew into a hamlet, then a village, then a town and at time of writing (2023) we now have a collection resembling Birmingham...

The Bankes Arms in the village commemorates Sir John Bankes, a lawyer and politician in the House of Commons from 1624 as MP for Woolton Bassett and later for Morpeth until 1629 when King Charles I decided to rule without a parliament. He did however become Attorney General and Chief Justice to the King during the Civil War. He bought Corfe Castle in 1635 and was serving in combat in London and Oxford when Corfe became besieged by a Parliamentary force for three years 1643-1645. His wife put up a strong defence and was only defeated by the betrayal of one of her officers opening a sally door to let in the enemy. She became known as Brave Dame Mary and was allowed to retain the keys to her castle which was, however, slighted (knocked down so much as to render it undefendable) following the end of the siege.

The castle dominates the village main street from its impressive mound overlooking the village. There are post holes on the mound, the only remnants of the Saxon hall where King Edward the Martyr may have been murdered in 978 CE. William I the Conqueror ordered the stone castle to be built soon after the Conquest in 1066. It would only be partially built in stone. There would still be a lot of earth and wood employed. Subsequently future Kings added to it, Henry I began building the stone keep. During the Civil War between King Stephen and the Empress Maud, the king laid siege to it in 1139. Kings John and Henry III spent fortunes on building work and the latter ordered the keep of both this and the Tower of London to be whitewashed - which is why the London stronghold is known as The White Tower. It remained in royal hands until Elizabeth I sold it in 1572.

There are at least two other curiosities in the village. In a small square we found the old village water pump hiding within a blue wooden jacket. Unusually after all this time it retains its handle, though we didn't try pumping it - there was enough water falling from the sky...

Corfe Castle also has the smallest town hall in the country, just a short distance from the village pump.

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A Wander Around Kotor

Thursday 19 October 2017. It's our final port of call for the Adriatic Explorer cruise before Thomson Dream returns to Corfu where we will have to leave her until another cruise. By which time she will be "Marella Dream" as the Thomson cruise brand is being renamed.

We awake during the final stage of our approach to Kotor, another ancient city with lots of medieval architecture. Today we are once again in a different country - this being Montenegro. Kotor is approached through a 28 kilometre channel, often described as a fjord, but which is actually a ria - a submerged river canyon. Just to make it even more confusing, it is known as Kotor Bay... A more zig-zagging, narrower bay would be hard to find, but it does widen out into a respectably large expanse of water just at the edge of Kotor city and the ships can dock so close that you can literally walk off the ship and cross the road to the city walls.

Whether you are one side of the walls looking out to the bay, or the other side looking into the city, Kotor is intensely beautiful. The bay itself is surrounded by high mountains and they rear up behind the city whose walls zig-zag wildly high above the rooftops, clinging to the steep mountainside.

The city walls and much of the architecture of the city are Venetian, dating from Kotor being part of the Venetian Republic from 1420 to 1797. The city fell under siege by the Ottomans twice during this time, in 1538 and 1657.

We entered the city through this gate near the far end of the bay. The weights would have facilitated the raising of a doorway - either drawbridge or a portcullis-type gateway.

The mountains see the sun before the city streets, which have to wait until it climbs a little higher before its rays can cast their glow.

This is somewhere around 10:00 - 10:15 in the morning. We didn't think we were rushing through breakfast but we appear to have been amongst the first to reach these streets at least. We had walked to the end of the bay before entering the city whereas most of our fellow passengers had entered through a nearer gate and were still exploring a different part of the city. Shops include craft shops, the usual tourist souvenirs - we bought a couple of pottery mugs with relief images of Kotor and other Montenegrin cities - and jewellery shops.

The sunshine starts to penetrate into the city, brightening and warming the place, though I did like the atmosphere of the shadows and street lamps.

The Cathedral of Saint Tryphon is one of two Roman Catholic cathedrals in Montenegro. It dates from 1196 and itself is built on the site of a former church dating from 809 CE. St Tryphon was from Phrygia (in modern Turkey) and was a farm worker noted as a healer, mainly of animals. He was martyred by beheading during the Decian Persecution around the year 250 CE. His head was (is?) kept within the cathedral.

This is a side door to the cathedral, but richly carved. The cathedral suffered much damage during an earthquake in 1979 requiring major restoration.

The Square of Arms. For many the first sight of the city after passing through one of the main entrances from outside the city wall.

Despite the small size of the city, the city walls stretch for 4.5km (3 miles) as they climb high up the mountainside. We will leave during daylight this time, but in 2010 we were here after dark and the sight of the floodlit walls stretching up the mountain were spectacular.

We pass through the walls back to the waterfront of the bay and sit for a drink in a cafe. My Coca Cola comes complete with a special plastic envelope around the bottle!

From outside the wall we can see just how imposing it is close-up. The tower wall is sloped to deflect cannon balls.

As we sail away, we take a look at the walls again. They make it that much harder for an enemy to drop in...

And that's it for this cruise. We sail back to Corfu and the following day go from a nice warm 23 degrees back to Manchester which is about 11 degrees! Brrr - I need another cruise!

Adriatic Explorer Cruise Index Page

Trapani and Erice, Sicily

Monday 1 September 2014. We got up early to watch the Thomson Majesty pull elegantly into the port of Trapani in Sicily. Thomson Dream was also in port for the day and although they weren't able to park side by side, I did manage a photo of them both from the dockside which we'll see later. What? Park? Yes, these nautical terms just trip from my tongue as though it were a slipway...

The coaches for all the ship's excursions were lining up and behind the ship we can see part of the large area devoted to salt pans.

Most of the salt pans seemed to be in the early stages ie filled with water. One pan was being cleared of it's salt and another, in the near left corner of the salt fields, was blindingly white and obviously to be harvested following the completion of the one being worked. Four or five small trains were laboriously being filled and chugging around their rectangular circuit to deliver the collected salt to the saltworks also on the near left. This is an ancient industry. The first mention of salt pans here dates from the Phoenicians. Just two or three thousand years then...

However, enough of industry! We are off on an excursion! We are heading up to a hilltop medieval town called Erice ("Er-reech-ay"). We pile on a bus and are dropped at the end of a fairly long queue for the cable car that will take us up the hill. Whilst it was fairly long it also moved fairly quickly once it got going and there was a spot of entertainment when one of the other coaches crunched into a bollard trying to get onto the car park...

Unfortunately the coach firm had not used a lot of imagination. There were two Thomson ships, both presumably doing the same excursions and they had numbered each set of coaches from No.1 ... Thomson Dream's coach number 4 pulled up directly behind our coach which was also No.4 and the resulting confusion with two guides trying to count their passengers reminded me of the British public sector...

The cable car took 8 of us at a time and fairly whisked us up the hillside which in places was quite steep. Our guide turned out to have a really annoying gratering voice and a manner of saying things really slowly. Luckily as we arrived at this church she told us our meeting time straight away and we took the opportunity to duck out of the tour and wander around on our own.

The streets were paved with cobbles and all had this same square-based pattern. We saw a sign for the castle and followed another group of people who also looked as if they were trying to get away from a guide with too many dates to tell.

It was quite warm on top of the hill. Mind you, there were so many phone masts ringed around it that I reckon the inhabitants are kept warm all winter...

There are lots of shops selling ceramics. No large shop windows - just lots of lovely displays on walls and stacked in front.

I saw this in a particularly shadowed street and wondered whether old legends and superstitions are still alive and well. A string of garlic bulbs hung outside this shuttered house.

Whilst we saw the occasional car go by as we flattened ourselves against a wall, they were very few. The town was quiet and peaceful and lovely views could be found around every corner.

We came to a small piazza as the sun came out and took a seat outside one of two street cafes. Fran stuck to the orange juice, causing me to rack my brain before the word arancio stuck its hand up. I had a bottle of Peroni - which of course did the thirst no good at all...

The bikes from the ship were just taking their leave from the cafes of the piazza as we sat down. Done it once and that's good enough for me. Definitely enough, considering those cobbles...

We had a mooch round this ceramics shop. Some gorgeous things. You just want to buy them all really, but we limited ourselves to a small dish to drop teabags into and the inevitable fridge magnet. I'm thinking of hanging steel plates on the wall now to hold them all... If we took them all on holiday and threw them over the side, the ship would serve after them in a flash...

We met up with the guide and the other folks from our coach, all the other coaches, and all the other ship's coaches and queued to go back down on the cable car. The wind was getting up and some dark skies threatened rain, but never delivered. There were 7 of us in the cable car and one of the guides from another coach got in to make up the 8. She was lovely and far more understandable than our own guide. We had a great time in the cable car coming down until all of a sudden it stopped dead, causing our car to swing wildly for a couple of minutes. It had either gotten a gust of strong wind that some automated part of the system decided necessitated stopping operations or (more likely) someone getting in or out at one end had blocked an automatic door closer and that had caused it to stop. Anyway a couple of people were not happy about it, even when I pointed out how lucky they might be as few people got to have a helicopter rescue from a cable car... It started again in about 5 minutes and they didn't seem at all disappointed at the non-appearance of a helicopter.

Arriving back at the ship park (I know, it just gets better and better...) I managed to get a photo of the two Thomson ships.

That evening as the Captain made his daily announcement before sailing, he warned us there was a Force 7 gale and rough seas ahead and so there proved to be. We found we were on a rather quiet ship that evening, but then it got to Miss Franny a bit too and we retired to our cabin to read and lie tossing about and fending off sliding objects.

Italian Flavours Cruise Index

Devil's Bridge, Kirby Lonsdale

More black and whites from 1983. This time our topic is the Devil's Bridge at Kirby Lonsdale.

The 14th century bridge has a legend that the Devil built it and spilled the stones he was carrying in his apron. They can still be seen in and around the river below. Kirby Lonsdale is a favourite stop for bikers after a ride through narrow twisting moorland roads close to the borders of North Yorkshire, Lancashire and its own country, Cumbria.

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