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.
Monday 25 May 2015. Our last day, Spring Bank Holiday Monday and we say goodbye to Mary, Rod and their family at The White House B&B and head into Wells for a look round before setting off on the long journey back up the motorway to Blackpool.
It is England's smallest city. The Crown Hotel is a 15th century coaching inn. There are several equally imposing and ancient inns in the vicinity. The previous day we had sat in one of them in a cellar that had once been prison cells!
A few of the shops in the cathedral area have the old windows from way back and it reminds me of the shops in Sidmouth that we saw last year.
Two impressive medieval arches lead from the market place. This one leads to Wells Cathedral and is known as the Penniless Porch as it is where beggars traditionally asked for money. They still do, there was one there today...
The other leads to the Bishop's Palace. Built by Bishop Thomas Beckynton in the middle of the 15th century - we'll learn more about him later - it is known as The Bishop's Eye as, from it, the bishop or his agents could keep watch on who entered the city.
The Bishop's Eye leads to a green sward before the moated Bishop's Palace. Complete with drawbridge and portcullis, he was having no pagans coming from Glastonbury, ringing bells and smoking hashish and giving flowers to just anyone!
Under this window a bell hangs. A bishop's daughter trained the swans on the moat to ring the bell and would reward this behaviour with a treat thrown from the window. The swans have throughout recent history lost the knack due to tourists feeding them bits of bread - which is very bad for them anyway - and during the 1980s they learned it again. I presume now they have lost it again as there were signs advertising bags of duck food for sale nearby... I would love someone to tell me they do still ring the bell for a treat!
We would perhaps have had a look at the Bishop's Palace, but we wanted to see the cathedral and we did have a long journey to make later that day! The Bishop's Eye seen from inside.
And so into the cathedral. You have to pay for a license to take photographs inside - this applies whether you have a top range camera or just your phone. It was well worth paying a few pounds to be able to take these memory stretchers!
The tower at the crossing was damaged by an earthquake in the 13th century and 100 years later was found to be sinking into Wells' rather boggy ground. To stop it falling, it was supported by the addition of unusual "scissor" arches on three sides. You either love or hate these but there's no doubt that they do the job they were designed to do!
There is some glorious stonework in the cathedral too. I have a copy of Arthur Mee's excellent King's England book for Somerset and to my chagrin realised I had left it at home when we were halfway to Somerset, so inevitably I missed some of the highlights. Still... that's a good reason to come back sometime! The photo shows a pair of 15th century chantries that face each other in the nave.
The fabulous astronomical clock dates from the late 14th century. We arrived in front of it just five minutes before 11 o'clock and sat expectantly waiting for the hour to strike. Then just a couple of seconds before it did, someone sitting next to me struck up a conversation...
Above and to the right of the clock sits this little figure, known as John Blandifer. He strikes the hour on the bell hanging before him, but rings each quarter hour by kicking his heels back against two smaller bells. This same action causes two knights in armour to strike bells with their battle axes on the outside wall of the cathedral. At the same time four knights charge at each other on horseback above the clock face, the victim flopping back in the saddle! The Victorians replaced the clock mechanism - but sent the original to the Science Museum in London where it is still working!
The tomb of Bishop John Still. He was bishop here when Shakespeare was writing and should be remembered himself for his own penmanship. But few remember his name as they read to their children his nursery rhyme Little Jack Horner...
A rather ornate memorial to Bishop Richard Kidder who died in a great storm in 1703 when the chimney of his house fell onto the good bishop and his wife in bed.
I found this quite sad - though a look around any old cemetery or graveyard will convince you how lucky we are these days in our healthcare... Nathaniell Selleck and his wife Ann were unfortunate enough to lose their their daughter Margaret in 1676 but then two years later had another daughter, naming her Teophila - a Greek name meaning "Loved by God". He loved her so much that He took her also at the tender age of three. On Teophila's tombstone the stonemason misspelt her father's name and had to add the second and final "L" in the little space available.
The first use of an organ in the cathedral was recorded as being in 1310. A subsequent one of 1620 was destroyed by the Roundheads in 1643 and its replacement of 1662 was itself replaced by this one of 1909-10 which incorporates some of the older instrument.
I took so many photos of the interior I can't hope to show them all here. This is the choir. Music plays a large part in the cathedral's life and a lunchtime recital was due to be given that day by a ladies' group.
One of the effigies from the tomb of Thomas Beckynton who was the Private Secretary to King Henry VI, surely one of our most unhappy monarchs. Reigning in the time of the Wars of The Roses he was usurped by the Yorkshire King Edward IV and found life so intolerable he spent months at a time not showing any sign of being aware of any thing, event, or person around him, leaving his unpopular French queen, Queen Margaret of Anjou to defend his throne. Thomas was made Lord Privy Seal from 1433-34 and became Bishop of Wells and Bath in October 1433.
His tomb has two effegies. The one we saw first has him in his bishop's robes whilst, below, he lies as he was to become after death.
He had the tomb built 13 years before his death and so walked the aisles of Wells, being reminded of what he would become. In Victorian times his tomb was opened and he was found to have been buried with no regalia but for his Bishop's Ring, which was removed and placed in a museum.
We are coming to the end of our visit. Leaving the church, we pass again into the cloisters. These are a bit of an anachronism - Wells was never a monastery, but perhaps the cloisters had a function as a processional route.
I left the cloisters and had a quick look around the square court they surrounded. The oldest thing to see here is the oblong stone jutting into the flower bed. It was first used by the Romans.
The west front of the cathedral is stunning. Would that every cathedral in the country had kept as many statues in their niches.
Yet Wells has not escaped totally unscathed. Of almost 500 there are well over 300 statues still here, some whole, some worn and some, including the topmost figure of Jesus above his twelve apostles, damaged by the bullets of Monmouth's rebels in 1685.
We passed back through Penniless Porch into the Market Square. This is the drinking fountain with three sides. Only one side of the three still flows of this fountain, built around 1799 to replace an earlier one that had been pulled down due to its condition in 1756. The earlier one dated from 1451 and was erected at the behest of our old friend and cadaver, Thomas Beckynton.
We made our way back to the car and with a smile for a brilliant weekend spent with good friends and great surroundings, turned northwards towards the M5 and Lancashire.
Sunday 24 May 2015 (continued). We trudged (sorry - I meant "skipped") up the hill from Cheddar back to the car and set off back down the hill past the show caves and souvenir shops to head back towards our holiday B&B. Though a B&B, because I had known Mary for a long time (it doesn't do to dwell on how long I always think...) we were invited to dine with them for our evening meal.
I wanted also to explore the tiny village a bit more. This is the White House - see the earlier entry for the reason it's not white! Opposite the White House is a property called The Old Mill. There were a couple of paper mills in the village in the past, making paper out of rags. Old clothes etc would be pounded until they turned to pulp and this was then spread and dried to form the paper. A laborious business.
In a previous entry I mentioned the monks of Glastonbury not having cameras to record their finding of what they said was King Arthur's tomb, but we find it hard now to understand just how hard to come by - and therefore expensive - our everyday items like paper, pencils, pens and ink would be to someone in medieval times. The Romans used tablets spread with wax and used a stylus to write. They were definitely not for long-term storage. Usually the wax would be wiped smooth and the tablet re-used. For longer storage clay would be written on and then baked.
Paper was almost non-existent in Europe until the 1400s, though paper was first made by the Chinese in about 100 BC. It took a thousand years to spread across the Islamic Middle East and came to Spain in the 1100s, reaching Germany by 1400. The first paper mill in England was in Hertfordshire in 1490, though the first commercially successful one was owned by John Spilman in Dartford, Kent as late as 1588. Before then sheepskin was widely used for writing on, being scraped with knives to remove old writing so that it could be used again. Paper made with wood pulp instead of textiles was only properly developed in the mid 1800s.
More information on the mills and much more can be got from the excellent website about the village at www.dulcote.com.
In the centre of the small village is a triangular village green. Apparently a toll house once stood here, but after some time following its removal, the villagers created this fountain from the overflow from the local springs. This is a natural flow, there is no mechanical device to pump water up into the air. The fountain was dedicated in 1861 to the village's benefactor Mrs M.C. Tudway of nearby Wells and, due to the high mineral content of the water being deposited, grows a little in height every year!
School-cum-chapel built by the afore-mentioned Mrs Tudway in 1860. Again according to the village website, it ceased to fulfil this function in the late 1980s and is now privately owned.
In addition to the fountain we found this delightful grotto in absolutely beautiful condition. It is set into the wall at the side of the small village green and is obviously lovingly tended and maintained. We were assured that the water is drinkable and behind hanging greenery we saw three falls of water into the clear basin which drains away on the left. The last time I came across an old well in this part of the world, it had green brackish standing water and a sizeable community of tadpoles who definitely banished any thoughts of wanting to have a taste!
We had another wonderful meal with Mary and Rod and a houseful of children which made for a jolly mealtime. After we had eaten, Mary's daughter asked me (after screwing up her courage!) to draw her, having seen my sketch of the house from the garden. It was lovely to be asked, though I am not used to drawing people at all and had never drawn a live model. But she curled up in a chair and I sketched her over about half an hour. At one point the sketch looked like her Mum at a young age and it ended with a sketch that, if it wasn't exactly her, it was a close family member! Thank you so much for asking L - give me another try sometime, ok?
Links
The White House B&B: www.thewhitehousedulcote.co.uk
Dulcote Village: www.dulcote.com
History of Papermaking (Wikipedia): en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papermaking
History of Papermaking in the UK: baph.org.uk/ukpaperhistory.html
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.
Sunday 24 May 2015. We waited until the rain had died down a little and then braved the weather to walk to the Chalice Well.
On the way up towards the well we had this excellent view of Glastonbury Tor with the tower of St Michael, dedicated to the Archangel Michael.
The Chalice Well gardens are built around the well where legend has it that the Holy Grail was placed when Joseph of Arimathea brought it to England. There is of course no actual proof that there was an actual chalice at all, never mind that it was brought all the way from the Holy Land and placed here. But over the centuries the tradition grew and is linked with the legend that Joseph of Arimathea came here as a merchant. We have already seen the Glastonbury Thorn that is said to have grown miraculously from his staff. The gardens are run by a trust and there is an admission charge.
The actual well sits at the top of a garden that has been landscaped around the spring that feeds the well and cascades down the gardens via a series of cascades, falls and pools. It has to be said that it attracts some strange people (I'm not referring to anyone in the photo). The first time I visited around 30 years ago, someone was sitting in a robe running a pestle around the rim of a brass mortar that was emitting what to them was no doubt a spiritual soothing sound, but to me was totally annoying...
The water here comes from the spring and can be drunk. I ignored the glasses though and cupped my hand under the spring to taste the water. It was quite nice tasting with little of the sour metallic taste of a high mineral content, though the red colour of deposited minerals shows there is some present.
The Holy Grail has been the subject of so many legends and quests down the centuries that it is easily latched onto by the pseudo spiritual. Glastonbury abounds in hippies. I was 13 in 1967 and then hippies were people from my age up to late twenties who liked bright clothes and music and perhaps drugs, though very few people I came across ever went that way.
I grew out of wanting to be a hippy around the age of 17 or 18. By contrast it seems that today's hippies are all aged from 40 to late 60s and far from peace and light, colourful clothes and care for others, it seems now to be more about pseudo spiritualism, being as scruffy and appearing as unwashed as possible... Floaty cheesecloth has been replaced by leather jackets. Glastonbury is full of shops offering "Tibetan Sensory Massage" and anything to do with fairies and elves and that part of the town came across a little (if I can be blunt) as being up its own backside... I imagine that many of the inhabitants don't feel much affinity with this aspect of the town either, though it is well established now.
It's obviously enough of a problem for the entrance of the gardens to display a message forbidding "group rituals"... In 2006 there was a clash in the town between local pagans and an association of young catholics who threw salt in the face of pagans with shouts of "You will burn in Hell, witches!" The problems are not always caused by the pagans...
This did bring a rather ironic smile to my face though. The Healing Pool. You can paddle in it but the sign warns it is slippery and they are not responsible for any (my words) injury caused by the healing pool...
We had climbed down from the well to the final terrace of the garden. There are lots of benches to sit on and for anyone into plants and gardens it would be worth a visit for the well-landscaped presentation alone.
I have to admit I didn't feel one little bit spiritual whilst there, despite others clasping the sides of their faces and rocking about. The Holy Grail or chalice legend seems to have its origins in the Norman period, 1100-1200 years after Christ and some 650-750 years after the time of the earliest Arthurian mentions. There are many many claims for its location and more recently a totally different interpretation of its nature based on the similar sound of the Old French terms "san gréal" (holy grail) and "sang réal" (royal blood).
A lot of thought and effort have gone into the garden, its sculptures, landscaping and planting (which includes at least one cutting from the Glastonbury Thorn). The mysticism, spiritualism and just about all other manner of isms were a bit lost on me...
Links
The Chalice Well Trust: www.chalicewell.org.uk
