England – Page 20 – From Pyrenees to Pennines

‘Very flat, Norfolk.’ *

No it’s not. But before we went there last week, we were inclined to agree with Noel Coward’s judgment. We’d decided to go to north Norfolk for a week off from the twenty-first century: no wi-fi, no TV, no motorways, but instead wide open countryside and sea, small uncluttered villages with a parish church worth exploring, market towns, and a night sky unspoilt by light pollution.

The village of Cley-next-the-sea, seen from the nature reserves on the marshland between the village and the sea.

We stayed near South Creake in North Norfolk, in the delightful bed and breakfast accommodation of Sara and Bob Freakley. Here is the view from their front gate.

Leicester Meadows: the view from the garden.

You can see that it’s not flat. It’s quietly, comfortably, gently hilly, with woodland and meadowland nearby. South Creake is the kind of village where any number of ducks raise their families on the village green.

Flint cottages at South Creake.

Heavy traffic at South Creake.

A narrow pathway in Cley-next-the-sea.

And like so many Norfolk villages, it has a grand church far in excess of its apparent needs. We loved St. Mary’s church, as so many in the area. Landowners spent money outdoing their neighbours when it came to church commissioning and building. Get it right, and royalty might come to stay – they never did. But wooden angels soar among the rafters of splendid wooden-vaulted roofs. Some churches are tall and stately, others rustic, with flinty walls. A few have chunky cylindrical towers, because flint doesn’t lend itself to crisply finished corners.

St. Mary’s, Burnham Deepdale, with its Saxon round tower.

A typical tombstone in a typical churchyard.

King Charles the Martyr at South Creake church. The Anglo-catholic tradition is strong here.

An angel above our heads at South Creake church.

And angels at North Creake church.

The splendid parish church at Cley-next-the-sea (population: 376)

And then there are the stately homes. Oxburgh Hall – once seen, never forgotten. It’s a romantic, moated 15th century manor house which almost came to the end of its life in the 1950s. This was a period when many landowners, crippled by debt, felt they had no option but to throw in the towel, and dozens of ancient manor houses in Norfolk alone were quite simply pulled down. The auctioneer charged with disposing of Oxburgh declined to allow the winning bid from someone who wanted only the sturdy roof timbers, proposing to leave the rest of the house to tumble down. Members of the family came to the rescue, as did the National Trust. Now it’s one of Norfolk’s best-loved tourist attractions. Here’s why….

Holkham Hall is overwhelmingly big. We decided we couldn’t do it justice and confined this visit to its four-acre walled kitchen gardens, with its vines, peach trees, vegetable gardens sufficient, back in the day, to support everyone who lived and worked in this sizeable community. Many English readers probably remember all about school history lessons featuring Coke of Holkham, early 19th century politician and agricultural reformer, credited with promoting crop rotation and pioneer experiments in sheep and cattle breeding. Holkham Hall was his home and family seat.

I’d tell you about Peckover House, suggested by friend and fellow-blogger Sharon and her husband Andrew. But it’s just over the border in Cambridgeshire, so not this time.

The orangery.

And then there’s the sea…and the wildlife. But I’ve told you about them already.

*Noel Coward, ‘Private lives’.

The sea, the sea

We’ve just had a brilliant few days away. First of all in Norfolk, then the Baie de Somme. I’ve realised I love the sea. Not sun-kissed beaches, though. Not ‘miles and miles of golden sand….’ *. Definitely no lying around sun-bathing for me, and building sandcastles is only fun for the first ten minutes.

No, I love the kind of seaside we’ve enjoyed this week. In north Norfolk, we seemed to be on the coast whenever it was low tide, squinting at the distant sea in retreat, as it left behind belts of shingle, mud, scrubby dunes and sand. We’d get a convincing work-out crunching along a stony,pebbly beach, taking in the views across a flat but ever-changing landscape in subtle shades of mossy greens, grey and beige, and across a sea foaming white as it crashed to the shore, but with its own varied palette of bands of blue and grey from the shore to the distant horizon. The sky went in for moody tones, too, rather than clear summery blues, with feathery scudding clouds chased along by the rather challenging winds.

We weren’t there just for the landscape though. Birds come here to live and breed, and as birds of passage too. There are supposed to be as many as 420 species here. We knew that while the birds are nesting they are less visible than at some other times of the year. Though we’ve just got ourselves pairs of binoculars, we haven’t yet got the skills to identify everything we see. But we still wanted to be down on the seashore, every chance we got.

Egret in the evening.

Snipe feeding.

Shelduck.

Our favourite. The graceful avocet.

These geese weren’t precisely on the shore. But they were pretty close.

These ducklings were keen to steal our lunch one day, as we had a blustery picnic overlooking the sea near Hunstanton.

Then it was the Baie de Somme, a mere 90 minutes from Calais. We all know about the Somme and the bloody, ceaseless, pointless battle that took place some distance inland during WWI, in 1916. But the Somme estuary is a peaceful place. Like north Norfolk, it’s an area of marshland, water and sky. It offers fresh, brackish and salted water as a rich habitat for a huge variety of birds – and seals. We weren’t very successful bird watchers here either, but it didn’t stop us trying.

*’…in Whitley Bay, Northumberland’. Travel slogan, Whitley Bay, February 1964

Loafing around in Harrogate

Up betimes, in order to be at Harrogate Hospital by 7.30 a.m. Yesterday was a day of white-coat-syndrome-induced high blood pressure, insensibility whilst under the knife, and not a little discomfort for Malcolm. He’s been waiting for months for some minor surgery, and now he’s had it, his life should get a lot more comfortable.

I, meanwhile, had to spend the day in Harrogate waiting for the call to go and collect him. I had quite a few errands to run in any case, and after that it wouldn’t have been worth traipsing back and forth from North Stainley.

So I did my jobs, and then had plenty of chance to loaf about. I’m not the world’s keenest shopper, but I do have a favourite charity shop in Cold Bath Road. Our friend Jonet volunteers there, sifting through and sorting donated books. I love the serendipity of looking along the shelves crowded with fiction old, new, English and foreign, next to an eclectic collection of non-fiction. As usual I left the shop with a satisfyingly large pile of reading, and this time, a new-to-me summer dress.

Then I headed for green space. What makes Harrogate a special town is its area of open parkland in the centre of the town – the Stray. It was created from common pastureland in 1778 to link most of Harrogate’s springs (it’s a spa town after all) and an Act of Parliament preserved its size at 200 acres. Even now, if part of its area is lost due to, for example, road widening, it must be replaced elsewhere. It’s pretty unique to be able to step directly from busy shopping streets straight onto a vast green area unbounded by railings or fences. Paths and roads will lead you through this green space to other parts of town. Like me, you could walk across the Stray to get to the hospital, or to reach the community round Cold Bath Road with its neighbourhood shops and Victorian housing. And yesterday, you could enjoy, as I did, the crocuses which have burst forth in their hundreds and thousands in glorious lakes of colour – purple, mauve, sunshine yellow and white. They’ll be followed in a week or so by an equal multitude of daffodils, and then avenues of cherries will blossom in all their pink finery. Here’s a few shots of Harrogate Stray on the warmest day of the year so far.

Walking on the Stray

I know grey squirrels are no better than rats with tails, but they still cheer me up as they scurry up and down trees.

View from the Stray to Harrogate.

Easter eggs on display at Betty’s, Harrogate’s Top Caff.

Haulage logistics, 18th century style

A sunny morning on the River Ure, just before we reached the Canal.

We went for a walk along the Ripon Canal the other day, starting from the point where it meets the River Ure. Back in its heyday during the Industrial Revolution, busy as it was then, the rural towpath we walked along might not have looked so very different. Back in its heyday, keels would have hauled coal northwards from the Yorkshire coalfields, and lead and agricultural products southwards. The canals were the freight-haulage routes of their age, and even though they were busy thoroughfares, the whole business of passing vessels through the three locks in one direction at a time limited the flow traffic to levels well below what those of us who’ve ever been stuck in a bad-tempered rush hour traffic jam on the M1 have experienced.

Ripon Canal is not one of the country’s great canals. There are water super-highways such as the Grand Union Canal linking London with Birmingham. That’s 137 miles long. There’s the Leeds-Liverpool Canal. That’s 127 miles long. The Ripon Canal runs for just two miles, from Ripon to Oxclose Lock, where it links with the River Ure. Like many of the country’s canals, it was built in the latter part of the 18th century, between 1767 and 1783, opening up water traffic between Ripon and York, and it eventually put the products of the Durham coalfields within Ripon’s reach.

The railways proved to be the death of canals all over England. Ripon’s withstood the opening of the Darlington to York railway in 1841, but the Leeds and Thirsk Railway finished it off. The railway company actually bought the waterway, to ensure local support , but they then neglected it, failing to dredge it, so that it became less and less useable. The canal was abandoned as a waterway in 1906.

But its fortunes have changed again. No longer a tool of the industrial revolution, the canal has become a playground for people who like ‘messing about in boats‘*. The Ripon Canal Trust spearheaded its restoration from the 1960s, and now the whole thing is managed by the Canal and River Trust. So whether you like boats, barges, or a stroll along a quiet backwater near town, Ripon Canal’s worth a visit.

One of the canal bridges.

The towpath again.

Walking the towpath

Barges on the canal.

*That’s what Ratty used to like to do in Kenneth Grahame’s ‘The Wind in the Willows’

In which nothing works out quite as planned….

There's a rainbow on the walk to the gravel ponds - before the lurgie set in. — There’s a rainbow on the walk to the gravel ponds – before the lurgie set in.

We’d been looking forward to this Christmas, our first in England, and in our own home here, for some years. Son and daughter-in-law planned to come from London, and Emily was arriving from Barcelona, bringing her boyfriend so he could enjoy his first English Christmas. The Bolton Posse were also booked in for parts of the time. We’d spent time making things ready for a real family Christmas …. and then the day before Christmas Eve, I got a cold.

Only it wasn’t a cold. I kept on giving myself severe talkings to, and pointing out to myself that a hacking cough and a swimmy head could all be kept firmly under control. Then, at a neighbour’s Christmas Eve party, I passed out. And had to be helped home and put to bed by the family.

The next day, I wasn’t up to anything. Everyone had to turn to and cook and prepare – which actually they didn’t mind at all. I somehow got up for Christmas dinner, which I couldn’t bring myself to eat. I was going to bow out before I put too much of a damper on things when Malcolm too succumbed and retired to bed …. where he has remained, and has refused food for several days.

It’s been such a disappointment. I don’t think we were guilty of setting the bar too high, of wanting an unattainable Christmas ideal. We just wanted time together, having fun in a low-key kind of way. In fact, the rest of the family has. And I too have been able to join them for some of the time. So long as I don’t move around too much, I can join in the games we’re all so fond of. ‘Bananagram’ has been the all-out winner: at most times of the day, you could find at least a couple of people hunched over alphabet tiles, competing to construct their grid of connected words. But we’re keen on ‘Scattergories’ too, and ‘Balderdash‘, which involves writing definitions for words nobody’s heard of, alternative plots for long-forgotten films, and unlikely explanations for various acronyms.

None of this would do while Catalan Miquel was still here of course, so there were plenty of card games, and, for those with steady hands, the chance to construct increasingly wobbly wooden towers in games of ‘Jenga’. But I don’t know what the poor bloke made of our Christmas -in-the-sanitorium.

The family pronounced themselves satisfied with this low-key celebration. But for both Malcolm and me, still nowhere near to feeling healthy again, it’s been a bit of a let down. And it’s not just because of Christmas. Today, we should have been setting off to drive to Laroque, to spend New Year with our friends there. We’re simply too ill to consider driving the 1000 mile journey at the moment. Let’s hope we can delay our journey by only a few days.

Pub grub

I’ve never been one for an evening down at the pub. When I was younger, I hated going out to meet friends there, for all it was a rite of passage and part of growing up. The smell of cigarette smoke, mixed with that of alcohol and under-ventilated space was the first downer, and then there was the problem that I didn’t – and still don’t – like beer. If weaker, to me it tastes of soap, and if stronger, of iron filings. What, really, was the point?

Over the last few years, pubs have had to re-invent themselves. Now that beer is cheap(ish) and cheerful at the supermarket, and now that people can relax at home in front of ever larger TV screens, fewer and fewer people want to dig themselves out of their cosy homes simply to go to their ‘local’ and have a drink with friends. So some offer Quiz Nights, or the chance to watch the Big Match on the Big Screen. Many many more have given up the unequal struggle and simply closed for ever.

Some though are doing well because they’ve chosen to offer good food, and those are the ones we like these days. The area we’ve chosen to live has more great pubs than seems entirely necessary. There are at least four within very easy reach. Get talking about matters of food when you’re out with your friends, and everyone will have yet another favourite haunt which they’ll insist you should try. What all these pubs have in common is cosiness. They’re warm and welcoming: muted colours and old oak furnishings, and often a slightly idiosyncratic lay-out which guarantees you a degree of privacy whilst also enabling you to people-watch . At this time of year, there’s sure to be a log fire flickering in the corner. Cheerful young staff will whisk you to a table as you arrive and summarise the ‘daily specials’. These pubs tend to have a limited range of dishes on offer, but that’s because the menu is designed round what’s available on the day, for that day.

There’s beer to drink – of course there is, it’s a pub after all – but these days there’s a decent wine list too, although the mark-up’s way beyond what we got used to in France.

So we’ve traded treating ourselves to a ‘formule’ at some local French restaurant, sitting outside and relaxing under the welcome shade of a large umbrella in favour of a cosy hour or two over a meal in front of the fire in an English pub. And do you know – they both have their special charms.

Here we are today at the Freemasons Arms in Nosterfield. Not a bad way to spend a Sunday.

A quiet drink, watching others having …. a quiet drink

The end of a good pud.

…and we were the last to leave.

England? France? A six months review.

Just down the road from our house in Laroque

We’ve been back in the UK from France six months now, so this seems a good moment to take stock.

Did we do the right thing in coming back to England to live? Absolutely no question: we’re so happy to be here, and nearer to most of the family. There are things we miss about our lives in France though: of course there are. It was tough to leave friends behind, and we continue to miss them. Still, three have visited already, and there are more scheduled to come and see us here. And it’s sad no longer having the Pyrenees as the backdrop to our lives. Though North Yorkshire’s scenery brings its own pleasures.

Still, it’s wonderful not to have to tussle with language on a day-to-day basis. Our French was pretty good, but it was generally a bit of a challenge to talk in any kind of nuanced way about the more serious things in life. Now I feel I’ve freed up enough head-space to revise my very rusty Italian, and to learn enough Spanish to get by when we visit Emily in Spain.

Many of our regrets or rediscovered delights centre on food. This summer, we’ve gorged ourselves on the soft fruits that the British Isles grow so well: particularly raspberries, gooseberries and blackberries. Oh, they exist in southern France, but they’re wretched, puny little things, with no lively acidic tang like those of their British cousins. In a straight choice between raspberries and peaches, raspberries win every time (though of course, it’s even better not to have to choose).

I miss, though, the choice we used to have in France of four or five different kinds of fresh, dewy whole lettuce available on market stalls every single week of the year. It’s flat, cos or little gem here, or those depressing bags of washed mixed leaves, and I find myself longing for the choices I used to have of crunchy, curly, bitter, blanched or soft leaves in various shades of green or even red. On the other hand, we do have tangy watercress here. And crisp crunchy apples, and Bramley cooking apples…..

And whereas in France there were always French cheeses on offer, and jolly good too, that was all there was, apart from the odd bit of shrink-wrapped Cheddar or waxy Edam. Here we can have English AND French (and Dutch and so on): decent French cheese too, unpasteurised, from small suppliers.

And what about eating out? Surely that’s better in France? Those copious home-cooked midday ‘formules’ – often a starter, main course, pudding AND wine, preferably eaten in the open air shaded by some nearby plane trees bring back such happy memories. But, but…. the menus were entirely predictable, and were dishes that had stood the test of time over the decades. After a few years, we wouldn’t have objected to a few surprises. Whereas back in Britain, most places seem to have upped their game considerably over the last few years. Local restaurants, pubs and cafés offer interesting menus, often based on what’s available that day, at fair prices. We’ve had some great meals since our return, and we’ve hardly started to get to know the area’s food map yet. And for Malcolm, there’s the constant possibility of slipping into a tea room to assess the quality of their coffee and walnut cake. This may be the main reason why he’s come back.

All the same, we can’t eat outside quite so often, particularly in the evening. And our fellow walkers have yet to be convinced of the pleasures of the shared picnic with home-made cakes and a bottle of wine: we’re working on them. Nor have we yet had a community meal, with long tables set out in the square as old friends and new share fun together over a leisurely meal.

Like most people who return from France, we find the crowded motorways unpleasant. But it is nice not to be followed at a distance of only a few inches by the cars behind us.

We’re struggling to shake off French bureaucracy too. Tax offices and banks over there continue to ignore our letters pointing out we no longer live there, continue to demand paperwork they’ve already seen, continue to ignore requests. And as we can no longer pop into the local office to sort things out, the problems just go on and on.

Something we’re enjoying here too is the possibility of being involved in volunteering. It’s something that exists in France of course: Secours Populaire and similar organisations couldn’t function without local help. But the French in general believe the state should provide, and the enriching possibilities for everyone concerned that volunteering in England can offer simply don’t exist. We already help at a community bakery, but I’m currently mulling over whether I should find out more about the local sheltered gardening scheme for people with learning disabilities, or about working with groups of children at Ripon Museums, or simply go into the local Council for Voluntary Service and find out what other opportunities exist.

Six months in, we’ve spent more time with our families, re-established old friendships, begun to make new ones. We’re happy in our new village home, and the slightly different centre-of-gravity we now have. Poor Malcolm’s waiting longer than he would have had to in France for a minor but necessary operation, but despite that, life’s good. We’re back in England to stay.

A sheep is a sheep is a sheep…..

… or not.

The splendid horns of a Swaledale sheep.

On Saturday we called in, far too briefly, at the annual Masham Sheep Fair. This is the place to go if you believe a sheep looks just like this.

Saturday was the day a whole lot of sheep judging was going on in the market square. Here are a few of the not-at-all identical candidates. And yet they are only a few of the many breeds in England, and in the world. There are 32 distinct breeds commonly seen in different parts of the UK, and many more half-breeds. I was going to identify the ones I’m showing you, but have decided that with one or two exceptions (I know a Swaledale, a Blue-faced Leicester or a Jacobs when I see one), I’d get them wrong. So this is simply a Beauty Pageant for Masham and District sheep.

And if you thought wool was just wool, these pictures may be even more surprising. Who knew that sheep are not simply…. just sheep?

Druids’ folly

It was all a bit competitive being a landowner in 18th and 19th century North Yorkshire. You wanted the fine house. You wanted the spacious and gracious gardens, landscaped to be ‘picturesque’: nature celebrated but tamed, rather than strictly-organised and geometric, as in much of the rest of Europe. And you wanted the Folly. You were looking for an extravagant yet decorative building, that displayed to the world your appreciation of classical, Egyptian or Gothic architecture. It was without purpose, it was eccentric, and it was a fake.

But that was entirely the point. A folly was for fun. It might complement the view. It might make a destination for a stroll for your family and guests. It might even be a picnic spot for a wider public looking then, as now, for something nice to do on a sunny Sunday afternoon.

Today, the ‘wider public’ was the Ripon U3A (University of the Third Age) walking group. It was not however, a sunny Sunday, but a dank and drizzly Friday. Our path took us through Colsterdale up the now dismantled track of the narrow-gauge railway built in 1902 to transport materials used in the construction of nearby Leighton reservoir. During WW1, the railway’s destination, Breary Banks, became a training ground for the volunteer soldiers of Leeds Pals. We tramped up the hill as those soldiers-in-training must have done: more suitably clad, certainly, and just as capable of sending the sheep running for cover in the bracken.

Then we were into woods, and along another path, and found ourselves…… in a clearing, with an oval of standing stones, some of them fashioned into doorways or caves, but all of them contributing to a sort of over-furnished Stonehenge. It’s not North Yorkshire’s answer to Stonehenge however, but William Danby’s folly. William Danby was the owner of the Swinton Estate, on whose lands we were standing. That is, both William Senior, who lived in the latter half of the 18th century, and William Junior, his son. Which of them built the folly is a bit of a mystery. Both of them were probably intrigued by the Druids. Poets and antiquarians at the time saw them as England’s earliest men of learning, the guardians of early belief-systems, and the first English patriots. Some say too that this ‘ancient temple’ was devised as a means of providing employment for men returning from soldiering in the Napoleonic Wars. There’s a story that there was a seven-year job on offer to anyone who would live as a hermit on the site. It’s thought that nobody stayed the course.

We explored the stones and caves, standing atmospherically on this slightly misty day at the edge of a suitably gloomy forest.

And then we went for coffee and cake at the Bivouac, a marvellously isolated and quirky cafe on a site -with-yurts for serious glampers. Definitely worth a detour. Suitably fortified, we finished our circular walk, and were back at home in time for a late lunch. A healthy walk, a couple of history lessons, a great coffee-stop. What better way to start the weekend?

I should mention that these photos give quite the wrong impression of our not-at-all miserable day. They were actually taken earlier this week, when the weather was really gloomy, and our French friends were still here.

The Whitby jet-set

We’ve just had good friends from Laroque staying for the week. We’ve been obliged to polish up our French, which turned out not to be as hard as we’d feared. And we’ve been doing our best to show-case Yorkshire. We didn’t expect that to be hard, and it wasn’t. But we had fun exploring links between our two home areas, something I’ve talked about before here. Easy enough when you’re walking in the hilly limestone scenery of the Dales, or discussing breeds of sheep, or our former textile and mining industries, or bumbling along single-track roads in the country, with no villages in sight.

But it would be stretching a point to find a meeting point between the land-locked Ariège, and the East Yorkshire coast, surely? Well, as it happens, no. We had a day exploring the coast near Whitby: and I remembered that during the 1800s, Whitby and parts of the Ariège, Laroque d’Olmes included, had a thriving industry in common. Jet.

19th century mourning jewellery. Wikimedia Commons.

Back in the mid 19th century, the fashionable French and English alike couldn’t get enough of the gleaming, richly black fossilised wood that came out of local cliffs (Whitby) and river beds (Ariège) to be transformed by local workers into brooches, earrings and lockets. In its hey-day, the industry employed thousands of people engaged in finding and extracting the mineral, carving and polishing it. Queen Victoria ensured its continued popularity in England by wearing jet as mourning jewellery when her beloved Prince Albert died.

We found no jet. So Wikimedia Commons had to help me out.

Its decline as a fashion item matched the decline of readily available sources of the material. Somehow, by 1900, jet had lost its allure, and both areas lost an important source of employment. Jet in the Ariège is consigned to history books and museums. In Whitby, however, there’s something of a revival, and there are once more a few shops selling costume jewellery and other items made of jet.

We never found a single piece, but not for want of trying. Instead, we had a more traditional day at the sea. We ate large plates of fish and chips. We seagull-watched. We paddled on the beach and investigated rock pools. And we ended the day at the higgledy-piggledy and charming settlement of Runswick Bay, clambering up and down the cobbled streets and admiring the quaint cottages with their views across the bay.