An historical question

Having visited Kenilworth today and over the last few years a large number of other ruined castles an interesting question is posed regarding one of the most device men in British History.

Did Oliver Cromwell effectively create English Heritage?

A large number of castles around the country were destroyed, or slighted, on the orders of Cromwell following the Civil War so that they couldn’t be used again to hold out against “the will of parliament”.

Over time these have become picturesque ruins which have then become tourist attractions and today have spawned the heritage industry.

So rather than the curmudgeonly, Irish massacring, Christmas hating, puritanical dictator that history has left us with, perhaps we should remember him as the founding father of today’s Heritage Industry.

This does of course mean he is also responsible for “living history”, inane audio guides and battle re-enactments.

Digging up his corpse was too good for him (to paraphrase the Daily Mail)

You can’t all be the most beautiful – an update

The Settle to Carlisle line winds hands down, though I would still like to put forward the Buddleia forest that the trains sit in waiting to get into East Croydon.

Doing the tourist thing

I’m going to put my hands up to doing the most stupid touristy thing I have done for a long time.

I made an assumption, which is never a good thing.

The largest body of water in the Lake District is called Windermere. There is a town in the Lake District called Windermere and it has a station in it. The station itself, shock, horror for a lot of English towns, is actually almost in the centre of the town.

Now it’s a natural conclusion to draw that therefore Windermere the town must be on the banks of Windermere the body of water.

It is from these same assumptions that people arrive at the Bodleian library in Oxford looking for Selfridges, and at the site of the 2012 Olympics looking for Shakespeare’s birth place.

No, Windermere, the town is nowhere near Windermere, the body of water. In fact it’s about two blooming miles away, which is a bit of a hefty walk when you only have an hour to get there and back to the station in.

Perhaps in future I should look at the guidebooks before making these rash decisions.

You can’t all be the most beautiful

I’m starting to get a little confused by the descriptions of some of the railway lines around Carlisle.

Along with the West Coast Main Line, there are four other lines coming out of Carlisle. One heads into Scotland and can therefore be discounted from the discussion of “The most beautiful line in England”.

All three of the remaining lines, depending on where you look share this accolade.

The Tyne Valley (or as it’s now known Hadrian’s Wall) line runs across the top of the country, roughly following the line of the wall, though you can never see it.

The Cumbrian coast line runs, as it’s name suggests, down the coast of Cumbria taking in the beautiful scenery, including Europe’s largest nuclear fuel reprocessing plant at Sellafield (which has never had an accident unlike that other site Windscale which it use to be called!)

The Settle to Carlisle line runs, imaginatively, from Settle to Carlisle and includes traversing the Ribblehead viaduct. (I can’t comment on any negatives at present as I haven’t been along this line yet, that’s the trip for tomorrow)

Now, there is the slight possibility that they could all be the most beautiful line as they all share a common starting point and run parallel to each other for about a quarter of a mile.

However, if the run into Carlisle station is the most beautiful train ride in England then I think my morning commute into East Croydon could be a contender to replace it.

On the other-hand, it could all be marketing spiel to try and persuade tourists to travel on lines which the train company has to run as a social service, but otherwise wouldn’t make much in the way of money, but that would just be cynical wouldn’t it.

No, perhaps beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Derelict freight yards are obviously the new beauty.

At least take an interest in the display.

As I was wandering around the exhibition on Scotland’s Crown Jewels in the castle I was suddenly stopped in my tracks by a comment that another visitor made to their partner.

“So what’s the big stone got to do with all this”, pointing to the large stone next to the Crown, Sceptre and Sword.

I could have forgiven them if there had not been five rooms of information boards and displays prior to getting to the Crown Jewels which explained all of this.

I could almost have forgiven them if they had spoken in an accent which didn’t make them clearly English.

But no, despite all the boards, despite all the information and despite all the controversy that it has caused they didn’t appear to have the faintest idea what “the big stone” had to do with the Crown Jewels.

For those who haven’t visited the exhibition, or who don’t have a bit of knowledge of the “Rocky” relationship between England and Scotland here goes.

The stone, the Stone of Scone AKA Stone of Destiny AKA The Coronation Stone, was used to crown Scottish kings from around the 9th century up until 1296 when King Edward I of England, having beaten the Scots into submission, took the stone back to Westminster on the assumption that no King of Scotland could be crowned without it, and it was a pretty big sore point on Scottish/English relations right up until it was returned, in quite a shower of publicity, to Edinburgh in 1996 (Ignoring a short period in the early 1950’s when it was stolen by a group of Scottish students and taken back up north).

Perhaps it's just me then who actually takes in any of the information on the display boards or pays any attention to important things that have happened in my lifetime.

To misquote words put into a famous Scots mouth by Hollywood.

"You can take our lives, but you'll never take our ignorance"

Weather to agree...

Last night I caught the weather forecast at the end of the local news programme for the “BBC in NE and Cumbria”. The forecast appeared to be relatively OK, except for the massive rain belt that was hanging over southern Scotland, making Edinburgh look like it was in for a very wet day. Not what I really wanted to see, but as the regional news programme stopped at the border, nothing north of the border is discussed, especially not on the weather, I just resigned myself to getting wet.

Straight after the regional news and weather the BBC have a national weather forecast. At which point I started to get very confused.

The national weather forecast for the NE region was the same as the one on the regional news, but the massive downpours which had been deposited across southern Scotland on the local forecast had disappeared on the national. Instead it was going to be grey and overcast, with the odd spot of rain, but not the torrential downpours forecast just moments earlier.

I can only assume that in the NE region they get quite protective of their good weather and try and make it look like nobody else is having any.

That or the weather presenter had let the Work Experience trainee plot the graphics for them.

Public Transport as a Public Service

Being a Londoner I am pretty used to crowded public transport, even on a Sunday.

I know that once you get out of London the frequency and coverage of public transport is hit and miss, given that a lot of it has to be done for a profit, and if the local council doesn’t support it, it doesn’t run.

However, I was pleasantly surprised as to how easy it was to get from Berwick to Warkworth on a Sunday, quick connections and a service every two hours.

I was even more surprised by how empty the buses were. On the first leg of the journey to Alnwick I was the only person on the bus for virtually the whole way, and from Alnwick onto Warkworth there were only a handful of other people.

Virtually the same back, less than half a dozen people on the bus from Warkworth and only me and one other person for most of the way from Alnwick to Berwick.

Whilst the tickets may have been quite expensive (only just the right side of £10 in total), it still couldn’t possibly have paid for the trip, and if I hadn’t been out today one of the legs would have had nobody on it.

So a thank-you.

To the people of Northumberland, thanks for subsidising my journey today. Your council taxes enabled me to go and visit a castle that I couldn’t have otherwise reached.

Berwick’s Scottish Roots show

There is a thing that the English are not good at, and that’s celebrating feast and special days. Yes there is Christmas, but ask most English people what day St Georges Day is, or when Shakespeare’s Birthday is and you will probably be greeted with a blank expression.

It’s not something that our neighbours to the North have any problems with. Hogmanay, St Andrews Day, Burns Night, all are important days in the Scottish calendar.

Sadly, for me, Burns Night turns out to be January 25th and this being a Sunday, it would appear that a lot of people have decided to make a weekend of it. So when I went over to Holy Island I wasn’t expecting virtually everything to be closed, including the Information Centre (open 7 days a week all year round, closed for Christmas and Burns!) and the local shop.

Whilst the Island and Berwick may be within England, they have changed hands on numerous occasions and it was becoming increasingly evident that when it comes to having a knees up, the area knows which side of the border it wants to be.

This was confirmed in the evening as the hotel was busy with people staying for the night as they were going to Buns night celebrations in Berwick.

Perhaps in future, when I go away, I should really make a note to check what festivals are on.

When Google maps go bad

Prior to heading up to Berwick I had checked online to see where the hotel was, using Google maps.

The hotel, I knew, was on the outskirts of town, next to the large supermarket. And according to the map I looked at it was there, just the other side of the road from the Supermarket.

Now, technically, I should have double checked on the Travelodge website, or perhaps looked up the postcode before taking this for certain, but I was in a hurry, and it looked easy to find.

Come 7pm I walk past the supermarket and start looking for the hotel. Only there are a couple of problems. The first one being that the road it’s the other side of is the A1, the main North South road linking Edinburgh to London, and whilst nowhere near as busy as the four lane monstrosity that carves through North London, it was still two lanes wide, and quite fast.

Eventually, I managed to cross over, nearly killing myself in the process, walked to where the hotel should have been and found that instead it was a pub.

By now I was getting quite concerned. It was very dark, no lights except for the headlamps of oncoming vehicles, and a few stars. I started to retrace my steps heading back towards the supermarket, deciding that I would go to the supermarket and check there if they knew where the hotel was.

Then, as I was approaching the entrance to the supermarket I saw it, the hotel, clearly signed, sitting at the back of the supermarket car park, and when I later checked online, the location given by the third and fourth placed results.

Something makes me think that someone has a sick sense of humour and enjoys sending people to their deaths on the A1, that or its a cautionary warning not to take everything you see online as the truth!