Ludlow Love Affair

 

The Shropshire Star

Ludlow love affair keeps drawing Dave back from Canada

Ludlow | Features | Published: Apr 30, 2019

Ludlow's fame as a food capital has spread far and wide. Canadian architectural designer and freelance food and travel writer David Gillett has been sharing his love affair with Ludlow with readers in Canada's national paper the Globe and Mail, telling them of the town's many delights, illustrated with his own sketches. Here David explains what has drawn him to make a journey of thousands of miles to Ludlow again and again – and why he's planning to be back soon

It might be the artful bend in the river Teme, or the ancient castle brooding above it. Maybe it’s the medieval streets, the atmospheric alleyways, the fine Georgian facades on Broad Street.

Of course, it would be rather banal to say that it’s the food. That’s the typical line used by the unimaginative, the standard trope about Ludlow: The Food Town. And who wants to be accused of being unimaginative, swayed by food culture, influenced by the obvious? Well, I’ll go first: me.

Hook, line and sinker: Ludlow’s food scene has me. Because, beautiful setting, fascinating history and lovely buildings notwithstanding, what really sets Ludlow apart is its foodie credentials:  its grounded connection to the countryside, to local producers, specialty shops and great chefs.

And it’s largely why I’ve been back half a dozen times, all the way from Canada. That’s an 8-hour flight, Toronto to London, followed by the long trek into the Shropshire hills.

“Back to Ludlow? Again? …Why?”  That’s how the questioning will go, as it has multiple times before.

 “ ‘Tell me what you read and I’ll tell you who you are’ is true enough but I’d know you better if you told me what you re-read,” said the French writer, Francois Muriac.

Muriac was onto something, and his theory applies just as tellingly to travel.

I’m not a bucket-list location ticker. Some places are worth returns visits- they just feel right, like going home. They’re a movie we want to see again, a poem that improves with many readings. For me, one of those places is Ludlow, and food has always played some part in the magnetic pull of this Shropshire town.

The Ludlow Food Festival is the longest running food celebration in Britain and has helped put the town on the world culinary map, attracting over 20,000 visitors every fall for three days of tastings and demonstration by top chefs. Thanks to this and other festivals celebrating everything from beer to sausages to cheese, hundreds of local producers are given a showcase for the best independent food and drink. This in turn has spawned a rich variety of food shops, restaurants and farm shops in Ludlow and the valleys close by. The connective tissue is an emphasis on quality, a connection to the land:  terroir. Some of the food people I talked to believe that a community’s food choices help maintain the landscape, that the famous “Green and pleasant land” looks as it does because of food and farming; we help support that, and the quality of life in this town, by the food choices we make.

And those choices are bewildering in Ludlow. The market sets up in the square several times a week, and on “Local to Ludlow” days, muddy Landrovers disgorge a bewildering array of goods, from just-laid eggs to delicate courgettes to scrumpy cider brews. On surrounding streets, a jolly gaggle of food shops congregate, all within a few minutes’ stroll from the castle and each other.  The Broad Bean, on Broad Street, sells the best smoked salmon I’ve ever tried and deservedly won the Farm Shop Deli of the year for 2019. Henry Mackley, who runs the nearby Harp Lane Deli overlooking the market square, couldn’t abide us starting our Ludlow stay with something pre-packaged from the supermarket. He kept the shop open an extra 15 minutes and proceeded to set us up with a basket of great ingredients, conferred at length with Katy about pasta proportions, and generously decanted a custom amount of his best olive oil in return for a donation to a local charity.

We soon discovered that Henrys’ expertise, and his eagerness to share it, is simply how life rolls in Ludlow.  Four family-owned butchers do a roaring trade. We visited Andrew Francis on our second night in town looking for some local partridge.  “Sorry, no,” said the friendly red-cheeked butcher, his trilby hat pushed back. “No, you don’t want that. Partridge isn’t open until next week. What you’ll be wanting is a nice a haunch of Venison”. He wasn’t going to sell game birds if they hadn’t been freshly sourced from the bushes of a nearby estate. We (and the birds) were fine with that. We traded him stories about eating bear roast and moose tenderloin. “O Canada!” he said, grinning.  And the venison was lovely.

The Mousetrap, a cheese shop barely the size of our rental car, is bursting with over 150 varieties, may made less than a short country drive away. With expert help we settled on a wedge of Shropshire Blue and three others. (Okay, maybe six.)

The cheese people in turn directed us to a green grocer for some of the freshest, plumpest produce I’d ever seen - much of it liberally caked with black topsoil from nearby farm fields, lush green with the frequent rains of the Marches.

Freshness and simplicity are at the heart of everything in this town, an original player in the Slow Food movement in England. Taste, freshness, provenance are the watchwords here.

And the restaurants follow suit: fewer ingredients but better ones, quality rather than novelty.

To start the day, a street-side table at Chichettis is hard to beat. Avocado on toast and an authentic wake-me-up Macchiato kick-started our day nicely. The contemporary Castle Tea Room, ingeniously inserted in the castle wall, serves tea and a fresh scones complete with a complimentary medieval courtyard view, and sometimes even a bonus falconry demo.

 Next to the castle, Elliot’s, a French bistro run by Olivier Bossut in the elegant Dinham Dall Hotel, capped one of our days in style. The cassoulet Toulosain was, to use a technical gastronomic term:  scrumptious. Elegant dining in a classic Georgian House: My inner Mr.Darcy approved.

Depth and new talent bodes well for the future. Karl Martin, the young chef at "Old Downton Lodge", created the most extraordinary meal we’ve ever eaten. Anywhere.  The restaurant, recommended to me by Lucy of “Let’s Go Ludlow” fame, is set in a medieval stone barn hung with tapestries, a fittingly atmospheric setting for a 3 hour dinner served with laid-back professionalism.  Like Shropshire itself, the food was at once both familiar and nuanced, simple but deliciously complex.

If finishing the day with a celebratory libation is on the agenda, “Ludders” continues to punch above its weight. You could visit the “The Blood bay”, a Victorain pub that will transport you back in time, or the tiny “Dog Hangs Well” parlour pub in Corve street. (No sign, but you’ll know it’s open if the antique street light is burning outside.)  You could try one of the many thriving traditional pubs, like The Wheatsheaf which is built into the walls beside the town’s only remaining mediaeval gate or wend your way down the narrow alleyway that leads to the Rose and Crown Inn, one of England’s oldest, plying its trade for over 600 years.

Lucien Bonaparte, Napoleons’ brother, would have known it well. He lived in “open confinement” a few streets over in Dinham House in 1811 while his brother was prancing around Europe. Used now for what must surely be the world’s loveliest wood-stove showroom, Dinham House is a Georgian masterpiece of stately symmetry. Lucien may have been “a guest of the King” but he had a retinue of servants and, no doubt, a steady supply of very fine Ludlow foodstuffs.

He knew it and anyone who visits today will soon learn: Ludlow is a fine town to be confined in for a few days, or better yet a week, a great pace to return to. Eating well definitely won’t be a problem.

To paraphrase Muriac: “ ‘Tell me where you travel and I’ll tell you who you are’. That is true enough but I’d know you better if you told me where you return to time and time again,”.

For some, the travel experience is ten thousand miles wide and one inch deep, but I’d argue for a narrower focus and a deeper, more local experience. And no matter how predictable it might seem, I know I’ll be back in Ludlow again,  exploring new cafes and foodshops, getting to know a beloved place a little better with each visit.

https://www.shropshirestar.com/news/features/2019/04/30/ludlow-love-affair-keeps-drawing-dave-back-from-canada/

David Gillett  April 2019

In Ludlow, Foodie Heaven Awaits

March 2018  The Globe & Mail

(Ludlow, Shropshire)

The Harp Lane Deli has the look of the perfect English country-town foodshop. Its location on the charming market square, the Union Jack bunting , the old bay  windows bursting with the promise of delicious local delicacies : all of these things say “food problems solved.”   Everything about it is perfect.

Well, everything but the “closed” sign.

To be fair, we had left it late. The sun was setting in the western wilds out over Wales, past the soft Shropshire hills. But we had driven all day, we were famished, and we needed something to take to our rented cottage by the weir on the River Teme. So we tried the door.

Luckily, it still opened. Henry, the consummate deli  owner, had seen the likes of us before: hungry food pilgrims newly arrived in Ludlow, much in need of help. Did he roll his eyes? Perhaps. But the foodie in him couldn’t abide us starting our Ludlow stay with something pre-packaged from Tesco. He set us up with a basket of great ingredients, conferred at length with Katy about pasta proportions, and generously decanted a custom amount of his best olive oil in return for a donation to a local charity.

We soon discovered that Henrys’ expertise,  and his eagerness to share it, are de rigueur in Ludlow, the original English Food Town. 

Its setting doesn’t hurt. Ludlow dwells amongst the  verdant green waves of A.E.Housman’s  Shropshire hills on the edge of the Marches, that ancient borderland between Wales and England . It’s a land that has seen centuries of conflict, and Ludlow castle, an atmospheric ruin dating from 1086 and once the home of Henry VI, sits on its crag above a bend in the Teme, looking out over the shadowed depths of Mortimer’s Forest. Ludlow, like York, was once a seat of government in Tudor and Stewart England and its position at this cross-roads of battling families , royal intrigue and heated cultural exchange has been fuel for the town’s vigorous character for centuries.

Just far enough from London to be special, yet close enough to be a weekend destination for Londoners and the cognoscenti  from nearby Birmingham, Ludlow has dodged the bullet that has plagued many other English towns in recent years:  a slow death at the hands of suburban super stores and empty High Street shops. It thrives, as it always has, as a market centre for a whole region with a healthy farming culture, great food and warm hospitality, being  “not so much provincial,” as film maker Jonathan Meade says, “- it actually feels autonomous, devolved, independent…like a de facto state.”

The Poet Laureate, John Betjeman,  went  further, saying  “Ludlow is probably the finest town in England.” A large part of this is the impressive display of well-preserved Tudor and  Georgian buildings, almost 500 listed buildings in a town of 10,000 people, older ones in the higgledy-piggeldy maze of Medieval lanes,  and a parade of textbook Georgian ones ranged along Broad Street, judged by many to be the prettiest street in England. Looking like a location  for a period drama (which it of course has been) , the street is best seen from upstairs at the excellent Ludlow Buttercross Museum, a little jewel of a local museum done right.  Admission charge? One pound.

So, lovely buildings : check. Great location, interesting history: check, check . But what really sets Ludlow apart and makes it worth the drive is its foodie credentials:  its grounded connection to the countryside, to local producers, specialty shops and great chefs.

The Ludlow Food Festival is the longest running food celebration in Britain and has helped put the town on the world culinary map. It attracts over 20,000 visitors every fall for three days of tastings and demonstration by top chefs and events including the famous Sausage Trail, last year a magnet for over 2000 lovers of the British banger. Add to that the competition for Pork Pie of the Marches, the Cake Competition and the Ale Trails and those three days seem very short indeed. A spring festival joined the calendar ten years ago, running  this year  on May 12 & 13 with an emphasis on real ales.

Thanks to the festivals, hundreds of local producers are given a showcase for the best independent food and drink. This is turn has spawned a rich variety of food shops, restaurants and farm shops in Ludlow and the valleys close by. The connective tissue is an emphasis on  quality, a connection to the land:  terroir. Some of the food people I talked to believe that a community’s food choices help maintain the landscape, that the famous “Green and pleasant land” looks as it does because of food and farming; we help support that, and the quality of life in this town, by the food choices we make.

And those choices are legion in Ludlow. The market sets up in the square several times a week, and on “Local to Ludlow” days, muddy Landrovers disgorge a bewildering array of goods, from just-laid eggs to delicate courgettes to scrumpy cider brews. On surrounding streets, in addition to Henry’s  Harp Lane Deli, a jolly gaggle of food shops congregate, all within a few minutes’ stroll from the castle and each other.  Myriad Organics, for example,  shows just how diverse a truly local and  organic product list can be. The Broad Bean, on Broad Street,  sells the best smoked salmon I’ve ever tried and dozens of delicacies I’ll need to return for.

Four family-owned butchers do a roaring trade. We visited Andrew Francis on our second night in town intent on some local partridge or grouse.  “Sorry, no,” said the friendly red-cheeked butcher, his trilby hat pushed back on his head. “No, you don’t want that. Partridge isn’t open until next week. What you’ll be wanting is a nice a haunch of our Venison. How many are you feeding?” He wasn’t going to sell game birds if they hadn’t been freshly sourced from the bushes of a nearby estate. We (and the birds) were fine with that. We traded him stories about eating bear roast and moose tenderloin. “O Canada!” he said, grinning.  And the venison was lovely.

The Mousetrap, a dedicated cheese shop barely the size of our rental car, filled out our “Local to Ludlow” jute bag. With over 150 varieties creating a smell that only a cheese aficionado could love, selection involved lots of  furrowed-brow sampling. With expert help we settled on a wedge of Shropshire Blue and three others. (Okay, maybe six.)

The cheese people in turn directed us to a green grocers for some of the freshest, plumpest produce I’d ever seen: Swedes, carrots, dozens of potatoe varieties, leeks, bewildering arrays of mushrooms - all liberally caked with black topsoil from nearby farm fields that can be glimpsed at the end of many of the streets in town, lush green with the frequent  rains of the Marches.

Freshness and simplicity are at the heart of everything in this town, an original player in the Slow Food movement in England. And the restaurants are largely no different: fewer ingredients, quality rather than complexity – no molecular gastronomy here. This is ‘hike-the-hills-then-sit-by-the-log-fire’ food. Not a test tube in sight.

To start the day, a street-side table in front of Chichettis is hard to beat. An authentic wake-me-up Macchiato and avocado on toast was a great kick-off. The lamb fleeces on the outdoor chairs were a nice touch, prompting a longer stay and refills. For tea and a fresh scone, the contemporary Castle Tea Room, ingeniously inserted in the castle wall, comes with a complimentary medieval courtyard view, sometimes with a bonus falconry demo.

 Mortimers on Corve Street, run by chef Wayne Smith, (who has cooked for Michael Jackson, Will Smith and a host of Premier League footballers) carries the flag for the many fine restaurants in town. In the former premises of Claude Bosi’s two Michelin-starred Hibiscus (now moved to London), there is some weight of culinary stardom to live up to. And he does so with straightforward food that is all about provenance, flavor and freshness. Try the strip of Hereford beef sirloin served with roasted shallots and baby leeks. Book very early, (but don’t ask for an autograph.)  Next to the castle, Elliot’s, a French bistro run by Olivier Bossut in the elegant Dinham Dall Hotel, provided us with a great evening out as well. The cassoulet Toulosain was excellent. Elegant dining in a classic Georgian House: My inner Mr.Darcy approved.

Depth and new talent bodes well for the future. David Chantler, vice chair of the Food Festival says:  “The three local, and as it happens young chefs who, for me best represent the trend might be Josh Crouch at "CSons at the Green Cafe”, Andy Link at the “Riverside” and Karl Martin at "Old Downton Lodge". The restaurant story continues to develop.

Finishing off with a celebratory libation might be fitting, and in this regard, “Ludders” continues to punch above its weight. You could visit the tiny parlour pub “The Dog Hangs Well” in Corve street and try that day’s local ale. (No sign, but you’ll know its open if the antique street light is burning outside.)  You could try one of the many thriving traditional pubs, like The Wheatsheaf which is built into the walls beside the town’s only remaining mediaeval gate or wend your way down the narrow alleyway that leads to the Rose and Crown Inn, one of England’s oldest, plying its trade for over 600 years. Or maybe take the advice of Monty Lowe, the historian and author  we met in the Buttercross Museum. “Try the back rooms at The Feathers for a glass of wine. Classic.” Classic indeed.  Built in 1619 and converted into an inn in 1670, The Feathers Hotel is one of the most famous (and ostentatious) half-timbered Jacobean masterpieces in the country. The interior rooms maintain their original proportions, ancient beams and plasterwork darkened with age.

Lucien Bonaparte, Napoleons’ brother, would have known it well. He lived in “open confinement” a few streets over in Dinham House in 1811 while his brother was prancing around Europe conquering people. Used now for what must surely be the world’s loveliest wood-stove showroom, Dinham House is a Georgian masterpiece of stately symmetry. Lucien may have been “a guest of the King” but he had a retinue of servants and, no doubt, a steady supply of very fine Ludlow foodstuffs.

He knew it, the Tudors and Stewarts before him knew it, and anyone who visits today will soon learn: Ludlow is a fine town to be confined in for a few days, or better yet a week. Eating well definitely won’t be a problem.

Just make sure you get to the Deli before closing time.

-          David Gillett   https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/travel/activities-and-interests/in-ludlow-england-foodie-heavenawaits/article38352636/

There and Back (Again)

(Globe and Mail TRAVEL,  Saturday November 11th 2017)   There and Back Again GLOBE & MAIL

Nursing both my throbbing feet and a pint of Thatcher’s cider, I eased back into my chair by the smouldering coal fire at the Wasdale Head Inn. Today was a failed attempt at the treacherous summit of Pillar. But a few weeks hence I’d be back home and likely facing the question again:

“Back to England? Again? …Why?”

 “ ‘Tell me what you read and I’ll tell you who you are’ is true enough but I’d know you better if you told me what you re-read,” said the French writer, Francois Muriac.

Francois was onto something, and his theory applies just as tellingly to travel.

Are you a bucket-list location ticker? Or are you, like me, pulled back by some unseen gravitational force time and again to a particular place?

Some places just feel right, like going home. They’re a movie we want to see again, a dog-eared book that never gets old.

For me, it’s Britain, with its ancient culture, mellowed architecture and daily routines that are immediately familiar while still surprisingly novel. Tightening the focus further: the English countryside, Blake’s “green and pleasant land”. If pushed, the epicentre of my longing is the North, with its desolate moors, raw and ever-changing weather, wild coasts and brooding mountains.

Specifically, the Cumbrian mountains in the Lake District, an area which just this year has been awarded UNESCO World Heritage status, joining the Great Wall of China, the Taj Mahal and the Grand Canyon in winning one of the highest accolades on the planet.

In addition to the official attribute-speak that comes with such a designation, standard phrases like “natural beauty” and “stunning vistas”, I’d add a host of other things. What’s not to like about a place peppered with weathered villages folded into heathered crevices redolent of coal smoke and sheep dung?  The names are evocative of some other time: Yanwath, Temple Sowerby, Nether Wasdale, Crackenthorpe.

These mountains are a compact, scaled-back Alpine jewel box, chock full of hulking masses whose rugged truths are soon apparent when the actual climbing starts.  Seen through the smoked windows of a tour bus headed for touristy Keswick, they are a picturesque back-drop. Yet these are true mountains with all the inherent mystery and danger such terrain can bring and noble names to match: Blencathra, Skiddaw, Great Gable.

Wordsworth, Coleridge, Beatrix Potter – many writers called these hills home and the Romantic poets haunted these heights for inspiration. John Ruskin wrote of his love/hate relationship with the country he knew so well, “Blind, tormented, unwearied, marvelous England,” he said. And then, under the spell of Lake District beauty, he built his home, Brantwood, on the shores of Coniston Water.

Around 18 million people are likewise enchanted and visit the Lake District each year, spending close to 1.5 billion dollars and employing 18,000 people in the process. They come for a variety of reasons: a lungful of fresh air, a trip to the flowered tea rooms of Grasmere, a pilgrimage to Wordsworths’ grave perhaps.

For me it’s about many things: my grandmother’s ancestral home in Langwathby, the upland sheep-farming culture, the architecture of the villages that take rustic-chic to the next level.

And the Walking, capital ‘W’. In Cumbria, it’s a term that covers a whole dictionary of movement: including rambling, scrambling and climbing. Our first trip to Cumbria almost 30 years ago introduced us gently to this pursuit, a half-day hike as part of an old uncle’s car tour.  Subsequent return visits have helped us discover the nuance, refine our approach and extend our journeys, walking, as Hillarie Belloc said so eloquently “Across the great wave tops and rolls of the hills.”

This in itself is reason enough to re-visit a favourite place.

Recently I found myself yet again in a favourite part of The Lakes, the Wasdale Valley, often called the home of British Climbing. In Wasdale are England’s deepest lake (Wastwater) and highest mountain (Scafel), and arguably favourite view (from Great Gable). It’s an isolated place high in the dark, Western fells, a deep valley of scree slides and jagged cliffs, ancient sheepfolds and thick cloud. Difficult to get to, difficult to leave.

It’s a place of sheep farming and mountain climbing: little else matters. A night in its silent, dark embrace re-sets your expectations and your preconceptions of what really matters.

Could it be that some of us are pre-wired to eat porridge, climb fells, endure hurricane winds and end up by the fire at snug pubs at sunset? Life distills neatly into this simple pattern.

Along the narrow path between our B&B at Burnthwaite farm and the Wasdale Head Inn, sits tiny St.Olaf’s church, built, so they say, from Viking ship timbers. In its tiny churchyard enclosed by ancient stone walls and wind-twisted yews, the tilting grave markers tell a story of mountain climbing tragedy. This was a tiny detail I’d missed on previous visits. Re-visiting gave me the chance to delve deeper. Records of deaths on nearby fells, often of more than one climber at a time, are common, speaking both to the inherent dangers of the area and the love that people have had for these hills over the years.

Alfred Wainwright, king of the fell-walkers and guide book writer extraordinaire, once said: “The fleeting hour of life of those who love the hills is quickly spent, but the hills are eternal. Always there will be the lonely ridge, the dancing beck, the silent forest; always there will be the exhilaration of the summits. These are for the seeking, and those who seek and find while there is still time will be blessed both in mind and body.”

Edmund Hilary’s team used the ‘exhilarating summits’ to train for their Everest conquest, and the lobby of the Wasdale Head Inn is a makeshift museum of hob-nailed boots, climbing axes and frayed ropes. Faded photos show jaunty Victorians posing on impossible pinnacles like Napes Needle, tweeds and all. And later, eating in the inn’s pub with climbers from Holland and Australia, Billy, the wired-haired terrier who regularly goes ‘down the pub’ on his own, visits our table in search of a handout, unimpressed by whatever feat of endurance we’d performed that day.

We’d seen Billy before of course, on previous trips. But on this return visit, we were starting to feel as through we knew him, just as we were coming to know the hills. One visit would have never done it for us. Two even, would not have been nearly enough to start the process of unlocking the mysteries of Wasdale, of the Cumbrian Mountains’, of northern England, of Billy the wire-haired terrier.

For some, the travel experience is ten thousand miles wide and one inch deep, a shopping list accomplished, another day…another flag. I’d argue for a narrower focus and a deeper, more local experience.

Returning to a familiar spot is less about comfort-zones and familiarity than you might expect. In fact, taking your exploration to that next level, past that introductory tour-guide stage and really jumping into the deep end of intimate, vulnerable contact – that can be the risky sort of travel that is asks more of you – and ultimately gives more in return.

To paraphrase Muriac: “ ‘Tell me where you travel and I’ll tell you who you are’. That is true enough but I’d know you better if you told me where you return to time and time again,”.

And no matter how my aching feet might protest, I know I’ll be back in a remote pocket of England’s north again, squinting up at the so far evasive summit of Pillar, reading the clouds, getting to know a beloved place better and better with each visit.

IF YOU GO

When To Go: The Lake District is beautiful in its peak season which runs from late April to early September, and everyone knows it. So consider visiting outside this period if you can. Prices drop and the crowds thin in October, just as the best colours come out on the hills, and the trails are drier underfoot than in spring. The average temperature in October is 9C, making a pub fire at day’s end just that much more inviting. There are some quiet lakeside paths in this area, but for the most part, Wasdale is for people with good hiking boots, all-weather gear and good map-reading skills.

Sleep:   Burnthwaite B&B is a farmhouse bed & breakfast on a working National Trust farm at the foot of the best mountains run by Georgina & Andrew (and Billy the wire-haired terrier). Accommodations, in the 17th C. farmhouse, are simple and comfortable – geared to walkers and mountain climbers. The breakfasts are hearty and legendary.

B&B from £33 per person per night, £38 per person per night en-suite.

bookings@burnthwaitefarm.co.uk

Getting there:    A car is essential. There is a good selection of rentals at Manchester Airport ( we used www.Europcar.com) and then there is a 3 hr drive to Wasdale. The M6 motorway makes the first 1.5 hrs an easy drive, then the roads quickly get progressively narrower and twisting as you wind your way up the western coast of Cumbria and into the mountains.

Eat:     Burnthwaite farm is just a ten minute walk from the local pub food and drink served fireside at Ritson's Bar at the Wasdale Head Inn, the self-proclaimed “Birthplace of British climbing”. The bar, open all day year-round, is named after the first landlord, Will Ritson - huntsman, wrestler, farmer, fellsman, guide, raconteur, and the first "World's Biggest Liar". The Inn also rents rooms in its atmospheric old building at the foot of Kirk Fell. 

reception@wasdale.com

www.wasdale.com

For the original article, go to:

There and Back Again GLOBE & MAIL

AN ANCIENT SAXON CHURCH

The little Wiltshire town of Bradford On Avon is considered by some to be the most picturesque in England.

               

Maybe.  But the day we visited was cool and wet, a darkening sky rendering the narrow streets lanes of despair, relieved only by the ubiquitous tea rooms awaiting the bus tours that , on this particular October day, stayed away in droves.

                Undaunted, my Medievalist wife, Katy, had somehow convinced her husband and three young children to forgo the crescents of Bath for an afternoon and search instead for the tiny Saxon church of St.Laurence built by St.Aldhelm at the turn of the 8^th century. Lost for centuries, the small church served as a school, a house and then a warehouse before its resurrection in 1856 by a local curate.

                Sheltering from the rain, we found it permeated by gloom, cave-like. It exuded age, the most thoroughly ancient building we’d encountered so far on a month’s sojourn in England.

                My four year old daughter, Molly Claire, her eyes adjusting to the dim light, responded to the architecture of the tiny chancel by singing, her plaid skirt swinging as see twirled, lost in the mystery of the place. She was alone in a circle of sound that reverberated off the aged stone walls.

                Maybe it was a good thing St.Laurence was lost for a thousand years, consumed by the organic  build up of the town around it. It survived with its soul intact never having suffered alteration, its spare interior imbued with atmosphere, “whispering”, as Mathew Arnold said of nearby Oxford  “the last enchantments of the Middle Age” .

                Carved angels above us on a striking Saxon arch, we watched silently from the side stalls as Molly Claire’s voice rose and lost itself in the echoing shadows amongst the ancient oak black with years.

                No one had told her to sing, but the building suggested it and she heeded. She sang the only song that somehow seem appropriate, an old Victorian hymn her grandmother had used to lull her to sleep:  “This Is My Father’s World”.

                “All nature sings

                And round me rings

                The music of the spheres”

                I kind of doubt she grasped the meaning of the words, if indeed that even mattered. But I’m certain she did sense that some magic was happening,  that the architecture had elicited something from her that was real, and spiritual and beautiful.  The notes she sang rose and joined the myriad others, notes from 8^th century voices and a million songs and latin chants since then.

                She joined in and became part of something that day, like a part of the building’s very architectural  fabric.  Her response to the spirit of the place and the built form of the room were nothing short of exactly right. And really, she had such a cute little voice.

-David Gillett

(First published in PERSPECTIVES magazine, Fall 2015)

                

London,Oxford,Sam & Me

Travelling with an architects' eye (and a baby)

We knew not what to expect, my wife and I, when we set off for six long weeks of trekking around England. We'd been there before, but then it was just the two of us, a bit of loose change and an architecture guide book. This time, it would be an autumn trip with three children in tow, all under 9, (which meant six extra backpacks, a baby seat, a stroller, and enough gummy bears to drive toothpaste shares through the roof.) And as with the English weather, we had no way of predicting if things would be fair or foul, stormy or calm.

Yet we were fairly certain of one thing at least: Samuel would make life difficult for us. Sam is 2.

Nothing wrong with 2, of course; some of our nicest friends had once been 2. But Sam, being 2 and proud of it, was out to undo what he could of our adventure. He had just learned to run (sideways), was long overdue for some sort of life-threatening sickness (probably Ebola), and was developing an alarming fondness for anything edible (and sugar-coated) or toylike (and plastic-coated).

Well-meaning but heartless friends had smiled weakly and suggested meekly that perhaps we should consider leaving Sam at home. Rumour had it that we were taking nannies in sufficient numbers to post a round-the-clock watch on him and his habits of mass destruction. Yet in the end, we went it alone, ready to take whatever he could throw at us.

What he did throw at us (apart from masticated gummy bears and half-empty bottles of HP sauce) was the chance to take stock and ask some slow-motion questions of ourselves. Did we really need to travel at that old hectic pace, cameras blazing? Did two cities in one day mean as much as one city in two weeks? Were frantic flybys as rewarding as measured contemplation?

Sam was a bear without his afternoon nap, and it soon became painfully apparent that we'd either have to sit inside every afternoon, losing the best part of a day’s exploration, or he'd have to sleep while we explored. The choice was between Simmering Frustration (and British soap operas) or Travels With The Amazing Sleeping Baby. We opted for the latter.

We went on tour, baby Sam and I, during the afternoons. While Katy took Harry and Molly on adventures in search of dragons and elves, I pushed him in a peaceful sleep-walk through the landscapes of my own Grand Tour.

I'd been to Bath before and marched through its crescents and squares like any duty-bound student of architecture, but this time it was different. My pace was slow and the rhythm of my walking was measured, thoughtful. Sam slept in tranquil oblivion beneath his horsey-blanket, Curious George next to his blushed cheek. At such a pace, the nuance of the honey-coloured stone wasn't lost on me, and hardly a doorway in John Wood's Royal Crescent escaped detailed analysis.

I studied the serene Georgian proportion in complete silence under the October sky, walked the leaf-strewn side streets, chatted in hushed tones with doormen, followed the movements of the clouds as they hurried towards winter.

It soon became a habit, these afternoon strolls; quiet, thoughtful, introspective. Strolls that would once have been frustrated aggravation became walks of discovery. I began to see just how much I'd been missing. The tour books had lied: a city a day? Walking tours that cover the centre of Oxford in just two hours? Sam and I spent as much time just crunching through the russet leaves of a deserted  Botanical Garden, the shadows of Magdalen College growing long beside us. Nothing could give one the sense of quiet contemplation that can be achieved at the controls of a stroller filled with a sleeping two year old.

With time to observe, my pencil and sketchbook came back into play. On the banks of the Cherwell, punters passed silently as under the blankets, Sam sailed on plush waves to the land of nod, sung to sleep by the ancient stones around him that "whispered" as Matthew Arnold put it, "the last enchantments of the Middle Ages."

Weeks of such afternoons passed, the stroller wheels showing their age, axles squeaking. We passed through villages and small towns, ruined abbeys and walled gardens and arrived finally in the hectic bulls-eye of action: London.

We studied the vanguard of modern London’s construction boom, circled the Great Court of the  British Museum for an hour, studying details, soaking in the freedom of a slowed pace. We walked the paths of Regent's Park on a lazy Sunday afternoon, avoiding impromptu football games by a safe margin, lightly crossing the cobbles, greatly enjoying tranquility in the centre of the metropolis.

It would never have been like this without Sam and his annoying  need for an afternoon nap. I would never have slowed to this pace without the pace of a slumbering child to slow me. I wouldn't have noticed the frozen angels in the cathedral close in Salisbury without him, or had time to solve the maze at Hampton Court (twice). Instead, I would have rushed headlong, striking names from the list I had mentally prepared back in architecture school. Shooting photos, marching through history, missing the minute details, the quiet lanes, the glories of an architecture that took time to absorb.

“Even sleepers are workers and collaborators in what goes on in the universe”,  said Heraclitus in 500 BC. Heraclitus knew his babies, I'd say.

Katy and I had given our family a six-week trek through the heart of an autumnal England. Sam, his little blonde head oblivious to it all, had given the subtle shading of the ancient stones back to me.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    ***

Originally published in the Globe & Mail and in PERSPECTIVES mag.

David Gillett

Walking The Wild Lands

Published in the GLOBE AND MAIL TRAVEL SECTION NOVEMBER 2.2013

Ominous storm clouds framing her jolly face, Mary Whistance offered us some pre-walk advice in her cheery Welsh lilt: “Tomorrow is the best day of the whole trail. Hergest Ridge is a right lovely walk. Steep though. And if a storm comes on, you’re in for it. A walker died up there last month, so he did. Poor lad, a boy and a half he was! Three days before they found him.” Her smile fizzled when she stole a furtive glance at the brooding sky.

 

 

It was the third day of our 136-kilometre walk north along the Offa's Dyke Path, which loosely follows the Welsh/English border.   While we ate our Welsh fry-up breakfast ("Job done tidy! You slaughtered those sausages , you did!") Mary's warning added fuel to the theory forming in my mind: Nothing on this long-distance path is as it first appears. This is a land of mist and magic.

 

The Offa’s Dyke Path is named after King Offa of Mercia who, in the 8th century, built the dyke as a sort of poor man’s Hadrian Wall to keep the marauding Welsh mountain men at bay. Zig-zagging from Chepstow in the south on the Bristol Channel, north to Prestatyn on the Irish Sea, it is sometimes a great bank up to almost eight metres high with a deep ditch to the westerly Welsh side. It is a fascinating raison d’être for a National Trail: a route that follows a engineered landscape rather than a geographic feature such as mountains or a coast line.

That does not mean the path, Llwydr Clawdd Offa in Welsh is an easy stroll through a bucolic British postcard. To be sure, it has its moments of breathtaking views across lush green valleys dotted with remote villages, hills rolling off into the distance. But once up close and personal, the green hills are two-hour uphill slogs littered with climbs over countless styles,//what do you mean by this?/// the path itself strewn with ankle-twisting rocks or mud the consistency of sticky-toffee pudding. It is wild country, this border land known as the Welsh marches, home to centuries of raids, skirmishes and midnight sheep-stealing. Fortunately, the wild is tempered by the homey pubs and friendly B&Bs spaced at walkable intervals.

My wife and I had chosen to do the southern portion of the path – considered by many to be the best half – from Chepstow to Knighton, a doable six-day walk. (Those wishing to do the whole 285 kilometres should allow at least 12 days with rest time added.)

Since it was mid-September, we’d prepared well for rain but soon learned that British weather reports are notoriously pessimistic and usually wrong. Every night we’d hear rumblings at the pub and earnest predictions on the BBC: tomorrow will be wet, windy and turning cold.

But our heavy rain pants and ponchos stayed in our packs and we went digging for sunblock instead.

As Mary had warned, it was just as well. Several sections of the path are well above 500 metres, and what can be an annoying breezy rain in town can be deadly on the heights of the lonely Black Mountain Moors.

We learned quickly that the path is a smorgasbord of variety. One moment, it traverses a cool, wooded ridge high above the Wye Valley. The next it drops down and passes the magnificent ruins of Tintern Abbey, founded by hardy Cistercian monks in 1131. A few miles later, it crosses a cast-iron bridge, built at the smokey heights of the Industrial Revolution, when the Welsh Hills were ravaged for coal and slate. Then it’s through a lonely windswept moor with distant views west to Brecon Beacons and east to the Malvern Hills, mountain sheep our only company.

Some days we’d never meet another soul for hours, leading to suspicions that the Offa’s Dyke is Britain’s best-kept long-distance hiking secret. But just as the changeable weather was never predictable, suddenly a bustling town would unfold in front of us.

Two hours after a knee-popping descent from the desolate heights of Hay Bluff in the Black Mountains, where on a clear day one is treated to a good view of magnificent Lord Hereford’s Knob, the path bisects the town of Hay-on-Wye. We made straight for the Granary Cafe for two bowls of organic Gooseberry crumble and coffee.

“Something really smells in here,” said Katy, tactfully surveying the room.

“Yea. Us.”

But sheep dung and mud is a ho-hum reality in Hay, famous for its 30 bookshops – including the Murder and Mayhem Bookshop, the Poetry Bookshop and the Sensible Bookshop – the popular Hay Festival and Richard Booth, the self-styled king of Hay, who lives in the castle surrounded by groaning shelves of ancient books and notices brashly proclaiming political independence from Britain. We’d scheduled a rest day here and it was worth it. For a couple of Canadian bibliophiles, Hay-on-Wye, the world’s first self-proclaimed “book town,” was bittersweet: So many books, but no way to carry them.

It was good we didn’t try, since the next day, our second last, was a gruelling 27 kilometres up and down over some of the most heart-stoppingly picturesque A.E. Housman countryside imaginable, liberally strafed with more than fifty stiles, a few questioning bulls, a fierce (but muzzled!) Rottweiler and hundreds of sheep.

 

The last night, tired but unbowed, we reached the comfy, isolated hill town of Knighton, the official end of the south half, start point for the wilder northern section and home to the Offa Dyke Centre with T-shirts, books and strange King Offa mannequins.

Staying with the Sharatts, who had a cozy sitting room well-stocked with maps and trail guides, was a fitting end to our trek. Not only did Pat tackle our long overdue laundry, but Geoff was a fount of helpful advice and knowledgeable comment.

“Too bad you’re ending it here,” he said in an enthusiastic lilt. “Because tomorrow’s stretch is the best part of the walk: most variety, best scenery … and toughest. Steep too. If the weather comes, you’re in for it.”

Now, where had we heard that before?

 

IF YOU GO

The Offa’s Dyke Path is rated “hard,” and is best suited to experienced hikers with proper gear. It can be walked in either direction, but is usually done south to north, so the sun and wind will be mostly at your back. The trail is generally well marked, with white acorn symbols indicating the route. But in many places, especially in rain and fog, it is easy to lose your way. Carry a good set of maps and a compass.

Getting there: Buses run daily to Chepstow, the southern start point, from London’s Gatwick and Heathrow airports. nationalexpress.com Train service to Chepstow is also good, typically running through Newport. nationalrail.co.uk

When to go: The trail can be walked any time, but prime season is April to October. (In the off season, accommodations will be harder to find.) In spring, the days are longer and sometimes a bit wetter. The fall is a beautiful time to walk, but days are much shorter.

Where to stay: The Bear Inn is an atmospheric 16th-century coaching inn. Located in the middle of Hay-On-Wye, close to all the bookshops, restaurants and pubs. Inventive local cuisine and snug, well-decorated rooms make it a memorable stopover. Double rooms from £70 ($118) a night; thebearhay.com

Geoff and Pat Sharratt have been hosting walkers since 1999 in their spacious Victorian house, now known as Westwood**, a B&B in Knighton. They have lots of maps and guides and are well-versed on the trail and the weather. From £25 ($42) a person a night; 1-54-752-0317

For more information, visit the Offa’s Dyke Assocation atoffasdyke.demon.co.uk for planning tips, accommodation ideas and to order guides and maps.

 **PS: Geoff Sharratt wrote to tell me their  B&B is now closed. So sad. But he added that the story has been passed around Knighton, which is not so sad.