Marcher Land Adventures 3

Back to the road for Wednesday's expedition, and it was another day of castles. My first stop, in fact, was just up the road from the cottage at Pembridge Castle, low, small, and still a private residence. My first thought was that it was a 19th-century folly, but no, though the building was extended and remodelled then a lot of it is genuinely medieval. 

I intended to call in at Goodrich Castle, but I thought that I could squeeze in a short trip north to Ross-on-Wye, as it turned out a busy small town clambering around a rocky outcrop. The big parish church has a fantastic range of memorials including one from 1530 - about as late for these things as you can get - that incorporates a parade of stone saints including St Catherine herself. The castellations around the 'town walls' only date to a road-reconstruction scheme in the 1800s, but there is a genuine ruin, Wilton Castle, on the outskirts of the town - privately owned, but you can just glimpse it from the riverbank.

Goodrich Castle is a massive structure of red Herefordshire sandstone, except the keep, built before the rest in grey stone from Gloucestershire. It was rendered uninhabitable during the Civil War: in the courtyard you can marvel at Roaring Meg, the massive mortar devised by the Parliamentary forces to destroy one of the towers and bring the siege of the castle to an end. 

Zooming through the Forest of Dean, I tried and failed to find Loquiers Well near Mitcheldean, marked on the map right by the main road but with nothing surviving visible at the site. So I went on to the very well-known St Anthony's Well in the woods above Mitcheldean. My friends Madame Morbidfrog and Mr Romeburns had been in the area a couple of weeks ahead of me, and - as wild-swimming enthusiasts - had been bold enough to go in it. I was definitely not, but although the photo below isn't all that impressive St Anthony's Well is in fact a very impressive place, the sound of gushing water mingling with the wind among the trees in the loneliness of the woods. Actually it's not that lonely at all, but it feels it.

I followed in my friends' footsteps again at my next stop, Puzzlewood in Coleford; in fact had they not posted photos from their visit on LiberFaciorum I would never have known about it. This strange woodland landscape is a former ironworking site: after the mines closed in the later 1800s its owner refashioned Puzzlewood as a kind of fantasy garden to amuse his children, and some decades later it was opened to the public. Now you traverse the damp woods along walkways and little bridges between rocks green with thick moss, looking at the weird shapes which look like the kind of towering monoliths you associate with parts of China on a miniature scale. I'm reminded a bit of the Cleft at Hawkstone Park, but Puzzlewood is a fairy landscape rather than a Gothic one. How Madame Morbidfrog managed to negotiate her way even a few yards in with her massive skirts and pixy boots I can't imagine.

St Briavels came next - a closed castle and St Bride's Well -

- and the next stop was Chepstow. Monday is the day the Museum is closed at Newport; Chepstow's has Wednesday off, so that was another I missed. I didn't have the energy to tackle the Castle, and was quite content to take a couple of photos from the outside. Chepstow Priory is grand and full of interesting features.

My last calling-point was Staunton, a village back over the Gloucestershire border. My aim there was seeing two more wells. St John the Baptist's Well is the better-known, though it still isn't one of the more celebrated sacred sites in this part of the country. The church is dedicated to All Saints, and the Baptist being the Well's patron suggests it might have been used for baptismal water, though no legend says so explicitly. Instead a little plaque by the well, very quietly sitting at the bottom of a track, informs us that it appears in a 14th-century document and was one of the village's main water-sources until 1931 when a piped supply arrived. 'Restored', says the sign, and looking at the overlooked and overgrown little Well now I doubt any of it is all that old. However, St John's Well looks positively cheerful compared to the other old village well, Brindsey's Well. This is buried in the bank along a lane on the other side of the main road. I had to pull away all the nettles and plants before I could see enough to take a photo, and it's the driest dry well I think I've ever seen. 

Marcher Land Adventures 1

My Autumn holiday this year took me to Herefordshire - but only a mile from the border of Wales on the one hand and Gloucestershire on the other. My location was here, Rose Cottage, along the kind of lane which has grass growing along the middle.

What I think I may do, rather than breaking the holiday down by topics, is just to describe where my travels took me each day. So we begin by entering the Principality by the Severn Bridge (just as well I wasn't planning to return that way, because you can't presently). I realised I was just yards from St Twrog's Chapel at Beachley Head, whose ruins sit on a tiny seaweed-covered rock just ten metres above the tide, for now at least. I slipped and slid across the rocks to have a look, not entirely sure I was meant to be there as most of the headland is military-owned. There's no sign of St Twrog's Well, which used to be there.

That was the first half-day - Sunday evening. On Monday I went to Monmouth, a pleasant town which seems to be fairly prosperous. There's a long, wide main street which leads up to the Shire Hall and main square with the Priory Church (shut) beyond. St Thomas Overmonnow is a charming small church beyond the Monnow Bridge - the only one in Britain which retains its medieval town gate - and as it has no central aisle it must have acquired its Catholic tradition after it was felt necessary to cleanse a church of such outrages. The Museum is in the process of moving to the Shire Hall, and in terms of objects only has a few broken bits of ceramic on display, but in its new site it will benefit from sharing the building with the old Courtroom, a profoundly terrifying space together with the miserable holding cells in the cellar (see St Albans for a parallel example). 

Previous holidays in Wales have demonstrated how there are castles around virtually every corner. My next stop on Monday brought me to the first of the so-called Three Castles, all commanded in the 13th century by the Marcher Lord Hugh de Burgh. This was Skenfrith. I had hoped there might be a café there, but sadly not, and after much delay I finally bought a sandwich from a filling station shop. Skenfrith Church is excitingly plain, though it contains the Skenfrith Cope, a medieval vestment in sadly deteriorated condition. I'd wondered if St Catherine might be depicted on it, but she only cropped up later in the itinerary. 

The second of the Three Castles (we have to wait for another day for the third) was at Grosmont: it, too, didn't delay me long and I was grateful that it was free to go in. At Grosmont, again, it was the church that provided the bigger surprise. The congregation has retreated behind a glazed chancel screen to the east end, leaving the nave as a dark, bare, barn-like space with monuments lurking in umbrageous corners: it was utterly unexpected. On the road onwards, I spotted a little folly-lodge, marking the driveway to Kentchurch Court.

By now the rain was falling as I made my way to mighty Llanthony Priory, away up a valley north of Abergavenny. I was grateful for my filling-station sandwich as there were no facilities there, either.

Could I make it, I wondered, to Newport? I zoomed down the rainy road to that coastal city, which, I discovered, is trying its best to look cheerful but really needs bright sunlight to manage even a half-smile. It doesn't help that greeting you along the main road to the car parks is a gigantic Debenhams resplendent in lime green, and empty. The Museum closes one day a week: it was Monday. The Castle by the River Usk is inaccessible. The Cathedral lies a panting walk up a steep hill some distance out of the town centre. The site is very old, but the building only became a Bishop's seat in 1949; entering from the west, you pass through the Romanesque porch through to the east end, which is a 20th-century extension. It's nice, though very obviously an overgrown parish church.

Tomorrow - a walk!

Crooksbury Hill & Waverley Abbey

My days off being absorbed by record office work, I haven't been on a proper walk for a long time. Apart from a desperate attempt to escape the Clergy Triennial Conference, and an excursion around follies near Dorking in May (neither of which really count), it's been April since I ventured out for a stroll. Today's walk was more of a stroll-ette as a) I was working this morning and b) I'm afflicted by a bout of plantar-fasciitis at the moment which makes a lot of walking a bit of a strain. So I didn't go anywhere I hadn't seen before, though I followed slightly different paths to the trig. pillar on the top of Crooksbury Hill and then down to Waverley Abbey. The paths were surprisingly busy with Bank Holiday business, but the Soldier's Ring in the woods north of the Abbey was strangely calm - and calmly strange, even if you wouldn't have noticed you were walking across a hillfort unless you knew it was there. I continue to be surprised by Waverley Abbey's ruins: I've been there innumerable times, but always find new views and angles to enjoy.

Cumbria 3: Castles and Ruins

Like South Wales, the Borderlands of Scotland and England were violent and debated, so there’s a good supply of castles and similar fortifications, although I went in virtually none of them. Durham Castle is part of the University so you have to book a tour, and at Carlisle I was wincing from being overcharged for postcards at Tullie House Museum (already an expensive enough visit) so I kept outside that one too; while Clifton Hall, incongruously sited next to a working farmyard, was shut. Penrith Castle is a shell; I glimpsed the private Naworth Castle and Langley Castle (the latter rebuilt in the 19^th century) from the roadside.

Hexham’s Old Gaol is like a little castle, but in fact is a purpose-built judicial prison built by the Archbishops of York. The Old Keep at Newcastle is a proper fortification, linked to its Black Gate by a walkway, so that was the closest to an ordinary castle visit I got.

The mighty Lowther Castle just south of Penrith is a different matter. This is a largely ruinous neo-Gothic mansion from the early 1800s, once the seat of the Lowther Earls of Lonsdale. The First Earl, ‘Wicked Jimmy’, was so notoriously miserly that when his heir took over the estate in 1802 he advertised for anyone who believed they’d been cheated or owed money by the Earl to make a claim. Hugh, the 6^th Earl, inherited his family’s colossal wealth derived from coal and land and managed to get rid of most of it thanks to extravagances such as spending £3000 per annum on cigars, insisting that his dogs travel first-class in their own rail carriage, and taking a 24-piece orchestra with him on trips. Three years after Hugh’s death in 1944, his brother and heir Lancelot sold off the contents of the massive Castle, though it was another ten before the 8^th Earl, James, despairing of finding any other use for the wreck, took its roof off, and transformed it into what amounts to a colossal garden ornament, which is what it now is. You can walk through what were once enormous halls and reception rooms and gulp as you realise quite how much money the Lowthers must have had to construct this fantasy building.

Lanercost Priory was the only ruined abbey I could easily get to.

Cumbria and Northumberland have an older stratum of ruin, of course: fragmentary but still charismatic, Hadrian’s Wall runs across the neck of Britain, punctuated by Roman forts and waystations. I went to Chesters, where local landowner James Clayton excavated the huge fortress after realising the importance of the walls his workers kept turning up just beneath the soil. The remains are now a strange intrusion in the gentle, sloping fields west of the North Tyne River. The soldiers stationed here were a largely Spanish cavalry regiment: five hundred men and as many horses, a bath house, a multi-storey headquarters building, gate towers and a commandant’s house. What must the Britons have made of it? A couple of miles further along the Wall is Carrawburgh – Brocolitia – with its Mithraeum. I was startled by its small scale: its aisles can only have accommodated eight people at once, watching as a new member was brought in to be initiated into the cult of Mithras. This is an even odder thing to find in the Northumbrian fields than a cavalry fort, a dark, secretive religious building, overlooked by sheep.

Finally, even before the Romans arrived, there was Long Meg and Her Daughters: the third-largest stone circle in England, and fully as odd as any of the Roman remains. There’s a farm close to the circle, and comfortable trees, but the stone ring itself seems resolutely undomesticated. This has a lot to do with Long Meg herself, a tall, narrow monolith of red sandstone standing outside the circle of dumpy grey limestone blocks. She is so clearly separate and different that you can’t help ascribing personality to her, and an eerie one at that. The story goes that Colonel Lacy of The Caves (who we will discuss later) tried to have the stones blown up with gunpowder so the field could be usefully ploughed, but after sudden and inexplicable thunderstorms while the explosives were being laid, the locals refused to co-operate. And so the circle stands.