A few thoughts about Barnstaple.

The mini-monsoon continued for most of the night but we woke to sunshine and big chunky clouds. The small site we are staying on is about two miles from Barnstaple. A bus stops right outside the gate. Having arrived at the stop ten minutes before the bus was due we decided to walk to the town centre instead. 

The Little Lily Campsite is about a 20 minute walk from Barnstaple town centre - but has great views of the countryside.

It soon became clear that Barnstaple seemed to be thriving, a marked contrast to our experience in Bideford a couple of days ago. If you recall, the previous post ended with me speculating whether a town could be both 'vibrant' and egalitarian. Thinking about it further, vibrant is a very silly term - pure gobbldigook really. I think what it actually means is thriving. If that is the case, then I believe Barnstaple has achieved a balance - a thriving place, but one that supports a mixed population. It is neither overtly gentrified nor obviously impoverished. 

It is not a large town, its current population of about 24,000 is roughly the same as Buxton where we live now. However, Barnstaple's shopping area is more extensive and there are very few empty shops. The place manages to support both a wide range of national chains and lots of independent shops too. In particular there are many independent food shops, a range of excellent bakeries and the small cafe where we had lunched served freshly cooked food that was simple, yet delicious. 

The Pannier Market sells food some days, but today happened to showcase Mills and Boon

This small cafe has a simple lunch menu, but everything is cooked right in front of you - freshly made and delicious

Waiting for lunch to be cooked...

Homity Pie!

Lots of local shops - many award winning - butchers, bakers - probably a candlestick maker in there somewhere.

As well as that the place has a town centre cinema and a small theatre. I was impressed too by the variety of buildings from all eras from the Georgian onwards. 

The main shopping streets are mainly Georgian and Victorian

But, also a town centre cinema with Art Deco decoration intact

More 30s buildings - now a Thai restaurant

A bit of 50s infill by the look of it.

and the Civic Centre - dating from the late 1960s but half empty and facing an uncertain future 

In short we liked the place a lot, so much so we immediately began to list all the disadvantages of moving here. It's quite remote, almost 90 miles from the nearest major city - Bristol, and further from Dover than we are in Derbyshire. Though the climate is warmer, being in the west it is almost as rainy as the Peak District, and it is the wet days which get us down at the moment. Whereas the area around Felixstowe was great for cycling, the lanes in Devon are narrow and hilly. The Tarka Trail is great, but you can tell the towns are not cycle friendly like in Suffolk. 

So, having visited both areas, we are still torn as to which might suit us better. Property in both areas is pricier than Buxton, Suffolk more so than Devon, but there are houses we could afford in each that would meet our needs. It's a big decision and we need to give it further thought. It might take a while, give me any problem and I will over-think it. It's not just me, In terms of making a simple choice, Gill can make Meg Ryan in 'When Harry Met Sally' seem positively impulsive. Whatever we do, you can guarantee the options will have been fully problematised before any final or even interim conclusion is drawn. In truth we are in no hurry to sell nor under any pressure - even more reasons to prevaricate.

Like Wales, but poorer.

It was slow going between Wiltshire and the West Country. A few miles west of Stonehenge a minibus had broken down on a narrow section of the A303 resulting in five mile tailbacks in both directions. We had plenty of time to admire Stonehenge from the cab as we inched along, an hour or more of stop and start.

By the time we reached our destination it was late afternoon. The site is on a dairy farm in the village of Weare Gifford, a few miles inland from Bideford. We chose it because the place is less than half a mile from the Tarka Trail, a bike track that follows the Taw estuary and Torridge valley for twenty miles or so through the North Devon countryside.

The village of Weare Gifford centres around a fortified manor house.

The small site is on The Barton Dairy farm

A herd of 70 or so of these were cajoled into the yard twice a day, yards from where were staying 

Next to us in the paddock - a mare and foal - all very pastoral.

It was a pleasant evening so we unloaded the bikes and rode down the trail for a few miles. The track follows the meandering river Torridge which surprisingly is still tidal, though here we are four or five miles from the sea. We wended our way through the trees which overhung the track, it was pretty, but difficult at times to see the landscape beyond the screen of foliage. I was not expecting quite so much evidence of early nineteenth century industrialization, not just the railway, but remains of a canal, aquaduct, tidal locks, a waterdriven canal incline and kilns. We tend to forget that the industrial revolution transformed rural, as well as urban England. 

Access to the Tarka Trail cycleway is about half a mile from the site

 

Next day we explored the trail in the opposite direction towards the sea. It runs all the way to Barnstaple, we managed to reach Framlington Quay, a ride of about 12 miles or so. The old station has been converted into a café. Time for lunch! We had a great view across the wide estuary and we swapped initial impressions of the area as we munched our way through baked potatoes - the portions were huge. We really don't know the West Country too well at all. This is our first visit to the North Devon coast. The thing that surprised us was how much the place resembled the south Wales coast - particularly the whitewashed coastal villages and the green hills running down to the sea. The coast itself is a mix of narrow inlets and broad estuaries. The resemblance is hardly surprising as Kidwelly and Carmarthen are only twenty miles north or so across the Bristol Channel.

Lunch stop at the cafe at Fremlington Station

On the return leg we locked the bikes at Bideford Station and walked across the long stone bridge to the town centre. The structure rests on the foundations of the first bridge built in the mid thirteenth century. It must have been an engineering marvel at the time and underlines the former significance of the place. At the time of the early colonisation of America Bideford was England's third deep water port, after Bristol and Plymouth, I presume. Sir Richard Grenville, the first Governor of the Virginia colony haled from hereabout. He returned with a native American, the first to arrive in England, though less famous than Pocohontas, As well as a port, Bideford built fast medium sized warships for the Royal Navy and was famous for the production of a black pigment called, somewhat unimaginatively, Bideford black. 

Bideford has a lovely setting - but seems in decline

The town's rich heritage makes its present decline even more lamentable. We were not expecting the levels of impoverishment we found. The first building to greet you as you cross the bridge is a large hotel, it is boarded-up and falling to bits. The waterfront, which could be lovely, consists of a row of betting shops and a discount convenience store. From here old steep streets slither upwards towards a Victorian market hall. Again, it could be delightful, but charity shops prevail, and the market hall only operates twice a week and its permanent shops consist of craft shops and galleries full of what Gill terms 'heartfelt junk'. It was all a bit depressing. 

The old Pannier Market has been converted into small craft studios. Most were closed.

The West Country has a bit of an alternative vibe - apparently the stone helps us seek angelic guidance...

Concrete cube of mysterious purpose

Abandoned old workshop, rusting fishing boats - a sad state of affairs.

Our trip so far has been very thought provoking, underlying the sense that we have become a nation of stark divides, and this is palpable simply by looking at places and people. Marlborough and Bideford are probably similar in size, the former has become preposterously wealthy, the latter disgracefully impoverished. Collectively we let this happen by making a series of bad electoral choices believing promises of short term gain. For three decades we have embraced the rhetoric of national renewal, hoping that a boom in London and the south might 'trickle down, wheresas in reality it resulted in bust for many other places. Even more fantastical, the mismanagement of this has shifted from Westminster to Brussels and Strasbourg. According to the Wikipedia article about the town, Bideford's two county councilors are members of UKIP. It is truly remarkable that blame for failures in English regional development are blamed on the EU when much of the funding that flowed into regional development over the past 25 years originated in Brussels. The real question is, why was it not utilised more effectively? I have some experience that  provides a partial answer. As a former bidder and deliverer of European projects, often the focus was to manipulate the funding so the 'matched' element was notional. The  EU money was used to massage the figures so the additional funds were utilised to mask the effects of reductions in UK public funding. In truth the overt 'austerity' of Mr. Osborne was built on decades of covert reductions to public spending and investment. No wonder the country is looking worse for wear. 

Our whistle-stop tour has confronted us with starkly different images of England - Hackney, Felixstowe​, Alderborough, Marlborough, Bideford. I am not at all sure it has helped in our original quest to explore places we might consider moving to. If anything it has confused the issue. Right now our exploration has been brought to a temporary halt as a 24 hour monsoon has trapped us in the van - not so much cabin fever as, in-cab fever. The result, too much time on 'Simple Notepad' not enough mooching about. Tomorrow is forecast to be sunny, Barnstaple beckons.....

Is vibrant a cipher for posh?

There was a report on the BBC about a week ago about the best and worst high streets in Britain. Normally it would have not stayed in my mind but for the fact that Marlborough was included in the list of the top ten most vibrant high streets in the land. Since this is where we are staying I became quite excited at the prospect of experiencing top notch retail vibrancy right on our retractable doorstep. So far as the least vibrant goes, then we have had recent experience of what that looks like. Having spent weeks in Tyneside earlier in the year it did not surprise me in the least that Shields Road, Byker was languishing at the bottom of the retail vibrancy charts. 

Before touching upon the retail delights of Marlborough, a word about the town itself. It is a remarkably handsome place with a lovely wide main street - a sign of its history as a wool town (room for livestock market). It has two magnificent churches, municipal buildings that look like they date from the Queen Anne​ era and the old buildings of Marlborough College dominate the west end of the town.

Not what I expected - why?

Handsome high street

Noble church and plethora of estate agents...

Saturday market

It should be lovely, but it's not really. For a start it is traffic choked and lacks pedestrian crossings so getting from one side of the main street to the other, or walking to Tesco's on the edge of town is stressful and hazardous. Clearly health and safety is not high on the 'vibrance scale'. 

Looking at the shops themselves, then they conform exactly to the somewhat 'tongue in cheek' posh-place bingo game I suggested a couple of posts ago. Indeed, Marlborough managed to out-posh Alderborough in the number of pretentious, over-branded casual clothes shops you can squeeze into a modest high street - Seasalt, Mintvine, Jack Wills, Fat Face - so, as far as I can tell, 'vibrant' is a euphemism for 'well-to-do'. Like much else in England it nigh impossible to escape the malign influence of social differentiation, as sociologists are wont to call it. Class consciousness is woven into our mindset.

Stripes are the new spots....

There's a Tom Lehrer somg about a Doctor who only specialised in 'diseases of the rich'

All our cartoon vegetables are grown in the UK - yet more neo-patriotic marketing...

So, I am proposing an alternative high street competition, a search for England's most ordinary shopping street - an award for being egalitarian. So far on this trip it has to be Folkestone, not just because it is spectacularly average, but the people there were welcoming, friendly and easy going. Other contenders could 'Curry Mile' in Rusholme, Manchester or Milton Keynes' intu Centre, both pretty vibrant places the last time visited. True, opportunities to purchase an overpriced hoody with pin-striped boaty styling are a tad limited, but sadly those may be sacrifices that must be made in the pursuit of inclusivity and social justice.

The followers of Noah

Before we get onto questions of social anthropology, a word about the traffic, or to be more accurate, a rant. The distance between Orford and Marlborough is about 165 miles, 61 miles of the journey is along the M25 which on a Fridays is one long jam which moves, if it moves at all, at the speed of slowly solidifying sludge. It took from 10.30am to 4.30pm to travel from Suffolk to Wiltshire, that's an average speed of 27mph. I have nothing against London as such, it's simply too big and, like France, Yorkshire or José Murinho's ego, easily could be shrunk to half its size without losing any of the more positive qualities it purports to possess.

The thing about being stuck in a traffic jam is it gives an unhealthy amount of time to observe and grumble about your fellow travellers. Today's particular beef concerned the drivers on the opposite carriageway. How come those of us orbiting London in an anti-clockwise direction were reduced to the speed of an arthritic tortoise while the clockwise people swept by unimpeded? Equally mysterious, why did this spate of vehicles going the opposite way include many large white trucks with the gnomic slogan "Championing Great British Quality" emblazoned across the side framed by a furled Union Jack. We speculated which particular British qualities were being exported - two dozen pallets of tinned Reticence​, a major shipment of Social Embarrassement or a couple of thousand family size two litre bottles of Irony Brew?

There is no doubt about it, since Brexit our national flag and the adjective 'British' have been embraced by ever more products as the guys in the marketing department strive to capitalise on the 'Let's Make Britain Great Again' zietgiest. When you think about it the whole Brexit debacle is a gift to marketing. What do you need as a marketeer? A constituency who is easily persuadable, a group that responds and embraces a well honed message and the myths and symbols associated with it. Last June 52% of us self identified ourselves as such a segment, gullible to assertions​ that lacked any substance and susceptible to persuasion by messages framed by patriotic rhetoric. So inexorably the Union Jack and the word 'British' has popped up next to all kinds of products on our supermarket shelves, most probably sourced here habitually, a question of repackaging I suspect, not a change to more local supplier​s.

Right now I am reading my breakfast cereal package - Jordan's Raisin and Almond Granola - I might even take its photo - Morning Granola! Click! Are you an avid cereal packet reader? Surely I cannot be the only one to studiously peruses my breakfast cereal packet right down to the 'nutrition panel' and the customer helpline number. Does anyone ring it, I wonder? Or is there some lone soul in an empty room waiting for the first call, slowly going insane like the unfortunate junior clerk assigned to John Major's 'cones helpline' still on duty long after the policy faded into obscurity waiting to be rescued like one of those Japanese soldiers discovered in the Malaysian jungle decades after VJ day. ,

The basic design includes the familiar cute hand-drawn picture of the family firm's Victorian Mill in Biggleswade complete with waterwheel. Apparently they have been hand crafting their traditional breakfast cereal for generations and delivering it personally to every supermarket in the land by horse drawn cart pulled by a dappled grey horse called Dobbin. Well, that's the image, the reality - Jordans Ryvita is a subsidiary of Associated British Foods, a big multi-national that owns many of our familiar brands - Twinings, Ovaltine - as well as non-food concerns like Primark and pharmaceutical and food technology industries across the globe. The cute farmer Giles bit, eco friendly messages and assertion of Britishness is simply their sales pitch.

This new Neo-patriotism is everywhere, the Union Jack on a Tesco's milk carton, In the store today - a sign with St. George's flag flogging 'English' strawberries packed in Kirkbrightshire (that's going to irk Nicola). So when we arrived at Postern Hill 'camping in the forest site' to discover the caravan next to us sporting two 15 foot fibreglass poles strapped to its side, the flag of St George fluttering from one, the Union Jack from the other, I began to anticipate two days of slump surrounded by Daily Mail reading little Englanders.

Happily, I was proven wrong , our neighbours turned out to be the site's only overt Faragistes, the rest of our fellow campers were a normal but varied bunch, a random mix of people brought together by a love of being outdoors and the simplicities that a weekend camping can bring to people usually juggling busy lives.

Postern Hill is definitely a campsite, not a caravan park with a camping field. Tents outnumber caravans and motorhomes; the place is refreshingly informal, no numbered pitches, just find your spot among the trees. This suits us fine. We have used campsites for more than forty years and for the first 37 of them only ever owned a tent. Admittedly​, once we got into our late 40s we camped less, but that was more to do with resistance to life under canvas coming from our teenage children, rather than any waning enthusiasm on our part.

It was late Friday afternoon by the time we arrived and though the place was quite busy we found a level pitch easily enough. As the evening unfolded the site filled still further as more and more weekend escapees arrived. Soon we were surrounded by a clutch of teepees as Postern Hill's crustier devotees gathered around us

The young woman from the teepee next door had the most amazing tattoos. It was difficult not to be slightly fascinated by them. However it seemed rude to stare, especially as she had a babe in arms - but the amazing contrast between the pearl white skin of the infant and her mother's arms, decorated with blue serpents and closely entwined foliage was startling.

Not all our neighbours were eco-warriors, there were all sorts of people here, lots of families and scores of kids. Some youngsters were corralled into playing organised games but most were whizzing about on bikes or scooters or simply running around in the nearby woods. It was great to see children on the loose. Compared to my childhood kids are allowed much less opportunity to roam free today.

Noah, however, was running free range when I first made his acquaintance. I was washing-up when a small boy bounded up and acrobatically​ leapt onto the draining board next to me and stared down at what I was doing wearing a somewhat triumphant expression

"Hello, you are taller than me now," I observed.

"I am Noah," my new friend informed me, as if this information explained everything.

Eventually his Dad approached, "Please get off the draining board, Noah, or you will have to go back to mummy." Noah complied somewhat reluctantly. Mrs Noah must be terrifying I decided. From that moment on, from time to time the site was disturbed by various people shouting "Noah! Noah! Sometimes it was his younger sister as she struggled to match his speed on a scooter. More often it was one of his parents on a hopeless mission the rein in Noah's boundless energy, insatiable curiosity and his burning desire to be first. I think Noah is a born leader. Perhaps we are all destined to be followers of Noah at sometime in the future. Even now, given the choice, it would probably make more sense to vote Noah than for Boris or Gove.

Alderborough and Orford - how much cute can we afford?

A couple of posts ago I ventured to list a few surefire symptoms of gentrification. If I recall, these included: a plethora of high-end branded casual clothes shops, food outlets that contain the terms 'artisan' or 'craft', gift shops renamed as galleries, especially those selling handmade silver jewellery, hand printed scarves, vaguely​ Oriental looking textiles or silk harem pants. By these criteria, in the game of posh-place bingo, Alderborough hits almost every button.

High end casual clothes shops....

Craft shops with hilariously pretentious names...

more 'quality' tee-shirt and chino purveyors

Silver jewellery shop....

All that being said, it is a unique place with beautiful vernacular buildings positioned on a wild, remote coast. No wonder people flock here. Therein in lies the problem, there comes a point where the balance tips between a town as a dwelling place, and its function as a visitor attraction begins to predominate. Gill felt that Alderborough was reaching that tipping point, l think it has already.

It might be posh, but it is still England - the country may be falling apart - but forming an orderly queue will always prevail

16th Centiry Moot Hall

Small fisherman's cottage - for a small fisherman we presume...

pleasing roofscape - well it pleased me!

It's a fishing boat, by George...

Gulls and hollyhocks

Gulls sitting on a Caterpillar -not often you can say that...

such a lovely coastline...

The village of Orford lies about five miles to the south. To reach there from Alderborough by road is over twice that distance due to the meanderings of the river Alde, the acres of salt march, estuarial mud and miles of flint shingle banks that have formed over the past thousand years. Though the landscape immediately inland is typical of Suffolk, a mix of cornfields, patches of woodland, and lanes that twist and turn over low hills, the coastline is wilder, a bleak strange place of shivering grasses and silvery mudflats.

The river slithers along behind the low bulk of Orford Ness. This massive bank of shingle is over ten miles long. The empty otherworldly atmosphere is magnified by the abandoned concrete giant 'pagodas' dotted about the place left behind by the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment whose experiments there remain secret even today. Now it is open to the public and the unique habitat protected as a nature reserve. It retains a slightly sinister ambiance, not least because the pale grey slab of Thorpe​ness nuclear power station dominates the horizon to the north.

Orford village is neither otherworldly nor in the least sinister. A tangle of red brick cottages stretch along a low rise a few hundred yards inland. The southern edge of the settlement is dominated by the tall keep of Orford castle built by Henry II in the mid twelfth century. The only other building of any size is the stubby flint church. Otherwise the place is a pleasing collection of cottages and more substantial houses from a mix of eras, there is a village pub, a general store which doubles as the post office and a very famous bakery.

This is a seriously good bakery

 Inspirational,pasteis da nata, so good we drove to Lisbon last year partly to compare the Suffolk version with the real thing!

It's quite a stragging sort of village - a tangle of lanes with lovely collages built of warm toned brick

One shop - does everything - Post Office, stationers, vegetables logs, compost....

Orford Quay next to the river is home to Pinneys fish merchants and a tea room in an old fisherman's shack, otherwise it's a workaday small harbour home to half a dozen small fishing boats, a few yachts and tourist boats offering excursions to the Ness or a trip up the river.

The two linked settlements look like a couple of paragraphs from Hoskins 'Making of the English Landscape' embodied. You sense a continuity, history as descent, a link between generations across a swathe of time. The lonely footpaths across the salt marshes, the huge sky and the strangeness of the deserted shingle bank adds to this sense of timelessness. Unlike Alderborough, Orford has retained function and integrity. It not unvisited, the large car park is evidence of that. However it is more than simply a cute visitor attraction, a parody of a village like nearby Dedham has become.

Is it somewhere we might consider moving to? It is tempting, though you are a long drive from a supermarket or chemists. There is another obstacle. Overlooking the quayside there is a house for sale. It is not a very nice house, in fact it may be the ugliest house in Orford. It is concrete faced, a bland early twentieth century building which looks like two semi-detached cottages knocked together. The garden is pretty and a wooden balcony had been built on the first floor to give the main bedroom a harbour view. I looked it up on the estate agents website. The asking price - two million pounds! I have a feeling we are destined to forever appreciate the charms of Orford as admiring day visitors.