UK 2012 ISSUE 16

Three Goddess - Bath

Now and again I gets comments or questions that deserve to be shared with a broader audience.  In this case, a prior instructor in photography and subscriber to my blog, prompted me to search the internet with the comment, "Before you depart merry old England, you  must have a go at Dwile Flonking."  I found a blog, Strange Games, that provides the following description:  "Resurrected in the late 1960’s Dwile Flonking (or Dwyle Flunking) is an outdoor pub game of dubious origin but startling originality.  . . . The game requires two teams formed of twelve players each. One team forms a circle (called the Girter). A member of the opposing team takes his turn to stand in the middle of the Girter and be the Flonker. The Flonker carries a 2-3 foot long stick (or Driveller) on the end of which is a beer sodden rag (or dwile). As the Girter members dance around him, the Flonker must flonk his dwile using his Driveller to try and hit a member of the Girter."  The strange thing is, this is apparently for real and there really are competitions.  Leave to the Brits to dream up something as crazy as Wellie Wanging and Dwile Flonking, "Monty Python" is obviously alive and well and living in Britain, even if it's perpetrators are no longer working together. btw how many of you caught Eric Idle singing "look on the bright side" at the Olympic Games closing ceremonies. Loved it, even sang along!!

Heythrop House

Mick's broken foot, for which he refused a plaster (cast), meant our expeditions are somewhat limited in the hiking department, so what to do.  Enter Living Social and a resort getaway in Heythrop.  Three nights, three breakfasts, one dinner, afternoon tea and a spa facial and massage, what could be wrong with that . . . just in case you were waiting for the other shoe to drop . . . absolutely nothing.  

I have always fancied staying in a stately home with all the pomp and circumstance, bric a brac and charm, poor plumbing and even worse beds.  Fortunately, our room was in the new building, all blonde wood and modern European fixtures, cushy feather beds and not exactly charming but functional and ultra modern; while still having total access to these spaces in the old building.  

Dad is doing much, much better; which has led us to try to be away more and more so as to get him re-accustomed to looking after himself.  No matter what we do I'm sure he will find the bungalow empty; three people in 750 square feet, with one bathroom does not a lot of room or privacy make.  So forcing him to be on his own, responsible for decisions about meals and making his own entertainment seems the right decision.  If I take the time to stop and think about it, Mick has probably been here nine out of the last twelve months, while my stay will be nearly six months.  With map in hand we perused the areas of Great Britain which are nearby but with which we didn't have a lot of familiarity.  I'm having trouble with tenses here, any English majors out there who want to take a crack at cleaning up my lack of consistency?  Ah, well, thought not.  So you will just have to put up with bad grammar.

Forge @ Slate Museum

North Wales won the nearby and unexplored contest, being something around a three hour drive and that's about as much as you really want to do in the Punto.  Geography and History lessons coming up.  Geographically speaking, if you draw a vertical line along the straightish bit of the western coast of the island of Great Britain and exclude the narrow jutting out part that is Cornwall and Devon, you will define Wales as the westernmost bit.  It contains England's highest mountain, Snowdon, and is considered by locals to be mountainous terrain.  That would be true if you regard rugged hills of no more that 3500 feet as mountains.  Economically speaking, I don't know what could possibly support the population except service industries and tourism.  There was a time when, in the south, coal mining was their livelihood and in the north, slate mines meant employment.  Today you can tour old quarries and mining and processing operations but as far as the economics of these industries, it is questionable.  Historically Wales has been a part of the British Isles and/or Great Britain since the 1200's but in reality they have often sought for a separate national identity.  Enough of politics and histories of which I know little or nothing, suffice it to say they now have their own legislature and have revived their native language.  The language thing is particularly intriguing.  There seem to be lots and lots of double "L" s which are pronounced as though you are clearing your throat.  To go along with the double "L"s is a sad lack of vowels with the exception of "Y" which is used in abundance.  More importantly, traffic signs, reader boards and public messages, Welsh is first, English second. 

Check out the Welsh Spelling

We booked ourselves a B&B in Betws-y-Coed (betwus e cooed),  pronounced by the English as "Betsy Coed," operated by a couple from Liverpool (think Beatles)!  The A4, a major East-West road, is narrow and windy, sort of like the road to Hana, without the waterfalls and bridges.  The valley walls are steep and green and dotted with Roman aqueducts and sheep.  Betws lies at the confluence of the rivers (afon) Llugwy, Lledr and Conwy in a narrow little valley within a half an hours drive of the coast or Llanberis, the starting off point for a hike up Snowdon.  The village itself stretches along Afon Llugwy for about a half a mile and is lined with outdoor shops, hotels, guest houses, restaurants and grey stone buildings with slate grey (stone) roofs.  Quite beautiful when the sun is out, pretty dour under leaden skies. 

Typical Welsh Stone Building

Road to Llanberis

If you're in Wales you gotta go to the top of Snowdon, and they provide a train for just that purpose.  It is a single track, rack and pinion system, makes me think of cogs on a clock anchoring in to holes in the track and you get dragged up the hill.  The cars are more like San Francisco cable cars than anything, but there is no getting on and off at multiple stops.  It takes about an hour to do the climb of five miles to the top, with stops to allow the downward travelling car to pass, sheep to get off the track and the addition of water to the boiler to keep the thing moving.  It also stinks of what I would guess to be coal which they burn to create the steam to power the engine . . . it's like going back to another era, if only the steward would come by with coffee and we weren't sitting on hard wooden benches.  Didn't really know what to expect, we saw tons of people doing the walk in both directions.  You do have the option to ride up and walk down or walk up, ride down, but we opted for riding both ways!  Once at the top there is little to see or do.  Once off the train you are pretty much at the TOP with nowhere to go, a short climb up some steps to the rocky top and it's back down for a quick cuppa and on to the train for the return journey.  A snack bar and gift shop is the extent of the facilities and if you want to wander it is 5 miles back down and no changing your mind half way or stopping at a little B&B for the night.

View from the top of Snowdon

 We did get lucky, it was foggy and grey when we left Betwys with predictions of rain but by the time we got to the top of mountain it had all blown away.  We kept joking we wanted more of the Welsh rain as it really did look more like sunshine than anything else.

Mick at the top of Snowden

A very cosy bathroom

Our B&B was lovely, we had a great view out over the river but the bathroom was an experience.  Do you remember the description of the funky one in Hayfield, the one which would have made a cruise liner designer proud.  These folk did them one better, how they ever crammed so much functionality in to such a small space is quite beyond me!  I wasn't entirely certain either of us would be able to sit on the toilet with the door shut but we managed.  The toilet fit in to a corner, the sink was a corner sink, there was even a heated towel rail.  The little half wall held tooth brushes, which I successfully dumped on the floor more than once.  It was not lacking for a mirror either, it was on a collapsible arm and even had a magnifying side.  God help me an overly large glimpse of ones face first thing in the morning is not a particularly welcome sight.  Tight quarters in the shower but plenty of water pressure, a sunflower shower head and explicable controls.

A Room of One's Own

Plumbing is one of my pet peeves, no two "facilities" are the same.  Sometimes toilets have double buttons but no explanations as to which is the little flush (#1) and which is the BIG flush (#2).  Sometimes you have to quite literally pull the chain because there is a box mounted high up on the wall and by pulling the chain dangling from the box you release the water in to the bowl.  Shower controls vary, sometimes there is no water volume control, a single knob controls the temperature and that is the extent of the selection process.  Dad's shower has two knobs one inside the other.  The inner ring controls how hot the water is while the outer ring turns it on and off but doesn't really control the volume.  Most often the water comes out in a trickle. I remember Leigh, who has hair down to her butt complaining that all it ever does is "pee" on you, making rinsing shampoo out a time consuming proposition and of course, there is no guarantee that the hot water will last all that long.  We can save the discussion of interconnected hot water and heating radiator systems for another rant. I have yet to see a shower with two controls for mixing hot and cold water, while taps in the sink are almost invariably two two single spigots and you get warm water by putting the stopper in and filling the bowl.  You still occasionally see the old on demand hot water in public bathrooms where there is a 6"x12" box mounted above the sink with a spigot that looks a bit like the steam nozzle on an espresso machine which produces a miserly stream of boiling hot water. 

Penryhn Stair

We saw one of the most ostentatious, over the top, ridiculously ornate, stately homes ever.  Mick's description for the place was obscene.  Penrhyn Castle in Bangor, Caernarfonshire, was built with money derived from exploitation of the local inhabitants on sugar plantations and slate quarries.  The family counted themselves among the nouveau riche and nothing was too much.  The carved stairwell took ten years to construct.  A special bed, carved from slate, was produced for Queen Victoria while another extremely ornate construction was built for the Prince of Wales.  Both of these beds were slept in for a total of three nights during the course of a Royal visit.  One room was all black with ebony wood and black slate, whatever materials they chose to use which didn't naturally come in black were dyed to match the room.  The entry halls are incredibly ornate with stained glass and guilt; everything is decorated and embellished and when it seems you couldn't possibly add another little bit of decoration somehow they managed.  The silly thing is this monstrosity, full of beautiful and valuable art and collectibles was their vacation home and was really used only for entertaining visitors. To be fair, the exterior is quite appealing and they have a really lovely walled garden.

Penrhyn Castle

Our landlord suggested, if we wished to take a different route back to the Midlands we take the High Road.  It is said to be the highest mountain pass in Wales if not all of Britain and runs between Llanuwchllyn and Abertridwr.  They forgot to mention it wasn't much more than a single lane dirt track running across the moors!!  We left Bala and turned left at the bottom of Llyn Tegid (a lake) looking for a sign for Lake Vyrnwy.  We found what appeared to be the correct confluence of roads (no street names, no directional signs) on our map, but the road we thought we should take showed as a dead end.  Not to be deterred by such minor inconveniences we took it anyway.  For ten or so miles we wound through an area of farming and cattle ranches, with substantial houses and barns and the usual signs of habitation.  The road was narrow but the landscape was verdant, the sun was shining, the birds were singing and all was well with the world.  Perhaps we should have been concerned that we saw no other vehicles, but it was an adventure.  Soon the road began to climb and as we left the valley behind  the tree studded landscape took on a barren windswept appearance.  At times the

road was  so steep you felt as though you couldn't see what was over the next rise, at other times it followed the contours of the hillside and you could see it snaking off in to the distance.  It was barely a single car wide, full of potholes, with an axle destroying trough on either side presumably to carry away rain run off.  We were quite literally travelling across the moors, no fences, no signs, no trees, no shrubs, just us, a big sky and the occasional sheep or cow grazing along the verge.  We must have travelled 40 to 50 minutes without  seeing another vehicle before we reached the top, where fortunately there was a reader board proclaiming this to be Bwlch-y-Groes, the Pass of the Cross. 

Penrhyn Castle

Things I have learned:

1.  In the course of its history Britain has had a window tax, a brick tax and a wall paper tax.  As a consequence it is not unusual to see a brick wall where what are obviously window openings have been bricked closed.   Buildings, in the Cottswolds in particular, have structural elements at the corners and elsewhere made of brick but the intervening space is stone.  More than that if you pay close attention you can see where/when the size of brick became significantly larger. Late Victorian houses had "wallpaper" that was actually a hand painted design on a plaster wall.

2.  There is a multiplicity of bread roll names/designs.  In the north a small round crusty roll generally used for sandwiches is a Bap.  A more common sandwich roll, in the South, is a Cob , which is larger and has a soft texture.  The term buns seems to apply to a sweet roll rather than something used in sandwich making.  Sarnies is a London term for sandwich.  Until this trip I had thought Mick was saying "sannies", sort of a short hand for sandwich, when in fact he was saying sarnie.  As often as not brown or wholewheat bread is referred to as Hovis or granary bread.  There is now a chain of sandwich shops which use exclusively baguettes called Pret a Manger (ready to eat). 

This is a narrow lane

3. The city of Boring,Oregon is sister city to (twinned with) Dull,Scotland.  omg . . . that's a long way to go to get Dull and Boring.

4.  Have you heard the warning "don't spit in to the wind"?  Having  found it necessary to relieve myself behind a pile of boulders at the top of Bwlch-y-Groes I will now add the admonishment "do not pee in to the wind" . . . you just might get wet!!

Minerva - Bath Museum

Mask - Bath Museum

Pistyll Rhaeadr