Southern England

7 September, Airbnb, Amesbury, UK

Seems like a long time since we left France, but the time warp is probably because we have done so much in the few days we have been in the UK.

We had a relatively smooth transition through the two airports, but that all came to a grinding halt when we got to the Heathrow Europcar depot to pick up our hire car. Granted it was a busy time, but an hour’s wait is just ridiculous. There were about 20 service points in the office, four or five were operating, but another half a dozen staff were wandering about behind the counter, chatting with their mates, while a score or so customers waited for service. Some lessons to be learnt here?

Brilliant sunshine awoke us yesterday. We headed off to Salisbury to visit the Cathedral and poke around the city. Salisbury has suffered a bit from the poisoning of an ex-Russian agent and his daughter a few months back. A second incident here in Amesbury hasn’t helped matters. Salisbury has responded with some creative moves to get visitors back. All parking in the city is free and so is the Park-n-Ride bus service from the outskirts of the city to the centre. We grabbed the chance to avoid trying to find parking in the city.

The cathedral and nearby museum were must-dos, but a tad expensive. Fortified by the Wiltshire version of a Cornish pasty, we headed off to the small town of Devizes to check out the Wiltshire Museum, a great introduction to the history and archaeology of the area.

We are again on the trail of places William Armstrong visited during his time in England and France a century ago.

After his long voyage from Australia in late 1916, William entered training at Larkhill Camp, just outside Amesbury. Yesterday we drove along the Packway, the main road through the camps, where hundreds of thousands of troops were stationed before heading off to the front lines in Belgium and France. Today the area is still home to major military installations. We asked at the gates of a couple of camps, but had no luck in finding anything that would have existed during the period that William was posted here.

We were confident today that we would see some of the territory William did 100 years ago. Bulford Manor, in the small village of the same name, was a convalescent hospital where William recuperated after an appendix operation in 1917. His diary contained a couple of photographs of the manor, one a group shot in which he was included. We found the Manor and it was almost as it was at the time, except for the ivy that had covered most of the front of the building.

Bulford Manor. c. 1915

Bulford Manor, 2018

Our greatest success of the day was in Figheldean, a tiny village just north of Bulford. William came here twice during his stay in England. The village was just a picture, with thatched roofs, cottage gardens and a village character by the name of Reg. We had approached a couple of locals on the single street through the village, asking about the old blacksmith’s forge, mentioned in William’s diary.  Everybody said we needed to find Reg. Eventually we did, up on the hill behind the village where he was working on his allotment, tending his chooks, vegetables and two of the ugliest pigs we have ever seen.

Australian troops in Figheldean, 1917

Same house in Figheldean, 2018

Reg knew exactly where the forge had been, near a chestnut tree, reminiscent of the “spreading chestnut tree” in Longfellow’s poem “The Village Blacksmith”. Sadly the tree had been cut down just seven years back, as it was becoming a danger to traffic. We had in fact walked past the remaining stump on our way up to the allotments. 

Village blacksmith under the Chestnut tree, circa. 1915

Stump of the Old Chestnut Tree, 2018

Having visited the final English site mentioned in William’s diary, we visited the Avebury stone circles and later in the afternoon Lacock Abbey, both UK National Trust Sites, which allowed us to use our National Trust for Scotland cards, saving us close to 70 pounds for entry and parking, which was almost what our joint Seniors National Trust for Scotland membership cost us. These entry fees are just not affordable without membership.

On the way home we thought we might take a bit of a scenic drive through some of the many small towns and villages of Wiltshire. Silly move. It was Friday afternoon and every country lane and winding side road was jammed with traffic.

9 September, Amesbury

26C and clear sunny skies at 3:00pm is not what we have come to expect of England in September. The down side of the great weather is that it brings all the locals out in force. The last couple of days have been spent playing tourist, as our duty to William is done, having found as much as there is to see of the world he knew here 100 years ago.

We joined the National Trust for Scotland before we left home because it was much cheaper than the United Kingdom National Trust or the English National Heritage. The National Trust for Scotland has reciprocal rights with the UK National Trust and indeed the National Trust of Australia. The message is, if you are interested in historical sites and the splendid manor houses and castles that abound in the UK, get a subscription to either the National Trust or English Heritage. As we said before the National Trust for Scotland was our choice, because of the reciprocal rights and our future plans to visit Scotland early next year.

Wiltshire has numerous ancient sites, perhaps the best known being Stonehenge. We first visited Stonehenge in 1976, when you could walk among the stones, touch them and get a real “Stonehenge Experience.” Now, the “Stonehenge Experience” involves the obligatory audio-visual presentation and a guided walk around the site, along roped-off paths. We have driven past Stonehenge at least once every day since we have been here and we are just as happy to view it from the road rather than paying AUD$28 each for the pleasure. Our Scottish NT pass is excluded from free entry.

Today we made the rounds of some of the lesser known “pre-history” sites on Salisbury Plain, Woodhenge and Old Sarum.  Woodhenge probably pre-dates Stonehenge, but as it was a monument constructed of large wooden poles, it disappeared from history very quickly and remained lost until 1922 when aerial photographs exposed the marks of the stumps. The site today is marked by concrete blocks that show the locations of the original circles.

Old Sarum was first built in Norman times. Substantial as it was, it was located in an inhospitable area so the castle and the accompanying cathedral eventually fell into disrepair. In Tudor times, Henry VIII gave permission for the local nobles to use the ruins as a source of building materials. The cathedral was moved to Salisbury, so providing us with one of the most magnificent late medieval buildings in Europe.

Probably motivated by one of our favourite 60s songs (“Winchester Cathedral” by the New Vaudeville Band) as much as anything else, we headed off to Winchester this afternoon to visit the Cathedral. Disaster! A local flower display was on exhibition in the Cathedral and we would have been up for an entry fee of AUD$20 each just to walk past the flowers to see the Cathedral. Sad, because Jane Austen is buried there.

11 September, Amesbury

Had our one visit to an English pub tonight, just a little local around the corner from our Airbnb. The atmosphere is always the same, cosy, friendly and chatty, as is most of southern England. We haven’t been down this way, through Wiltshire, Somerset and Dorset, for many years. The amount of open countryside is a bit of an eye-opener, all rolling hills, newly-harvested fields and large copses of trees. The cities in this part of the UK are reasonably small and easily negotiated, even though some of the back streets and country lanes are a tad narrow.

We have definitely given the area a good going over. Yesterday we visited Wells, mainly to see the cathedral. Travellers get a little weary of cathedrals, and we have been the same at times, but many of the English cathedrals are such architectural masterpieces and of such historical significance that we can’t pass them by. Wells was no exception to this rule. Beautifully restored and maintained, it is a real treasure and the surrounding area boasts some of the most original medieval streetscapes in Europe.

We had believed that we could walk to the top of Cheddar Gorge, just outside the famous cheese town of the same name. After a couple of kms, ducking traffic on the narrow road through the pass, we were wondering why nobody else, except for a few rock climbers, was trudging the same, sometimes dangerous, path. Eventually we turned back, as every bend that promised a peek at the pass only exposed another steep slope. Returning to the carpark at the bottom of the gorge, we decided to drive up to see what we might have missed. Good call! At the top of the pass there was nothing to see but trees!

Our afternoon was spent careering down extremely tight country lanes to get to Brean Down Fort, on the English side of the Bristol Channel. Just across the expansive muddy river mouth, (it was low tide) was Cardiff. The whole area was crammed full of now-deserted holiday camps, camping grounds and caravan parks. Negotiating the single lane access road would be hell in high summer!

A very long day on back roads brings us to one of our major problems travelling in this or in fact any part of England. Put simply, too many cars and not enough roads. The problem is further exacerbated by the fact that most residents’ cars have to be parked on the road outside their homes, because there are very few houses with their own parking space. There must surely come a point in England, when traffic will just grind to a halt, because all car owners decided to hit the roads at once. The motorways aren’t too bad, they mostly flow fairly well. But the A-Roads, second class highways that feed onto and off the motorways, are often single lane and heavily trafficked, passing through towns and villages where roads are lined with parked cars, leaving passageways that are much too narrow to deal with the large semi-trailers/lorries, that tussle with cars and vans through tight bends bordered by stone walls.

An easy last day today, down to Portsmouth to visit a fairly new museum on the D-Day invasion. A great museum, but a little restricted in space. For the first time on this leg of the trip, the weather was a little unpleasant; no rain, but blowing a gale down on the seafront.

We have really enjoyed our digs here in Amesbury - a spacious cottage, apple and pear trees in full fruit around us, backing on to a dairy farm. Free entertainment is also provided by the family’s three little girls and their friends who are revelling in the last warm days of summer, charging about the yard on their bikes and collecting fallen fruit to throw over the fence to the cows grazing in the field behind their house.

Nothing much has changed in the centre of town over the past 100 years as the two photos below attest.

Amesbury High Street, 1905

Amesbury High Street, 2018

12 September, Hampstead Hotel, Stansted Airport

Just a stone's throw from the Stansted terminal, we are all set for the next phase of our trip, back to old Yugoslavia. We were last in Yugoslavia in 1987, when Tito was the leader of what seemed to a united country - just an illusion as it turned out. Within a few years of Tito's death, a series of bloody conflicts occurred throughout the Balkans. Ancient tensions between Serbs and Croats, Christians and Muslims erupted in a truly horrible conflict that eventually drew in the European Union and the USA.

Peace has been restored and several Balkan states have joined the EU, ensuring some hope of a lasting peace.

On our last trip, shops and supermarkets had very restricted food items available, the road infrastructure was frankly primitive and the future looked glum.