We had 24 hours to spare before picking up our cats from the cattery, and my original thought – a night’s stargazing in Northumberland’s dark sky reserve – was scuppered by the almost-full moon. Instead, we went to Ironbridge.
I’ve been there in July of this year, but again, himself was left behind to look after the cats while I had fun. As a retired engineer, he would have loved to go in my place (though he would have snoozed through the lectures on romantic novel techniques). What else could I do but take him there as a tourist?
We agreed that as this was my second visit to Ironbridge (although just a few hours on a Saturday too hot to walk far), that he would have first pick of which museum to go to. He chose the Museum of Iron at Coalbrookdale, and I asked for a trip to the Clay Pipe factory at Broseley. On paper, these were just over a mile apart, and roughly a mile from the accommodation we were staying at. I had no idea at the time that Coalbrookdale would choose to throw a small party in the form of a Heritage Day, with free admission and a display of steam engines and classic cars – nor that Broseley Pipe Works would close for the season the weekend before.
We arrived at three on Friday afternoon after a horrible journey down the M6, settled in and set off to see the Iron Bridge. The first part of the journey was all up… then as much down… and then we reached The Hill Top Paper Shop. Bad sign. It was steeply downhill from there. One mile underfoot on flat ground takes us about twenty minutes at an easy pace – up and down took us longer, and we felt the after-effects of a few days’ stiff hillwalking.
A meal and a pint in the Tontine Hotel and a wander over the bridge gave us the oomph to set off back uphill, but not before we spotted a familar little warrior;
We climbed back up the hill faster than we thought we could, and even had enuff puff to argue over which route was quicker – down this street and turn right, or down the next street and turn left. As soon as he set off down his chosen street, I started to run down mine, hoping to arrive at the meeting point early and pretend my route was better. Which would have worked if I hadn’t had to get the camera out for this;
The next day, we looked at the route we’d have to take on foot and saw a lot of up, a lot of down, and much of it along fast roads with no footpath. We drove, to save our feet for the museum. Lucky we did. The Museum of Iron is on three floors, and took us two hours to go through the lot. One of the items on exhibition was a small kitchen range. I remembered our old neighbour from Stratford telling my parents that when the woman who bought our (rented) house from the landlord stripped out the walls of my aunt’s kitchen, she found a Victorian range cooker boarded up in an alcove. I wonder now if it was a Coalbrookdale range.
Outside, we had a meal at the cafe on site, then went to explore Enginuity, a museum for children (half-expecting to be turned away). It was fun, and there were other adults there pressing buttons and peering at the exhibits whirring around (though I think we were the only ones unaccompanied by children). After that, we went out to let the retired engineer ogle the steam engines and the classic Landrover displayed outside, before going in to the exhibit of the archives, curated by Georgina Grant. Where Oliver Meeson, clay pipe maker, had a home-made rig set up and was making clay pipes in the traditional way.
With an hour to go before all the museums in the gorge closed, it was obvious we weren’t likely to see the china or the tile museum on this trip. We went around the furnace at the north end of the site, where Suzanne Spicer took us for a tour of the furnace and explained the history, the difficulties of running a factory that depended on a certain river level and how the iron for the bridge was probably made as pigs here and transported down to the site to be cast.
We left at half past four and made our way back for a mug of tea and to pack the car. We left at 7pm, and got home at 9.30, ready for a good sleep before retrieving the cats the following morning and getting back to our normal lives.
Julia Chalkley 