Julia Chalkley

I’m Baaack

In the final words of the Lord of the Rings trilogy; “Well, I’m back.”

We’ve just returned from a holiday that took us back to places we had been to before. Usually, I prefer to go to somewhere new. But the memories associated with this area is so good that I couldn’t stay away.

Let’s start with our base. Filey.

A High Tide in Short Wellies by Ray Lonsdale

I first saw this statue in 2015 and I love it. A giant fisherman staring out to sea, while a mouse creeps up on the fish wrapped in newspaper between his toes. The photo above was taken earlier this year. No, you don’t see a wrapped fish between his feet. Either the local vegans protested, or somebody hacked it off the base and stole it. Either way, shame on them.

The town is much as it was ten years ago, and that’s a large part of its charm. It can’t last forever, but right now it’s a great place. With the addition of a new gin distillery in the old smokehouse, for gin addicts.

Staithes

I have been hoping to return to Staithes for decades. I was taken there on an Open University geology field trip in the early 2000’s and loved the place. Not so much the town, though it is pretty; more the foreshore below it. Staithes marks the northern end of Yorkshire’s Jurassic coast, where the oldest fossils can be found.

Anyone wanting to go fossil hunting at Staithes needs to be aware of the tide. The rocky beach barely slopes at all, meaning that the falling tide recedes very quickly and a rising tide gives virtually no warning before you’re ankle deep in water. The advice is to start your return journey to Staithes at or before the time of low tide.

We arrived at about halfway between high and low tide, and the sea was still covering all but a narrow ledge next to the cliff. That was the other piece of advice we were given; stay away from the cliffs. Minor rockfalls rattled down the cliff and exploded on the ledge while I was on my way out towards Old Nab. I’d been adopted by an amateur geologist who was leading me out to Old Nab and on towards the Port Mulgrave headland. He wore a hard hat, but even he stayed fifteen metres away from the cliffs.

We didn’t find any remnants of the Victorian train tracks running from the old ironstone mine at Mulgrave to Staithes, but we did find fossils. I brought back one stone full of tiny fossilised shells and one small ammonite, but I couldn’t find any of the sea-lilies I found on the OU trip. We parted company halfway to Port Mulgrave; he knew a way up the cliffs near the furthest headland and I went back to Staithes, finding a brick in a rockpool along the way.

I didn’t realise what it was until I visited the Staithes Museum on my way back to the car.

Next up… Whitby.

We spent Tuesday in Whitby. This was my fifth visit and the first time I’d gone as a free-range tourist while both the abbey and the Whitby Museum were open. The first visit was after sailing from Norway in 1995. The skipper brought us in to Whitby as he claimed it was a port of last resort – if you called them up, they had to let you in. The skipper knew a lot about the town, including the fact that the best chippy shut at 9pm so we’d have to average six knots for the next few hours if we wanted a proper fish supper. He and the first mate drove the boat hard and the last few hours were rough sailing, but we made it to the mouth of the river by eight o’clock. The waves were ringing the bell on the safe haven buoy like the Devil was coming to town and the Abbey’s ruined outline was lit up on the headland above. As we were tidying the ropes to get in, a rowing boat came out from the shelter of the harbour walls with the cox howling at the crew to Pull, Pull!

This visit was a lot less frantic. We spent six hours prowling around the Abbey, the shops of Whitby and the museum in Pannett Park. I had the chance to get close to the abbey walls, spent an hour in the geology section of the museum and now have another Lazy Lemon T-shirt warning anyone who cares to read the text on my chest that I really don’t like mornings (“I’m awake. That’s as good as you’re getting today”) And there are fossils on Whitby Beach, alongside the jet (and the dog poo). The legend has it that St Hilda turned all the snakes of the area to stone and threw them into the sea, which is a fair mediaeval explanation for the coiled forms of the ammonites you can find there. I didn’t have enough time to go hunting. I must go back, maybe during the next Goth Weekend.

We were intending to travel to Scarborough by train but… trains once an hour, the next one cancelled and limited seats remaining on the rest, it didn’t sound too attractive. Park and Ride it was, then. A good choice, as the first stop was right outside the Rotunda Museum, the place I really wanted to see.

I’d been to the Rotunda in 2015 during a writers’ group meeting and always wanted to come back. Have to say that this year’s visit has cured me of that. There’s still some of the old Georgian charm in the place, but the recent refurbishment has stripped out many of the original wooden framed cases. It’s geared towards educating the kids now. Three very noisy groups of primary school children took over the place all morning, sprawled around on the floor and shrieking. We had to wait until they’d been herded off to their lunch before we could see the whole range of exhibits. It was great that the teachers led them through the basics of geology, but I miss the atmosphere of a serious Georgian museum.

An access ladder made in 1855 for £6 10 shillings and the spiral stair to the top floor

We spent the rest of our visit enjoying a superb lunch at Brewed next to the Rotunda, then wandered across the Spa Bridge to see what the park was like before getting back on the bus. We would have walked on the beach if the sea hadn’t been hogging it all, or walked into the centre of Scarborough to look at the independent shops in the Market Hall and then on to the marina. But our feet were aching and we just wanted to get back to Filey for the chance to loll on the sofa with a mug of tea.

Scarborough Marina is where our sailing holiday finished in 1995. We sailed from Whitby to Scarborough in light winds and helped the skipper tie his yacht to the marina wall (the marina dries at low tide and he wanted the yacht to lean quay-wards rather than topple into the mud). We went home on the train. Easier to do in those days as we lived in London, within walking distance of a station.

The last free morning of our holiday was spent at the far end of Filey Bay. We parked at Hunmanby Gap and walked along to Reighton. The tide was coming in the whole time so we had just an hour to enjoy the walk – enough time to get to Speeton, if we hadn’t been dawdling and fossil hunting. I found a couple of Gryphaea fossils from the clay cliffs to show Himself why they’re called Devil’s Toenails.

The following day we packed up and set off for home. The weather had turned to grey October with rain threatened for next week. The trees along the route were still flying yellow and red leaves but some of the branches had been blown bare. It won’t be long before the only green in the trees will be holly and ivy leaves.

A Bouquet of Secrets

The cover is dark and so are the stories

It all started when Sara Paretsky grew tired of being the only female author at the crime writers’ conventions she attended. She started a group for female crime authors called ‘Sisters in Crime’, hoping to encourage other women to get those crime thrillers published.

There was obviously a need. The group grew and spread into other parts of the world, and I am now a member of the EU/UK chapter, even though my few attempts at crime stories have never made it into print. I don’t have a criminal mind, apparently, but I have been welcomed into this community of writers who can conjure up anything from knife in the back thrillers to amateur sleuth capers.

Last month, one of the Sisters announced that she was willing to edit an anthology of short stories and did anyone have the time to write a crime story with a Gothic setting? I didn’t have the time, but that word Gothic drew me in. Later this month I’m going for my fourth visit to Whitby Abbey, the setting for part of Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’, and that kind of imposing ruin has always impressed me.

Whitby Abbey on a winter evening, with the Moon shining through the window.

The nineteenth century was the golden age of all things Gothic in England, drawing inspiration from the ruins found during the Grand Tours around Europe and its Asian border countries. Half-destroyed castles. Neglected stately homes with dark and cobwebby corridors. Ruined abbeys. The Sisters had no objection to moving things along into the new century, so I took my character into an abandoned warehouse and locked him in the cellar. Darkness, cobwebs, mysterious noises… I live in an old house and that’s every night around here. I am so glad I have a pet cat (‘Sasha, go to sleep!’).

Anyone with time to read and a yen for creepy crime could do worse than buy the anthology. ‘A Bouquet of Secrets’ is available for pre-order on Amazon now, and is due for release on October 31st (of course!). There are some talented crime novelists in there, and I’m looking forward to reading their interpretation of Gothic. They’re all probably creepier than an idiot hero who thinks it’s a laff to go exploring an abandoned warehouse…

Bats must be so tired of being used as a horror motif. They’re just me with wings… all they want to do is sleep all day.

I Can’t Keep It In…

Most of the litter was soft drink cans. Guys, this doesn’t biodegrade…

I was out with a group of people on a youth club trip in 1975, and we stopped partway to our destination for a break to stretch our legs in a local wood. I went out to explore while the tea was brewing and came back with an empty plastic compost bag that had been dumped in the stream. I stuffed the bag into the litter bin nearby, and the rest of the group just watched me like I’d grown green fur and horns. I tried to explain about the Conservation Corps and their drive to improve the environment, and they said “Riiight…. So is it okay if we leave some of our urine behind this bush, or will you want to scrape it up?”

Fifty years on and I’m still that person, though I admit I can’t bend down to pick up litter as easily as I could back then. So I was pleased to hear that our local library hired out litter-picking equipment. Long-handled picker, gloves, hi-vis vest and purple bags. I was in town last week to get the encrusted calcium chipped off my fangs (dental hygiene appointment) and took a few minutes to drop in and pick up a litter kit.

It took a few days to find the time, but Saturday was the day. Even so, there were several other jobs waiting for me and I had to say very firmly that I was going out for an hour to pick up litter.

An hour turned into two, and then some. Two purple bags filled with rubbish – mainly drinks cans (one of them unopened), though plastic sweet packets and bottles also featured heavily. Once I got my eye in, it was easy to spot; if it had straight edges or bright colours, it was likely to be litter. Special mention for the two unopened packs of some kind of medical tablets – not prescription, or I’d have dumped them in the garden of whoever it was assigned to. Four wheel trims, all from different makes of car, and a rusty iron bar. And of course, the traditional plastic Evian bottle containing either whiskey or the piddle of a severely dehydrated person. So grateful for the arms-length picker on this trip.

It does leave me wondering what kind of pillock can go to the effort of opening a window to throw out a can of drink but doesn’t understand that it’s less hassle to just drop the rubbish into the passenger footwell and dispose of it at home. Maybe they’re going home to mummy and daddy and they’re afraid of admitting that they drink Red Bull?

Don’t be a litter-bugger. You can keep it in. This is the second time this year I’ve had to clean up our street, and I have better things to do with my time.

A quick update. I lugged the two bags full of rubbish home on Saturday, but I left the glass bottles and wheel trims there because I had my hands full. Went back on Tuesday to collect the glass (for recycling) and wheel trims (for a fresh litter sack). Already half a dozen items of litter chucked out onto the verges, including an empty can of Red Bull in exactly the same place as last time. Disheartening.

A Walk in the Park

Image by Mouse23, Pixabay… I was too busy smelling the lavender to take a photo

Last month’s adventure was a trip to the Self Publishing Show in London. I went last year, drawn in by an author friend, but this year I was going back with intent. I had so many questions that I’d wear a big hole in any friendship with them all, so I would be asking those questions to the sponsors at the stalls.

Just like last year, I booked a room at the Mad Hatter Inn in Southwark. The building was once a hat factory owned by the Tress family, but it cheers up its industrial past by putting Alice in Wonderland references everywhere. My room had pictures of the White Rabbit anxiously checking the time and Alice reading the label on the bottle (“Drink me”), while the dining room was decorated with various characters from the Alice books. Including the Blue Caterpillar inhaling smoke from a bong, and I’m told this was one of the Tenniel illustrations to the first edition. Tenniel probably drew the author sitting cross-eyed at his own bong, from the general crazy whirl of the plots.

Last year I had a room on the first floor overlooking the waste ground behind the hotel. It gave me a view of what was behind a tall wooden fence – the rough ground and weeds and wildlife of a site ready to be built on. This year, I was given a room on the third floor, and on the side facing the Thames. Not that I got a view of the Thames. I was looking directly at One Blackfriars, the curvy glass tower that is on the same scale as the Gherkin and the Shard – after planning objections cut its height by a hundred metres or so. As with all residential developments, it came with a side-order of ‘affordable homes’ – in this case, in a separate concrete building on a nearby street, thereby dividing its inhabitants from the gorgeous views and smart facilities enjoyed by residents of One Blackfriars itself. I couldn’t see the topmost towers without putting my face to the glass of the window and really craning my head. It was spooky from evening onwards, and I couldn’t help but think of the Twin Towers every time I saw it. Lovely for its rich inhabitants, but a crap neighbour.

This year I knew that things could be different. I walked to the show each day and I knew the route included a few hundred metres along Stamford Street (traffic, June heatwave, noisy) before reaching a cut-through to the Thames through a pair of quiet, cool parks called the Bernie Spain Gardens. From the entrance of the southern garden you can see through the trees to the buildings on the north bank of the Thames. The first garden is a sunken lawn built on the basement hollow of a demolished building, with flower beds all around it and narrow paths diverting through stands of trees and tall shrubs. From the centre of those small paths, all you can see in any direction is tree or shrub. Lavender and honeysuckle kept the air scented everywhere.

Just beyond the wall enclosing the park are flats. Three stories tall, unintrusive and looking out onto the gardens – I would have loved to live there. Very different from the side-street block of the One Blackfriars affordable housing, where the view was of a non-descript building across a dark street.

At the northern end of this park is a road with speed humps to slow the traffic and just across that road is the wide lawn and bushes of the northern Bernie Spain garden. From here, the Thames is in view. It’s a straight amble to the Thames across the garden alongside Gabriel’s Wharf, a group of independent shops and street-food businesses. There’s a line of food trucks and shack-type restaurants all the way along the South Bank from here to the Festival Hall.

The signage at the entrance to the gardens answered my question about who Bernie Spain was. She was a psychologist living in Waterloo, in the Coin Street area, and seemed to be always a campaigner. She worked to have a community hospital built in Lambeth and spoke out on behalf of her patients. When she heard about plans to build a huge complex of office buildings between Coin Street and the river, she organised the residents to form an action group and begin fighting.

If the development company had won, one resident described their plans as a “Berlin Wall” that would have completely cut off access to the South Bank for the residents living just a few hundred metres from the river, meaning a long walk along busy London A-roads to the nearest bridges. Bernie wouldn’t give up. She set up signs saying; “London needs another office block like it needs another plague”, and fought the company all the way through the courts. The company gave up its plans on one site just before Bernie’s death in 1984 and gave up the second site months later. The Coin Street Action Group bought both sites and organised a community gardening scheme to have both sites planted and maintained.

I couldn’t help thinking that Bernadette Spain might have had other plans for the last seven years of her life, something that didn’t involve standing up against teams of corporate lawyers intent on making wealth for their clients. Seeing what she did achieve with those years made me very glad she didn’t just give in and move. The walk through those gardens was something I looked forward to in the months approaching the Self Publishing Show.

And yes, I got the answers I was looking for. But as is the way with all projects, more questions have cropped up since then. The first draft of ‘Shilling Cove’ is about to come under the eye of an editor who will definitely tell it like it is, and after that, I can release it into the wild and turn my attention to the next project. Just hoping this one will take less than five years to finish. Bernadette Spain, how did you find the energy?

Conference Call

Back in March, we went to the annual Scottish Association of Writers’ annual conference at Cumbernauld, with a few days walking around Northumberland as a treat along the way. I had to go to hand back the Largs Shield, and this time I knew I wouldn’t be winning it back because their rules (very sensibly) forbid anyone from entering the same competition for two years if they have just won it two years in a row. It was sad to hand it over, but I had given it a good polish and hoped it would cheer up somebody else for a year or two.

Bit of a strange one this year, as we had so much trouble booking a room back in October last year that I gave up. Face it, if you ring a hotel and ask to book a room some months in advance, you don’t expect the clerk to hesitate and say that he wasn’t sure if he could do that. I understand now that I probably caught them on the day when the staff had been told that the Westerwood had been sold to another chain, and that the clerk didn’t know what would be happening to the place in six months’ time. I’m sure next year we’ll be able to book a room with no trouble. The accommodation we found instead was a warm and spacious cottage run by a friendly couple in the house next door, so no complaints there. I did promise to friends at the Westerwood that if there was another fire at their hotel, we would be there in ten minutes with a vehicle to sit in and some warm clothing while they waited for the fire brigade.

The trophies laid out ready to be presented. Photo by Grahame Anderson

I may have given back the Largs, but I went in hopes of getting a mention for a different competition. Not disappointed. I got fourth for the humorous short story again and had a special mention for the best first line of all the entries in that contest. Nice start, shame about the punchline. Fourth place for a 30 minute TV pilot, even though I don’t watch TV series (Broadchurch and The Detectorists have been the only exception in the last ten years). Third place for a general article. I put in a novel extract at the last minute, and I do mean last minute; I submitted the entry with ten minutes to spare before the deadline. The idea was one I wrote as part of the 29 Plays Later challenge in February 2024, but I wrote the prequel to that play as a prose novel extract all on the last day – woke up at 8am with the thought that it would make a good novel idea and spent the entire day writing it out. It was rough, and I didn’t expect it to get anywhere, but I was interested to know what the judge thought of the idea. The feedback the judges provide is always worth the entry fee, even if they let you know you were sitting at the bottom of their list.

Sometimes, the judges surprise you. It helps that this was a twelfth century princess and the judge had a soft spot for historical drama.

My friends got their own mentions. Sue took second place for the Largs Shield, Elizabeth picked up a series of certificates and Mairi won the Helensburgh Shield for her TV pilot – described by the judge as good enough to pitch to a TV station, although he admitted that all the stations were looking to reduce their drama offerings.

Add to that, the Northumberland highlights… the Vindolanda Trust has broken the turf on this year’s excavation site (the final quarter of the soldiers’ area) and has started excavations at the Roman Military Museum seven miles away; the Sycamore Gap stump is sending up sprouts; and I finally got to see the Falkirk Wheel in motion. It’s still shut for repairs, but that’s just an excuse to go back next year for a boat trip (and the Kelpies).

This year, SAW invited us to fill in sheets saying what goals we set ourselves for the next twelve months. We’ll see.

Sight

Someone commented recently that I hadn’t posted for a long time. It wasn’t for lack of things to say; more because I’ve been struggling with my eyesight.

The last post was made just after our holiday in north Norfolk. During that holiday, I came out of a shop into a sunny October day – pale blue sky, low sun – and something flashed in my eye. I thought at the time it was the sun reflected off a car windscreen or mirror, but it was intense – more like a flashlight shone directly into my eye from close range. I could see a bright spot right in the centre of my vision. That’s happened before when I’ve caught a flash of sunlight, but this was different. This didn’t fade away.

I’ve had worsening short sight all my life, and worn spectacles since I was nine. I got my first migraine at eleven, when I lost half the sight in one eye for an afternoon. Then I had that weird spot on my retina (that thankfully cleared up) – and the possible retinal tear that panicked my optician into sending me to Moorfields as an emergency (false alarm, thankfully) – and the cataracts that went from slight to operable within two years. I have had enough sight scares to have a fair idea of how fragile the line between seeing and blindness can be.

The cataract operations were terrifying, but they gave me near-perfect sight and freed me from my specs – apart from reading specs, which half the time are on my nose and the other half the time are set down somewhere so safe that I cannot find them. I’ve had almost five years enjoying – really, seriously enjoying – being able to see clearly all the time. The thought of losing sight in one eye was horrible.

I spent a couple of weeks suffering headaches if I tried to read or write for any length of time. The word I was looking at directly vanished into a blank spot, leaving the rest of the text clear around it – a kind of literary hide and seek. Look at a word and it’s gone. Exactly like the worst of my migraines.

The optometrist was amazing. She examined my eye very carefully and said that one eye had just undergone the natural process of vitreous separation, that it had completed without any perceptible problems and that the retina had probably caught very slightly and been ‘twanged’. She advised taking no action other than returning immediately if I noticed any worsening of symptoms. That was fine by me, as I’m a coward about eye operations.

Fingers crossed as I write this, but my sight seems to be fine now. I still have that clear post-cataract vision; the missing text came back within a fortnight and is still visible. I’m starting to believe I can keep this clear sight for at least a few more years yet, and lifting my head up to see what’s ahead for me.

The Empire Strikes Back

Lucky strike with the story of a blacksmith’s son

A couple of months ago I sent two stories in to a Globe Soup contest. It was set up as historical fiction; buy a ticket and be assigned a historical period at random. I ended up sending in two stories, one about a blacksmith’s son who achieved his ambition of getting a place in the Roman fort near his village and one about a teenage girl who was one of a very few in her village to survive the Black Death.

As always, I spent more time on one story than the other, and grew to be more fond of the characters (that doesn’t mean I didn’t treat them badly, mind; just that I felt sorry for them when I did). And as always, I was looking elsewhere when the results came out. I was shortlisted for one of the stories – not sure which, but I suspect my native blacksmith – and a friend of mine, Sue Cook, was shortlisted for her Roman Empire story.

The winner of that contest was yet another Roman Empire tale. I know Globe Soup has writers from all over the world taking part, but it does seem that the Roman Empire set off a lot of different tales. The winner’s story revolved around the trade in purple dye – my hero ran the bath-house and scrubbed Roman backs. In both cases, the Romans caused a big problem for the native workers they employed.

Sue has finished her story for the Christmas crime anthology (available to pre-order now at https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0DKG4TP9Q ) and has gone back to writing her novel based in mediaeval times. I’m fighting through one of those really cluttered times – one or two appointments every day and a lot of driving to get there – but after that, I will go back to my novel about what happens when you tell a real whopper of a lie and get away with it for a bit too long.

And of course – there’s Globe Soup’s short story competition. And the question of where to send my Roman bath-boy next.

Norfolk

It’s Cromer, but maybe not as you know it. The beach is closed for about half a mile near the pier for ‘works’ – looks like a shipload of granite blocks have been dumped next to the esplanade with a couple of hills of granite left thirty yards further out in an attempt to protect the sea wall itself. Sadly, that often impacts on the cliffs just beyond the protected zone, so there may be more erosion along the walk to East Runton in future. Good for fossil hunting – not so great for the houses and businesses on the cliff tops.

We were staying a mile east of Cromer this time. We walked down from the cliffs to the beach where the Banksy was sprayed onto the wall. There’s not much left of it now after two years of fierce storms on a stony beach and one graffiti attack – I was looking at the wall it was on without seeing it, and from recent reports it’s down to some faded paint blotches and a white square with some black marks. From there we had a good walk to Cromer itself.

Bookworms… last surviving secondhand bookshop in Cromer

We had a list of places to visit, too long for us to make it all the way around. We did get to Bookworms, the tiny secondhand bookshop near the pier, but the other two secondhand bookshops have closed for good (one’s an art gallery – one is closed with all the stock still gathering dust on the shelves). No. 1 the chippie is still there and serving the best fish and chips (and veggie alternatives) in Cromer. And the Neanderthals from the Deep History Coast still point the way to the correct toilet.

Ladies pee in the sea… Gents water the dunes. Actually, no, please don’t.

We did get the chance to eat at The Grove Hotel’s Sundowner marquee – brilliant tapas and mild jerk chicken pizza. And visit Felbrigg Hall, though yet again we didn’t get as far as the house – arriving on the one day of the year they hosted a massive sponsored run. The place was packed, and everyone seemed to have brought at least one dog with them. We’re really not keen on crowds. We had a long walk around the walled gardens in the cold, then went to rescue a large bagful of books and six plants. In two cases, ‘rescue’ is the right word; two big peony plants that might be dead right down to the roots, or might be waiting for spring to fetch them back. Fifty pence for plants that cost sixteen pounds originally, it’s worth the risk. Our peony plant in Chingford suffered twenty years of neglect from us and came up with beautiful silky red blooms every June.

Three days in Cromer, and then on to Pentney. Along the way, we went to Holkham Hall. We’d walked west along Holkham Beach on our previous visit, and this time we wanted to walk east, as far as Wells Lifeboat Station. Great walk in the sunshine; about four miles in total, though any walk on soft sand feels like twice the distance. We drove down to Holkham Hall afterwards for lunch and got tempted into booking on the Cellar Tour the following day (and the Attic Tour next Wednesday).

No photography allowed in the cellars, but photos really can’t do it justice. It’s a world all of its own. The original builder of Holkham Hall spent his Grand Tour studying the architecture of great halls in Europe, and brought home his favourite ideas. What lies under Holkham Hall is a network of comfortable walkways connecting servants’ stairs up to key rooms above, windows opening onto the north to chill the larder, a huge woodstore and a stray Tudor window.

Buddha’s Hand citrus in the Walled Garden at Holkham

We finished the Cellar Tour with a visit to the Walled Garden. Apparently, one of the early Earls got fed up with the busyness right next to the hall and had the Walled Gardens relocated – almost a mile away. If you have a back yard of 25,000 acres, I suppose a mile is ‘nearby’. It was worth the walk, but it would have taken another mile of walking to cover the whole lot. After a couple of greenhouses, the Melon Pit, the Pineapple Pit, several flower beds and the vegetable garden we were done in.

Our accommodation in Pentney was at the Energise Spa. Small, but excellent. Outdoor pool with jets, indoor swimming pool, saunas and steam room. I had the entire pool to myself twice during our visit, and there is nothing much better than a pool full of warm, clean water and empty of everyone else to swim in.

The cliffs at Hunstanton. 113 million years of geology.

Our final day in Norfolk was a return trip to Hunstanton. Sunshine, warmth, a walk from the lighthouse to Hunstanton along the beach and back along the cliff top. Not sure there’s a much better day to spend a birthday.

Now back to real life. Looking after two elderly cats, getting the garden ready for winter and starting on the next stage of getting the house in order. And – writing.

Sixty Years Ago

Murals under the railway arches at Colwyn Bay

While I was clearing my father’s house I found a platform ticket for… Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwyllllantysiliogogogoch.

Yes, I still have it. My brothers remember my dad stopping the car outside the station on holiday and the short argument that followed; rain hammering on the car roof and my mother getting out and running across to buy a souvenir ticket to say that they had at least been there. It’s just a ticket. It cost three old pennies – about the same as a modern penny – and I can probably get a replacement on Ebay, but it wouldn’t be this one. The one the station master sold to my bedraggled mother, knowing that she was probably not going on to stand on the platform (like most of the people who bought platform tickets from Don’tMakeMeSpellItAgain).

I don’t remember the incident, or our family holidays to Wales. I was probably there at the time, sitting on that odd little booster seat in the back of the Hillman designed to lift toddlers to adult height. I don’t have any photos, but trust me on this; if you survived a Sixties childhood, well done you. That child seat was a padded block set into the centre of the backrest of the back seat and folded down on its hinge for the child to sit on. It was dead centre of the back seat, not fixed down, no seat belt (no seat belts anywhere in that old Hillman). Great view from there – nothing between me and the windscreen. Nothing at all to stop me from flying forward between the front seats and straight through the windscreen in the event of a sudden stop. The brakes were probably not effective enough to fly me to the bonnet, but hey.

‘Sunny’ Rhyl. Wet, windy, the beach fenced off for major excavations and everything closed.

Our holidays are a joint agreement. He wanted to go to Chester; I thought that would be interesting, and made it a six day trip so that I could go back to some of the north Wales beaches the rest of my family remember clearly. As a toddler, it was all just beach. My clearest memory was being carried screaming to the first aid post with a piece of broken bottle embedded in my foot, and that could have been anywhere. I’m going to be mean and suggest it was Rhyl because we went to Rhyl this year and we didn’t like the place. The beach was fenced off for Balfour Beatty to do something to a stretch of it with diggers that left great piles of sludge-colour sand. The cafe and toilets were open until the end of September – except that metal shutters were padlocked shut on both doors. The seafront was a solid mass of tawdry-looking money traps – bingo halls, slot machine arcades. The tourist information booth had given up and gone dark, and I don’t blame it. You can put as much lipstick as you like onto a pig, but nobody wants to kiss it.

Colwyn Bay. Don’t be fooled by the blue sky, it had just sent down a hailstorm.

Next stop along the coast was Colwyn Bay. Much better. Still wet and windy, and the car park we chose had maybe fifty spaces, but the Flat White Cafe was open and serving great coffee and cake. We walked to get down onto the beach and got caught in a hailstorm, arriving in the train station soaked and laughing. The station master and another customer stood chatting with us, and the customer came out into the filthy weather to set us on our way.

If we’d had a full day here, we could have walked along the beach to Rhos on Sea along the seafront of Colwyn and Rhos. Our landlady told us we should have gone, so maybe we’ll come back and have a better look next year. The toilet was haunted by a tourist who desperately needed a pee but wasn’t willing to spend twenty pence to get in – she managed to get in when the previous user left, but wouldn’t have been able to lock the door behind her. The same door was then haunted by an official who was clearly wanting for her to come out. We scarpered before we saw whether he was going to ticket her for not paying or just get in for free himself.

Final stop of the day was Conwy Castle. Magnificent. Walls pretty much intact and the chance to walk around the top of them; clear signage to tell visitors what each bare space had been and what went on there (dining and dungeons very close together – good story material). I could have climbed a set of spiral stairs up to the top of the towers. I didn’t. I should have. I’m afraid of heights, and it annoys me to have that fear keeping me from enjoying great views from high up places.

There will definitely be a next visit to Conwy. One in which I will get to the top of that twenty metre high tower, hopefully with the same clear visibility. I enjoyed the walk around and the information boards. The castle was probably whitewashed when new, so that it was visible for miles as a big imposing thug on the landscape. Bits of tower still stand along the seafront with modern buildings embedded in them, and a long wall stretched away from the castle, climbed the hill in the distance and over the top out of sight. A castle town.

Have to go back. If the guard lets us in.

The other day we spent not walking around Chester was a free one – where did we want to go? Nowhere, not until the rain stopped coming down like surf on a Hawaiian beach. We waited in till midday, discussing places to visit nearby. The Sandstone Trail was a good walking path, but with no peaceful walking route to get to it, and no parking places. The pub with a reputation for great food and magnificent views had changed hands a few months prior and was now serving greasy spoon food at haute cuisine prices. The village across the main road had nothing to recommend it except for a craft shop which was closed unless you were attending a paid workshop. The sun came out and we drove to the only local attraction left that appealed to us – Beeston Castle.

There’s not much left of Beeston, but it must have been some fortress in its day. You climb uphill to the car park, then uphill to the curtain wall, then up again to the summit of the hill and the castle itself. The castle was short of domestic luxury in its day, with the inner space set on uneven ground and all the living space in the towers, but as a fortress it had balls. It was built as a show of defiance by Ranulf of Chester, who returned from the Crusades in 1220 to find the new king Henry’s justiciar confiscating lands of other men who had (in Henry’s view) was more wealth than they deserved. Ranulf’s castle was built to say; “Come up here if you want to take my money.” Henry waited his time and seized the estates from Ranulf’s heir in 1237, granting the castle and the earldom of Chester to his son, the future Edward I.

Looking west… yes, that probably is Wales on the horizon.

The castle was taken by Parliamentarian troops in 1643 and taken back by Royalists in 1644. After the series of Royalist defeats elsewhere in 1645, the garrison surrended to Cromwell’s forces and the castle was ‘slighted’ – damaged so as to make it indefensible in future. Chester Castle was spared that damage as its position near the River Dee and the Welsh border made it more valuable to hold as a fortress.

This is the point when we learned that, from the top of Beeston Castle crags, you can see the great dish of Jodrell Bank just thirty miles to the east. If I had known how close Jodrell Bank was, I would have planned a trip there. Seems we’ll have to go back for another stay in the area. I’m hoping to get the chance to stay in The Smithy again, with a lovely garden and silence at night, and hope The Grosvenor Arms in Aldford is still serving great food and good beer.

Inside the Wall

This was our first day in Chester. Not very impressive weather, but it matches our first view of the city itself. We were staying about five miles out, relying on the Park & Ride to get us in each day. No problem with the system, the bus or the drivers – £2.50 to ride around all day, free parking and helpful drivers. But having got onto the bus we had to do the whole route round the city to get back to the car, and the first sight of the city wasn’t impressive.

Fat Boys Pizza and Kebab. Rows of shops but virtually no customers. Metal shutters on a fabric shop? I dunno. Maybe you can exchange ten yards of that polyester curtain fabric you just robbed for a bottle of whiskey round here. The weather wasn’t helping much, and we spent most of that first trip wondering whether we’d made a mistake coming to Chester for a few days – maybe a long weekend in Qaanaaq would have been better?

What we came to realise was that there’s two parts to Chester – you’re either inside or outside the wall. Outside – on the route we took – it looks like any town these days. Vape shops, people shouting as if drunk or drugged, rundown houses. Not the kind of place we’d get off the bus to explore. The fourth bus stop is Foregate, the city centre – about two hundred yards from that famous Eastgate Clock.

First objective was to get up onto the wall and set ourselves to walk all the way around it. We had real trouble finding the wall and the way up onto it… Anyone who’s been to Chester will be laughing by now, but come on. It isn’t immediately obvious that the clock sits on the wall itself, as there were no tourists on that stretch of the wall on that rainy Tuesday morning.

View from under Eastgate Clock towards Foregate

We walked down to the Roman ampitheatre that first day. Maybe because it was raining hard or maybe because we were tired from the drive over, but we were not impressed. We found a dead end up onto the wall from the Roman Gardens that was blocked off completely. We backtracked to a set of stairs up onto the wall (hidden at the end of an alley that ran between the back of a business and the side of a disused church) and set off.

We got about halfway around that day. We stopped at the Little Roodee Cafe – huge car park full of cars and about a dozen coaches, but inside the cafe we were outnumbered by the staff. Something to eat and a good coffee and we were off. Himself wanted to see the Agricola Tower. Which hides between the University of Chester and the complex of the courts, council offices and the Military Museum. And is also definitely not Roman.

The solid square shape should be a clue. William the… Conqueror, or what ever name you know him by, had it built as the gateway to a castle. Interesting, that when that tower was newly built, the king gave it a name from a thousand years before his own time to give it substance. That tower is still there almost a thousand years later.

Our second day in Chester was entirely different. Dry, sunny and warm. We turned up early and got straight up onto the wall, heading in the opposite direction. This was definitely the pretty side of the city. We walked behind the cathedral, found a collection of independent shops (including one that sold great coffee) and got as far as Chester Racecourse. The races were on and the crowds were arriving. The racecourse was built on the silted up bed of the River Dee, apparently. The things you learn along that wall.

The countryside over there is Wales. Chester’s ring road is only just on the English side of the border.

Just beyond the racecourse was the Little Roodee Cafe; the point where we had got off the wall last time. This time, we headed up to the Military Museum and spent an hour looking around. Then another half hour talking to the volunteers who run the museum, and that was just as much of an eye-opener as the exhibits themselves.

The final trip to Chester was to visit one of the Civil War events at Chester Castle. Although we’d been drawn to visit for the Roman ruins, Chester played a key role in the Civil War. It declared itself neutral but warned that it would be fortifying the city in case either side felt the need to nudge that neutrality. The walls were repaired and strengthened. Despite the ‘neutrality’, the area was strongly Royalist, and the Parliamentarian forces set up a siege of the city that lasted for sixteen months, with frequent attacks from both sides. There’s an information board in the Roman Gardens which explains that the city walls were destroyed in places, with a vertically-mounted picture on a sheet of glass showing the troops fighting around a V-shaped gap in the walls. If you crouch down and look at the wall through the glass, the V-shaped gap on the picture lines up with the repaired section of the wall beyond it.

The six remaining Nine Houses – on the other side of the wall to the Roman Gardens

The Civil War exhibition went on for two days, with re-enactors firing muskets, explaining life during the siege and the timeline if the siege itself. The highlight was the visit to the top of the tower, where the guide explained the geography of the siege and we got a good look around.

On the way back down the tower, I dropped in to the chapel on the first floor. The re-enactor who had retired from fighting to become a mural painter had explained the paints to us – effectively, dyes that were painted onto fresh lime mortar. In the Old Chapel, Victorian murals on fresh plaster had flaked and faded and fallen off the walls in patches, and modern restorers had found the original murals underneath. Not just surviving, but reviving as the chapel was visited; the condensation from the breath of visitors is bringing the old images back, faces and angels and leaves appearing on the walls and ceiling.

The hammock in the garden of our accommodation. Surprisingly comfortable.

That was the city half of our visit to Chester. Given that a lot of disputed cities must have had walls around them, it’s a shame that so few survive. Chester’s walls were built between 70 and 80 AD by the Romans, and by a quirk of luck have been strengthened, extended, maintained by levying a murrage (tax) on goods entering the city, repaired, adapted to accommodate Georgian walks and modern traffic. It’s good to walk around the walls. It gives a view down onto the city, a different perspective from the usual street-level city tours, and an insight into the different uses of this wall throughout almost two thousand years.