I’m way behind again on my blogging, I must sort myself out! It is Sunday morning the 26th June, nearly 9 am, the sun is shining, and the forecast is for 30 degrees!!!! Guess where we are!!!
I don’t know what you all thought of course, but I bet some of you thought France/Spain/Italy/Greece….. well the truck doesn’t go that fast!!! We are in London. The funny thing is that on the weather on the BBC they were talking about heat waves, and gave out an 0800 equivalent number for a NHS advice line to help you cope in such extreme conditions!!!! Extreme indeed, it’s just a usual summer!! Why doesn’t “a” become “an” there, it’s in front of a vowel but “an” doesn’t flow properly.
Anyway, I’m lying in bed listening to the birds singing, the planes coming in to land at Heathrow, the clackity clack of the underground (now over ground this far out) trains on the viaduct about a kilometre away, writing this. I should be up enjoying the day but it is pretty pleasant being horizontal still.
So we had yesterday in London with Yvonne. It was a warm but overcast mostly day, it was forecast to reach 26 but I think maybe 21/22 was tops. It was still very nice to be sitting out on the lawn chatting, drinking cups of tea, with only a tee-shirt layer on top, watching (well not really, it was behind us) our washing wafting on the breeze. What we were watching as we talked were the little robins bobbing around and munching on the bird seed Hilary and Yvonne had put out for them. A bit later we saw a pair of jays too, they are nothing like a jay I imagined, with a flat top hairdo, but large orangey coloured birds who obviously like bird seed also.
Apart from doing our washing, and Diana spending about 4 hours cleaning the inside of the campervan, we didn’t do much, it was bliss. I did go for an hour long walk up to the Finchley shops to buy a few things from the supermarket and to get some more books for Hilary. We have had to ration her reading, she has gone through well over 60 books in 2 months, some of them she has read more than once, and we can’t keep up. The ones I bought yesterday I haven’t told her about, and I have hidden them in the truck, our concern is that it is easy enough to get them here in England from the charity shops at about a pound each but once we leave here finding books in English will be a problem.
Well the horizontal thing didn’t last, I was told to get up, and go out and enjoy the day, humph. So now I am clean, fed and tea’d and sitting in the sun on Yvonne’s back lawn. It is very warm, the sun beating down on my neck reminiscent of a real summer.
So yesterday was just a hang out day, and evening. Hilary was glued to anything on television, she keeps asking if we can buy one for the campervan but the adults are enjoying evenings of parallel play and listening to the radio, or just quiet.
We arrived at Yvonne’s on Friday evening at about 6.30, with dinner we had prepared earlier in the day, Maisie Simm’s chicken casserole, and vegetables, cooked some rice and had strawberries and fresh cream as well. We had driven from Teversal that morning. Our intention had been to have another night somewhere between Teversaland Yvonne’s but by the time we had got onto the M1 it was just a couple of hours south, amazing system buzzing along as fast as you want it seems, I think there is a limit 70 miles an hour comes to mind (the van doesn’t bother with that speed so we don’t need to worry, we sit on about 100kms/h, sometimes 110, but very rarely). Other vehicles seem to whizz past, certainly more than 120km/h some closer to 150km/h I would guess. It is easy driving though when the roads are not too full, quite a few patches of bridge building or extra lanes going in so a few places where the speed limit is down to 50 mph, and the roads get a bit clogged but allin all, plain sailing, which makes big distances easily manageable.
In the morning we left Teversal camping ground, where we had stayed on our way north about 6 weeks earlier. It wasn’t raining, so we headed a few miles up the road to a couple of National Trust properties we had earmarked for perusal. The first was Stainsbury Mill which is a flour mill on the Hardwick Estate, it is still working, the same mill that was there in the 1800s, but an original mill was there in the 1200s if not before. There were some very enthusiastic NT guides who told us all about the process and showed us things working.
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| The mill |
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| The blowy thing where the grain is cleaned |
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| The two grinding machines |
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| Some grinding stones |
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| Examples of stones with pattern cut into grinding surfaces to aid scissor action |
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| The water source from the pond which runs onto the waterwheel (just inside out of view) to power the whole system |
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| The grader with different sized seives to sort out flour from semolina etc |
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| One of the gowns worn by the miller to keep flour off clothes and filth from flour |
Hilary had a couple of sheets of pictures that she had to find around the mill, always a good way to get children to look around and be occupied, though she is also interested in the way things work and the processes. It is always these places she enjoys the most. The wheat, barley, corn or oats are brought into the mill in sacks, these sacks are raised up on chains running over a large bobbin type wheel 4 storeys up, over a series of cogs and things (one large continuous chain which is run by a water wheel and a series of cogs. The grain is first cleaned by going through a short tunnel system with a large fan at the end. The fan blows down the tunnel, the lightest stuff (chaff, dust, dried grass) is blown furthest and falls into the waste shute (this is fed to stock) the grain falls down a closer shute and is rebagged. This is then sent to the kiln or drying room. It can either be stored at this stage if not needed immediately or else milled. The grain is taken back up by the sack full on the chain (manually) and poured into the grinding wheels. This is a system of 2 large round but flat stones with special patterns cut out of them so that when the top one runs over the bottom one (which stays still) it acts like a scissor movement cutting the grain and grinding. The flour falls out the side of the stone where a thing a bit like a horizontal mud-flap on the outside of the wheel flips it down a chute where it then goes off for grading. The fineness of the flour is determined by how big the gap is between the two grinding stones, but also when the flour is graded it is graded into three types. It is all fed down a sieve type tunnel, the finest white flour (which was what the people at the big house wanted) fell out first and was bagged up. The next grade was more a wholemeal type and the third was the semolina the miller called it, which is the hard bits that couldn’t be ground properly. Most of the flour from here was used on the estate in Bess of Hardwick’s time, she owned the mill, and the grain all came from the tenant farmers who were obliged to use this mill. I’ll tell you a bit more about Bess a bit later, suffice to say she was a very shrewd and astute business woman.
The mill is very close to Hardwick Hall itself which is an imposing building up on a small hill not far north of Nottingham in Derbyshire. The National Trust brochure describes it as a dramatic house built by Elizabeth, Countess of Shrewsbury, (Bess of Hardwick, Elizabethan England’s second wealthiest woman) in the 1590’s. As said earlier, she was an astute business woman , but also a very sensible marrier. She had four husbands, including the Duke of Devonshire,none of whom lived very long (less than 20 years each, some only a few) and each more wealthier than the last, so she accumulated wealth and status, and then through wise business practices made it grow. She had three sons and was able to set them all up nicely, the eldest inherited Chatsworth House, the second Hardwick Hall, and the youngest Bolsover Castle. She owned such businesses as the mill, a glass works and a quarry, so though Hardwick cost, I think they said, £25,000 it was very reasonable because all the stone was local and the huge amounts of glass were from her own factories. It is famous for its large glass windows in fact it says “more glass than wall” though that isn’t strictly true. It is also famous for the tapestries and imposing towers which are topped with Bess’s initials.
The gardens and estate are beautiful too, we actually did the formal gardens the afternoon before as we arrived about an hour before closing and decided to have a stroll around the gardens doing the children’s trail. There are a series of “rooms” with separations made by stone in places and hedging in others. The middle garden area is predominantly herbs and vegetables, gorgeous huge purple cabbages, rhubarb, gooseberries, beans, lettuces, you name it. There are also orchards with pears, apples, plums and mulberries all laden with young fruit, and flower gardens too. There are 900 acres of parkland too within the Estate, we didn’t actually explore that too much, but we did drive through it a couple of kilometres n a long and winding road drive-way amongst oaks, grasslands, long-horned cattle and sheep.
We had a lovely explore through the house/hall. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to use the flash on the camera and it was kept fairly gloomy inside with thick curtains at all the windows, I presume to preserve the fabrics, paintings and especially the tapestries, which are a highlight of the property.
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| A pretty fire surround in hardwick hall |
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| A beautiful black velvet couch |
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| Close up of part of a tapestry |
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| Closer upof another tapestry |
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| One of the tapestries |
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| Tapestry lined gallery |
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| The gallery |
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| An Elizabethan lady |
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| One of the views through dirty windows |
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| Dining table |
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| A bed |
The tapestries are amazing, dozens of huge hangings on the walls, intricate stitchings of, mostly faded now, scenes of Elizabethan life. The views from the hall were great too, sweeping vistas down to the parkland or snatches of the more formal gardens. Unfortunately the windows were dirty so the camera picked up the window glass rather than the view.
We spent a good 2-3 hours here, Hilary had plenty to do with puzzles, and other play things to do, including dress-ups which she wasn’t keen to do, but was keen to dress us up. We had a late lunch in the truck (2.30) and then headed to the M1. I’m not sure how far it is from Hardwick to London, but we stopped for fuel once, and then a bit south of Nottingham for a wee break, comfort stop and cup of tea. We had told Yvonne that we wouldn’t be with her until Saturday but when I saw it was only 120 miles to London I thought it was silly to stop just for the sake of stopping, so we phoned her and asked if it was OK to arrive that evening. Of course it was, we were at her place by 6.30, or navigating improving greatly as time and experience moves on and roads become more familiar. Hilary was actually up front for this journey, we had intended swapping her and Di at dinner time but as we didn’t stop for dinner Hilary stayed in the navigator’s seat. She was great, looking ahead to predict where we needed to go, when her map ran out we were in familiar enough territory to be able to find our way to Yvonne’s from memory.
On Thursday we left Scarborough in the pouring rain. We had been going to stop at a lavender farm on the way, and also a place called Eden Camp which is a huge modern military museum. The latter looked fascinating on paper, with each barracks building holding a different display, women in the military, fashion in military as well as soldier’s life stories, equipment, arms etc. However, it was really wet and cold and we decided that staying in the warm van was preferable. We did see some beautiful red paddocks on our drive and I took a little off road to see if we could get closer for some photos. It was pouring!!! I did it, but got absolutely soaked in the process, I had to have a complete change of clothes for the rest of the drive. The experience and photos were worth it though.
Stunning. Other than that we just drove down to Derbyshire and went to Hardwick Hall gardens as already discussed.
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The day before we drove from Scarborough to Bridlington, about 20 miles down the coast. We had a few things to do there. One was to see a caravan repair firm to see if they could do some maintenance on the van, we have a few issues, dripping taps, lights that won’t go, we’ve never been able to get the fridge to go on gas, and worst the chemical toilet (empty thankfully) is stuck most of the way in, but we can’t get it out or further in, so we haven’t been able to use that for a few weeks. Instead we either use a campground, discreet patch of bush or a chamber pot type arrangement, hasn’t been too much of a hassle, but we need to get it sorted before we head back to foreigner parts. Also (talk about thick) after about 5 weeks (maybe more) we noticed an unpleasant odour coming from the bathroom, we investigated the toilet, no it was OK, it smelt more like a drain. Took a sniff of the sink, whew. It so happens that while the kitchen sink is free draining (straight out through a pipe, so you put a receptacle under the pipe and empty the greywater out when it is needed), but the bathroom sink and shower (which we haven’t used yet) drain into a waste tank, which obviously needs to be emptied occasionally. Well, I googled the Hymer waste-tank, how to empty it page, and discovered there is a lever at the back near the wheel which releases the waste-water. Yeah right!!! It doesn’t seem to work, and the turn around lid thing on the bottom of the tank which I can just reach by squeezing underneath and stretching (all the time keeping my face clear of the outlet, haven’t smelt what’s in there)is as tight as and I can’t undo that either. So we have a tank full of very whiffy water affixed to the bottom of our truck. We have had to bung the sink with gladwrap and a plug to keep the stench out of the truck, goodness knows what is happening in there though!!! I pity the poor bugger who manages to open it!!! Anyway, having found the place we chatted to the lady at the reception only to discover that they only do static caravans and campers not mobile ones!! Nevermind, we had plenty of other things to do, including visiting a rock factory. Not the sort that does stone work or anything like that, but one that makes Scarborough rock, chocolates, biscuits and other “boiled sweets”. We did a factory tour to see them making rock, (only a small part of the process),
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bits were also on the video though for a more complete explanation of the process, and Di and Hilary had a chance to make a piece of blueberry flavoured rock with their initial down the middle. It is very labour intensive, bits are mechanised, like the pulling machine which stretches the sugar toffee mass and thus aerates it and the other one which squeezes the huge log of rock into skinny little worms of rock. However the mixing and layering and adding the part with the words or picture or whatever is all done by hand (hands without gloves I might add!!!!). I think a machine wraps the individual rocks but then those pieces are bagged/boxed by hand by rather bored looking women and men (I can imagine it would be an incredibly tedious way to make a living.)
