Hay on Wye and around Bristol

Our week has been a bit of a mixed bag. We came home on Wednesday night to find that Pierre had been broken into during the day. They had forced the lock (luckily Harry works with panel beaters and so they taught the students the next day how to get a forced lock and surroundings back to normal), and had stolen our tent (only used once), and our tool kit. We had taken anything of value out since the last time, but had also left our cd's in the glove box - we had the last laugh though as they weren't the originals - only the ones Harry had burnt and called Hazza 1 and Hazza 2 etc - not much to sell in that lot we think. On Friday I had a meeting in Chepstow (another lovely big mansion made into a hotel and golf course with a little church and graveyard close by) and so dropped Rebecca off there to wander around the castle, little village and the River Wye while I went and sat at my meeting all day (with sunshine streaming through the window). It was a glorious day and so we looked forward to our visit to Hay on Wye on Saturday and a 3 hour walk we had planned around the Black Mountains. Filled with anticipation we stopped after winding our way through tree lined minor roads that took us to the Priory at Llanthony where it started to rain. The priory was falling down like many of them but had a similar design although quite a lot smaller. It sat in a valley, nestled in some hills and it was cold and wet. Harry has vowed it is the last weekend he will wear shorts this year. After looking at each other rather sheepishly we decided that hot drinks and food was far preferable to following those decked out in their wet weather walking gear up the hill into the mist (I think they envied us our hot drinks actually). So we ate, drank, wandered around the Priory and little Church of St David (where the first church stood in the 6th century and where St David lived for a time in the valley). Llanthony apparently in Welsh is spelt Llan-ddewi-nant-honddu meaning the Llan of St David on the river Honddu. (dd sounds like th in English). The Priory was originally built by two hermits in the early 12th century and later became a home for Augustine Canons - also known as Black Canons - as they wore black. They were ordained ministers which meant they went out to the countryside to preach and minister to the poor which made them quite different from other abbey's we have seen where they lived basically in solitude. When the monasteries were dissolved these canons were actually given pensions. The Priory became a place of refuge and it has thick stone walls and very small windows to act as a protection. Henry VIII again was responsible for the Priory falling into disrepair - he has a lot to answer for doesn't he?

Being in the land of the welsh means multi lingual signs everywhere so I thought it was about time that we increased our vocabulary from the welsh road signs. So here goes:

coeden = tree
castell = castle (that's an easy one)
baner = flag
dwr = water
aderyn = bird
pel = ball
mor = sea
tan = fire






Hay on Wye is a little town that sits right on the border of England and Wales, but is actually in Wales (it is one of many little towns on the Wye and we drove through many of them called something on Wye today). To get to the town we drove through some spectacular scenery, country roads and roads winding through a long flat plateaus. It is known as the 'Town of Books' but before that it has a history dating back to the 1100's and included a Norman Invasion, destroyed by King John (it was rebuilt one night by the wife of William de Breos who built the castle in the first place - the name of this outstanding woman was Maud de St Valery and she achieved this huge feat by carrying the stones in her apron). But more recently the Town of Books has its name from Richard Booth (he proclaimed himself as the King of Hay cos he owned the castle that overlooks the little village that slopes down towards the river) who opened his first second hand bookshop back in the early 1960's. A tourist is now given a map of the town with the 30 bookshops labelled - some selling new and some old but all of them a lot of books. Our first stop was the castle bookshop where there were boxes of little books for free so we gave a little donation and got books (very edited versions I think) with authors like Lord Byron, Robert Browning, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Kate Pullinger, Thomas Gray, William Blake, John Milton, Matthew Arnold, Isaiah Berlin, Rudyard Kipling, Churchill, Walt Whitman so who knows what I will write in the blog in the next few weeks. When we asked where to find a particular subject in some of the shops (the notice did say please feel free to ask) we got waved in a general direction but I gather the intention is that you have to browse the floor to ceiling shelves (yeah right after shelf 4 or 5 I didn't have a hope of seeing the titles) rather than just head for a specific subject. The book shops were in the castle, old cinemas, the town hall, outside and open to all weathers, under large marquis and trees, or in little boutique shops that looked small from the outside but usually meant a flight of stairs down to the basement, and up one or two floors. Besides book shops, we saw book binders, a jigsaw and teddy bear shop (biggest jigsaw had 24,000 pieces and cost around £157, while the smallest only had about 20 pieces and was made from wood, - Harry and I did decide we could buy one for winter to do in the evenings but couldn't find one we liked at a reasonable price), some expensive clothes shops, record and cds, lots of cafes and pubs and an art gallery. We stumbled across an auction - we could hear the auctioneers voice throughout the town - and thought 'a book sale' but to our surprise when we creeped through a door it was a 'pony sale'. There were heaps of ponies of all shapes, colours, sizes and ages and some of them were sold for £25 (how cheap I thought we could take one home) while others into the hundreds which we considered a better price. We walked into a dolls house shop and Harry decided that Caramello needed a chair. So, he tried the first chair and couldn't fit in it because it was too small, and he tried the middle size one but it wasn't quite long enough and so he fell off it, and then he tried the big one and he sat in it and it was just right - so we ended up buying it and now he sits proudly in comfort during the week before catching a bag somewhere during the weekend.

We then drove through Hereford a nice little town that we might explore more of one day and followed several trucks full of potatoes to Ross on Wye. Another little historic market town on the (yes you guessed it) the River Wye. It has a number of listed buildings and a mock gothic wall. We went up to the museum and watched a little video on the town (built from the surrounding red sandstone) and read that in the 1200's Henry III approved a charter for Ross on Wye to have a market every Thursday. I have driven past many little villages with signs saying there is a market every Tuesday, or Friday, or Sunday etc and now realise that these market days are steeped in history and probably approved by a king many years before. While driving back to Bristol I mused about whether history is restricting in many ways, provides some security and safety, or whether it offers some sort organisation and boundaries for us to follow - probably a mixture of all three. We came here to see the history as NZ is such a new country - its laws are far younger than many of the buildings we see and there aren't any age old charters to tell us what to do. So, does that make our culture more relaxed and spontaneous and is there less of 'this is how it is done around here because that is how it is always been done'. Food for thought of which I have few answers.

On the Sunday, we took Rebecca around Bristol to show her the city in autumn and then went to Weston Supermare. We missed the motor cycle beach races by a week thankfully, as there would have been crowds and she wouldn't have seen the endless mud, burnt down pier, or the architecturally interesting houses (some with a definite European look). The pier will be rebuilt and there is a competition for a design at the moment. We voted - I liked the building with a roof like a big wave - and wandered through the information centre which had articles on the history, fire and rebuild project. 'In the early hours of Monday 28th of July, a devastating fire took hold of the Grand Pier Pavilion and it was totally destroyed in less than 2 hours. In this modern age, live pictures of the fire taking hold, were shown across the globe and it became the biggest domestic news story the BBC had ever broken, attracting 1.6 million hits on their website in just four hours' (so bigger than the Queen Mother's funeral we thought, Princess Diana - perhaps not a domestic story, the crash landing of the 777 at Heathrow?).