The snail slithers on...

Just to make sure people know that I haven't forgotten you all! Things have been a bit hectic lately, but there are many more tales of caravan travel still to come!

There are more travels around Lochaber, as well as ponderings on whether it's copping out to take a telly with you, fixing chemical toilets (I know - try to contain your excitement!) and what a caravan is useful for when it's sitting on your drive in the middle of winter.

See you soon!

Glencoe: Massacre and Majesty.

Glen Coe, or Gleann Comhan as it is named in Gaelic, runs more or less east-west and marks out the path that an ancient glacier carved out of the landscape on its way to join the even bigger glacier that must have carved out Loch Leven, which in turn must have flowed* into the even bigger glacier that formed Loch Linnhe. It is long, U shaped and sweeps the motorist on a gentle descent towards the sea, before the road turns sharply northwards again.

Indeed, given that the A82, which is the main road north if you're on the western side of the country, cuts straight through it, it must count as a minor miracle that Glen Coe remains pretty much unspoiled, at least, unspoiled by traffic and industry.  Huge articulated lorries thunder through the narrow cutting that leads into the glen from the high western end, and yet the peace tranquility of the place seems undiminished. Not that the glen has always been quiet, of course...

On the thirteenth February 1692 the Campbell clan, who were staying as guests of the MacDonald clan, rose up after a night of convivial feasting and massacred their unsuspecting hosts in a crime that shocked a nation and resonated down the centuries. Clans killing each other wasn't exactly unknown back then of course, but to transgress against the mores of hospitality in such an underhand way, rather than to face their foes on the battlefield as honourable men was an unconscionable crime that has left a deep scar in the psyche of the place.

This was no fight after a party either. The massacre began simultaneously in the settlements of Invercoe, Inverrigan, and Achnacon, which suggests a pretty high degree of planning - this was 1692, it's not as though they could send each other a text saying "GO!". The killing then spread out across the glen as MacDonalds, roused from their beds, attempted to flee to safety. In all thirty eight members of the clan MacDonald were directly murdered by their Campbell guests, with something in the region of a further forty women and children dying of hypothermia after their houses were torched. This was February don't forget. I've been in Glencoe in winter - I can only assume that the only reason about forty people died of exposure was that there were only about forty people there.

The reason for this shockingly violent attack? What terrible crime had the MacDonalds committed to bring down the wrath of the Campbells?

Basically it turns out that they were being punished for their tardiness. They'd been a little late in pledging their allegiance to the new Monarchs on the Block, William and Mary, who'd been brought in to depose the previous Monarch who was basically a bit too Catholic for Parliament to stomach.

Nope, not making that up - check your history. Some protestants in Parliament didn't like the fact that their King was Catholic and feared he might forge an alliance with Catholic France. They therefore invited the Protestant William of Orange, who had no claim to the throne in his own right but was married to a woman who did, to come over from Holland and take the crown. Which he then did, in the so-called "bloodless revolution".

It can't have felt all that bloodless in Glencoe.

All of that is a massive over-simplification, of course. There are any number of books and pamphlets about the massacre, its context and its aftermath. I think for me it all comes back to the fact that the Campbells were there as guests. That they ate and drank with the MacDonalds knowing that they would murder them later that night. There's a measure of cold bloodedness in that which I find chilling.

It's a testament to the stunning beauty of Glencoe that knowing all of that doesn't take anything away from the jaw dropping magnificence of the place. Glencoe is quite frankly stunning. Big enough to impress, but built on a small enough scale that you can still take it all in. Given that the main road up the north west of Scotland runs right through it, I'm astonished that there aren't accidents as motorists drive off the road while gazing in slack jawed awe at the magnificence around them. This effect is amplified when you approach the glen from Rannoch Moor.

From this direction, before you even see the glen you are first greeted by a waterfall, the top of which is almost at your eye-level but which thunders down maybe twenty meters to the river below. There's a good sized lay-by overlooking the thundering torrent, making it easy to stop and take in the roaring plume of water. To be fair, in the summer, when it's been dry it's more of a trickle, but it still reminds you that you're pretty high up. Get back in your car, drive on a little and  when you emerge from a high rocky cutting to find the glory of this glaciated valley stretching out below you.

The visitor to the glen is always rewarded, no matter what the time of year it happens to be. In the spring and summer you are presented with vibrant greens overlaying the subtle greys of the bedrock that forms the peaks that tower on either side of you. In the depths of winter, even if it hasn't been snowing, the place frequently shimmers under a sparkling party dress of frost and ice. When we were there most recently it was mid autumn, and the valley was clad in exuberant yellows, oranges, russets and reds.

As you make your way along the A82 you descend into the bottom of the valley. There's a small lay-by on your right which gives you a chance to take in the full length of the glen - especially if you get out of the car and climb up the hill a little way. Progress further and there are two good sized car parks on the left, both of which give stunning views, and make great starting points for exploring the valley on foot. Even when we've been feeling lazy we've spent a lot of time in these vicariously enjoying the supurb walking offered by the steep sided peaks that surround the glen by watching other people making the ascent. You could even climb up over the hills into the beautiful Glen Etive on the other side. Glen Etive is a subject for another time, however, so we'll continue down the hill.

The asphalt ribbon of the A82 sweeps down to the valley bottom, past the glistening water of Loch Achtriochtan and out towards Loch Leven and Loch Linnhe. On the way you'll pass the visitor centre run by the National Trust for Scotland, who own a significant proportion of the glen itself. The visitor centre has, I'm afraid, always left be a little underwhelmed. The centre and its buildings have won many awards, so it might just be me, but every time I've been in there the shop never seemed to be more than half open, and the staff never more than half bothered. There is an interesting exhibition though, and video presentations which will tell you about some of the local history, the wildlife and geology of the place. I think what I'm saying is, if you need to get out of the rain for a bit you might want to give it a look, but if the sun is shining you might as well give it a miss.

Heading west from there you'll come first to the village of Glencoe, and then to the village of Ballachullish. Glencoe sports a small folk museum, which I have no recollection of ever visiting - although Mrs Snail insists that we have - and a small grocery store. Well, small by southern standards at any rate. If you disregard the supermarkets to be found in the heaving metropolises of Fort William (which has a Morrison's) and Ullapool (which has a Tesco) the shop in Glencoe is actually quite large by the standards of the Western Highlands. There are also many guest houses, should you be travelling sans-caravan.

Ballachullish is actually slightly larger than Glencoe Village, although since most of the village is a little way up the hill you can't quite tell that from the road. Like Glencoe Village it overlooks Loch Leven, and at the water's edge sits the "Isles of Glencoe Hotel". Obviously we've never stayed there, and although we keep meaning to, we've never eaten there either. We still like the place, however, because of the view across the Loch which can be had from their car park...

There is also a rather good tourist information centre on the inland side of the main road, a hardware store, a car dealership and Chisholm's Garage, worthy of mention because when we had car trouble here a couple of years ago they fixed it in about two minutes flat and refused to charge me. It is true that the problem was minor - just a detached under-tray - but that's not the point. The point is that I couldn't fix it, and it must have been obvious that I couldn't - and that I knew nothing about cars. They could have sat me down in their waiting room for ten minutes, fixed the problem and charged me fifty quid. I'd have left happy and none the wiser. As it was the nice man took one look at it, crawled under the car, twiddled something, snapped the under-tray back into place, crawled out again, grinned, and sent me on my way. I offered to pay, but as I said, he was having none of it.

In a strange way, that little encounter remains one of my fondest memories of Scotland. You can tell a lot about a place and its people by the way they treat strangers...

Beyond Ballachulish you soon reach the roundabout that marks the point where you have to decide whether you're going to continue north on the A82, towards Fort William, or head back in a southerly direction on the A828 towards Oban. I'm not sure why, but this spot seems to attract Buzzards, which can often be seen sitting on the streetlamps there - like this fella, who was there pretty much every time we went past on our most recent visit:

Beyond that, it's a matter of a few hundred yards to the pale green metal bridge - which has always reminded me of the eighties video game "Outrun" for some reason - which carries the A82 over the narrow stretch of water that links Loch Leven with Loch Linnhe and which, for me at least, marks the point where Glencoe ends and the next phase of the road north begins.

*Insofar as several billion tons of ice can be said to "flow". We're dealing in geological time here though, and by those standards glaciers practically sprint!

The long, high road...

Scotland is, without question, our favourite place.

Actually, that's a bit sweeping. The Highlands of Scotland are without question our very favourite place.

In fact, one of the driving forces behind our decision to buy a caravan in the first place was the amount of money we were spending on self catering accommodation up there - a price comparison I may discuss in a future column.  The Highlands are awesome, in every sense of that word, but they are also a long way away from where we live, so any foray to the far north is going to involve one of those long drives I was going on about in the last post.

We only had a few days - in my day job I'm a teacher which means I get a week off at the end of October but Mrs Snail has a proper job and so limited holiday time. Since we were limited to five days, a trip to the far North West Highlands, our very favourite part of our very favourite place was more or less out of the question. It's basically a two day drive, and however much we enjoy driving, spending eighty percent if our holiday in the car isn't that much of an attractive proposition, so we lowered our sights a little and set off for the Caravan Club site at Bunree, just south of Fort William. Usually this is a stopover point for us as we make our way to what we think of as the "real" Highlands, but the Lochaber region is pretty attractive in its own right and a great place for a relaxing autumn break.

Of course, we had to get there first, so having done all the hitching up stuff the night before we climbed into the car at six am on a dark, cold and rainy Saturday morning at the end of October and pointed the whole outfit north on what is one of our very favourite drives.

We joined the A1 just north of our home base in Harrogate and heading north. Just because it's close to home doesn't mean it's devoid of interest - as I believe I may have mentioned in an earlier post, I'm something of a 'plane nut and one of the first landmarks on the road is Dishforth Airfield. This used to be an RAF base, but has been operated by the Army Air Corps since 1992. They used to fly AH-1 Apaches out of there, but these days it's a base for the Lynx. In more than twenty years of living in the area I don't think I've seen a single aircraft fly in or out, but I live in hope.

With the cruise control set to sixty we trollied on towards Scotch Corner and the A66. Scotch Corner is an odd landmark when you think about it. It's signposted from miles away, but it isn't really a place at all. I mean there isn't really anything there - it's just a junction where you keep going straight on the A1 if you want the North East of England or Edinburgh, or you turn left (or right, if you're going south) onto the A66 if you want the North West of England or Glasgow. That's it. Oh, there's a hotel and a service station there, but they're only there because of the junction. There's no real landmark, no reason to make a fuss about the place.

So we didn't. We took the left hand turn and made our way onto the A66.

Billy Bragg has a song about the A66, and it is most certainly one of my very favourite roads because there's so much on it. As you head north west from the A1 almost immediately you could turn off to explore the Bowes Museum in the little market town of Barnard Castle. This treasure house used to belong to the Bowes-Lyons family, but was given to the nation and turned into a museum which is administered by County Durham Council. It's an amazing place, but to do it justice you really do need to spend a whole day there (the "Yorkshire Rarebit" in their cafe is nearly as good as the Croque Madame I had in Dartmouth, so there's no need to take lunch) and we didn't have the time. Also, it wasn't quite seven in the morning so it wouldn't have been open, and in any case I wouldn't fancy getting a caravan into their carpark. So. Onwards!

There are many other landmarks that the '66 has to offer. There's an Army training ground at Warcop, with many signs warning that Tanks may be crossing the road, although much like Dishforth's apparantly helicopter free airfield the Army once again proves itself to be a massive tease. In a lifetime of travelling up and down this magnificent road I've yet to see a single armoured vehicle. Less elusive are the ruined castles at Brougham and Brough, both rich in history, and both within easy sight of the road.

There are any number of excellent cafes and tea rooms along this part of the route, but I refer you to comments in an earlier post about lay-bys. There are many of these along the length of the '66, including one, just on the border between County Durham and Cumbria which sits high on a hill and commands fabulous views of the valley below with the hills of the Lake District in the far distance. It is here that we stopped for a well earned breakfast of bacon sarnies and coffee before setting off again, full and refreshed - and still more than two hundred miles from our destination.

Eventually, you get, if not to the end of the road, at least to the bit of the road where you have to turn off onto another bit of road. In our case, that's just outside Penrith, where we take another sharp turn northwards onto the M6, then the A74 and the M74, towards Scotland, Glasgow and Stirling.

This slog through the borders is perhaps the least interesting section of the journey. I don't know why but it always feels like a bit of a long trek, so it's nice to be able to break this section up a bit. We tend to stop at Annandale Water services on the M74 just north of Lockerbie. This is partly because by the time we get there we've used about half a tank of fuel and although I know the trip from there to Bunree will also only use half a tank, I always try to avoid driving on fumes - especially when the caravan is on the back.

The fuel station at Annandale is as expensive as you'd expect on the motorway, but it boasts a large and well spaced forecourt which makes caravan access easy, which is always a bonus. Caravan parking is less good - shoved out on the far side of the car park, and not terribly large. In the summer you can often find that the caravan spaces are actually taken up by cars, which is pretty maddening too. But that's not really the reason we like Annandale so much.

After a couple of hours in the car, it's nice to get out and stretch your legs. At most service stations that would involve a quick turn around the carpark. At Annandale however, you can stroll around their rather nice lake, feed the Swans and escape the traffic noise for a bit. Fair sets you up for the rest of the drive...

And there is still a fair bit of driving to do once you're past Annandale...

Fortunately, once you get past Glasgow the scenery gets a little bit more interesting. Most Sat-Navs and computer generated directions will actually take you through Glasgow and up the side of Loch Lomond to the little town of Crianlairach. This is most definitely an interesting and attractive drive, but having made it many times before aquiring the caravan, we've always felt that life doesn't need to be as interesting as all that.

For a start, having done it by accident once, I would suggest that Glasgow is not a particularly caravan friendly city. Miss your turning and you're in for a world of confusion - the last time we did it, which was actually on the way back south a few years ago, we ended up hopelessly lost driving past the Rangers ground on the day of an old firm match and getting chased for about two miles by an irate taxi driver who thought we'd cut him up.

Not making any of that up.

If that isn't bad enough, the road up the side of Loch Lomond is very twisty and horribly narrow in places. I'll admit that we stopped going that way when we first got the 'van, and our inexperience probably made us over cautious, but that whole stretch of road remains filed under "more aggravation than it's worth" for us...

So instead we cut around Glasgow and head up past Stirling. And before you look at a map, yes, if we went via Edinburgh up the A9 it would probably be shorter, but the A9 is hideous and we shall not speak of it here. Besides, the A89 past Stirling is a great bit of road. It cuts around the outside of Stirling, giving grand views of Stirling Castle (and we do love a good castle) and the Wallace Memorial, before heading off through the little town of Callendar and along the picturesque shores of Loch Lubnaig. If you're passing that way there are some excellent lochside lay-bys along the shores of Lubnaig, and if we'd been there slightly later in the day we would have probably pulled in for a spot of lunch.

 So, onwards, through the landmark town of Crianlarich, where the road becomes the A89, and the hills start to become a little more mountainous. It's when we get to the bustling little town of Tyndrum, a few miles further on that the Highlands really feel like they've started.  It's a funny little place, Tyndrum. For a start, I've only ever seen it written down so I have no idea how to pronounce it. Is it "Tin-drum" or "Tyne-drum"? Or neither? From an anglophone perspective the trouble with so many place names in Scotland is that they're anglicised versions of Gaelic, and so the pronunciation isn't always obvious. The upside of this, of course, is that the further north you go, the more signs are bi-lingual and so you can start to work things out. Slowly but surely we're starting to grasp the rudiments of the gaelic language this way -although at our current rate of progress we're still about sixty years away from fluency...

There don't really seem to be many residential buildings in Tyndrum, with pretty much everything you can see from the road existing to serve the many, many tourists who pass through. Chief amongs these would appear to be the "Green Welly Stop", which can be identified as you drive through by the enormous image of a smiling green welly on the whitewashed exterior wall. This is a strangely impressive emporium which sells all manner of tourist tat, from a key-ring costing pennies to Harris Tweed handbags costing a couple of hundred quid, as well as whisky, high end outdoor clothing and pretty much anything else you could possibly want.

And yes, they do sell green wellies...

Should you be feeling peckish, and not in the mood for cooking in the caravan or - heaven forbid - not travelling with a caravan, you could do a lot worse than pull over on the other side of the road from the Welly Stop check out the renowned "Real Food Cafe". Since we do tend to use the caravan kitchen when we travel we haven't visited all that often (their carpark is a little tight too, so if you're stopping with a 'van on the back you might want to park at the Welly Stop) but a couple of my very best friends visit regularly on their way to Skye and they swear by it.

Don't just take their word for it mind you - check out their menu and, perhaps more persuasively their bucket loads of awards...

As I said, we tend to make use of the caravan kitchen on long drives, so we eschewed the delights of Tyndrum and continued on, out of the town and up the hill to a lay-by a couple of miles outside the town.  Here you have a fabulous view of a big hill, a railway line and the West Highland Way. Don't get too excited, in many years of stopping here we've never seen a train, although you do catch a glimpse of the odd walker. On this occasion I have to say that the weather was not really with us and there were not walkers, and no trains. Just some really rather nice sandwiches and a lot of drizzle.

And then onwards again. Down the hill, around Loch Tulla, and up one of the steepest climbs I've ever done with a caravan on the back, up onto the magnificent desolation of Ranoch Moor, and the home straight. I really love driving across Ranoch Moor. It's one of the wildest places I know, and yet there's a road and a train line running right through the middle of it. As you drive through the middle of one of the UK's last areas of genuine wilderness the sense that you're literally in the middle of nowhere is almost overwhelming. If you pay attention and are suitably lucky you can see Red Deer here, but even if you don't I defy anyone to travel across this huge expanse of emptiness and not feel privileged to have done so.

From there, there's just the descent into Glen Coe, and before you know it you're across the bridge over the narrows that separate Loch Leven from Loch Linnhe, through the little town of Onich, and you're there, at the Caravan Club site at Bunree. More about all of those places in future posts, but for now, I think I've wibbled on enough so I'll leave you in the heart of Lochaber. Trust me - there are many, many worse places to be.

Just for your information...

Not a real post (expect one of those either later today or tomorrow) just a couple of updates.

You may remember if you read the post about Totnes that there was a campaign locally to stop the coffee chain Costa opening a branch at the bottom of the hill. I'm pleased to report that Costa has now cancelled its plans, leaving the town refreshingly brand free.

In other news, @RealRoadSnail is now on Twitter, if that's your thing.

The joy of towing!

If you own a caravan it's pretty much certain that you're going to drive to most of your holiday destinations. There are two ways of looking at the drive you take to get where you're going. You can regard it as a chore - and many people do. "Oooooh, that's a long drive" people say when you tell them where you're going, presumably because they think you haven't realised. Alternatively, you can embrace the journey as a part of the holiday experience, relax, and enjoy it. After all, when you're towing a caravan if you're going to travel any sort of distance at all you're going to be spending a fair proportion of your day in the car.

The reason for this is simple - there's no such thing as a racing caravan*. Even on motorways you're restricted to sixty miles per hour. On regular roads the limit is fifty - and while towing isn't nearly as difficult as many people seem to think, if the road is hilly or twisty or both, then you're not going to be pushing the pedal to the metal and throwing your outfit around like it was a sports car. It's a simple fact of life - a journey with a caravan on the back of the car will always take longer than a journey in a car that doesn't have a one bedroom flat attached to the bumper.

So yes, you can choose to regard your caravan as a big, white parachute fixed to the back of the car, slowing you down and making every narrow lane or sharp bend a white knuckled buttock clenching challenge. But if you're going to think like that, you might want to consider the possibility that the caravan lifestyle might not be for you. Get yourself a motor home, or  a tent.  Or a hotel. Because if you view towing your 'van as a chore, wherever you're going  you'll get there tired, worn out and thoroughly pissed off. And you know what? You're supposed to be on holiday.

So revel in the fact that you have a one bedroom flat with you. Use it. The highways and byways of Britain are strewn with lay-bys (something particularly true of Scotland, about which more later) so when you've been driving for a few hours find one with a nice view and stop for a bit. Make yourself a cup of tea**. Cook yourself a spot of lunch! Remember, you've got a one bedroom flat with you, which means there's a kitchen. No luke warm brew from a thermos and a curled up sarnie for you - just pull over, wind down the legs and cook yourself up a storm.

There are other things that you can do to make your towing life more pleasurable too. If you're stopping en-route lay-bys are good. Motor way service stations, generally speaking, are not. I'm not sure what the caravan fraternity has done to upset the nation's service station designers - perhaps they're all Jeremy Clarkson fans, but there are few that could be described as "caravan friendly". The "caravan park" areas of most such places are laughably small, and spaces are often blocked by idiots in cars or vans who apparently couldn't find the regular car park and haven't been moved on.

This seems particularly unfair because you just try parking your caravan in the wrong section. There'll be a little man in a fluorescent  jacket knocking on your door in less than a minute. If I sound a little bit chippy on this point it's because I am - and don't even get me started on the near impossibility of getting into some of the petrol stations attached to these places with a caravan on the back. Just take my word for it. There are some good motorway stopping points out there, but they seem to me to be the exception. As a rule you'll find better places to stop, and easier to access and less expensive fuel stations if you turn off the motorway and onto the A and B roads. There you will find a wide abundance of wonderful things - many of which I will no doubt return to at some point in the future.

The irritations of the service station can be matched on the road if you let the behaviour of other motorists get to you. The idea that caravans are a terrible nuisance, causing massive inconvenience to everyone else on the road has pretty much become an accepted "truth" (thanks, Top Gear...) which causes the most extraordinary reactions when other road users see you coming. This is most noticeable at road junctions. I can be barrelling along at fifty miles an hour, perhaps a hundred yards from the junction as a car pulls up at the end of the adjoining road.

Under normal circumstances no sane driver would even contemplate pulling out in front of you when you were only a hundred yards or so away and approaching at such a speed.  Common sense, however, doesn't seem to be something that a certain kind of driver bothers to engage when the vehicle approaching them is towing a caravan. They don't think "that car is going pretty fast, I'll wait until it's gone past and pull out behind it, because to do otherwise would be unsafe". No. They think "that's a caravan, I'd better get out in front of it, even though I'm then going to drive really slowly".

So they proceed to pull out in front of you, seriously testing your reaction times and your brakes, apparently unaware of the fact that because you're towing your inertia is much greater and so are your stopping distances. I presume these people are thinking that if they don't get out in front of the caravan they'll be stuck in one of the mythical traffic jams that caravans allegedly spawn, I don't know, but I do know that the practice can be fantastically annoying.

There is, however, absolutely no point getting annoyed about these people. All you can do is hit the brakes as smoothly as you can (especially if you have somebody else driving three feet from the back of your 'van because they feel they ought to be desperate to get past, even though you're driving at the speed limit) and continue on your way. After all, it's the other driver that'll end up with high blood pressure, not you...

The other thing you can do - and which it seems to me far too many caravan and trailer towers don't do - is pull over if you have a queue behind you and let them past. It's not hard to do - just find one of those handy lay-bays, or indicate left and slow down when you hit a long straight bit with nothing coming the other way. You'll get where you're going more or less as quickly as you would have done anyway, and the people stuck in the queue will get where they're  going without suffering an embolism in frustration. Who knows, they might even mention that you didn't hold them up when they next get into a "aren't caravan's awful" conversation in the pub. Of course, they probably won't. The chances are they'll remember the thirty seconds they were held up, not the fact that you let them past. But that doesn't matter. What matters is that you'll arrive at your destination relaxed and with your sanity intact, either ready to enjoy your holiday or ready to get back to work.

Because, however many trials and tribulations the open road has to throw at you, travelling with a caravan should be a joy. My little profile statement at the side of the blog says that I didn't want to buy a caravan - and I didn't. Before we bought our Lunar Quasar 462 all I thought about were the potential downsides. Driving with a caravan on the back has changed the way I look at the world on the other side of the windscreen. It's slowed me down and allowed me to appreciate the astonishing (in every sense of the word) beauty of the British countryside. And if that wasn't enough, it's allowed me to spend time in places I wouldn't otherwise have got to.

Sorry if all of this has seemed uncharacteristically philosophical - it actually started out as a post about driving up to Scotland. I just found myself wandering off. Don't worry though, normal service will be resumed next time with some proper travelogue stuff about the drive north...

*Yet. I suspect this situation will change the next time the boys in the BBC Top Gear office get really bored. They did, after all, make a train out of caravans once...

**Or if it's a warm day open up the 'fridge and get yourself a nice cold can...

Lydford - when is a castle not a castle?

As you may have gathered, we love a good castle. As the afternoon sun finally began to challenge the drizzle and greyness we decided to round off our day on Dartmoor with a visit to a little Motte and Bailey style affair in the picturesque village of Lydford. 

Snuggling cosily in the stage coach route between Okehampton to the North and Tavistock to the south the collection of pretty stone cottages sits on the site of "Hlidan", an Anglo Saxon settlement founded by Alfred the Great as part of his fortifications against the Vilkings, who were ravaging his kingdom from the east, and the Cornish, who were lying in wait on the other side of the Tamar, presumably waiting to overwhelm the Devonian locals with savoury baked goods.

Just slightly north of the village is the rather beautiful Lydford Gorge, a natural feature cut into the rock by the force of the river Lyd. This steep sided river gorge sports a pretty spectacular thirty metre high waterfall and "The Devil's Cauldron", a deep pothole. I don't know any of this from personal experience, mind you, because the site is owned by The National Trust, who would have charged us £5.90 each for the privillage of having a quick look. Earlier in the day we might have forked out, but we were not that far from closing time and after a quick discussion we decided that it probably wasn't worth it.

After all, we are from Yorkshire, which means two things. First of all, the Yorkshire Dales are literally ten minutes from our front door, which means that if we want river gorges, incredibly high waterfalls and deep potholes, we don't have to go all the way to Dorset to find them. It also means that, as Yorkshire natives, we're as tight as the proverbial duck's arse and as a result  there was no way we were going to fork out the thick end of twelve quid to see something we could see closer to home for free.

So, we pulled a U turn quicker than a cabinet minister with an unpopular policy and headed back to Lydford proper, pulling in to the ample (and free) public car park opposite the pub. Because we're all high tech and cutting edge, (and because it was free - I mentioned that we were tight didn't I?)  I'd downloaded English Heritage's audio guide onto my 'phone (thanks to the free WIFI in the pub the day before - sometimes I bloody love living in the future) so we didn't cross the road to the castle immediately.

Instead the guide directed us to turn right out of the car park and down the road a bit to a little field on the right hand side of the road near the old post office. It's not an obvious landmark, and had the guide not directed us there we wouldn't even have noticed this unremarkable little patch of grass. Aside from a slight mound running through it seems to be completely featureless. That mound is important though - because it's the remains of Anglo Saxon defensive earthworks, which means it's a direct physical connection to the men and women who defended Alfred's kingdom of Wessex more than a thousand years ago.

An unimpressive bump in a field to some, perhaps, but to me it's basically time travel, and I love time travel!

Still, there is a limit to the amount of time even the most avid archaeology fan can spend looking at a bump in a field, so we turned ourselves around and ambled back towards the castle, which stands next to the pub on the northern edge of the village. The castle is administered and maintained by the fine folks at English Heritage, is free to enter and is open at all times. If you don't have the handy audio guide on your 'phone as we did, there are plenty of helpful display boards around the place. I'd recommend you watch your step, and probably don't go there in the dark - the hill that the castle stands on is smallish but reasonably steep, and the interior of the castle itself boasts steep staircases and some pretty hefty drops. 

As castles go, it's a reasonably modest affair - and this might well be because technically it isn't a castle at all. As I said at the top of the post, it looks like a pretty standard Motte and Bailey castle, a two storey square stone tower atop a small, steep hill. It seems to me rather likely that it's meant to look like that, but it is in reality something of an architectural fraud. It's certainly old - the castle we see today was built in the thirteenth century - but it wasn't  built as a castle, and it wasn't built on a hill.

The audio guide informs me that back when the structure was first put together it was in fact a three storey tower with the ground floor at what is now street level. The "hill" that the two visible storeys now appear to stand on was actually added later, basically by piling copious amounts of rubble and soil around the ground floor, so that the top of the mound effectively turned the first floor into the ground floor. It seems that at the time this was done, most of the former ground floor was filled in with rubble, leaving only a small "dungeon" type space. That rubble has now been cleared, and if you make your way down the steepish metal stairs and examine the walls you can clearly see where there used to be doors and windows.

For most of its active life this "castle" was a prison and courtroom, serving as an office of the royal Forest of Dartmoor, and also housed the "Stannery Court", which had jurisdiction over the Devonian tin mines, and the miners that worked in them. The Stannery Court made the place infamous for its ferociously hard line approach to "justice". The Lydford website gives this chilling example of the kind of punishment that could be meted out here:

" the penalty upon any miner found guilty of adulterating tin for fraudulent purposes was that three spoonfuls of molten tin should be poured down into his throat."

In other words, not just "death" but "really horrible and painful death".

The place was also used by the Royalists to imprison captured Parliamentarians during the Civil War. It's not all incarceration and misery, mind you. Lydford was also the site of a royal mint in Anglo Saxon times, and the silver "Lydford Pennies" were valid as currency throughout Wessex. Indeed, some of them made it to Scandinavia - perhaps pillaged by the very Viking Raiders that Alfred the Great founded Hlidan to defend against.*

We really liked Lydford and its castle. I suppose it helps that we visited the place in the sunny afternoon of what had been a pretty bleak and miserable day, but it really was a pretty little place, and it's always fun to have free reign of a "castle" - even a slightly fraudulent one. Should you find yourself on Dartmoor I'd recommend giving it a look. There's also a rather nice church that's also worth a look by all accounts, situated just next to the castle, and the earthworks of the original Anglo Saxon castle just on the other side of that.

Sadly we missed both of these landmarks because by the time we'd done with the castle it was starting to get a bit dark and we were keen to head back to the 'van. Maybe next time, eh?

*Oh, alright, it's equally possible that they were given as payment for goods the Vikings were trading - either way they have a rather nice collection of the little silver critters in the Stockholm museum...