TwentySix reasons to eat lunch in Dartmouth!

As we stepped off the boat onto the Dartmouth riverside the time was approaching half past one and our thoughts were turning towards lunch. As I've said before, lunch is not a matter to be taken lightly, we've often spent more time looking for somewhere to have lunch than we have eating there. (As an aside I'd point out that we've often found all sorts of non-food related hidden gems while looking for a good looking eaterie.)

We didn't think that Dartmouth would present up with much of a challenge, mind you. It's a small place that attracts a lot of tourists, so we figured that pleasant little restaurants would be pretty thick on the ground - and we were right. To be honest, we didn't really need to cross the road, as sitting demurely on the harbour side is the Station Restaurant. It's an odd building in many ways - not least because the railway is on the other side of the river Dart. The story goes that the railway company couldn't get planning permission to build a bridge over the river, so the trains had to stop in Kingswear. Dartmouth Station was therefore built on the harbour side and linked to the trains by a ferry.*

The little restaurant looked rather crowded, and besides, it doesn't do to go straight for the first place you see so we ventured further into town. Turns out, we were right - there were a lot of places to eat. Little tea rooms, pubs, fish and chip shops (which we ignored because you should never buy fish and chips south of Sheffield. Just trust me on this...), bistros and all manner of foodie goodness. We passed several "possibles", but eventually found ourselves outside the rather attractive cream shop front of the TwentySix Cafe on Lower Street.

We looked in through the windows to see a pleasingly simple interior, mostly white and cream, with just one occupied table. I confess that we are a little hesitant - whilst we don't particularly like being shoehorned into places, a Bistro with only one occupied table doesn't inspire all that much confidence about the dining experience. There was something about the place though. I have no idea what it was, perhaps the softly playing French music, perhaps the discreetly framed photographs of sailing yachts but there was a atmosphere about the place. So, in we went.

We settled in to a table for two by the wall, and were greeted by the happiest waitress I have ever met. seriously, I don't think that she stopped laughing at any point during the hour or so we were on the premises. I suppose that could have been annoying, but it wasn't - she was marvellous. We perused the menu, all the time being amused by her loud and incredibly giggly 'phone conversation with a fellow member of staff - again, this could, in different circumstances, have been annoying. Being forced to listen to other people on the 'phone is genuinely quite high on my list of "things that really really get on my wick", but somehow the pure joy of it made her one-sided chat more of an entertainment than an intrusion. Service was unaffected too - I don't quite know how she judged it so perfectly, but her 'phone call ended and she appeared at our table the very instant we were ready to order.

The menu at TwentySix is simple and classically French - Croques, Onion Soup, open-faced  sandwiches and so on, which meant that the regular "unknown restaurant" standbys of both me (burger) and my wife (cheese ploughman's) were unavailable.  In the end, we'd both gone for more or less the same thing - Mrs Snail went for a Croque Monsieur, while I opted for a Croque Madame, which as the menu pointed out is basically a Croque Monsieur with an added poached egg. For those of you wondering what a Croque Monsieur is, well, basically it's a ham and cheese toastie. But nice.

In this case exceptionally nice.

A ham and cheese toastie is not, in the grand scheme of things, a difficult thing to get right. I mean, it's not in any way up with differential calculus or pan-dimensional geometry. On the other hand, it is spectacularly easy to get horribly wrong. For a start far too many people use horrible fatty ham, which ends up as chewy horrible gobbets in your mouth. Many people who get that bit right use tasteless gloppy cheese which they fail utterly to season and therefore tastes like melted tupperware.

No such issues here. The ham (or "Jambon de Paris" as the menu would have it) was beautifully cooked, lean and incredibly flavoursome. The cheese was  rather good gruyère, melted but not burned, and seasoned with lashings of dijon mustard. All of this on a lightly toasted slice of granary bread, which itself was possessed of a gentle nutty flavour which complemented the topping perfectly.

We were impressed, is what I'm saying.

I have to say, about the only thing that could have improved their Croque Monsieur  would have been an unctuous runny egg yolk oozing through the cheese and ham onto that wonderful granary toast. That of course is why I'd ordered the Croque Madame, but on this occasion my foresight was to go unrewarded. My toast, ham and cheese combination did indeed come topped with a poached egg, but sadly it was topped with a poached egg that had been cooked until the yolk was disappointingly solid.

Cest la vie, as the French might have it. I'm prepared to forgive them because not only was the meal utterly delightful in spite of the lack of a runny yolk, it also came accompanied by an unannounced side order of chunky crisps and a little pot of delicious Aioli. All things considered I'd have to rate TwentySix as the outstanding dining experience of the whole holiday - better perhaps even than The Vintner in Stratford!**

Should you ever find yourself in Dartmouth, and feeling a bit peckish, I can give you no better advice than to direct your feet to Lower Street and the impeccable food and service of this excellent little bistro. In fact, TwentySix is probably worth making a special trip for, although a perusal of the website will show you that the Dartmouth Bistro is a sort of satellite venture, and that the original branch of TwentySix is to be found in Teignmouth. All I can say is that if the parent establishment is even half as good as the one in Dartmouth, it might be worth collecting the set!

*This has the ring of truth about it, but I was given this information by the Captain of the Cardiff Castle, who also told me that they spend the winter trimming low branches on riverside trees to keep them parallel with the water...

**Just go to the "Lunch in Stratford on Avon" posting to see what high praise this is...

Dartmouth part one - Sailing by.

We visited Dartmouth immediately after Totnes, and if you've read the previous instalment of this blog you'll know that so far as we were concerned at least, Totnes was a pretty tough act to follow. Would the home of the Royal Navy's premier training facility measure up?

We snaked our way through the winding roads between Totnes and the coast  (and I'll be talking about them at some length in a future post) debating whether we'd be able to find anywhere to park in the centre of such a small tourist trap of a town. It was something of a relief therefore to see the large park and ride car park on the town's outskirts. We pulled in, bought our parking ticket and almost immediately hopped onto a bus which whisked us  right down to the harbourside.  Even better, the cost of the bus was included in the price of the parking for everyone who had been in the car! There were two of us, but the family of five ahead of us in the queue also got return tickets when they surrendered the stub of their parking ticket.

I'll be honest, I haven't used that many park and ride schemes, so this might be pretty common but I've never seen this kind of ticketing system before. Park and Ride schemes that I've used before (York and Cambridge, since you ask) Have offered free parking, but charged for the bus service. Doing it this way around made no appreciable difference to me price-wise, but if you've got a family of four it would save you a bit. Given that, as a tourist town, Dartmouth must be keen to attract families and groups this approach strikes me as a stroke of genius! The place was impressing me even before we'd properly arrived - which can only be a good thing.

Like many places, Dartmouth is not blessed with the most attractive suburbs. But by the time the shuttle bus had made its way to the riverside bus stop things were looking a good deal more attractive. We stepped out of the bus and surveyed the veritable flotilla of boats moored to various jetties in the river and, thinking that a river trip might be nice we cast our eyes over the various kiosks belonging to companies offering pleasure cruises. We were just coming up to half past twelve and the question was "river trip then lunch, or lunch then river trip?" My eye fell on a blackboard outside one of the kiosks. One hour cruise up the river Dart, next sailing, 12:30.

Clearly fate.

Tickets were hastily purchased from a nice man in a sailor's hat, and we hurriedly made our way to the jetty where the blue and white majesty of the Cardiff Castle was waiting to depart. We clambered aboard and made our way through the saloon bar to an open seating area at the bow*. One of the nice things about catching something like this at the last minute is that you don't spend ages hanging around - we'd barely taken our seats before the boat began to move off into the middle of the Dart.

The first thing you notice when you sit in the middle of the river is the way the famous Naval College dominates the town. I was surprised to learn that the Britannia Royal Naval College wasn't actually founded until 1863. It looks older than that, which was probably deliberate, its huge red brick frontage glowering over the town. As you might expect, given that it is the place where the Senior Service trains its officers, it has an illustrious history and has trained some pretty illustrious names. His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales trained there, as did his father, His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh. In fact, as our own ship's captain pointed out, it was as an officer cadet at the Britannia College that The Duke met a young Princess Elizabeth when she came to inspect place in 1934.

The rest, as they say, is history.

The good ship Cardiff Castle made her way sedately upstream in the direction of Totness and our captain's patter really hit its stride. On the left hand bank as we cruised along was the town itself, and many, many boats moored in the safety of the river's embrace. Then there was the HMS Hindustan, a permanently moored training vessel belonging to the Britannia College, and more training launches than you could shake a stick at. The right bank was occupied first by Dartmouth's mirror town of Kingsmere, and then by what was once a ship yard, then a ship repair yard, and is now a "great development opportunity". Such is progress.

The sun was blazing down, the river was full of dashing little boats and the patter from the captain was suitably amusing as we swished onwards. I don't know whether our gallant captain also had an interest in real estate, but he certainly was keen to point out buildings that were now holiday cottages.  One impressive looking house that wasn't available for the season was "Greenway", Agatha Christie's old home, perched high up on the right hand bank. The Captain seemed to have been a fan, because he was keen to tell us all about the times the novelist had spent there. Mrs Snail, who is a fan of Mrs Christie's work and something of an expert on the subject pronounced his information to be "passable" - which is pretty high praise.

We'd have liked to have given Greenway a visit, but time sadly did not allow on this occasion. The house is now run by the National Trust, which means it costs an arm and a leg to get in, but it's definitely on our to do list for the next time we're in that neck of the woods. You can actually get there from Dartmouth by steam train on the Dartmouth Steam Railway, which strikes me as a suitably evocative means of getting to the house where Christie, who for me at least will always be an icon of the inter-war years wrote so much of her work.

We were on the short trip, so instead of continuing on up the Dart to Totness, the boat heaved to (or whatever turning around and going back the way you came is called on a boat) not far on from Greenway, just downstream of the pretty little town of Dittisham, which according to the good Captain is posessed of several fine pubs, all within crawling distance of each other. Since the commentary had covered most of the sights on the way upstream, the patter for the downstream leg was more of a stand up routine. The Captain was keep to tell us why all the lower tree branches overhanging the river formed a ruler straight line in parallel with the river's surface. "It's what we do in the winter, Ladies and Gentlemen. We get in little boats and row up with shears to keep it neat..."**

It didn't seem long before we were back at Dartmouth, but the cruise wasn't quite over yet. We made our way past the town, with Kingswear now to our left, and carried on to the mouth of the river, guarded by the forbidding facade of Dartmouth Castle, before heaving to (or whatever) again and finally returning to the jetty.

It really was a fabulous way to spend an hour, and I'd heartily recommend it. We'd timed the weather perfectly too. This particular Dorset trip hadn't exactly been rain free, but for the whole time we were on the river the sun blazed down. Just as the Cardiff Castle settled at the dockside the sun slipped modestly behind a cloud and the gentle breeze swelled to something more closely approximating a stiff wind.

Time then for a spot of lunch and a stroll around the town itself - which is a topic for next time...

*That's the pointy end, for all you landlubbers out there...

**To be fair, he did 'fess up and say that wasn't true. They have cordless hedgetrimmers now...***

***Oh, alright. It's the high tide line.

Totnes: Coffee and Castles

Unusually for the summer of 2012, we arrived in the town of Totnes in brilliant sunshine. This always helps create a good first impression of a town in my experience, but I have to say that Totness didn't really need any help!

To be honest we didn't really mean to visit the town as such, we were planning just to visit the castle on our way to Dartmouth. It was such a beautiful day though, we'd got up early. This often happens when you're in a caravan. Somehow when the sun is streaming through the skylight you just don't feel the need to stay in bed. So, we set off early and were in the little car park at the top of the hill just before nine in the morning - in spite of the fact that we actually had to go through the one way system twice because the road to the car park is so narrow, and the turning to get into it so sharp we missed it the first time.

Still, we climbed out of the car and walked the hundred yards or so to the gates of the castle to find them firmly locked. It was at this point we bothered to check the castle's opening times and discovered that we were an hour early - the place doesn't open until ten! Always happy to turn a problem into an opportunity we set off in search of the high street, via a tiny little footpath which ran down the back of some houses and seemed a better option than waling on the narrow and pavement free road.

This proved to be an excellent choice on more than health and safety grounds because as we ambled along we passed the town's guild hall. Built in 1553 on the foundations of an eleventh century priory - and still in use as the headquarters of the town council - this is a cut above your average council office. We weren't sure what was council and what was residential, so we didn't poke around too much but it was a strangely atmospheric and intimate building. We were impressed.

Finally we emerged near the bottom of the high street. We knew we were somewhere special immediately because two shopkeepers were standing in the doorways of their respective emporiums conversing across the street. That sort of thing might happen in old episodes of Doctor Finnley's Casebook, but I have never seen it in real life. We immediately got the sense that there is a powerful community spirit in Totnes. Also, that the high street is quite narrow... The street runs up the hill, but we just walked - taking advice from Billie Holliday and directing our feet to the sunny side of the street, soaking in the all too rare warmth of both the sun and the town.

The first thing that strikes you - actually that's not true, it doesn't strike you, it slowly dawns on you - is the total lack of the sort of identikit chain stores that have made so many high streets indistinguishable from each other. Totnes has somehow avoided the attentions of McDonald's, WH Smith, Starbucks and their ilk and the high street is instead occupied by a range of highly individual business from bookshops to art suppliers, to music shops and cafes. I confess we were charmed immediately - there's just something in the air!

Totness is a fiercely independent and individual place - it even has its own currency, the "Totnes Pound" which is accepted in around seventy or so businesses in the town. The idea - formulated by Transition Town Totnes is to encourage people to shop locally, with local business. It seems to be working. As I said, the high street is  currently untroubled by multinational corporations and bursting with individual one off small businesses. Recent attempts by Whitbread's Costa Coffee chain to gain a foothold at the bottom of the hill are being fiercely resisted - as a quick glance at almost any shop window in the town will illustrate, they almost all seem to be displaying "STOP COSTA" posters.

I'm not usually a fan of such campaigns, taking the view that if locals don't want a particular outlet in their town all they have to do is not shop there and it will simply go away. But Totnes is a little different. The local economy - and the swathe of local coffee shops - depend largely on tourists. Tourists who arrive by train. Which stops at the bottom of the hill meaning that the familiar Costa logo will be one of the first things they see. If they arrive by car, then the chances are they won't park at the top of the hill like we did, but in the town's main car park - also at the bottom of the hill.

The arrival of Costa would change things radically and would certainly affect the viability of the smaller locally owned coffee shops and cafes. It doesn't matter how good the local guys are, people tend to go with what they know - and if you're a small one shop concern there is no way you can compete with the likes of Costa on price. So, here's to the small traders of Totnes - long may they continue to drink independent coffee!

I suppose that if the corporate armies continue their assault the good citizens of the town could do what their forbears might have done and take shelter in the castle at the top of the hill, which is where we headed next*. We arrived at the gate in brilliant sunshine and found the gate still firmly closed. A quick check of the watch showed that we were still a few minutes early so we pottered a little awkwardly around the little garden that sits outside the gate to the castle. The awkwardness came from the fact that the gate is set into the castle's curtain wall right at the end of a little row of terraced cottages and we did feel a little as though we were hanging around on somebody's doorstep.

It was a very pretty place to be hanging around though, and the weather was beautiful so it wasn't really much of a hardship.  The nice man from English Heritage apparently thought otherwise, however. He seemed a little surprised to see us as he approached the gate (exactly on time at ten am, I should say) "Oh, I'm sorry, are you waiting to come in - I don't normally get people this early!" he said, unlocking the gates and letting us through. We followed him up the hill to the little hut which served as gift shop and ticket office where we bought a guidebook, flourished our English Heritage cards which entitled us to free admission, and set off to explore.

You might remember that the last castle I wrote about was the big, brash behemoth at Warwick. Well, just as Totnes high street is the polar opposite of Oxford Street, Totnes Castle is the antithesis of Warwick. Once you're past the little hut you find yourself in a large, vaguely circular area that was once the "bailey" of this classic Motte and Bailey Castle. The castle proper is a surprisingly compact construction at the top of a very steep hill, originally intended to make it hard to attack, and to allow it to dominate the town.

As is usually the way the original castle, built in 1068 by "Juhel of Totnes"**, one of William the Conquerer's cronies, is long gone. According to the guide book it would have been made largely of wood, and given that it was thrown up within two years of the conquest must have been built pretty quickly. No surprise therefore that it didn't last very long. Juhel didn't retain control of his lands much beyond the death of William 1st, and the estates passed through many hands, including one William de Braose, who probably built the first stone keep,  before ending up, basically derelict, in the hands of the de la Zouch family in the early fourteenth century.

They received a Royal Order to refortify the castle, and so constructed the shell keep we see today. After that, nothing happened. Seriously. Apparently there was a little bit of kerfuffle during the English Civil War, but the castle "saw no action". Once again Totnes refuses to conform to expectations. Castles are built to control and defend, and it seems that Totnes Castle was never really called upon to do either. I rather like that.

English Heritage, who have controlled the castle since 1984, have done what they always do with castles. They have tidied things up and made things safe and are now basically preserving it for the future. No rides, not shows, no razzamatazz. In fact, it's one of the most tranquil places I've been for a while. The bailey area is now shaded by massive trees, and the ramparts of the shell keep afford spectacular views of Totnes and the river Dart. By virtue of turning up at opening time we got the place essentially to ourselves (the nice English Heritage man wasn't joking when he told up that he didn't get many people in so early). 

Had it been later in the day we might have availed ourselves of the picnic tables in the bailey area -  it would have been a fantastic place for lunch. But it was still too early for that, so we bade the castle farewell, headed back to the car and struck out for the coast. "Dartmouth will be interesting", we thought, "and we're bound to find somewhere good for lunch there."

I'm happy to say that we were right on both counts...

*I know, that's a terrible link...

**I bet his mother didn't call him that...