Getting our Kicks on the A66. Part One.

As the great J.R.R. Tolkien once observed, "The Road goes Ever On".

As people who drive up and down this beautiful island of ours (and occasionally drive onto boats so that we can drive on other islands too) we are pretty reliant on roads, to be honest. It is fair to say though, that not all roads are created equal - the M25, for example is clearly evil and to be avoided at all costs unless you want to watch aircraft on the approach to Heathrow, in which case try and get stuck in a traffic jam just south of the M4 and you're golden.*

The A1 on the other hand must be one of the greatest roads in Britain, linking as it does two of the Capital cities of the home nations, Edinburgh and London, taking you through some astonishing landscapes - both rural and industrial - on the way. Not for nothing was it once known as the *Great North Road".** And then there's the A66. That fine ribbon of asphalt that links the North East with the North West of England which we always think of as the end of the first leg of the Long High Road to the foot of the Great Glen, or the start of the last leg home.

In all our years of traversing the road, however, we have seldom paused to see the sights it promises. This is a shame, because as you might expect for a road that runs through the Counties of North Yorkshire, Country Durham and Cumbria it's a pretty ancient way across the Northern Pennines. As a result there is a lot of history en route.

Since our base at Snail Towers is centred in the heart of North Yorkshire it makes sense to begin our exploration at the eastern end. Now. Officially the '66 begins just outside Middlesborough, that fine town at North Yorkshire's most northern tip. However, according to all modern maps it then disappears when it hits the A1, and then reappears a few miles south at the historic junction known as "Scotch Corner" just north of the ancient Yorkshire town of Richmond, which is where we always join it, and where our little odyssey will start.

An indication of how rich in delights this road actually is comes almost immediately, as you leave Scotch Corner in your wake you are almost immediately informed that taking a right hand turn will lead you to the The Bowes Museum in the town of Barnard Castle. I confess that we drove past this sign for several years before we investigated, each time commenting that "we really ought to go and have a look at that".

We were right.

The Bowes Museum is a truly remarkable institution. By far the largest building in Barnard Castle the museum is housed in a former stately home - a building which has a pretty interesting history in its own right. It was built in the French style for John and Josephine Bowes, a couple every bit as interesting as the magnificent building they had constructed.

John was the illegitimate son of the 10th Earl of Strathmore and a "commoner" (I really hate that phrase, but it's the one that would have been used at the time), Mary Millner, who had been a servant at the Strathmore Estate, caught the Earl's eye and ended up living - for all intents and purposes except the legal ones - as his wife. The Earl finally married Mary on his death bead, presumably in a rather belated attempt to restore some honour to Mary in an age when living "in sin" was a cause for deep social shame and approbation, and to legitimise their son.

I've not found much out about Mary's later life, so I don't know if it worked for her or not. Things most certainly did not go according to plan for John. After two of the drawn out court cases that the Victorians loved so much he was not recognised as the legitimate heir to the Strathmore Estates, which in the end passed to the 10th Earl's younger brother Thomas, who also took the title of 11th Earl. John was not disinherited completely, however, and the families lands in Durham were settled on him.

Educated at Eton - because titled or not, he was still the son of an Earl and there are some things that you just do - young John went on to be come pretty wealthy by utilising the coal resources on his land, eventually being able to split his time between England and France pursuing his growing interest in art. It was in Paris, at the Théatre des Variétés (which he happened to own) that John met Josephine, an actress and painter. They were married in 1852 and began to amass the bulk of what would become the core of the collection now housed at the museum which bears their name.

Josephine Bowes laid the foundation stone of the extravagant and palatial new home for their collections in 1869. Sadly she never saw the building completed, dying in 1874. John Bowes himself also died before the completion of the project, in 1885. By the time of his death though, the museum project had caught on amongst the local set and it's future was secured. The museum finally opened in 1892 attracting a pretty impressive 63,000 visitors in its first year. (For scale, that's nearly eleven times the actual current population of the town of Barnard Castle itself.)

It's not difficult to see the attraction though.

You can easily spend a full day exploring the exhibitions and galleries. The place has pretty much everything, from social history artefacts, paintings, sculpture, it is a genuine treasure trove of endless fascination. there is, however, a clear star of the show. A star that shines so brightly it has become the logo for the whole institution. The wonderful Silver Swan.

I shot video of this when we were there, but Blogger is obstinately refusing to let me embed it here, so instead I'll just link you to some footage on YouTube so you can see what I'm talking about. This masterpiece of automata is exactly what the name suggests, a life sized sculpture of a swam (a mute swan, if we're going to be specific) fashioned out of silver. When activated it swims on a rippling silver pond, flexes its neck as it looks around, before plucking a little silver fish from the silver water and gulping it down.

It is exquisite, and well worth the visit in its own right, even if there weren't paintings by the likes of Goya and Cezanne to appreciate as well.

Its origins are a little unclear - we know it was constructed in 1773 by John Joseph Merlin, a well known and respected inventor of the day and that in 1774 it was a part of the exhibition of London showman James Cox. We know that it was a part of the 1867 Paris Exhibition because the great American novelist Mark Twain not only saw it, but wrote about it in The Innocents Abroad. He seems to have been rather impressed - no small thing for a cumudgeon like Twain.

The Swan became a part of the museum collection for the princely sum of £200 in 1872 and now it lives in isolated majesty in a glass case in the centre of its own room on the third floor of the museum and is ceremonially brought to life for forty glorious seconds every day at two p.m. sharp. Our advice is to get there early, because it really does draw the crowds and space can actually be limited.

I think it's pretty certain that if you like museums you're going to want to spend most of a day here. Fortunately the Bowes Cafe offers a fantastic choice of hot and cold food - I can personally recommend the "Yorkshire Rarebit" - and even serves breakfast, so if you get there for doors open, you needn't explore the exhibits hungry!

All that, and we've barely started!

As the A66 draws you ever further westward you'll find yourself in some pretty green farming country - and about four miles for Scotch Corner you might well spot some unexpected beasts to the left hand side of the road. We'd actually driven past a few times and said to each other "I'm sure I just saw a camel" and "was that an ostrich?" before we paid proper attention and confirmed to ourselves that we weren't going mad.

Although it wasn't an ostrich. That would have been silly.

We've never actually stopped there (there are issues with allergies to things with fur here at Snail Towers) but Mainsgill Farm does indeed have a magnificent two humped Bactrian camel that their website informs me is called Delilah.  Delilah would appear to have a calf called Camelot, and the pair share the farm with Lamas, Alpachas, Rheas (a South American ostrich like bird, which is what we saw on the way past) and yes, actual ostriches, so our sighting wasn't so silly after all...

As well as the exotic animals, farm shop and tea room, Mainsgill is also a working livestock farm, and their shop can sell you any number of high quality meat based products so if you're pitched up in the area and want something special for dinner (and you're not a vegetarian) the place is probably doubly worth a call. Who knows, next time we're in the area we might stock up on the anti-histamine tablets and investigate in more detail. We'll let you know...

It's not the only eye catching farm based landmark in that neck of the woods either. almost exactly due south of the Bowes Museum the '66 takes you past a remarkable looking building with a turf roof which will invariably have sheep grazing on it. It's another of the landmarks of the eastern A66 that we have always remarked upon but never visited. Cross Lanes Farm is a multi-award winning organic farm with the by now almost obligatory cafe/restaurant and some serious eco-credentials.

Again, there's a well stocked farm shop where, as well as vegetables, artizan breads and other scrummy sounding foodstuffs you can also buy the farms rare breed pork, grass fed short horn beef, farm cured bacon and any amount of other meaty delights.

Oh, and one of those eye catching sheep on the roof? It's called "Roofus".

But we're still at the very start of the A66's journey into the west. Time to put the foot down a little and speed on our way. Ahead lie castles, food, hills, crosses and then the majesty of the Lake District.

Join us next time and the road goes ever on...






*Yes, I have done this. Not even sorry.

**Oh, all right. So that's not exactly true. Large sections of the old Great North Road are indeed beneath the surface of the modern A1, but the GNR tended to run through town centres and so large sections of it still exist in their own right - and are even still called the Great North Road -there's certainly a long section in my hometown of Doncaster that is still so named.