From Elphin to Lochinver.

So here we were, ensconced in the heart of Assynt, the region of Scotland that first kindled our devotion to the highlands, and the place that made us buy a caravan in the first place. 

We first came to Assynt nearly twenty years ago. Mrs Snail's parents invited us to join them on a self catering holiday in the fishing town of Lochinver, a few miles north of our current pitch at Elphin. We were students at the time and the chance of a free holiday was impossible to refuse. Once there, I don't believe we ever truly left.

We returned to the self catering chalets at Lochinver many times in the following years, sometimes alone, sometimes with Mrs Snail's Mum and Dad. But the price inevitably rose year on year until we were paying in excess of six hundred quid a week to stay in a little chalet with a view of the harbour. And a jacuzzi. If I'm honest, however much I love life on the road with the caravan,  do miss that Jacuzzi. Mind you, the way caravan equipment is going at the moment, I'm guessing it's only a matter of time...

But the fact was that at those prices a trip to this wonderful part of the world was too expensive to be anything other than a treat we allowed ourselves only occasionally. What can I say? We're greedy. We were determined to find a way to come here more often, and Mrs Snail suggested that a caravan was the obvious solution. I confess I took some convincing, but it all turned out extraordinarily well in the end. Since picking up the Road Snail we've been to all sorts of places we wouldn't otherwise have got to, but most of all, we've been to Assynt a lot more frequently than would otherwise have been possible.

Elphin sits a few miles inland, opposite the twin hills of Cul Mor and Cul Baeg. (Respectively "Big Back" and "Little Back" in Gaelic.) Many years ago, as a much younger and fitter man I accompanied my father in law on an ascent of both of these hills in one day. He was older then than I am now, and I have to say that now I'd probably just do the one... It's a good walk though, and not particularly difficult - and the view from the top is fantastic, assuming the clouds are higher than the peak and you actually get one. This, I'm afraid, can not be guaranteed.

Head north from here and in a couple of miles you arrive at the Ledmore Junction - something of an important landmark hereabouts, although if you didn't know that you'd be hard pressed to tell. The "T" junction marks the point where the mostly North/South A835 ends and you join the mostly East/West A837. That's all there is really, a T junction and a sign - not so much as a house. I'm not even sure that Ledmore actually qualifies as a place at all...

Still, if you're minded to turn right here and head to the west you'll follow a winding single track road that will eventually take you to the central town of Lairg. We, however were turning left and taking the rather more substantial road West towards the coast and the little fishing community of Lochinver. 

As you approach the Ledmore junction you are afforded impressive views of the long craggy ridge of Suilven - my very favourite hill - and the taller and rather pleasingly mountain shaped Canisp, both rising up on your left. Right in front of you, however looms the impressive bulk of Ben More Assynt (not to be confused with Ben Mor Coigach, the other "big hill" in these parts) which is the region's only Monroe, or Scottish Mountain over three thousand feet. 

The A837 sweeps you onwards, eventually bringing you to the shores of Loch Assynt, and the little village of Inchnadamph. As we passed through we noticed a couple of RAF Regiment soldiers ambling their way along the road, and wondered what they were doing there - the RAF is often to be seen in the skies over Assynt, but you seldom see them on the ground. We assumed that they must be involved in some sort of training exercise and pressed on. Bear them in mind though - we'll be coming back to them in a future post...

Ichnadamph is also the site of the memorial to the geologists Peach and Horne, who we well also be coming back to in a future post. On that morning however we kept rolling on towards Lochinver and soon were passing the ruins first of Calder House and almost immediately afterwards of Ardvrek Castle. These two buildings span a great deal of the history of this area, and both ruins are interesting in their way.

Perhaps forever fated to be the bridesmaid rather than the bride in this pairing is the grey boxy structure which is all that remains of Calder House. However historically and politically significant it might be, Calder House looks like the derelict shell of an old house, while Ardvreck looks like a ruined castle, and castles are always interesting.

Unsurprisingly the Castle came first. Built on a promentary that is very nearly an island in Loch Assynt in the later part of the fifteenth century by Angus Mor III* of the Clan MacLeod, the castle is joined to the mainland by a narrow strip of beach. This former MacLeod stronghold began life as a simple rectangular block, perhaps three or four floors high - presumably reminiscent of the Pele Towers that can be found all over the border between England and Scotland.

It remained a fairly simple affair for about a hundred years until in the latter part of the sixteenth century when Donald Ban IX made some improvements. It was Ban who added the tower, and following the fashion of the time he also vaulted the cellars and the ceiling of the great hall on the first floor.

Very little remains visible of the other building that stood around the castle itself, or of the ramparts that augmented the building's natural defences. The stronghold needed good defences, because Ardvreck experienced a lot of violence throughout its active life.

It withstood many attacks and sieges over the years, as various branches of the Clan MacLeod fought for dominance and other enemies, from outside the family tried to muscle in on MacLeod territory. It was one such attack, by the MacKenzies of Wester Ross in sixteen seventy two that finally breached the fortress and, after a two week siege, ended MacLeod rule in Assynt.

The castle continued under MacKenzie ownership for some time, and it was nature who had the final word. The great devastation that brought the place to ruin was the result not of attack by men, but a lightning strike in seventeen ninety five.

By that time, however, the main focus of the MacKenzie Lairds of Assynt had moved to Calder House, the construction of which had been ordered in Seventeen Twenty Six by Kenneth MacKenzie II. By all accounts his wife Francis found Ardverck a little too lacking on modern comforts, and Calda was an attempt to make her feel more at home.

There's an argument for suggesting that he might have been showing off a little mind you. When it was constructed Calder House was the pinnacle of gracious living. Apparently it was the first symmetrical manor house in North West Scotland and the design would be influential in the plans for later MacKenzie houses in Wester Ross.

The MacKenzie dominance of Assynt was to be short lived, however. Kenneth built up massive debts supporting the Royalist cause, and his wife was not exactly a paragon of frugal living. By seventeen thirty seven it was all over. Not just the house, but the whole of Assynt was sold to the Duke of Sutherland - the region still resides within the county of Sutherland today - and the brief MacKenzie dominance of the area came to an end.

With that end came the end of Calder House. The Duke of Sutherland had no need for a manor house in Assynt, he had a whole castle of his own on the east coast. Indeed, he (or at least his successor) still does. Besides, even if he'd wanted to he wouldn't have got the chance. Determined that no Sutherland should ever reside there, MacKenzie supporters looted and burned the building on 12th May seventeen thirty seven.

The ruin you see today was finally produced when, demonstrating an attitude to recycling that does them credit, at the end of the eighteenth century a bunch of guys from Inchnadamph at the head of the loch earned themselves one shilling and sixpence each for taking stones from the house and taking them to Inchnadamph for use in the construction of the schoolhouse. That was good money in those days and certainly easier than quarrying stone from the ground.

Ardverck is an old friend. We've been visiting this wonderful little ruin for the better part of twenty years, and I have to say, it's looking pretty good. When we first visited back in the nineties we had to park at the side of the road and both Ardverck Castle and Calder House were covered in warning signs that suggested anyone venturing too close  was taking their lives in their hands. Since then extensive work by Historic Assynt has secured the structures and provided ample car parking and informative sign boards.

Very informative for tourists, if only because they help explain why you see so many geology students on the side of the road. Geology is important in this neck of the woods, for reasons we'll get to in a future post - the same one where we'll talk about Peach and Horne, in fact. For now all I'll say is "drive carefully around here" - geology students turn up on the road as unexpectedly as the Red Deer that roam around here, and hitting students is every bit as damaging and inconvenient as hitting deer...

Indeed, as we moved on from the castle I was forced to break sharply as a young lady in a mud spattered waterproof and a short black skirt - going bravely bared legged in the midge filled air - stepped backwards into the road without looking, presumably to get a different perspective on the rock face she was staring intently at. My speed on the break was rewarded by a broad grin and a cheerful wave. Ah, the immortality of youth...

Just beyond the ruins you have an opportunity to turn right, and head north along the A894 towards the north coast - and we'll be doing precisely that in a few posts time. But we kept cruising westward along the shoreline of Loch Assynt, the western half of which is dotted with small islets sporting clumps of spindly pine trees. It occurs to me that in all the years we've been coming here we have never once stopped to photograph the Assynt Pines, as we have come to call them, which is odd because they're a sight we have come to think of as iconic.

The loch dominates the left hand side of the road. Before the junction with the A849 the view to the right is the massive bulk of Ben More Assynt and his associated peaks. Once past the A849 Ben More is replaced by the smaller but no less impressive form of the mountain Quinag (which so far as I can tell is pronounced Cun-i-Ag). Both of these mountains are actually more like mini mountain ranges in their own right, but Quinag, although much small both in terms of area and height, is rather more impressive because you can see so much of it at once.

Once you've passed the end of the loch the land around the road begins to rise above it, so views become more limited. However, don't despair because this just makes the glimpses you get between hills all the more interesting and in any case before long you're skimming through the small light industrial area that sits on the edge of Lochinver and them suddenly you're driving down the high street with the sea loch stretching out into the Minch.

 Next time we'll be exploring this remarkable little town and its surroundings. See you then!







 
*Yes, all those of you who've been following the Gaelic notes in this blog have already realised that Ardverck Castle was built by "Big Angus". Seriously.

Lunch in Dornoch, Seals and a Castle.

We learned some time ago that if you're approaching Dornoch from the north it pays you to approach a little obliquely by taking a narrow little left turn off the A9 a few miles north of the town and following the banks of Loch Fleet towards Skelbo Castle - especially if you happen to be visiting when the tide is low. On this visit the tide was just coming in, but we took the detour anyway and were rewarded with a fine view of the large colony of Harbour Seals*that calls the loch home.

They really are endlessly entertaining. Some loll like corpulent Roman dignitaries on exposed sandbanks, some swim and play in the shallow water - water shallow and clear enough, incidentally, to make it possible to make them out as they swim beneath the surface - some leap in and out of the water doing a passable impersonation of a dolphin while others rest on submerged sand banks, assuming what I've always thought of as the "banana position", bending their bodies so that their heads and tail flippers protrude above the waves. It looks most uncomfortable, but the seals seem to like it.

Seal watching is clearly a popular pass time here. The road is predictably single track, but there are a few capacious laybys to allow you to stop and stare to your heart's content. There are even benches to sit on and display boards to tell you what you're looking at - because there is an awful lot more here than just seals, entertaining as they are. Depending on the height of the tide, the season and the weather, you can see all manner of wildfowl and wading birds here too. We've spent hours here over the years - but as you may recall from the previous post we'd been driving for some time, it was lunchtime and we were hungry so we moved on after a mere quarter of an hour or so, scooting along the little single track road which leads you directly into Dornoch's main street.

I call it the main street, because "Town Square" is a bit of a strong word for it, but in fact I mean the open paved area at one end of the main street. Here can be found several parking spaces (although when it's busy there's an excellent pay and display car park on the next street over),the main bus stop,  the town notice board, a few shops - about which more later - the town hall and the Dornoch Castle Hotel.

In all our years of visiting this fantastic little town we have only eaten in two establishments. On our first visit we were with Mrs Snail's parents and we had lunch at the Royal Dornoch Golf Club. This was years ago, and I remember almost nothing about it save for a faint memory of being impressed. Every visit since we've either had a picnic, not been there at lunchtime, or made a beeline for the Dornoch Castle Hotel. It's a little forbidding from the outside perhaps, but once you learn a little about its history you begin to understand why.

The origins of Dornoch Castle are shrouded in the mists of time. It is believed that the current building stands on the site of the original Bishop's Palace, built for St Gilbert - who also founded the Cathedral - at some point in the thirteenth century. At what point the oldest of the current buildings was constructed is open to question - but look at it, it looks pretty old...

We do know that the place left ecclesiastical hands in 1557 when Bishop Robert Stewart gave it to his Brother in Law, the Earl of Sutherland. It remained in Sutherland hands until the family sold it in 1922. In those three hundred and sixty five years the building served as a palatial residence, court house and  gaol**. In 1570 it withstood a vicious siege when the Murrays of Dornoch rescued the young Earl Alexander of Sutherland from Dunrobin Castle (just up the road - I'll tell you about it someday) where he was being held by the Earl of Caithness.

The young Earl of Sutherland, it seems, was under the guardianship of the Earl of Caithness, who had married him off to one of his daughters - twice the young man's age - and proceeded to rule both Caithness and Sutherland with the proverbial iron fist. Clan Murray were opposed to the dominance of Caithness and the Clan Mackay (the clan who ruled the area around Strathnaver) and so snuck into Dunrobin and spirited the youngster away.

Naturally the Clans of Caithness and Mackay, and the Sutherlands of Skelbo, weren't going to take this lying down and gave chase. There were days of bitter and intense fighting but the people of Dornoch were outnumbered and the town was sacked. The townspeople held out for a further week in the towers of the castle and adjacent cathedral. The invaders were determined to force the people out though - and that's when things in the history get a little weird, involving a thirteenth century curse, a furious - if dead - saint and the Devil himself. I'll probably come back to that when we visit the cathedral later...

After all those adventures a large part of the castle complex became a hotel in 1947, and it manages to walk the very tricky tightrope between the opposing challenges of remaining true to its heritage as a stronghold and stately home and being a comfortable place where tourists can relax and enjoy a good meal. Indeed, it walks that tightrope very well. The walls of the lounge/bar/reception area are of the same split get stone that the exterior walls are constructed from, and I suppose that this could make the place seem a little cold and forbidding.

It doesn't though, partly because of the huge fireplace dominating the wall on the left hand side, which is so large you could use it to garage a fleet of small cars, and which on damp rainy days is guaranteed to make even the soggiest of visitors feel warm and welcome.

 The decor also helps. There must be a terrible temptation when you own a castle to fill the place up with stags heads, suits of armour and heavy red drapes. As regular readers may recall me and Mrs Snail like a good castle and we've seen many places that have fallen into this trap and consequently look as though they're being used as a set for a medieval B movie. The Dornoch Castle Hotel has deftly sidestepped that particular design faux par, and instead has light modern looking wooden table and chairs down the outside wall - If I'd paid more attention to Lawrence Llewellyn Bowen programmes in the nineties I cold probably tell you what kind of wood they are - it certainly looked too classy for pine - but frankly I have no idea and it isn't actually relevant so I'm not going to worry about it. The fireplace is surrounded by deep and comfortable looking leather sofas - well, they look like leather at least, I confess I didn't actually check, and the bar itself, tucked away in the far corner, is also resplenant in light polished wood - with not a horse brass or shield mounted claymore in sight.

We grabbed a table by a little window looking out onto the street. A tall young woman with dark bobbed hair and a dazzling smile brought us menus and confirmed that yes, they did offer free WIFI. She handed me a slip of paper bearing the WIFI access code and left us to choose our lunch. My choice was, of course, very easy. I already knew I was having the burger - I knew from happy experience that the burgers at the Castle Hotel are awesome, and to be honest the lunch menu isn't all that extensive - so I directed my attention to downloading the recent Monaco Grand Prix from the BBC i-Player.

Myself and Mrs Snail are massive fans of Formula One but we'd travelled from Killin to Grummore on the Sunday of the race and while one of the things we like about Grummore is its lack of TV signal and internet provision, that does make it difficult to keep up with events in other countries. Of course, it also makes it easy to avoid finding out the result of a race that had taken place days earlier, so with the race downloaded we were looking forward to some motor racing action when we got back to the 'van.

 The waitress with the dazzling smile reappeared briefly to take our orders, and to apologise that they were all out of Beef Burgers and, although burgers were still on the menu, all they had was venison. I was slightly amused that she presented this to me as though it might be a problem - personally I couldn't have been happier, I have no issue whatsoever with eating Bambi and vastly prefer venison to beef.  After a little ummin and ahing Mrs Snail opted for a tuna and red onion sandwich.

I was not in any way disappointed. The venison patty was beautifully rich and well seasoned with a tangy tomato relish which cut through the richness of the meat. There was, I confess, some salad, but since I was on holiday I paid it no mind. Far more worthy on notice were the chips (none of your "fries" nonsense here, thank you very much) which were thick and crisp and golden. Indeed, about the only issue I was presented with during the whole course of the meal was the fact that the chips were so crispy the salt kept bouncing off.

Yes, I know, it is such a hard life isn't it?

Mrs Snail declared her sandwich to be "very nice", but was clearly not totally blown away. It looked good, but was a little light on the red onion front.

Overall, well, we definitely still love the Dornoch Castle hotel. The food is good, if perhaps a little limited - and I have to say I'd rather it was limited and excellent than fancy and poor, so that's not much of a criticism - and the service is brilliant. The staff are attentive enough that you're never waiting long for anything you might want, but discrete enough that you don't ever feel as though you have somebody hovering on your shoulder.

With lunch over it was time to move on and have a bit of a wander around one of Sutherland's prettiest little towns - join me next tme for a little light shopping...

*They're also known as "Common Seals" but I just can't bring myself to refer to these extraordinary aquatic mammals as "common".

**Or "Jail" if you prefer. But I'm British, and can spell, so "gaol" it is.

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...

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...