Glastonbury Abbey.

Happy New Year!

I trust that your New Year's celebrations were suitably splendid. After the last post's clamber up the Tor, I think it's time we had a little wander about the Abbey - or at lest what's left of it. 

The Abbey is owned by the Bath and Wells Diocesan Trust, which has clearly understood how you make maximum revenue to support your asset - you both enter and leave via the gift shop - but which also does an excellent job us using that revenue to maintain the asset. We like a good ruin, and have visited a good few ruined abbeys in our time. Coming from Yorkshire helps, of course, some of the finest abbey ruins in Europe can be found in that magnificent county. Our expectations are high.

On some scales the remains of Glastonbury Abbey are unimpressive. They lack the towering gothic majesty of North Yorkshire's  Fountains Abbey, or the intimate quirkiness of St. Dogmael's Abbey, set as they are in expansive - and largely empty - grounds. So yes, on some scales, not that impressive. Measured by other scales, however, it's a very striking place indeed. Heritage organisations like English Heritate and the National Trust could learn a thing or two from Glastonbury.

You exit the gift shop and are immediately reminded that this place was founded as a site of Christian worship. The little chapel dedicated to St. Patrick is the first thing that you pass, and is still a consecrated place of worship, with services held every week. The interior is beautiful, light, bright and airy, the walls adorned with simple mural depicting the saint driving the snakes out of Ireland. I regret that I took no photographs to show you, but a clearly devout young man was praying in the front pew, and out of deference to his devotions I left the camera in my pocket - after all, he had first call on the place. The chapel was founded in the year 1500 by the Abbot Richard Beere, and so has more than five hundred years of continuous use as a house of worship. We tourists are mere Johnny Come Lateleys, and as such should know our place.

To the rear of the chapel you will find the famed "Glastonbury Thorn".

Well, actually, you won't, because the original Glastonbury Thorn was felled and burned during the Civil War by the Puritans, who in their general and joyless fundamentalism regarded it as an object of unholy superstition and so added it to the long list of wonderful things destroyed by their shameful religious vandalism.

The tree that stands in the grounds of the abbey was propagated from that original tree, as was a second thorn that stands in the grounds of the Church of St John the Baptist on the high street.

The story goes that Joseph of Arimathea brought the Holy Grail to Glastonbury and while there thrust his staff into Wearyall Hill (just outside the town) where it grew into the miraculous Glastonbury Thorn. The story is unclear about why he might have done this. The tree was deemed special because it flowered not only in the spring, when one might expect blossom on a thorn tree, but also in the dead of midwinter when no other flower bloomed. This was regarded as a miracle - and as proof that the Cup of Christ had indeed been brought to these shores, for what else could bring life to the dead of winter?

Well, the thorn is in fact a variety of the Common Hawthorn called Crategus monogyna Biflora. A variety which does, in fact, flower twice a year. A more scientific explanation perhaps, but even I - a hardcore exponent of science - would concede that it lacks romance.

The discussion about whether Joseph of Arimathea actually did visit Glastonbury - with or without the Holy Grail - is ongoing. (Rather sweetly Wikipedia describes the issue as "controversial" - by which they mean that for some people it is an absolute article of faith while others regard the very idea as frankly ridiculous.) It's actually not impossible - there was trade between the middle east and the land that would become England at the time of Christ, so it could have happened. Could he have had anything to do with the Thorn, or, as many in medieval Glastonbury would have claimed, did he in fact found the Abbey itself and bring Christianity to these shores years before the Roman conquest?

Well, that seems doubtful, given that the first mention we have for the "miraculous" plant is in an early sixteenth century tome "the Lyfe of Joseph of Arimathea"*, and if he really had been involved in the arrival of the Thorn and founding of the Abbey you'd imagine that somebody might have mentioned it earlier...

Mind you, there might well be something in the idea that the thorn is special. Many people have tried growing new plants in recent years both from seed and from cuttings. Since the fifties however they constantly revert to being common or garden single flowering regular hawthorn bushes. Spooky, eh?

Moving on you come to the most intact area of the old abbey buildings, which can be entered via an impressively carved ornate archway which once upon a time led into the Lady Chapel.

I suppose in a sense it still does, except of course that the Lady Chapel now has no roof. Or floor. Or internal walls. That's sort of what it means to be a ruin, I suppose.


The building is twelfth century, constructed between 1184 and 1187 after a fire ravaged the abbey complex. It's famous for the ornate stone carving and, back in the day, would also have been extravagantly painted. As I said, these days it is lacking both a roof and a floor, but it's still impressive. In its prime it must have been absolutely mind-blowing.

We moved on, into what would have been the Nave - now essentially part of one exterior wall, and through a very impressive arch into a more well preserved area, with most of the exterior walls still standing . There was a little crowd of people surrounding a man in medieval finery, so we ambled over to see what was going on, and he turned out to be a sort of re-enactor/guide. (He did tell us which historical character he was but I confess I've forgotten.) We'd missed rather a lot of his spiel, but were still regaled by stories of the Abbey's long and occasionally bloody history.

We learned that the origins of the Abbey are most likely to be Saxon, with the base of the west end of the Nave possibly being built on the foundations of a stone church which, it is said** was built there in the seventh century by the Saxon King Ine of Wessex. That sort of suggests that Joseph of Arimathea may not have been involved... Anyway, we can be reasonably sure that the site was enlarged by St Dunstan (although he wasn't actually a saint at the time) in the tenth century, presumably in the 940s or 950s, given that by 960 he had left Glastonbury to become Archbishop of Canterbury.

About a hundred years later the Normans turned up and treated the Saxons of Glastonbury Abbey with the same amount of deference and respect they lavished on Saxons elsewhere in the kingdom - which is to say, none at all. They did do rather a lot for the Abbey's structure though. The Normans were famed architects and builders, and set about enlarging and aggrandising the Saxon buildings.

Let's just say they didn't skimp. By the time the Domesday Book came to record the Abbey's wealth in 1086 it was the richest and most magnificent monastic institution in the country. Not that the money helped a hundredish years later when, in 1184 the place burned down again. The monks were not overly perturbed however - it helps when your outlook is based on eternity, rather than the short of medium term, and of course although they'd lost many of their buildings they still had the cash which probably came in handy too - and set about rebuilding.

It was around this time that the monks set out to find the graves of King Arthur and his Queen Guinevere who, they thought, might be buried in the old Saxon cemetery. History is largely silent about why they thought that although as a cynic I tend to the view that the need to give paying pilgrims a new reason to pay the place a visit may have had something to do with it.

Whatever the motive, they duly dug up two skeletons which were entombed in great splendour. The fancy tomb didn't survive the ravages either of time or King Henry VIII's dissolution***, but the bodies are still buried in rather simpler graves in the Nave to this day:

By the time of the dissolution Glastonbury Abbey was second in power and influence only to the Abbey at Westminster. That still didn't help it when Henry VIII decided he didn't need the Pope's permission to get divorced (a decision that may have had something to do with the fact that the Pope had refused such permission), set up the Church of England with himself at the head (a position still held by the British Monarch) and plundered the considerable wealth of his kingdom's monasteries to fund his wars and pay for his banquets.****

The dissolution was particularly bloody for Glastonbury. The King's men came in September 1539 on the orders of Thomas Cromwell (long famed as one of history's great villains but given some smidgen of sympathy in Hillary Mantell's Booker winning "Wolfe Hall" and "Bring up the Bodies" - which for the record I heartily recommend, but I digress). They began to strip the Abbey of its not inconsiderable horde of silver and gold. The last Abbot, one Richard Whiting - who had sided with Henry over the split with Rome and therefore might reasonably have expected to be cut some slack - attempted to resist, but to no avail.

His attempt to preserve his Abbey failed and he died a traitor's death - hanged, drawn and quartered - at the top of Glastonbury Tor on November 15th 1539.

So ended the greatness of Glastonbury Abbey.

It's history between late 1539 and 1908, when it returned to the bosom of the church in the form of the Bath and Wells Diocesan Trust, is frankly rather depressing. It changed hands many times and seems to have been mostly owned by a long series of people who didn't really care about it as anything other than a quarry.

It's a pattern that repeats itself throughout history. There are after all, two ways of obtaining stone for a new building. You can find a decent lump of rock in the landscape, cut out big chunks, transport them to your building site and then cut those chunks to size, smooth them and dress them at great expense of effort, or you can just find a building nobody wants anymore and nick the already cut and dressed stones from there. Glastonbury Abbey is by no means unique in having suffered this fate. But if you were wondering what had happened to the walls that are no longer standing, the honest truth is that large parts of Glastonbury and it's surroundings are built out of them.

Recycling at it's most brutally efficient, perhaps.

This is, of course, why so little of the original fabric of the Abbey complex remains. And why it is all the more remarkable that the "Abbot's Kitchen" is so intact. It even retains its roof!

The refrectory, the long hall where the monks would have eaten their meals, survives only as foundations, as you can see from the picture to the left.


In the background of that picture however, you can see the bell shaped structure that housed the kitchen, and that is very much all there!

Well, alright. The roof is octagonal. I'm going to call it conical later
because this isn't a geometry class.

Without question the best preserved building to remain in the Abbey complex - in that it's the only building with all its walls, a roof and even actual, working doors - the octagonal stone structure has been described as "the best preserved medieval kitchen in Europe". Given that there are actually very few intact kitchens from this date (it was constructed in the mid fourteenth century at the behest of Abbot John de Breynton) it is perhaps #1 in a field of #1.5, but still...

Whatever it's status as "the best example of a thing", the Abbot's Kitchen is an impressive building. I have been unable to find any explanation as to why this particular building survived the dissolution and subsequent plundering of he Abbey complex for building materials, but survive it did.

It even found new uses, at least for a while. In the seventeenth century local Quakers adopted the structure and it became the "Friend's Meeting House" for a while, although the non-conformists were eventually forced out. I've not been able to find details regarding the hows and the whys, but it seems a shame. After all, the site was developed as a place of Christian worship. True, it was developed as a Catholic site, but the Quakers were at least putting it to the use it was originally intended for - and of course the people who forced them out wouldn't have been Catholic in any case...

Anyway. Somehow this one building did manage to resist the ravages of time and construction. Given that Christ taught that "the meek shall inherit the Earth" it does seem fitting that the only part of the complex to survive is not the extravagant ecclesiastical buildings with all their finery, but the kitchen - a simple place of work.

And it has to be said, it's pretty impressive. Somehow, the building looks bigger on the inside. I'm fairly sure there is no Galifreyan technology involved, but you never know...

The ceiling is high, rising to a point far, far above your head. The walls are whitewashed, and this amplifies the impression of space and light. A fireplace (or at least a collection of wood and charcoal artfully lit by read and orange lights to look like fire - the place burned down in 1184 don't forget, the Abbey has never forgotten that lesson...) occupies each corner, as it would have in the kitchen's prime. Smoke would have escaped through a hole in the ceiling immediately above the fire, and also through the top of the building's more or less conical roof.

The space is laid out exactly as they think it would have been when the kitchen was supplying the Abbot's Hall (the regular monks got their food from a much humbler kitchen - it would seem that, in monasteries at least, not all men were equal before God...) with a large table in the centre, and roasting spits over each fire. It is of course a static and somewhat sterile exhibit, lacking the heat, noise, smoke, dirt and smells that would have defined it during its working life, but even so it is fascinating to imagine what the lives of the cooks would have been like.

Stepping out of the kitchen into the uncharacteristically bright August sunshine we contemplated a stroll around the Abbey's rather extensive grounds. There are thirty six acres to explore, mostly parkland with a duck pond, a fish pond, a "wildlife area" and of course a cider orchard, because we're in Somerset and growing apples is essentially compulsory. 

However, it was heading for lunch o'clock, and neither of us fancied a walk, so we turned and headed back towards the building that housed the gift shop  - not because we fancied doing some shopping, but because the gift shop building also houses the excellent little museum which explains the history of the Abbey - and from which I gleaned much of the information presented in this post.

The museum isn't big, but does house a number of fascinating exhibits. For a start, there's a detailed (and huge) scale model of the Abbey complex as it may have looked at its height back in 1539. There is also a covered display case to house a single piece of parchment taken from a hand written (because that was the only way to produce these things back in the day...) copy of Pliny's "Historia Naturalis". The case is covered by a large felt flap, which protects this mid twelfth century artefact from the fading influence of the sun - and you may rest assured that this picture was taken without flash.

On its own of course, a singly page from an eight hundred year old book is of little use. But it is representative of the work which monks of the Abbey may well have produced. And it might only be one page - but it's an eight hundred year old hand written document. A tangible link between your twenty first century eyes and the twelfth century hand which held the pen and wrote these words.

Call me an old romantic if you like, but I find that remarkable.

You should probably go and have a look for yourself...

Join us next time - when we will visit another museum, but one considerably more up to date...

                                                                                       

*It was the 1500s, people didn't really do spelling...

**Although they might be wrong when they say it...

***A bit of ecclesiastical vandalism we can't blame on Cromwell and his cronies...

****Yes, I know there was more to it than that, but what do you expect? I write a caravan blog for goodness sake - if you want minute historical detail you need to be reading AJP Taylor!

Glastonbury High Street. Oh, wow. I mean, WOW!

So, there we were, parked up in the West Country, a couple of miles outside the little city of Wells. We arrived at the excellent Caravan Club Certificated Location on a Saturday afternoon, pitched up and then headed into Wells to grab some supplies from the perfectly located Waitrose supermarket on the edge of town. (There's also a Tesco store if you follow the road around, but we didn't find it until a couple of days later...)

That evening we were disturbed by loud music coming, so it seemed, from somewhere nearby. Was it one of the other units on site? Or one of the very few nearby houses? We couldn't tell. But we were tired and irritable after a long day's drive from Wales, and were therefore more than a little irked. After about an hour or so I realised that pretty much everything we heard had been a song by The Kinks.

"Can't be a party," said I, "Not unless they're all massive Kinks fans,"

"Could it," I suggested, "be a Kinks tribute band rehearsal?

Mrs Snail was unconvinced. The music ended about half past ten, followed by muffled bangs that could only be fireworks some indeterminate distance away.

The mystery was finally solved the following morning when - on the way to somewhere else - we drove through Glastonbury. On the hedge that surrounds the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey in the centre of town was a MASSIVE hoarding advertising that "The legendary Ray Davis and his band" had been playing there the night before.

So. Not the actual Kinks, but certainly the most authentic Kinks tribute band there ever was...

And what that  did was give me a huge amount of empathy for the people of this part of Somerset when the legendary festival takes place. Our little camp site** was seven miles or so away from the concert, and we could hear it pretty clearly. Now, add another three stages to that. For the festival revellers on site, I imagine the noise from the stage they're watching drowns out the noise from the nearby stages. Can you imagine the cacophony they must be able to hear from a distance though? And that goes on all day!

And suddenly I realise that I sound like a grumpy old git.

Not talking about the festival today though. Or the Abbey - that's getting it's own post. As is the magnificent Glastonbury Tor, No, today I want to talk about the town itself, which is unlike any place we have ever been before. Comedian Mark Steel, on visiting "Glasto"* for his Radio Four comedy show "Mark Steele's in town" remarked along the lines of "Glastonbury high street, eh? You want to re-align your chakras or pick up a dream catcher you're well in, but god help you if you only want a pint of milk!"

He was wrong, as it happens, there's a convenience store just over the road from the Abbey car park (OK, so that's not technically the High Street), and an "Organic Superstore" at the far end.

But he wasn't far wrong...

Now. Before we go any further, we need to get something clear. At no point in the rest of this post will I be deliberately mocking anyone for anything. Not their beliefs, not their dress sense, nothing. I will be pointing out things that seemed funny at the time. To be honest, the joke, if joke there is, is mostly on us. No disrespect is intended to anyone.*** That's not how we roll here at Snail Towers.

The High Street in Glastonbury runs, more or less, from the market place, up hill, ending outside the "Bag End Grow Shop" (which yes, sells all the things you're imagining it sells) where it forms a "T" junction with Wells Road (it goes to Wells, astonishingly enough) and Lambrook Street.

In some ways it's like any other High Street in the UK. There's a Post Office, a couple of pubs, some coffee shops, some restaurants, the usual smattering of charity shops, a church. Everything you'd expect really. But this is truly a High Street like no other. Having wandered up and down identikit main streets in towns across these Sceptred Isles past identikit chain stores and chain restaurants I have to say, Glastonbury was immensely refreshing.

So, let's start in the market place - which I have to say is pretty small. Indeed, used as we are to the kind of spacious market squares in Yorkshire market towns such as Ripon, Richmond and Masham (and of course personally I'm from Doncaster - a town which does an exceptional market) we didn't even notice that is was the market square - the only reason I know now is because I looked at a map before writing this up.

Still, the square (which was more of a triangle if I recall correctly)  marks the point where Magdalene Street bends around to the right to seamlessly become the High Street. To the left you will see the impressive stone facade of the George and Pilgrim which has sat, in some form or other, at "Number One, the High Street" since the fifteenth century. It is, in fact, the oldest working pub in the south west - and given that it's been trading for close on five hundred years must be a serious contender for one of the oldest businesses of any kind. These days it's part of a chain and, in addition to a bar and restaurant it offers fourteen rooms for guests. We didn't eat there on this occasion, and of course we didn't stay there, but it looks nice - suitably old and authentic - and the Trip Adviser Reviews are largely positive.

It adds a little obvious age to the start of this genuinely ancient street which now stretches out ahead of you, crammed with cafes, restaurants, little alternative clothes shops, book shops, places to buy occult paraphernalia, fancy soap, you name it.

And you won't recognise any of them.

It's an absolute joy.

Crossing the street we ducked into a little shop selling crystals and stones. As we entered, a pair of middle-aged women dressed as if for a WI meeting were leaving, a random snatch of their conversation hanging in the air behind them:

"...I really must go and have a coffee and something to eat - I'm just resonating with everything in here..."

Mrs Snail and I smiled wryly to each other - what else would you expect in Glastonbury after all?

We explored the shop, which appeared, entirely predictably, to be much bigger on the inside, with back rooms appearing apparently from nowhere, crammed full of beautiful crystals and polished stones. Some are clearly for mere decorative purposes but others labelled with detailed instructions regarding their use to cure any number of ailments and ills. I don't believe in crystal healing - although quartz does excellent things inside a watch - but I do believe in really beautiful things, and that little shop was crammed full of so many of them. I could have stayed in there, entranced by the pretty things all day.

It was, however, lunch o'clock and we were keen to find somewhere to eat.

We might have gone back across the road to the George and Pilgrim, but however hungry we were, we have a strict policy of never going straight into the first place we see. Which is how we found ourselves half way up the street outside the impossibly groovy Hundred Monkeys Cafe. With massive plate glass windows looking out onto the street and a small queue made up of people in hemp trousers and dreadlocks alongside a terribly well spoken family in designer jackets suggesting that the place was popular with a wide spectrum of society, we investigated the menu, before joining the queue and being ushered to a table for two in the window.

The thing about this excellent eatery - which is clearly something of a local institution and was so full that it was turning people away within minutes of our arrival - is that it completely understands and reflects the diverse culinary preferences of its clientele. If, like myself, you have a carniverous nature there is an excellent range of meaty and fishy dishes on the menu. If, like Mrs Snail you increasingly eschew meat, there's an equally impressive selection of meat free dishes. If you're a vegan, that most ignored and despised group of diners in the eyes of your average chef? No problem. There's a good range of options for you too.

Because the Hundred Monkeys has a menu that does not descriminate. The bill of fayre is not divided into "sections" based on food preference. Nothing is presented as a vegetarian or vegan "option". Some of the dishes on the menu happen to contain no meat. Some happen to contain no animal products at all. And those latter two options? They're dishes in their own right, not meat free imitations of meals that usually contain meat. It was refreshing.

You're not going to be surprised that I had a burger, made as you might expect from locally sourced organic meat. It was sublime. Mrs Snail was much more original and opted for a "Roasted Peach and Goat's Cheese salad". That was also beyond brilliant.

I love Goat's Cheese, but I confess I was a little suspicious of roasted peaches in a savoury salad. Oh my goodness, but it worked! The peach and the cheese complimented each other beautifully, just the right balance of acidity and mid lactic notes against a well thought out mix of leaves, some fresh, some bitter, some peppery. It was an absolute triumph! There was also loads of it,which is how I know this, because Mrs Snail couldn't finish it all so I got to try!

The real star, however was the Cola.

The Hundred Monkeys is an ethical establishment. As such it has no truck with the evil multinational purveyor of sugar laden fizzy vegetable extract beverage that is the Coca-Cola Company. Which was potentially an issue for me because pretty much the only soft drink I consume is that self same sugar laden fizzy vegetable extract beverage.

With the same sigh that usually accompanies the enforced order of Pepsi I have to make in Pizza Hut**** I opted for the Hundred Monkeys' ethical alternative - "Whole Earth Organic Cola". I didn't have high hopes, expecting something that would taste off, in a "knit your own broccolli" kind of way.

I was wrong.

Very wrong.

It was a revelation.

This was the first non Coca-Cola cola I have ever enjoyed. So much nicer than Coke.

Wasn't kidding about the queue. And of course there's a VW camper outside...

So there we sat, by the window, looking out at the comings and goings on one of the most interesting high streets in England.

Come back next time, and I'll tell you what we saw.



*This, I have been informed by some of the hipper young people of my acquaintance is what all the bright young things call the town. Although they seemed unable to distinguish the town from the festival, so what do they know?

**About which more in a later post... (Probably...)

***In a later post however, I'm going to be incredibly rude about a young woman I met at the top of Glastonbury Tor, because while I have infinite respect for the beliefs of others, I have neither respect nor patience for their pretentions. You'll see what I mean when we get to it...

****Which is owned in part by Pepsico, and so does not offer "The Real Thing".

Shakespeare in the Dog House!

Sorry. I just can't resist a punning title. In fact, this has little to do with Shakespeare, and nothing  to do with dog houses - real or metaphorical.

In fact, what I want to talk about this time is the visit we made to St. Dogmael's Abbey during our recent foray into South Wales. Sorry it's taken so long to post - six weeks or so since the last instalment - but for some reason I found this difficult to write. It was such an unusual place I found it hard to commit the experience to words with any kind of accuracy. I'm still not sure I've done it justice, but there's a limit to how long you can spend on something, even in the persuit of perfection!

The wonderful hidden gem of a place sits about a mile to the west of Cardigan, on the opposite side of the river Teifi (it's a Welsh name, and so is pronounced Tey-vi). It's one of those places, not hard to find, but easy enough to miss if you don't know it's there. Don't make that mistake. If your travels take you to the Cardigan area this is one little gem you absolutely don't want to miss!

The Abbey whose ruins can be seen today has Norman foundations, but just how long the site had been a place of Christian Worship at that point is unclear. Certainly there is a charter from the twelfth century which refers to "the ancient church of St Dogfael", suggesting that it had been used by Christians for some considerable time before the conquest.

St Dogmael - or "Dogfael", medievel spelling seems to have been more or less optional - himself is believed to have been doing his thing in the sixth century. That of course puts him in that portion of history after the departure of the Romans from these shores that some are pleased to call the "dark ages". Modern archaeologists and historians will tell you that the dark ages were in fact anything but dark, the problem is the scarcity of any kind of documentation from the period. We know very little for certain about what went on in the  sixth century, and St Dogmael is no exception.

The guide book* tells us that the saint was the son of a man called "Ithel ap Ceredig ap Cunedda Weledig". Apparently this would mean he was descended from the founder of the royal family of Gwynned. It is also claimed that he was the cousin of St. David - which in Wales is a pretty good claim to fame! Anyway - suffice to say there's deep history there, but as I said, the ruins you can see today are Norman in origin, and a fine set of ruins they are.

Not perhaps as big and imposing as the famed ruins at Fountains Abbey in North Yorkshire, but still an interesting example of a smaller monastic house.

Looking through this window you can see the churchyard of the adjacent parish church - which of course means that a part of the site at least is still in use for its original purpose after at least 1,400 years. That's rather impressive when you think about it...

Enough of the walls and foundations are visible for you to get a sense of what the abbey would have been like in its heyday, before Henry VIII's break from Rome and subsequent dissolution of the monastaries pretty much brought an end to the monastic way of life not just here, but more or less everywhere else on this sceptered isle.

Since then the Abbey buildings have served the local community in the way ruins and disused buildings have always done - as an aesthetic feature and a handy quarry. I'd be highly surprised if several of the local houses didn't contain stone originally cut and dressed for the abbey. It's fitting really. Monastic houses were supposed to serve the community** so it seems reasonable that the place continued to do so long after the monks were gone.

These days the ruins are a picturesque place to visit, but also a pleasant backdrop. The day we were there was intended to be the opening night of an outdoor production of Shakespeare's last play, The Tempest. 

This is why there were folding seats under a blue tarpaulin and a bunch of pretend masts and sails about the place when we were there.

Of course, we were there during the diluvian summer of 2015, so the little tents housing the production's technical equipment were filled with people looking at weather reports and trying to decide whether they'd need to cancel the performance. So far as recall the skies remained clear, so I presume the performances went ahead, although I haven't been able to find a single review online, so I can't be sure...

There is more to this little gem than just the Abbey, however. Pulling in to the little car park our attention was first taken by the old mill pond which sits adjacent. It's not very big, surrounded by large trees which offered some dappled shade against the surprisingly strong sun - this being one of the few days on our Welsh trip we'd actually seen the thing. It was very pretty indeed, and offered a home to some of the most remarkable ducks we've ever seen.

I'm no poultry expert, and have no idea what breed they might have been, but they were much bigger than your average millpond mallard, and the same sort of iridescent rainbow of "black" plumage one might normally associate with a starling's wing.

They were quite the attraction, with many other visitors pausing to watch them waddle lazily about before settling down on the sparse grass verge between the road and the water.

We watched them for a while, before making our way into The Coach House Visitor Centre. In many ways this is a hidden gem attached to the hidden gem. You can actually get to the Abbey without going through The Coach House, but I can't imagine why you would.

Partly housed in (astonishingly enough) an old coach house, and partially in a modern extension, the Coach House Visitor Centre is part cafe, part information centre, part art gallery, part museum, part craft shop, you might expect the whole to become a disorganised mishmash. But far from it.

The cafe section occupies the new extension, with the art gracing the walls. A neat little information section takes up a corner at one end of the extension, with a museum featuring ancient stones from the Abbey in the ground floor of the old coach house.

Given that we left the Abbey ruins at around lunch o'clock, we decided to try the cafe out for size. It's fully licensed, and although I was driving Mrs Snail very much enjoyed a bottle of the locally brewed lager. Indeed, she enjoyed it so much that I bought a few bottles of the various local brews to take away - because I hate being left out!

The food was simple - it's a cafe, not a restaurant, after all - but well presented. We both opted for cheese and ham panninis, which were served with a salad garnish and were pretty good. The service was swift and pleasant and the atmosphere was laid back and convivial. We very much enjoyed the place and should we ever be in the area again (and given that it's not that far from Grandma Snail's*** house, we will be) we'll certainly be popping in for coffee and a bite to eat.

It's a fascinating little corner of Cardigan, and I'd argue strongly that no visit to South Wales would be complete without dropping in.



*A very reasonably priced publication I should say - for a mere £2.95 it gives detailed information about the Abbey and it's history, as well as the Pentre Ifan Burial Chamber we explored in the last post and Cilgerran Castle, about which more next week. Back over the border English Heritage would have made three separate guidebooks and charged four quid for each of them! Just another brilliant thing about Wales...

** They often didn't - quite the opposite in fact, but that was the original intention...

***Yes, I know I said I wouldn't call her that, but right now I'm in Yorkshire and she's in Wales. Besides, she is a Grandma, so I figure I'll risk it...