UK - SOMERSET

MAY - 2016

PRIDDY CAMPSITE AND VISITS THEREFROM

THE MENDIP HILLS

The Mendip Hills rise about 150m from sea level and extend roughly 25km from East to West and 5 km north to south. At their western end they terminate in Brean Down that is a peninsula pointing like a finger across the estuary of the River Severn towards South Wales, and at their Eastern end they decline towards Salisbury Plain near the small town of Frome. Two extensions to the line of hills form the islands of Steep Holm and Flat Holm roughly half way across the Estuary.

The Mendips were formed by limestone deposits from an ancient seabed being laid down over even older sandstone and later upheavals of the earth's crust. Over many millenia much of the limestone was worn away at the highest point so now the sandstone lies very near the surface along the uppermost ridge with limestone all around its edges.

Because water just runs off sandstone but dissolves limestone this has resulted in deep gorges and many caves around the dges of the hills. Human and anaimal rermains from some 12,000 years ago have been found in some of them.

NEARBY TOWNS

There are many small villages and some larger towns on and around the Mendips. Notable amongst these are the seaside town of Weston-super-Mare where I grew up, Wells which is the smallest Cathedral City in England where the Bishop has a moated Palace, and Cheddar famous the world over for the cheese that bears its name but was first made here centuries ago.

Not far away is the town of Glastonbury, famous for the tower (called a "Tor") on the summit of its small hill that nevertheless stands tall above the surrounding Sedgemoor marshland. Glastonbury has been a town since well before the Birth of Christ and legend has it that Joseph of Arimethea visited and struck his staff into the ground whereupon it subsequently grew into a living tree. Legend also tells King Arthur's Camelot was founded here though it has to be said many other places also make a similar claim. Nowadays Glastonbury is well known for the music festivals held here to which thousands of people come and camp to listen to rock and pop bands.

Priddy is a tiny village high in the hills above Cheddar and has a campsite at which I stayed between the 14th and 23 May 2016.

PRIDDY CAMPSITE

The site is run by a couple who are Franchisees of the Camping and Caravanning Club to which I belong and claims to have 90 pitches. But during my stay there must have been a shifting population of fewer than half that number.

So it was well appointed and quiet. Furthermore, because I had booked to stay longer than most I was assigned a pitch at the edge of the site overlooking farmland in general and a field in which horses grazed and galloped in particular. Here is a photo of my outlook.

The camp shop had locally made cheese for sale and the farm next door also sold beef and other eatables from free range animals they had raised themselves. You can be sure I tried both and felt I was living well away from modern mass marketing.

I can put my bicycle inside my new car without having to take it apart so I was able to make a few trips - sometimes just in the car and sometimes using the car for the main journey but getting the bike out to have a ride when I reached an attractive spot - though there are many more people, roads and houses in comparison with conditions when I was a boy.

Here are notes and photos of some of the places I visited.

CHARTERHOUSE

Charterhouse is even smaller than Priddy with just a couple of farmhouses now.

But it wasn't always like this. People have lived here since the Stone Age and it was an important stop during the Iron Age for people travelling from their fort on Brean Down to the much larger one at Old Sarum near modern day Salisbury - a distance of about 150 km. Doesn't sound far these days but imagine walking it with bears, wolves and wild enemies seeking prey as you trudged along the route!

The hamlet became important in Roman times soon after the new Millenium when they first colonised Britain. That was because they found lead and silver ore here where it was easily mined as it was near the surface. All the silver was soon extracted but lead mining continued on and off until the nineteenth century.

The area is now designated as an area of special scientific and environmental interest. Here's a photo showing some of the old workings that are of course now completely grassed over.

Ancient Lead Mines

I have a special memory of this place from when I was eleven years old in 1947.

At the time I was a keen boy scout and my father and the Assistant Scoutmaster of the Troop to which I belonged (his name was Pip) conceived the idea of making the journey to Old Sarum along the same route travelled by the Ancient Britons.

So, at Easter, we set off with bulging rucksacks full of tents, sleeping bags, cooking pots, stoves, and other camping gear.   But we didn't start at Brean Down because there were many modern houses, roads and so on for the first part of the journey.   Instead we were taken by car to a farmhouse not far from the lead mines at Charterhouse where we were given permission to camp in one of the farmer's fields.

Soon after pitching the tents and crawling into our sleeping bags we heard a quite loud pitter-patter on the tent material - but it wasn't enough to require investigation or stop us from dropping off to sleep.

Awaking in the morning and looking out we saw it hadn't rained the previous evening - we had heard the noise of snowflakes landing on the thin material of the tent roof.      Snow now lay six inches deep for as far as we could see in all directions.

So that expedition was abandoned and we never did do any serious hiking in the steps of the Ancient Britons.

There was no snow in May this year but in the cooler air on the hills there were still a few bluebells colouring the landscape.

Bluebells in May!

BURRINGTON COMBE

The word Combe, pronounced coom, is derived from the ancient Celtic meaning "steep-sided valley".     It is found in many parts of Great Britain in one form or another - for example in Wales it is spelt Cwm.      Because the sport of mountaineering was first practised in Great Britain the same word has been exported to many other parts of the world - for example a valley high on Mount Everest is known as The Western Cwm.

So, Burrington Combe is narrow with steep sides and has at its bottom a twisting road - somewhat similar to Cheddar Gorge but with cliffs that are less high and dramatic.

Like Cheddar Gorge though it does have several caves with evidence of pre-historic occupation and is popular amongst speliologists.      As a teenager I tried it here once but didn't like it very much at all - squeezing through narrow crevices, not knowing whether one could squeeze back, coming across vertical drops and wondering if one would be drowned if there was a sudden downpour!     It struck me rather like rock-climbing in the dark only worse!

But Burrington Combe is well known for another reason illustrated by this photo.

Rock of Ages

In 1762 while out for a walk, the Reverend Toplady was caught in one of those downpours so common in this part of the country. He took shelter in this crevice under the overhanging stone.   This inspired him to compose the well-known hymn "Rock of Ages, Cleft for me, ...."

WESTON-SUPER-MARE

Weston was a small hamlet or village for centuries until the late 1800's when it blossomed as a seaside resort.    It is scarcely a proper seaside because it is on the south eastern bank of the River Severn as it widens to several kilometres between the English and Welsh coasts.     But, it is tidal, it does have extensive sands and it is the closest such place to Birmingham which was the centre of Britain's industrial heartland at the time.

My parents lived in the much larger and well-established city of Bristol about thirty km up-river from Weston and I was born there myself in 1936.       But in 1940 there were many German air-raids on Bristol and its docks at Avonmouth so my parents decided to rent a house in a hamlet called Holcombe not far north of Priddy.     We lived there until 1942 when the family moved to Weston because my father still worked in Bristol and the daily journey was much easier than it had been from Holcombe.    

So, I lived in and went to school in Weston between the ages of 6 and 18.        I have far too many memories to write about now but it was interesting going back to Sand Bay the other day - where I heard my first cuckoo of the year - seeing the old pier at Birnbeck and the rocks at Anchor Head on which I used to play.

Birnbeck Pier now needs major renovation if it is to survive

Interesting too to pass the greens between the Sea Front and the parallel road inland on which I remember massed US military vehicles being assembled in readiness for the Normandy Landings during WW II.

The southern end of the Promenade was a favourite place of mine for many years upon becoming 11 years old.    That was the year when the family visited London after an abortive attempt to follow the trail of the Ancient Brits.    It was notable from my point of view because my father took me to Selfridges Store in Oxford Street and there we found the first roller skates available after the war.

They were pretty basic by today's standards with steel wheels that soon wore "windows" on the rolling surface.    They made a tremendous racket, but the skates did have rubber bushes so a degree of directional control was possible.     I loved them and spent all my spare time on the 1/4 mile section of the Promenade allocated for skating where we used to play tag zooming in and out of wind shelters and all over the available space.

The glass sided wind shelters are still there but this is a photo of the ones integrated into the sea-wall that sometimes used to trip us into a headlong fall onto the sands below.

Birnbeck and New Piers seen across the sands

These were the sands upon which my father and I were swept ashore one Boxing Day after a maiden voyage in a canoe he had rebuilt as a Christmas present.    We managed famously when facing the waves on the way out to sea but were rolled completely over when sideways-on as we tried to turn back to shore. The rise and fall of tide here is the second highest in the world so we also had to push the upturned canoe ahead of us whilst struggling through knee deep glutinous mud before reaching the dry sands.

Perhaps most evocative of all was passing 7 Malvern Road at which I had been revived with milky tea containing a shot of brandy after running a mile in clothes sopping wet with muddy seawater!    

In this house too I had cowered one night under a Morrison Shelter like the one in the pic below as returning German bombers dropped off explosives they'd not been able to aim at their designated targets. One landed in a railway embankment at the bottom of our garden but fortunately it didn't explode.

A Morrison Shelter

The shelter also served as a dining table when the sides were removed and on ours my parents and three uncles in the airforce played monopoly when they could get an evening pass from the Locking camp near Weston.      They weren't posted to Locking for long but I always remember them complaining about the camp food.     That was perpetually bad as the camp was also a training centre for RAF cooks. Trainees were always moved on as soon as they could produce anything edible so other airmen in the camp were always fed by beginners.

Unsurprisingly my old school - the Weston-Super-Mare Grammar School for Boys, and its sister establishment for girls, - have long gone and the site is now occupied by a sixth form college specialising in Mathematics.

BREAN DOWN

This peninsula was occupied for centuries before the Birth of Christ and there was an Iron Age fort at the landward end.

Also at the landward end and just north of the peninsula itself is the mouth of the River Axe at a place now called Uphill.     This is an abbreviation of Hubba's Pyll.     Hubba was a raiding Viking and Pyll was the Viking word for harbour so the place he landed his longboat was naturally named after both him and the use to which he put the river entrance.

There was a great scare in the middle of the 19th century because the French had designed and built an iron-sided warship at a time before the British had done the same and were still reliant upon wooden vessels.

The British Government feared an invasion up the Severn Estuary and so built three forts in which they mounted large guns capable of firing shells at any ship anywhere across the width of the estuary. One was sited on the Welsh coast, one on the island of Steep Holm and one at the tip of Brean Down.

No invasion was ever attempted so the guns were removed and the buildings converted to tearooms and souvenir shops in the early 1900's when Weston bloomed as a seaside resort.    During the second world war the Military again took over the site that was used to mount powerful searchlights and as a station for developing experimental weapons systems.

One idea was to develop a bouncing bomb similar to the ones successfully used in an air attack on the dams in the Ruhr Valley.   In this application the notion was to mount them on a trolley that would be launched downhill on a pair of rails and then brought to an abrupt stop by buffers at the end.   The idea was that the bomb would be projected off the trolley and skip over the surface of the sea until hitting its target.

But in practice it was found so much momentum was built up that trolley and bomb burst through the buffers and the whole lot went over the cliff and straight into the sea. In the lower right of this photo you should be able to see the rails on which this happened.

Power of the Sea and the Bomb that Didn't Bounce

The photo also illustrates the height and power the sea can develop in these parts.    The building was designed to house one of the searchlights and had a projecting fringe to stop light from shining upwards. You can see the fringe has been torn off the rest of the roof and flipped backwards upon it.

Climbing up to the Brean Down ridge and cycling along it was the first expedition I made when I bought my new bike in 2012.     I repeated that journey this week though less speedily as another 4 years and loss of fitness has slowed me down more than a little.

Still, I made it and was rewarded with some good views of Weston Bay including this one in which a seagull was flying fast enough to beat the camera shutter speed.

Weston from Brean Down