Is this the best presented breakfast of an AirBnB host in Wales?
I think so! Anne Rees and her husband Frank were warm and
friendly hosts. I very much enjoyed staying in their beautiful house. I think
Anne could be a closet stylist. There are lovely vignettes all over the house, on shelves, on window sills and great attention to detail. She could easily have
got a job with Country Living Magazine. The garden was equally delightful with
several places where you could sit and sip something chilled delicious while nibbling
her fresh from the griddle welsh cakes (the only ones I tasted) enjoying the
fragrance of the planting and the birdsong – oblivious to the fact you were in
very busy capital city.
But time to stop wittering on about Country Living scenarios
and move on to England once more.
Driving in Wales is not a simple matter as all the signage
is in two languages and so it take drivers twice as long to read everything. I
think that must cause accidents particularly on fast roads where no-one makes
allowances for foreigners in hired cars with Welsh number plates or even me in
an English car with English number plates.
Why don’t they use two different fonts? One for the English
words and one for the Welsh?
Or as they do in Scotland, use two different colours?
Only a suggestion....
Another interesting thing is that you have to pay to come
into Wales on the Bridge over the river Severn but you do not pay to leave the
country. I wonder why that is?
By passed Bristol and saw what looked like an almost life
sized whale made of willow or wire or something just poking out of a field beside
the main road - the head and then the huge tail. Super!
As I went by the Clifton Suspension bridge a
minute or two later, I spotted two men in hard hats suspended from it. You can
just about see them in these photos. Rather them than me!
Weston Super mare was not particularly super. No idea what
this is supposed to be in the town centre.
Does it light up at night I wonder? As usual I asked the
locals for a must see must do list. The two young men in the pound shop said
there was nothing to see in the town except the pier. Mmm... seen a lot of those
on my travels. They did have one of those big wheel things on the beach that
Brighton has just surrendered in favour of their new i360.
Maybe Brighton flogged it to Weston Super Mare. One thing
they do have that Brighton doesn’t is a vast amount of sand. At the far end of
the town, as far away from the amusement arcades as you can get and still be in
the town, the car park is on the sand.
But you have to be careful. It isn’t also known as Weston Super Mud for no reason.
However, all that sand is used to create their annual sand
sculpture festivals which have been going on since 2005. The sculptures are
made of sand and water and are extraordinarily good.
The theme for this year was ‘When I grow up’ and although
some of the ideas for the theme came from the public, they are created by
professional artists. The exhibition is on the promenade and its open from
March to October at £4 a ticket. If you go on the website you can see some of
the work from past years in their picture gallery. www.westonsandsculpture.co.uk
These two JCB shifting sand at the far end of the promenade looked
as if they were practising building sand castles.
I would have loved to have seen the Dismaland that Banksy
the Bristol artist, set up there last year but sadly it was a short term
attraction and it has already gone.
Sometimes it pays not to resist the Unruly Sat. Nav. I
ignored her instructions to take the motorway and regretted it. Since Bristol I
am obviously not the only tourist in the land. It is July and now the roads are
jammed with sheer weight of everyday traffic, holiday makers including cars
pulling caravans and the inevitable road works. I added an hour to my journey
in traffic holdups so I gave in and let Unruly Sat Nav have her way.
She took me through the Quantock hills. At a tiny village
called Wheddon Cross I stopped for petrol and was offered a free cup of hot
chocolate from a little Budgens store which had just taken delivery of a
customer coffee dispensing machine and wanted to ensure it was working.
The Sat Nav. Took me along narrow single track roads in
North Devon (A3358) where I only got tantalizing glimpses of Exmoor through the
occasional gaps in hedges the height of double decker buses until eventually I
arrived in Ilfracombe.
It is a very hilly town with two distinct parts, not
dissimilar to the old fishing towns in Scotland. The old part is clustered
round the harbour in Fore Street where the original fishermen lived.
Then the town expanded up the hills when the ‘gentlemen’ built their houses in the Victorian heyday of English seaside resorts.
Damien Hirst, he of dead things cut up and passed off as
art, lives in Combe Martin the small town just outside Ilfracombe. He has
created another controversial piece called Verity and she stands on the harbour
in Ilfracombe.
At first glance and from one angle the 65 foot sculpture
looks like a strong young women holding aloft a sword a bit like the actress
Jennifer Lawrence in the role of the young woman in the Hunger Games Trilogy.
However, look closer and it is less appealing. Her flesh is flayed and her face
half skull and her body ripped open to show an unborn fetus...
Controversial certainly, and it makes me wonder about a man
who makes his name depicting horror, death and rotting flesh. Opinion is
divided amongst the locals. It is bringing visitors to the town and the town
needs the tourism because they come to stare and comment, then to eat, drink
and sleep. So grateful he doesn’t live in my town.
Mr. Hirst has also set up a restaurant in the town and a
small art gallery so he is doing what he can to help tourism, but like so many
seaside resorts that I have visited on my 80 days, Ilfracombe has not kept up
with changing times, and I think it is struggling to find its niche in a world
where tourists are more sophisticated and expect more than a seedy boarding
house and fish and chips.
The Landmark theatre is a strange looking building.
I
thought it was a brick kiln. It was built to replace the Victorian Theatre, but
my hosts in Ilfracombe, Hilary and Robin who have been hoteliers in the town in
the past, say it is not as the council
originally planned it and it is known locally as Madonna’s bra! They are
concerned that with the demolition of the Winter Garden there are no
attractions in the town for tourists if it rains. Tourism is seasonal, and in
the case of Ilfracombe, where the Landmark only seats 400 and rules itself out
for conferences, there is nothing else for the young people in terms of work. So, like Hilary and Robin's kids, they have to leave the town for jobs.
It makes me appreciate Eastbourne.
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