Dinner in the Bournemouth hotel was not good. Standard
coach party variety ‘four courses for a tenner’ and all pre-prepared and pre-cooked. But at least it wasn’t fish and
chips, and the delightful Hungarian waiter found me amusing enough to give me
twelve after dinner mints with my coffee!
Yesterday’s grid locked southern Britain coast roads made Ros and I very wary of going into Southampton or Portsmouth on this part of my trip.
Far from this being a one off life event, I intend to make this journey again as soon as I have saved up and go
clockwise, arriving at the East coast of
Britain in July rather that the South West. I will make good on all the bits I have had to miss and visit places on
the Suffolk coast and the South coast with more time to explore. Like Bill
Bryson, but not leaving it so long between revisits.
But today we are heading to Eastbourne so that I can drop
Ros off and save her a seven hour train journey.
Ros managed to get a full refund on her train ticket
while I was being screamed at by a woman taxi driver in a yellow cab for pulling
up to wait for Ros in front of the railway station.
"Move your f..king a..e off the crossing you f..ing
imbecile!” she screeched out of her window, pulling up beside me.
"I’m not on the crossing. As you can see - I’m in front of it. I’m not preventing anyone
from crossing, and there aren’t any yellow lines."
"Are you f..king
blind? You are blocking the taxi exit!”
"If I were, and I am not, how did you get out?" I asked very
reasonably given her unnecessarily aggressive communication and wondering what
the poor fare paying passengers thought of her demonstrating a tendency to
episodes of road rage.
“What do you think those f—king parking bays are for
then?” she shouted, driving past me tyres squealing.
Fact - I am not local and this is not my railway
station and I had not seen the row of parking bays until she mentioned
them. I think she could have handled it
differently. And thank goodness she is
not driving me anywhere.
Ros back on board, we took a left off the jammed roads
outside Bournemouth and found ourselves travelling across country, through
leafy lanes and towering trees, towards Lymington in the New Forest. And
the sun came out.
In a tiny village called Sway, in Hampshire, we spotted what had to be a folly. It was
extremely tall and seemed to have curtains at the windows so it was possibly inhabited
by someone, though being 13 stories high and so narrow, how did anyone get up to the top?
We Googled it in a lay-by and Google suggested it was 66
metres high and a grade 2 listed building and the first concrete building to
have been erected in Britain. The chap
who built it was Andrew Thomas Turton Peterson, a highly colourful
character who had run away to sea as a boy, travelled in India, become a
lawyer, made a fortune as lawyers tend to do, and retired to Hampshire and
built the tower.
I thought it was a
lighthouse but also thought it wasn’t near enough to the sea. I was right and wrong. It can be seen from the Solent and Trinity
House, in charge of Lighthouses round
our coastline, forbade a light at the top in case it confused
shipping!! There is a suggestion that Mr. Peterson is buried at the top!
On to Lymington, which has become one of my favourite towns of
the whole trip. The market was in full swing and what a great weekly market it
is – as good as anything I have seen anywhere.
The town was buzzing. What a shame we weren’t staying in
the New Forest. I would have liked to explore little villages further but it’s
a good reason to revisit perhaps later in the year.
A sandwich in a favourite hotel of Ros’s and we were off
again into the New Forest National Park.
I was still hoping to glimpse some of the New Forests
famous wild horses. I wasn’t disappointed
We saw cattle, horses and donkeys on the roads and on the
verges beside the roads. At one point a
large white stallion who had been placidly munching grass in the verge as we
approached, got spooked and reared up and came rushing straight onto the road
towards us. I slammed on my brakes just in time to avoid him crashing down on
top of Gloria. Since we had the roof down he would have done all of us serious
damage, not to mention harming himself.
The cars behind me saw what was happening and fortunately
we all managed to avoid the potential nasty accident.
The village of Bosham was our next stop because I had
heard somewhere that in the churchyard at Bosham was the grave of the young
daughter of the famous King Canute. I wondered if it were true.
Bosham was busy. It was holding its annual church summer
fete, a quintessentially English affair in the manor house
with stalls...
Strawberries and cream with plastic champagne glasses
full of chilled Prosecco
(yep your eyes do
not deceive – one and a half glasses each as it was three for two!)
Plastic duck races and a brass band.
Bosham is one of
the prettiest villages on the south coast. Ros learnt to sail here in the Dark
Ages. It has art galleries and craft shops to attract visitors and pretty
houses but I was interested in the church.
Holy Trinity Church is probably one of the oldest Saxon
churches in Sussex.
It’s mentioned in
the Bayeux tapestry...
which was a record of the events leading up to the
invasion of England by William the Conqueror in 1066. It has links therefore
with Westham and Pevensey Bay near
Eastbourne and Hastings.
I discovered that what I had heard is a long held
tradition rather than a fact, that King Canute young daughter was drowned in
the mill stream and was buried in the church. In 1865 a small stone coffin was
found in front of the chancel arch. No one knows if it is the princesses coffin for sure but
it brings tourists in anyway.
We got back to Eastbourne in time for Ros to be collected
by Crispin and taken back to Wittersham in comfort.
I managed to avoid detection from my neighbours and slept in my own bed for the
first time tonight in 76 days but I did
not unpack anything, for tomorrow, I intend to rewind and go back along the
coast to complete my journey the way I had originally planned stopping in Worthing and then in Brighton.
