Puzzlewood and The Kymin: Forest of Dean Part 3

An Unusual Wood and a Gentleman's Picnic House Above the River Wye

Puzzlewood

Gloucestershire

Forest of Dean

We had intended to visit Puzzlewood yesterday, but missed the sign and went on to the Clearwell Caves. That could have been that, but we were in no particular rush to get home today, and when we talked to our daughter last night, she brought up Puzzlewood and strongly recommended we go. So we did.

The owners are developing Puzzlewood as a family attraction, but we felt we could ignore the play area and the farm animals, though I could not resist a photo of a chicken – a silkie, I believe, originally a native of China.

A silkie at Puzzlewood

The wood itself is a remarkable landscape; a confusion of boulders, trees and twisted roots, covered with a rain-forest thick layer of moss. We followed the forest paths, which divided and then looped back on themselves and then divided again.

Puzzlewood

Navigation was a minor puzzle and there are no maps but the fields on the far side are only 300m away, and if we walked further than that to get there, we were usually going in the right direction.

Puzzlewood and a 'rickety bridge'

There are fairy doors, and rickety bridges (though more firmly constructed than they are made to look)  and places to pause and access the Puzzlewood app – provided your phone (unlike ours) has the right operating system - but what makes the landscape unique to the Forest of Dean and unusual even within it are the scowles.

Scowle, Puzzlewood

Scowles are labyrinthine defiles several metres deep, though in many places the sides have been eroded into discrete blocks of stone.

An eroded scowle

Long thought to be the remnants of iron-age open-cast iron ore extraction, geologist now believe them to be natural features, though enlarged and exploited by mining activity.

A Gloucester County Council archaeological information sheet entitled The Scowles of the Forest of Dean suggests the present view is that they originated as a natural underground cave system which formed in the Carboniferous Limestones of the Forest of Dean many millions of years ago. Uplift and erosion eventually caused this cave system to become exposed at the surface. The exposed caves were rich in iron ore were easy pickings for the earliest miners and their work and further erosion produced the landscape we see today.

Lynne plods up through another scowle

Our daughter had been right, Puzzlewood is well worth a visit and we spent over an hour wandering round in the wood. Returning to the café we drank cappuccinos (cappuccini?) beneath a sizeable sword. Looking closer, I learned that it was made of Valyrian steel and was formerly the property of Eddard Stark.

The Valyrian steel sword known as Ice wielded by Eddard Stark (allegedly)

I am not aware of Puzzlewood being a location in Game of Thrones, but it does feature in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, four separate episodes of Dr Who, two episodes of Merlin and the BBC’s 2016 adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream. JRR Tolkien was a frequent visitor and used the wood as a template for some of Middle Earth’s Forests, and maybe Harry Potter’s ‘Forbidden Forest’ is also a relative.

The Kymin

Monmouthshire

It was time to leave the Forest of Dean so we headed west towards Monmouth which lies beside the River Wye and – more importantly to us – the A40.

We were still a mile or two short of Monmouth when we passed a Croeso i Gymru sign; we had entered our ancestral homeland but were still east of the Wye. I had always believed the border ran along the River Monnow to its confluence with the Wye and then down the Wye to the coast, but not so - for reasons known only to long dead cartographers there is a fun-sized chunk of Wales on the wrong side of the Wye opposite Monmouth.

Always a welcome sight to the exile

Having left the Forest of Dean, in political fact if not quite in spirit, we turned off the main road, following the National Trust signs to The Kymin. The road, narrow with the occassional hairpin, climbed steadily from the Wye Valley to a viewpoint 250m above the river.

In the late 18th /early 19th centuries "the principal Gentlemen of Monmouth and its vicinity" formed the Monmouth Picnic Club or Kymin Club (from the Welsh Cae y Maen – Field of Stones) "for the purpose of dining together, and spending the day in a social and friendly manner". Everyone enjoys a picnic in good weather, but the Monmouthshire weather gods are a fickle bunch, so Philip Meakins Hardwick suggested building a roundhouse for "security from the inclemency of the weather". The members, headed by the Duke of Beaufort and 8 MPs paid subscriptions and building started in 1794.

The Kymin

The Kymin, as it became known, had kitchens on the ground-floor and a banqueting room above. The view is spectacular and the banqueting room was – and still is - equipped with a telescope. In time the club ran out of steam and eventually the building became a dwelling. That ceased in the early 20th century when the roundhouse was restored and duly found its way into the care of the National Trust.

Banqueting Room, The Kymin

The view is variously said to encompass nine or ten counties. Monmouth is a long way down beside the river and a great deal of effort would be required to drag a picnic/banquet all this way. I doubt that troubled the members, they had servants for that sort of thing and all they had to do was trot up on their nags – a little more effort than my driving up, but they could park closer to the house.

Monmouth and the Wye Valley from the Kymin

The Naval Temple

In 1800, to commemorate the second anniversary of Nelson’s victory at the Battle of the Nile and in recognition of the victories of fifteen other Royal Navy Admirals, the Kymin Club built The Naval Temple.

Tne Naval Temple, The Kymin

This was the early days of tourism; the Wye Valley was prime tourist country and Nelson himself came floating down the river with Lady Hamilton and her husband Sir William Hamilton (as a prize gooseberry). Nelson was greeted by a cannonade and the band of the Monmouthshire Militia playing See, the Conquering Hero Comes (they don’t do that for tourists these days, or was it just me?). During his brief stay in Monmouth, Nelson breakfasted at the roundhouse and visited the Naval Temple of which he said "it was the only monument of its kind erected to the Royal Navy in the Kingdom," which was diplomatic. Others have been more forthright, ‘In very bad taste,’ said antiquarian, archaeologist and artist Sir Richard Colt Hoare in 1803 while architectural historian John Newman has described it as ‘hard to come to terms with.’ And this retired maths teacher and artistic ignoramus agrees with Hoare and Newman - and no doubt he will find that a great relief.

Naval Temple, The Kymin

[Afterthought: November 2019] Being in Wales all the signs were bilingual. It might be worth mentioning that Welsh was the main language of the Forest of Dean until the 9th century, ‘scowles’ probably deriving from the Welsh ‘ysgil’ meaning ‘a recess’. If the English electorate support Boris Johnson’s plan to break up the United Kingdom, then Wales will probably cling on to England like Montenegro clung to Serbia, but in the end it will go. And then maybe we will want our forest back.

And so we left the Kymin and headed home.

Forest of Dean

Part 1: Into the Dean, Goodrich and The Speech House

Part 2:Coleford and Around

Part 3:Puzzlewood and The Kymin

Up a Mountain down Memory Lane: Taff's Well, Pentyrch and Tongwynlais

Sat 22-Aug-2015

A Plan to Climb the Garth

Wales
The Garth is in the County of Cardiff (red)
north of the city

'For my sixtieth birthday' Lynne's sister Julia had said, 'I want to climb the Garth - and we could gather as many of our cousins as possible to do it with us.'

And so, some months before her birthday, while the weather was still amenable, we met in Pentyrch to set off on this not quite epic ascent. The gathering of cousins though was not a great success; Lynne and Julia have six cousins, but only cousin Nick was available. Even so with partners, offspring and offspring’s offspring, 11 people gathered for the team photo outside the cemetery on the corner of Heol-y-Bryn and Temperance Court (yes it really is called that) and Julia’s daughter Alison became the twelfth when she caught us up twenty minutes later.

Team photo, Pentyrch
(only ten people? Well, I'm behind the camera.)

And why climb the Garth? Because for Lynne and Julia it is a trip down (or perhaps, up) memory lane. It is a hill or mountain they climbed many times in their childhood, and it is a mountain or hill with a story.

Taff's Well and Doctor Ifor Monger

That story starts with Dr Monger. Lynne spent the first nine years of her life (and Julia the first four) in Tongwynlais. The village, a little to the north of Cardiff, is a line of shops and dwellings beside what was once the main road north from Cardiff up the valley of the River Taff to Merthyr. The modern A470 is a dual carriageway that by-passes all the villages that once straggled along it, though the valley topography means it does not always by-pass them by much.

Dr Monger was their family doctor though his surgery was in Taff’s Well, the next village/straggle to the north. Everyone thought highly of Dr Monger and Lynne used to share his homespun philosophy with me, sometimes quite forcefully. Much of it involved ‘wrapping up warm in cold weather’ - to which I have always taken a cavalier attitude. Although I never met him I developed quite a healthy dislike for Dr Monger, though to be fair, it was probably not his fault; he was, by all accounts, a first class, old-school, family doctor.

Lynne thinks this was Dr Monger's house and surgery, Taff's Well

The Garth stands above Taff’s Well and Tongwynlais, but we set off from Pentyrch on the other side of the hill as the climb is much easier. Sitting higher on the hillside, Pentyrch is less linear and more upmarket than Taff’s Well and Tongwynlais. Lynne’s father was born and brought up here and his brother (Lynne’s Uncle Lynn) lived here until his death last year.

The Garth above Taff's Well

Setting off from Pentrych

We walked up Temperance Court and turned into Mountain Road.

Up the Mountain Road, Lynne, Small, Julia, Arthur

Where the minor road swings left to cross the pass and descend into Efail Isaf, we turned right towards the open hillside.

Onto the open hillside

Christopher Monger and 'The Englishman Who Went up a Hill but Came Down a Mountain'

Dr Monger was more than just a doctor; he was a talented amateur artist and a writer with several novels and short stories to his credit, some of which are still in print. His son Christopher inherited the artistic streak, becoming a professional artist, writer and film director. His best known film The Englishman Who Went up a Hill but Came Down a Mountain starred Hugh Grant as the Englishman of the title with the Irish Colm Meaney (taking time off from keeping the Deep Space 9 space station functioning) and Anglo-Irish Tara Fitzgerald both pretending to be Welsh.

The Englishman Who Went up a Hill and Came down a Mountain, (Borrowed from Wikipedia)

The film, a whimsical romantic comedy, is based on a story told to Christopher Monger by his grandfather, and the writer’s credit goes jointly to Christopher Monger, his father (Dr) Ifor David Monger, and grandfather Ivor Monger, though both the elder Mongers were long dead when the film was released in 1995. It is set in 1917 when an arrogant English surveyor arrives in Taff’s Well (Ffynnon Taf) which is fictionalized as Ffynnon Garw (Rough Well). The name might be inspired by Nantgarw a mile or two up the valley, or it may be a little dig at Taff’s Well. Although it is hardly a picture postcard village….

Taff's Well

…. it does have some fine, sturdy Edwardian buildings as well as many of the 19th century workers cottages that abound throughout industrial South Wales.

Sturdy Edwardian buildings, Taff's Well

He surveyed the local mountain, 'Our mountain, the first mountain in Wales' and discovers to the horror of the locals that it was just under 1000ft and therefore not a mountain but a hill. As ‘the grandfather’ says:Is it a hill, is it a mountain? Perhaps it wouldn't matter anywhere else, but this is Wales. The Egyptians built pyramids, the Greeks built temples, but we did none of that, because we had mountains. Yes, the Welsh were created by mountains: where the mountain starts, there starts Wales. If this isn't a mountain well… then Anson [the surveyor] might just as well redraw the border and put us all in England, God forbid.’

The wily and, it must be said, eccentric, locals devise a plan to delay the surveyor’s departure while they build an earthwork on the summit. The hill is resurveyed and now, lo and behold, it is over 1000ft and secure in its classification as a mountain.

The pimple on the broad back of the Garth

The Summit of the Garth, the the Truth about its Height

It is a steady climb, but not very steep and it does not go on for too long, indeed the youngest member of the party was among the first to reach the top of the hog’s back. The summit sits on a pimple at, according to the Ordnance Survey, 307m. The magical 1000ft mark has disappeared with metrication - and it is a fiction that this modest height ever ‘officially’ defined a mountain.

'I've climbed my first mountain. Now, which way is Everest?'

But 307m is 1,007ft, and if 1000ft makes a mountain then the Garth is a mountain only because of the pimple. So it happened just as the Mongers, grandfather, father and son told it and the pimple exists solely to make the Garth a mountain. Sadly, Pentyrch Community Council and the Pentyrch Local Historical Association disagree. According to their plaque at its base, the pimple is the largest of four Early-Middle Bronze Age Circular Burial mounds on the Garth dating not from 1917 but around 2000BC. You may believe whichever story pleases you.

Nick, Lucy, Henry and Anne on the summit

The youngest member of the party was the first to leave the pimple and lead us to the end of the ridge where there is a 20th century earthwork of non-obvious purpose.

Come on you lot, let's get on

There are fine views south over the city of Cardiff and the Bristol Channel, reputedly as far east as the Severn Bridge, though that was hiding in the mist. The view north to the Treforest Industrial Estate, Church Village and Llantwit Fadre is less pleasing though the Brecon Beacons were perhaps visible in the far distance.

Cardiff and the Bristol Channel from the Garth

At the very end of the ridge looking down on Taff’s Well the linear nature of settlement in the Welsh valleys was obvious….

Taff's Well from the Garth

… and, looking a little south, the turrets of Castell Coch could be seen poking out from the trees on the opposite side of the valley.

Castell Coch from the Garth

We returned through the bracken on the flank of the hill, at one point braving an infestation of midges which for a few yards meant the air was so thick with insects they got down your neck, up your nose and into your mouth. Thereafter the descent was straightforward.

Turning back through the bracken, the Garth

Dinner in the Cwrt Rawlin Inn

All 12 of us met again for dinner in the Cwrt Rawlin Inn on the edge of Caerphilly. It is a large family pub that Lynne and I have visited before and were impressed by the friendliness and efficiency of the young staff. They did not disappoint, and while the Cwrt Rawlin could never be accused of being a gastropub, their food is wholesome enough and very reasonably priced. Thereafter Nick and family returned to Bristol while the rest of us crossed the road to the Caerphilly Travelodge.

Julia and Alison.
I know this picture is in the wrong place, but Alison did catch us up, and as there is no other picture of her.....

Sunday 23-Aug-2015

Castell Coch

Friday had been a day of rain. On Saturday we had walked in a window of glorious sunshine, but it rained while we were in the pub, rained overnight and was still raining in the morning, the mist sitting low on the hills.

Castell Coch, Tongwynlais

Anyone who has driven down the M4 past Cardiff will have noticed the turrets of a fairy tale castle rising above the trees just north of the road. This is Castell Coch; it sits in the woods above Tongwynlais and is exactly the sort of place an imaginative four year old would like to visit on a wet Sunday morning. It also has a family connection - Lynne's grandmother was once a cleaner here.

On the drawbridge of Castell Coch, where an imaginative four year old would want to be

It looks like a fairy tale castle because, for the most part,it is. The foundations and the first metre or two of the towers were built by Gilbert de Clare in the 13th century, everything above that is Victorian.

The Coutyard, Castell Coch

Gilbert de Clare, the Norman Earl of Gloucester, has appeared in this blog before as the builder of castles at Llantrisant and Caerphilly. He was known as ‘Red Gilbert’ because of his hair colour or his fiery temperament (or both) and it is alleged that Castell Coch (Red Castle) was named for him. It was subsequently destroyed in a series of Welsh rebellions

Dubious turrets, Castell Coch

500 years later the ruins were acquired by John Stuart, Earl of Bute as part of a marriage settlement. Although they were of the Scottish nobility it was his great-grandson John Crichton-Stuart who built Cardiff docks to export the mineral riches of the interior and started the transformation of a small coastal settlement with barely 1,000 inhabitants in 1800 into a city which would become the capital of Wales.

The Dining Room, Castell Coch

His son, also called John Crichton-Stuart inherited the title in 1840. Extremely wealthy and with an interest in architecture and antiquarian studies he contracted William Burges to rebuild the castle. Burges was a fully paid up member of the Gothic revival and a drinking buddy of the Pre-Raphaelites and although the exterior is a reasonable historical pastiche (except for the fanciful pointed turrets) he let himself go on the interior, carefully locating the top, then going way over it.

The Drawing Room, Castell Coch, the The Fates over the fire place

Unsurprisingly the castle has featured in many film and television productions, Siân remembers it best for the opening sequence of Knightmare, an interesting and imaginative children’s programme that ran from 1987-94, while Lynne remembers being taken to see the filming of The Black Knight an Arthurian tosherama starring a badly miscast Alan Ladd with Peter Cushing and Harry Andrews as the Earl of Yeonil (that will be the Yeonil in Sonerset, then). The jury is out as to whether it is ‘so bad it’s good’ or just plain ‘bad’.

Lady Margaret's Bedroom. There were no ropes in the 1950s and a cleaner's granddaughter could run round, open all the drawers and climb on Lady Margaret's bed.

And then we all went home. Thanks to Julia for the idea, Nick and family for being there and making it a family occasion and to Siân and James for bringing 'the chap' who was, as always, the star (or am I biased?)

Commemorating Comedians in Caerphilly, Morecambe and Ulverston

Three Towns Commemorate their Favourite Sons

Tommy Cooper, Caerphilly, South Wales

County Borough of Caerphilly

When we visited in April 2009, Caerphilly looked a dismal town; shops were boarded up, paint was peeling, windows needed cleaning – those that were not broken – and many of the people look pale and unwell. It gives me no pleasure to write this; I may be a long exiled Welshman, but both sides of my family come from South Wales, as do Lynne’s (her mother actually attended Caerphilly Grammar School), and it remains a part of my somewhat complex concept of ‘home’. There are still many pleasant and prosperous places in the region, but I fear that Caerphilly is typical of too many towns struggling to adjust to the post-industrial world.

The centre is dominated by one of Britain’s largest Norman castles. This should be a tourist attraction, and maybe it is, but on a dank April day the castle looked as dark and forbidding as Gilbert de Clare (see also Llantrisant and Castell Coch) could have hoped for when he began work in 1268.

Parc Dafydd Williams, Caerphilly

On the plus side, there is a pleasant garden which the town kindly chose to name after me (all right, it’s some other bloke with the same name, but it could have been). Nearby is a statue of Caerphilly’s favourite son.

Tommy Cooper was born in Caerphilly in 1921, though the family moved to Devon when he was three. His connection with the town is slim, but Caerphilly needs all the straws it can clutch. The statue, the work of James Done, was unveiled by Sir Anthony Hopkins in 2008.

Tommy Cooper and Caerphilly Castle

For those too young to remember, Tommy Cooper was a magician. Tall and ungainly with a fez stuck on his permanently dishevelled head, he looked nothing like the standard magician – and his tricks went wrong. From this simple premise he extracted humour which was sometimes simple, sometimes complex but always hilarious. An innately funny man, he could make an audience laugh by standing silent and motionless on stage, he was also a competent magician. Occasionally his tricks went right, just to keep everybody off balance.

He died on stage during a live televised show in 1984. At first, both the audience and stage crew thought the collapse was part of his act. Sadly it was not. A one-off and a true original, he died far too young.

Eric Morecambe, Morecambe, Lancashire

Lancashire

Morecambe

I have written about Morecambe Bay before (Morecambe Bay and Sunderland Point) but not about the town. A station and harbour were built beside the bay in 1846 and the town that grew up around them and absorbed the fishing village of Poulton-le-Sands eventually adopted the name of the bay. For a time Morecambe thrived, the railway bringing tens of thousands of holiday-makers each year, mainly from Yorkshire and southern Scotland.

In 2013, however, marketing Morecambe as a seaside resort seems a job for a hopeless optimist. With a beach of imported sand, and sea that only visits for a couple of hours a day, the cool, damp climate is the least of its disadvantages. Yet people still come here. The hinterland of north Lancashire and southern Cumbria is countryside of rare beauty, but surely it is only those who know no better - or can afford no better - that take a seaside holiday in Morecambe. Maybe Morecambe has its charms, if so I have missed them – I would be happy if anyone enlightened me.

The sea front at Morecambe

While the town took its name from the bay, Eric Morecambe took his name from the town where he was born in 1926. John Eric Bartholomew, as he was then, met Ernest Wiseman in 1940 and the double act of Bartholomew and Wiseman was born. Separated for a while by national service, they reunited, changed their names to Morecambe and Wise and the rest is history.

The Morecambe and Wise show was a Saturday prime time fixture for well over a decade and the Christmas special was compulsory viewing. With a script that was not actually replete with jokes, Eric’s clowning and ad-libbing regularly reduced my mother to a quivering heap. The quality of guests was legendary, serious actors, like Judi Dench and Glenda Jackson, serious musicians, like André Previn, and serious politicians, like Harold Wilson, queued up to be the butt of their jokes.

Eric died in 1984, the month after Tommy Cooper. Like Cooper he died of a heart attack, but unlike Cooper he managed to finish his show before collapsing backstage.

A statue of Eric Morecambe by sculptor Graham Ibbeson has pride of place on the town’s sea front. Before the Olympics the Queen did not do guests spots on other people’s shows, but she did came to Morecambe to unveil Eric’s statue in 1999.

Eric Morecambe on the Morecambe Sea Front

Eric and Ernie brought the double act to such a pitch of perfection they effectively killed it. Humour does not always cross the generations, but my mother was one of his greatest fans and my daughter can sometimes be heard quoting him, though she was only three when he died.

Stan Laurel, Ulverston, Cumbria

Cumbria

Traditionally a detached part of Lancashire, but since 1972 officially Cumbria, the Furness peninsula is a strange sort of place. Travelling south, the Lake District hills flatten out into land scarred by ancient glacial activity, riven by broad sandy estuaries and fringed by desolate salt marshes. The unlovely industrial town of Barrow lies at the tip of the peninsula while at the base is the small, neat market town of Ulverston.

County Square is hardly the focal point of the cluster of handsome old buildings that make up central Ulverston, but it does seem to be considered the town centre.

County Square, Ulverston

Stan Laurel was born Stanley Arthur Jefferson in Ulverston in 1886. He came from a theatrical family, went into the business straight from school and joined Fred Karno’s troupe in 1910. In 1912 he toured America with the troupe (which also included Charlie Chaplin) and decided to stay. He was already a well-established actor and film director when he started working with Oliver Hardy in the late 1920s.

The statue of Stan and Ollie that stands outside Coronation Hall is, like that of Eric Morecambe, by Graham Ibbeson. It was unveiled by Ken Dodd in 2009.

Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy outside Coronation Hall, Ulverston

Ulverston also has a Laurel and Hardy museum, but it was closed for ‘major refurbishment’ when we visited – what did we expect on a cold wet January morning? Laurel and Hardy were no doubt funny in their day, but I doubt modern audiences find much to laugh at. That said, they were innovators in their field, they were the first major double act in film history, and they were successful in both silent and talking pictures, so they must have had something.

My mother met them when they were touring Britain in the late 1940s. They came to the Ideal Home exhibition and visited the stand where she was demonstrating cookery techniques. Her verdict: ‘a pair of silly old fools.’