Abergavenny and The Walnut Tree

Over the Welsh Border to a Town of Charm and History and a Once Great Restaurant Recently Restored to Glory

Wedding anniversary dinners have become a tradition over the last few years, and this year we went to Abergavenny to celebrate our 35th. 35th? Surely that can’t be right - but it is. Where did all those years go?

Abergavenny Castle

It’s a pleasant, prosperous looking little town, Abergavenny. It has a castle and a museum, water meadows where we strolled in sunshine beside the tumbling River Usk, an ancient church and an 11th century Tithe Barn containing a 21st century café and exhibition. And it’s full of people who welcome you and tell you things you never knew you wanted to know but are actually quite interesting.



Abergavenney Tithe Barn

We visited on the wrong day for the market, but the town has long had a foodie reputation, and the first and foremost reason for that, and for our visit, is The Walnut Tree restaurant a few miles away in the hamlet of Llanddewi Skirrid.

Opened in 1963 by Franco and Ann Taruschio, The Walnut Tree was once a beacon in an era of gastronomic darkness. They maintained the highest of standards for over thirty years, but after their retirement the restaurant fell on hard times. It eventually closed in 2007 despite, or maybe because of, featuring in the first of Gordon Ramsey’s restaurant rescue series. It reopened in 2008 and Shaun Hill, who held a Michelin star at the Merchant House in Ludlow, has returned the restaurant to its former glory and to Michelin star status.


The Walnut Tree, Llandewi Skirrid near Abergavenney

Restaurant reviews traditionally start with the décor. That’s not my interest, but I did notice that we sat in a rustic style bar for our pre-prandial Pernod before going through to a restaurant which was much bigger inside than it appeared from the outside. Not all the twenty four tables were full on the day of our visit

Tinned tongue used to be a Saturday lunch regular in my youth, but I haven't seen it for years. Lynne’s starter of poached tongue bore only a slight resemblance to the Sixties stand-by. Thin slices of tongue surrounded a salad of rocket and green beans like the petals of a flower. Such soft and exquisite meat with a fine, delicate flavour required, and got, a salad with a gentle and unemphatic dressing. It seems a shame that tongue is so rarely available in supermarkets.

My monkfish sat on what the menu called a tomato, ginger and chilli sauce, though it was actually half way between a sauce and a salsa. If the tail was char grilled to perfection, the deceptively simple sauce was possessed of magical properties. At first it seemed merely tomato, then the ginger emerged, growing gently to dominance before finally the chilli ran a little dance round the edge. Another forkful was required to see if it happened again. I could quibble by saying a sauce should accompany the fish, not vice versa, but it was too good to bother with such trifles.

Sadly, Lynne's main course sole was also char grilled, and what may be appropriate for a robust monkfish was far less suitable for a delicate sole. It was over cooked and over-charred. A complaint brought an offer of an alternative main course (but by then it was already eaten and the human stomach is finite) but no apology and no visitation from the chef to discuss the issue.

I had rack of lamb on a casserole of spring vegetables. The tender, pink chops were from the youngest of lambs and provided texture, while the lamb breast in what was really a cawl beneath provided as much sheepy flavour as anyone could want. The spring vegetables, even the remarkably earthy potatoes, were packed with flavour and freshness.

We took a rest for digestion and to finish our wine. With the mix of fish and meat we had required two half bottles, thus effectively reducing the vast wine list to about a dozen choices. For the white we chose a Chardonnay from the Ste Michelle winery in Washington (the west coast state, not the east coast capital city), the red was a Gigondas from a well know producer. I ordered the Chardonnay with trepidation; during our time in Washington we learned that the locals had no great regard for their state's oldest and largest producer. But that was twenty five years ago, this unoaked chardonnay was light bodied but had varietal character, good acidity and a pleasing dryness. The Gigondas, though, was disappointing. I always look at the appellation and the bottler, but need to remember to check out the vintage; I am sure this will open up in a few years and be a fine wine, but it was too young, too dark and too closed to live up to expectations.

Lynne’s dessert involved intensely flavoured redcurrant and blackcurrant sorbets presented in a brandy snap basket. I had Bakewell tart with a scoop of vanilla ice-cream. When I was little and holidays meant two weeks with my grandmother in Porthcawl, a visit to Borza's ice-cream parlour was a special treat. Their ice-cream was like nothing else I had tasted and I used to spend weeks anticipating the visit. The secret, I know now, was real vanilla; while the rest of the world used vanilla as a synonym for 'plain', Borza's treated it with respect. Borza's is long gone from Porthcawl and many of the Borza clan now lie beneath a modest mausoleum in the municipal cemetery (just across the path from my grandmother). This scoop of vanilla ice-cream took me back to my childhood and was undoubtedly the best I have eaten for fifty years. The Bakewell tart became something of a sideshow, so its amazing lightness was almost unappreciated, and its lack of jammy/marzipanny flavours somewhat overlooked. I drank an Austrian Beerenauslese with the Bakewell tart which was, in its very different way, as sweet, subtle and wonderful as the ice-cream.

Overall, four and three quarter wonderful dishes out of six, is not bad, but the amuse-bouche were no more than a tiny cheesy biscuit and the limp cherry hiding in the petit fours was disappointingly slimy. The meal was touched with greatness, as it should be in any Michelin starred restaurant, but there were faults, too. Maybe we were unlucky on the day, but we have eaten better at this price elsewhere.

'Fine Dining' posts

Abergavenny and the Walnut Tree (2010)
Ludlow and La Bécasse (2011) (restaurant closed, post withdrawn)
Ilkley and The Box Tree(2012)
Pateley Bridge and the Yorke Arms (2013) (No longer a restaurant, post renamed Parceval Gardens and Pateley Br)
The Harrow at Little Bedwyn (2014)
The Slaughters and the Lords of the Manor (2015)
Loam, Fine Dining in Galway (2016)
Penarth and Restaurant James Sommerin (2017) (restaurant closed, post withdrawn. JS has a new restaurant in Penarth)
The Checkers, Montgomery (2017) (no longer a restaurant, post withdrawn. Now re-opened under new management)
Tyddyn Llan, Llandrillo, Denbighshire (2018)
Fischer's at Baslow Hall, Derbyshire (2019)
Hambleton Hall, Rutland (2021)
The Olive Tree, Queensberry Hotel, Bath (2022)
Dinner at Pensons near Tenbury Wells (2023) (restaurant closed Dec 2023, post withdrawn)
The Cross, Kenilworth (& Kenilworth Castle) 2024

Alexandria

The new Library of Alexandria

One August evening in 1966 the SS Nevasa docked at Alexandria carrying over a thousand sixth formers on one of the then fashionable ‘educational cruises’. In the morning, the students embarked on a fleet of buses bound for Cairo.

Me aged 15 and the Sphynx, aged 4500
August 1966

I was one of the youngest of those students, a few weeks short of my sixteenth birthday and taking my first steps outside Western Europe. It changed my life. We drove through the delta and were then shown the pyramids, the Egyptian museum and the citadel. I still recall marvelling at the donkeys and the palm trees in the delta, at the heat and the honking traffic in the city and at the colours and the costumes everywhere. I particularly remember sitting in front of the Sphinx and telling myself ‘you are here, you are really here’ and slapping my leg to prove it was no dream. I had not believed it possible to actually stand beside something so fabulous and remote. I had seen the pyramids in books and until then I had assumed that in books they would remain.

To borrow a cliché, I thought it the ‘trip of a lifetime’. I had no idea how much easier and cheaper travel would become, and I was seriously underestimating the opportunities ‘a lifetime’ could throw up. I have been fortunate, and many more times, and in many more places, I have slapped my leg and told myself that yes, I was really there.

Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandrian Quartet had been on the reading list for the cruise – and I had diligently read the first book – but we had largely ignored the city in our rush to the pyramids, as thousands of cruise ship passengers still do today. Lynne and I have been to Cairo three times since then, but I had never been back to Alexandria and Lynne had never been there at all, so when we visited Cairo last month it seemed appropriate to rectify the omission.

One minor disappointment marred the Nevasa trip. Having driven south through the delta, we were scheduled to return by the desert road. I had never seen a desert and was excited by the prospect, but the road was closed and we had to return the way we came. This time there was no problem and although I have travelled through several deserts since, I still experienced a frisson of excitement as we set off in the relative quiet of a Cairo dawn.

The desert road might have been romatic in 1966, but today it is a six-lane highway. The poor maintenance and erratic traffic provided a little interest, but essentially the trip was as dull as a hundred motorway miles usually are. And we passed through scrubland on the edge of the cultivated delta rather than true desert.

Egypt’s Alexandria was one of several founded by Alexander the Great as he rampaged from Greece to India via North Africa. For defensive reasons he placed the city on the narrow strip of land dividing Lake Maryut (or Mareotis in Greek) from the sea. It thus became a long thin city and retained this shape even after outgrowing the confines of the lake. Today its 4 million people live in a 30 km strip along the Mediterranean coast, but the desert road from Cairo still arrives at the lake’s north shore before tracking round it.

Durrell describes a duck hunt on Mareotis. The well-healed participants were punted out to a pavilion on stilts where they spent the evening carousing. A short sleep and a hearty breakfast later they stealthily set out into the marshes for the dawn slaughter. With this in my head, I was unprepared for my first sight of the lake. We topped a slight rise to be confronted by a sheet of water, the far side lined with towering petro-chemical plants, their flares a dirty yellow against the clean morning sky. There are still ducks on the lake; sometimes they quack, sometimes they cough.

The Haramlik Palace, Alexandria

The pleasure grounds of Montazah lie at the city’s eastern end. For a small price, you can drive through well-tended gardens, around a few hotels and down to a series of private beaches. Ramadan was in August this year, the usual Cairene holiday month, so those who could took their holidays in July. The beaches, both private and public were full and Cairo was, allegedly, empty - though to me it looked as frenetic and crowded as ever. Also within Montazah, is the once royal palace of Haramlik, now a Presidental palace. In 1952, during the coup that would eventually bring the Alexandrian born Gamal Abdel Nasser to power, King Farouk fled from here into exile.

After leaving Montazah it became clear that nothing of interest is deemed to have happened in Alexandria between the burning of the Great Library in AD 293 and the opening of the new library in 2002.



The Roman Theatre
Alexandria

The Alexandria national museum is much newer than the Cairo museum. Many exhibits have a local and/or Ptolemaic provenance and are better displayed, but Cairo’s shear quantity of artefacts – never mind its ramshackle charm – makes this very much second best.



Pompey,s Column,
Alexandria

The Roman theatre is small, but beautifully preserved, while Pompey’s column is an impressive piece of masonry set on mound above a nilometer. It was actually erected by Diocletian rather than Pompey, but his name lacks the romantic cachet. Below the ground, lie a temple of Serapis and the Daughter Library. By 50 BC the Great Library of Alexandria contained over half a million manuscripts. As it continued to grow, it spawned this subsidiary ‘Daughter Library’. The Mother Library, stuffed with ‘pagan knowledge’ was torched by Christian mobs in 193 AD; her Daughter suffered a similar fate a century later.

The Catacombs of Kom es-Shoqfa are reputedly Alexandria’s most memorable monument. The largest Roman burial site in Egypt is entered by a spiral staircase seemingly screwed into the earth. There are family burial niches, a triclinium where relatives reclined on stone coaches to feast in honour memory of the dead, and an atmospheric central tomb guarded by bearded stone serpents and medusa-headed shields. There is also a ban on photography which is, I discovered, rigidly enforced.

One of the Seven Wonders of the World, The Pharos, was partly dismantled in 700 AD then reduced to rubble by an earthquake in 1303. We had a look at the toytown citadel of Fort Quaitbey, which replaced the building that replaced the Pharos. Down by the beach with the bathers and trinket sellers I struggled to get a feel for the place as it once had been.



The Fish Market
Alexandria

Lunch was a relief after so much antiquity. The Fish Market is an upmarket restaurant aimed at foreigners rather than an actual market; it might have been better if it was. The ‘salads’, perhaps mezze would be a better word, were excellent. We enjoyed the tahini, hummus, baba ghanoush and other dips we could not name, scooped up with flat Egyptian bread, but the unidentified fish seemed tired and the strips of squid had far more chew than is desirable.

Across the curve of the Eastern Harbour we could see the new library, a squashed spiral of ever-so shiny granite, sparkling in the sun. We drove round the almost elegant corniche (Michael Palin described it as ‘like Cannes with acne’) to Alexandria’s newest jewel. With a cultural centre and art galleries, in addition to many, many books, the striking building is a fitting successor to the great library of antiquity.

We spent most of the day being driven from ancient site to ancient site, but the modern city surrounds them and would itself repay exploration. I had naively assumed that because Alexandria was on the Mediterranean, and was once a Greek city, it would be wealthier and more liberal than Cairo. It was quickly obvious that neither was the case. Many streets looked poor and the women were even more covered up. Sharifa, our guide, told us of a Christian friend who moved to Cairo when her husband died because it was too difficult walking round without a headscarf – not that this troubled Sharifa, though she had come with us from Cairo. In the 1950s several hundred thousand Greeks remained in Alexandria, now there are virtually none. ‘Where have they gone?’ I asked. Sharifa shrugged. ‘Assimilated,’ she suggested, but with no great confidence.

E M Forster produced a guidebook to Alexandria; Lawrence Durrell and Nobel Prize winning poet C P Cavafy, wrote about the city in their different ways, and all described a formerly cosmopolitan metropolis in terminal decline. Modern Alexandria would point to the library as a sign of its rebirth, but there remains a sense that this once great city has been by-passed by history and overtaken by brash upstarts like Cairo. Alexandria, though, is still worth much more than a day trip and it is a shame that cruise passengers will continue to merely pass through on their way to somewhere else.

See also: When Aunty Edith went to Alexandria

When Aunty Edith went to Alexandria

The event, or rather non-event, related below did actually happen. Over the intervening forty years my imagination has played fast and loose with my memory, resulting, I suspect, in more than several embellishments. I cannot vouch for the literal truth of every word that follows, but it remains, I believe, true in spirit. All names (except Alexandria) have been changed to protect the guilty.

My Aunty Edith never had a good word to say about anyone. I would hate that to be said of me, so I shall hastily say a good word about Aunty Edith. Aunty Edith was a respectable woman. More precisely, Aunty Edith was a very respectable woman. Even more precisely, a teeth-clenchingly, eye-wateringly respectable lady. Unfortunately, she rarely showed others the respect she took as her due.

She once requested investment advice, and her bank duly sent an advisor to see her. ‘My dear,’ I heard her tell my grandmother afterwards, ‘he was the most peculiar looking person.’ This could have meant his hair was too long, or too short; his tie was too bright, or too drab; his lapels were too wide, or too thin. Maybe he had used a ball-point instead of a fountain pen, written with his left hand, or had sat in the wrong chair. Good forbid that he had a beard or his eyes were too close together or (whisper it quietly) he wore brown shoes. There were many ways to transgress against Aunty Edith’s largely arbitrary, and not entirely consistent, code of behaviour.

We can probably be sure that in a small town on the South Wales coast in the 1960’s the advisor was not from an ethnic minority. Aunty Edith would have had difficulty understanding the concept of racism; everybody was inferior to her and it was thus axiomatic that the more different a person was, the more inferior they must be. Having brown skin was, without doubt, several degrees worse then wearing brown shoes, but to Aunty Edith it was all part of a continuum.

Like many unconscious racists, her racism started at home. She often spoke disparagingly of the ‘Welshies’ – a word I have never heard anyone else use. That she herself was Welsh; born in the Valleys with the maiden name Thomas, and speaking with an accent that could come from nowhere else, never seemed to cross her mind. The Welshies were the ‘working classes’, the ‘great unwashed’, the little people whose existence she regretted but without whom life would have been impossible.

Aunty Edith was not, I am happy to say, actually a relation. She was married to one of my grandmother’s many cousins. Godfrey Bevan was a mild mannered man and a banker by profession (think Captain Mainwearing, not million pound bonuses). He and Edith had no children and, for some reason, he spent as much time out of the house as possible. He spent a lot of that time at the ‘Corsairs,’ a drinking club down by the harbour. Godfrey died in the mid 1960’s. I will not say that he drank himself to death to get away from his wife, but I cannot deny that the thought has crossed my mind.

A year or so later Aunty Edith took a Mediterranean cruise, maybe to cheer herself up after the death of her husband, though I suspect she had largely forgotten who he was.

In Alexandria she was met by expatriate acquaintances living in that once cosmopolitan city. She visited their house and then, for some now forgotten reason, had to return to the ship on her own.

A taxi was found, the destination communicated and the fare agreed. Even today, Egyptian taxis rarely have meters, and even more rarely use them. Locals instinctively know what to pay; foreigners are well advised to negotiate a price before starting out. It will be several times the local fare, but it is your duty, as a representative of a rich country, to pay up cheerfully.

I heard her tell the story several times and though I was a teenage boy and would rather have been anywhere than trapped in a room listening to Aunty Edith, I can still hear the indignation and near panic in her voice as she remembered the events.

No one tells a story twice using exactly the same words, but she had certain stock phrases:

‘He drove me for miles and miles...’ Well, Alexandria is a very long thin city.

‘He drove me up hill and down dale...’ Unlikely, Alexandria is a very flat city.

‘My dear, he was the most villainous looking man you can imagine.’ That probably only meant he was, like every other Alexandrian taxi driver, an Arab.

'At one time he seemed to be driving me round in circles.’ I would not trust Aunty Edith’s sense of direction; in an unmetered cab taking the shortest route is in everybody’s interest.

‘I had visions of him stealing me away and selling me into the white slave trade.’ Given Aunty Edith’s notorious prudery in matters sexual (perhaps another reason Godfrey took solace in the bottle) I am not sure she knew what ‘white slave trade’ meant. She was a chunky woman in her mid sixties with a disapproving glare that could wilt an iron bar, anyone hoping to make a living from renting out her body was either an incurable optimist or knew something about niche markets I neither know, nor wish to know.

‘Eventually we arrived at the dock. I have never been so relieved to see a ship in my whole life.’

To summarise: a taxi driver took a woman to the agreed destination for the agreed fare - hardly a story worth telling, let alone retelling. What Aunty Edith never realised was that the tale tells us nothing about Alexandria, or Alexandrian taxi drivers, but a great deal about her. As such, it is a warning to anybody who tries to write anything about their travels: I will endeavour to take heed.

See also our trip to Alexandria