Goldcliff, Redwick and Magor

Wales

Gwent (Monmouthshire)

Pottering back slowly from South Wales to Staffordshire we turned off the M4 west of Newport and followed the ring road south of the city. We passed the old transporter bridge and the docks before reaching Liswerry, where a minor road took us into the Caldicot Level, the alluvial wetland that lies between the M4 and the Severn estuary. This dank, flat marsh was the home of my paternal grandmother’s family until they moved into Newport at the start of the last century, and we were in search of family graves.

Where we Going?

When I was small my (maternal) grandmother taught me to recite the 13 counties of Wales. The local government re-organisation in 1974 reduced that to 8 while another in 1996 introduced 22 single-tier local authorities which now call themselves counties. A further suggested rearrangement in 2015 was overtaken by events. To avoid confusion (largely mine) I will stick to the 13 'historic counties' I learned at my grandmother's knee. These counties were created by Thomas Cromwell at the request of Henry VIII in 1530.

The Historic Counties of Wales

SE Wales with the approximate extent of the cities of Cardiff and Newport
and position of the relevant villages

I prefer the old counties, though, this map appends an inappropriate 'shire' to Glamorgan among others. My father, a native of Newport always claimed to be a citizen of the Autonomous State of Gwent, though he spent his last 45 years in Buckinghamshire. I am thus duty-bound to prefer 'Gwent' to 'Monmouthshire'.

Goldcliff

We drove through depressing territory all the way from the last urban and industrial gasp of Newport right out to where wet cows chew dispiritedly in meadows of long wet grass. Drizzle fell from a grey sky; it seemed the natural state of affairs.

Goldcliff has no gold and no cliff. The name originates from the siliceous limestone bank by the coast at Hill Farm; sadly quartz is not gold and an 18m high bank is neither a hill nor a cliff.  This world is flat and protected from the sea by a concrete wall. Drainage channels covered in green scum keep the land just about dry enough to be pasture. We found no centre to Goldcliff, though there is a church somewhere, but what we did find was a mile long dribble of houses lining the narrow road. There are well built farmhouses and a sprinkling of new buildings, many of them large, some of them very large. People with money have chosen this bleak place to build their homes. I have no idea why. I am forced to conclude that this landscape has charms I fail to see.

Redwick

We had to track a mile or two inland and then back out toward the estuary to find Redwick. The village is remoter and closer to the coast than Goldcliff, not that there is any sign of salt water. There is no harbour between Newport and Chepstow, the tidal mudflats being unable to shelter even the smallest fishing boats, and the villages have turned their back on the coast and made their living from agriculture - at least until the boom in commuter housing.

Around Redwick the land seems lusher and the atmosphere less desolate – though perhaps I was fooled by a pause in the drizzle. The village does at least have a centre - a pub facing a church across a bend in the road. The pub looks well kept and cheerful, festooned with colourful hanging baskets. It also boasts a ‘Piste de Boule’ suggesting the Bristol Channel is not the limit of its horizons.

St Thomas', Redwick

Outside the church a stone shelter houses a collection of artefacts from the agricultural past, most notably a cider mill and press. I had never thought of my Monmouthshire ancestors as cider drinkers despite the county bordering the English cider heartland.

Cider Mill and Press, Redwick

St Thomas’ church is an ambitious structure, big enough to accommodate the whole of Redwick and still squeeze in several bus loads of visitors. They are proud of their peal of bells and, helpfully, have a list of who is buried in the churchyard. None of them were the ancestors we sought.

St Thomas' Redwick

Outside, on the porch, a scratch shows the high water mark of the great flood of January 1607, though as New Year then started in March the scratch is dated 1606. On the 30th of that month a huge storm surge – or possibly a tsunami – rolled up the Bristol Channel. The Welsh coast was inundated from Laugharne in Carmarthenshire all the way up to Chepstow, while on the English side the water swept across the Somerset levels as far inland as Glastonbury Tor. 200 square miles were flooded, livestock and villages were swept away and over 2000 people died. And this was where my ancestors chose to live.

Flood marker, St Thomas', Redwick 

Barely a thousand people live in Goldcliff and Redwick put together but Magor is a much bigger village, maybe even a town. We parked by the ruins of the 13th century Procurator’s House and strolled into the central square. There are dignified old buildings, shops, pubs, restaurants and a profusion of hanging baskets and flowerbeds. The town looks smart, freshly painted and prosperous. It is also far enough inland to have grown a modern estate to the south, spreading up the side of the rise which protects Magor from the sea. To the north there is a little industry, the M4 and Magor’s very own motorway service station.

Magor

If Redwick church is too big for the village, the 13th century builders of St Mary's evidently expected Magor to grow into a city. 

St Mary's Magor

It is surrounded by a well-tended burial ground and we scanned a few gravestones searching for the ancestral Attewell family.

Magor churchyard

Lynne is openly scornful (but, I think, secretly impressed) that the graves of my mother’s family can usually be found by locating the largest monument in the cemetery. It worked at Trealaw where my great-great grandfather’s statue sits on a plinth even Nelson might envy while his son and much of the rest of the family lie under a substantial tangle of angels and cherubs in the more bucolic setting of Penderyn. The biggest monument in Magor churchyard is not huge or excessively showy, but it does tower over its rivals and yes, it is the resting place of the Attewells.

Me and the Attewell Monument, Magor

The spire-shaped monument was built to mark the grave of Mary Attewell, my great-great-great grandmother who died in May 1887. My great-great-great grandfather William Attewell joined her there in 1890, followed by an assortment of sons, daughters and in-laws though not my great-great grandfather Thomas Attewell who was born in Magor in 1833 but had moved to Newport before he died in 1917.

The grave of Mary Attewell, my three greats grandmother

Inside the church we met a friendly local engaged in writing a history of the church. Old photographs, she informed us, showed the now weathered Attewell monument to have once been shining white. Maybe they, too, enjoyed being just a little showy.

The Attewells had a farm near Magor and their sons and daughters married natives of Goldcliff and Redwick. They clearly made some money; William and Mary lived lives which were long and, I presume, comfortable by the standards of the day. I was surprised to find that all three villages were prosperous and remain so, though now for rather different reasons. Clearly there are those who do not find the landscape of the Caldicot Level desolate and depressing but I am not one of them. I am glad Thomas Attewell left, even if Newport is hardly the city of anybody’s dreams. They all went eventually, but even so the population of the coastal wetlands looks to be growing, not shrinking. And as for the people who live there now – well they’re welcome to it; this branch of the Attewell family is unlikely to want it back.

Manchester, Llantrisant and Beijing

A Chinese Visa, an 18th Century Landscape and a Medieval Welsh Castle

05-Aug-2010

To Manchester for a Chinese Visa

Greater Manchester

We popped up to Manchester to hand in our Chinese Visa applications. The comfortable, spacious offices of the new Visa Centre mean it is no longer necessary to queue – usually in the rain - outside a pokey little room at the Consulate in Didsbury; and as the Centre is in Manchester’s Chinatown, it seemed a good idea to book a morning appointment and follow it with lunch.

Arriving a tad early gave us time to look round a Chinese supermarket and make a few purchases before ringing the bell at the Visa Centre the approved ten minutes before our scheduled appointment. Perhaps because of the appointment system, perhaps because visas can now be obtained by post, not only was there no queue, but we were in and out in five minutes.

Manchester City Art Gallery, Valette and Ibbetson

With an hour and a half to kill, we were pleased to discover the city art gallery – a most un-oriental building – squatting on a Chinatown corner. It houses a large collection of mainly British paintings and we saw a couple of Lowrys and several memorable Manchester cityscapes by his onetime teacher Adolphe Valette. The Victorians are well represented with the obsessions of Rossetti and Holman Hunt, curly-haired ginges and God, respectively, fully explored. There is also John William Waterhouse’s uncomfortably sexy Hylas and the Nymphs, a copy of which I recently encountered in a Malvern B & B, where its prolonged contemplation was unavoidable by anyone taking a bath. Finally, there are as many eighteenth century portraits and landscapes as one could wish for.

Albert Square, Manchester by Alphonse Valette

Julius Caesar Ibbetson’s A Distant View of Llantrisant Castle is actually less remarkable than his name (he was born in 1759 by Caesarean section and was, allegedly, acutely embarrassed by his exotic monicker). In such small dark landscapes it is difficult to make out what is going on - I do not know if they were supposed to be like that, or are in need of a clean, or the paint is deteriorating. A view of Llantrisant from the south is well known to anyone who has driven along the M4; its church is clearly silhouetted on a hill, but we had never seen it from the west and never knew it had a castle. Maybe, we mused, it had existed in the 1790’s but was there no longer.

A Distant View of Llantrisant Castle, Julius Caesar Ibbetson

06-Aug-2010

Llantrisant and William Price

Rhondda-Cynon-Taff

Wales

As fate, or luck, would have it, we were in South Wales the very next day visiting Lynne’s extensive but aging tribe of aunts and uncles. Our last visit was in Llantwit Fadre, after which we made our way to Peterston to spend the evening with a friend. Our route, inevitably, took us through Llantrisant, and yet again we had an hour to kill.

Modern Llantrisant sits on the flat land below the hill and has dual carriageways, irritating road works and a huge Tescos. Turning off the main road and winding our way upwards we found an older, quieter Llantrisant centred on a small square at the summit of the hill.

The car park was free and offered us a suggested walk through the old town, including a visit to the castle. The coffee shop was less welcoming: “No, you can’t have a cappuccino, we close in forty five minutes.” We were graciously allowed a filter coffee, though it was not very good.

The square is still called the Bull Ring though the bull baiting that gave it its name was banned in 1827 - not for reasons of animal welfare, but because it attracted unruly crowds. It is home to a statue of William Price, surgeon, druid, chartist and eccentric. Price could hardly claim to have invented cremation, but it was not practiced in England or Wales between the Roman Empire and the death of his infant son, Jesus Christ Price in 1884. He was prosecuted for burning the body, but argued that as the law made no mention of cremation it could not be illegal. The judge agreed and within twenty years the practice had become established.

Me and William Price, Bull Ring, Llantrisant

Price had another son whom he named Jesus Christ II Price (he later changed his name to Nicholas). Although invariably described as an eccentric, Price was actually a 24-carat nutter. In his statue he wears his druid’s tunic and a fox skin hat and looks every inch a man marching gloriously to the beat of a drum only he can hear. This alone could have made him a hero in Wales, but he also gave freely of his medical expertise to help the less advantaged members of society, and espoused the Welsh language, and his own idiosyncratic version of Welsh culture, at a time when the professional classes were determinedly aping everything English. When the time came for his own cremation in 1893, a crowd of 20,000 turned out to pay their respects.

Llantrisant Castle

Twenty metres down the road, beside the old Weight House, is the entry to the castle fields. A shattered remnant of one tower is all that remains of the stone structure built in 1246 by the Norman Richard de Clare, Lord of Glamorgan, to replace an earlier wooden fort. The rebellious Welsh damaged the castle in 1294 and 1316, and it may finally have been destroyed by Owain Glyndwr in 1404. It was certainly in ruins shortly after that date, but has deteriorated little since Julius Caesar Ibbetson came here over two hundred years ago. Where he stood to get his ‘view from the west’ is a mystery, his angle apparently requiring him to hover fifty metres above the plain and be able to see right through Llantrisant’s substantial parish church. Such is artistic licence.

The remains of Llantrisant Castle

The positioning of Manchester Art Gallery on the edge of Chinatown is, doubtless, coincidental, but from the number of Chinese faces looking at the paintings, the coincidence is appreciated. Our subsequent arrival in the Little Yang Sing restaurant was less accidental, but we were equally appreciative. We went to Manchester for a visa and a lunch and discovered Julius Caesar Ibbetson and Llantrisant Castle. Ibbetson also visited China; in 1787 he was official draughtsman on the very first British embassy to Beijing, producing watercolours of the plants and animals encountered on the journey. Small world.

[and having acquired our visas we duly set off for China. Kunming and the Stone Forest, the first part of that story, is just a click away]

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)
The Angel at Hetton, North Yorkshire (2025, Golden Wedding Celebration)

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

Upton-upon-Severn to Andoversford: The South West Odyssey Days 7 to 9

The South West Odyssey was a long distance walk.
Five like-minded people started in 2008 from the Cardingmill Valley in Shropshire and by walking three days a year finished at Start Bay on the South Devon Coast in May 2019.

Into the Cotswolds

Day 7 03-Jun-2010

Crossing the Rivers Severn and (Stratford) Avon on our Way to the Cotswolds

Worcestershire

Francis, Brian & Hilary and Lynne & I travelled down on the 2nd and spent the night at the Tiltridge vineyard. Sadly the vineyard shop closed before we arrived and although it was a very comfortable and welcoming B & B we gained no advantage from it being a vineyard. We dined at the White Lion in Upton-upon-Severn, a pub of some antiquity. Prince Rupert drank too much there during the civil war and Henry Fielding's stay resulted in a mention for the inn in 'Tom Jones' where appropriate use is made of the bedrooms.

Francis, Brian, Lynne & Hilary, Tiltridge Vineyard, Upton-upon-Severn

Mike and Alison T drove down the next morning and we were supposed to meet them and Alison C, now living in Cheltenham, at the Upton car park where the previous walk had finished. As we were about to leave Tiltridge, Alison called to say she had missed her connecting bus and needing rescuing from Tewkesbury.

Tewkesbury is not a long detour and we were only a little late at the start. Had I driven like Nigel Mansell, who was born in Upton, we might have arrived on time, but I chose not to.

In what had become the almost traditional sunny weather we set off down the High Street....

Francis points out the White Lion, High Street, Upton-upon-Severn

...and crossed the River Severn.

Crossing the Severn at Upton

Wychavon

Our morning's walk across the eastern half of the Severn Valley was similar to the afternoon we had spent in the western half the year before. In addition we crossed the M5 - where we left the Malvern Hills district of Worcestershire and entered the Wychavon district - and, more pleasingly, the River Avon.

Crossing the river Avon

Over the river we arrived in Eckington where we paused for a glass of lunch at the Bell Inn.

Eckington

We had now crossed the valley and stood at the foot of the Cotswolds where we would spend the rest of the 2010 walk and all of 2011.

Refreshed, we left The Bell and headed for Bredon Hill.

To Bredon Hill

Bredon Hill offers enough of a climb to raise the heart rate and loosen any limbs that had stiffened up at lunchtime, but as a hill it has featured more in literature than in the annals of mountaineering. We reached the top where A E Housman had been before us.

Here of a Sunday morning
My love and I would lie,
And see the coloured counties,
And hear the larks so high
About us in the sky.

The 'coloured counties' or at least the Severn Valley as seen from Bredon Hill

Having climbed the scarp, the descent was more gentle, passing through fields of barley; the healthy grain destined, according to the signs, to be wasted on the production of Carling.

Carling, what a waste!

The old buildings of Eckington were black and white, but now we were in the Cotswolds the main, and in some villages only, building material was Cotswold stone. Passing through Overbury.....

House in Overbury

...and continuing to the end of the day's walk at Conderton we had plenty of opportunities to admire the mellow honey-coloured stone.

Lynne, Hilary and Alison T met us at Conderton and transported us to the Tally Ho B & B in Alderton.

Day 8 04-Jun-2010

Conderton to Winchcombe

We returned to Conderton after a substantial breakfast.

Conderton

A couple of kilometres of relatively flat farmland (outside the boundary of the official Cotswolds Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty) brought us to the surprisingly redbrick village of Beckford. Despite having only 600 residents it has the air of a larger and more self important place.

Marching through Beckford

Gloucestershire

Tewkesbury

We crossed into Gloucestershire and although we were in the Tewkesbury rather than Cotswold District, the countryside became typical Cotswolds with gentle climbs up wooded hills followed by long descents into fertile valleys. Up and over Alderton Hill took us to lunch at Gretton.

Descending Alderton Hill

It was descending Alderton Hill that I noticed the sole of my right boot was splitting from the upper at the toe. The boots were hardly new, but I didn't think that ought to be happening.

Wildflowers, Gretton

The afternoon started with the ascent of Langley Hll accompanied by the slow, inexorable disengagement of right sole from right boot.

Nearing the top of Langley Hill

By the time we started on the descent into Winchcombe the sole was flapping with every pace. Soon it became so detached that a careless pace would fold it under my foot.

Down towards Winchcombe

Under normal circumstances the long and gentle descent would have been a very pleasant walk, but hampered by my flapping sole, and a little concerned I might have to hop the last mile or two, I was relieved to make it to make it to the town on two feet.

I went in search of duck tape, Mike and Francis went off for a cup of tea and a cake and others sought out a beer. All quests were successful - actually I got duck tape and a beer.

For a town that has been continuously inhabited for over a thousand years Winchcombe has few notable landmarks. Buildings of different eras jostles elbows, but as they are all of warm, weathered Cotswold stone they come together to form a pleasingly harmonious whole.

The Old Almshouses, Winchcombe

We returned to Alderton for a shower and then back to Winchcombe for dinner at the Wine & Sausage Restaurant in the White Hart. The evening ended with more beer at a table outside the Gardeners Arms in Alderton, the warmth of the evening lingering even after the sun had gone down.

Day 9 05-Jun-2010

Winchcombe to Andoversford

After judicious application of several metres of duck tape I was reasonably confident my boots would see out the day. We returned, again, to the delightful town of Winchcombe and after a brief altercation with an elderly dog walker who seemed to believe that people from out of town should not be allowed to use the street parking, we set off up the Postlip Valley towards Cleeve Hill. We traversed a small and ugly industrial area before reaching the wooded valley - even in the Cotswolds, it seems, people have to work.

Up the Postlip Valley

We emerged on the grassy lower flanks of Cleeve Hill where butterflies flitted through the short grass. One Common Blue (or Holly Blue) obligingly sat still long enough to be photographed.

Male Common Blue, Cleeve Hill (maybe a Holly Blue, but probably not)

Unlike other Cotswold Hills, Cleeve Hill is a bare grassy dome....

Nearing the top of Cleeve Hill

...the top offering excellent views over Bishop's Cleeve and Cheltenham racecourse beyond.

Bishop's Cleeve

The hill is also crowned by a couple of telephone masts, which might be unsightly, but at least Mike was assured of a good signal.

Mike takes a phone call, Cleeve Hill

The rest of the morning was spent on a long descent down a wide valley which grew wider as we went.

The descent from Cleeve Hill

It was several, maybe even many, kilometres to the village of Brockhampton and it began to feel something like a route march. Eventually we made it and found Lynne, Hilary and Alison T waiting for us at the Craven Arms. We were soon joined by Matthew and Heather, the 'Crane offspring', who would join us for the afternoon walk.

The weather had not been up to the standard of the previous two days and it rained while we were having lunch. As we were sitting round a large table under an even larger umbrella, we just stayed put and let it rain around us. It was a passing shower and we left Brockhampton in renewed sunshine

Francis strides out of Brockhampton

Cotswold

It is a brief step from Brockhampton to Sevenhampton. Alhtough we had been in the Cotswolds for some time, it was on that short stretch we finally entered the Gloucestershire District of Cotswold. The lush, flower-filled valley from Brockhampton to Sevenhampton and on to Andoversford (brevity in village names is not a quality much admired in these parts) provided a short but very pleasant afternoon's walk.

Passing Sevenhampton

We reached Andoversford and the end of the 2010 walk fairly early...

Andoversford - The End (for 2010)

...so we could all sit in a car for an hour for or more on our way home while our legs stiffened up. I felt a little sympathy for Mike and Francis, who had to be in work the following morning, but not enough to spoil my Monday of relaxation.

The South West Odyssey (English Branch)
Introduction
Day 1 to 3 (2008) Cardingmill Valley to Great Whitley
Day 4 to 6 (2009) Great Whitely to Upton-on-Severn via the Malvern Ridge
Day 7 to 9 (2010) Upton-on-Severn to Andoversford
Day 10 (2011) Andoversford to Perrott's Brook
Day 11 (2011) Perrott's Brook to the Round Elm Crossroads
Day 12 (2011) Walking Round Stroud
Day 13 (2012) Stroud to North Nibley
Day 14 (2012) North Nibley to Old Sodbury
Day 15 (2012) Old Sodbury to Swineford
Day 16 (2013) Along the Chew Valley
Day 17 (2013) Over the Mendips to Wells
Day 18 (2013) Wells to Glastonbury 'The Mountain Route'
Day 19 (2014) Glastonbury to Langport
Day 20 (2014) Along the Parrett and over the Tone
Day 21 (2014) Into the Quantocks
Day 22 (2015) From the Quantocks to the Sea
Day 23 (2015) Watchet, Dunster and Dunkery Hill
Day 24 (2015) Dunkery Beacon to Withypool
Day 25 (2016) Entering Devon and Leaving Exmoor
Day 26 (2016) Knowstone to Black Dog on the Two Moors Way
Day 27 (2016) Morchard Bishop to Copplestone
Day 28 (2017) Down St Mary to Drewsteignton
Day 29 (2017) Drewsteignton to Bennett's Cross
Day 30 (2017) Bennett's Cross to Lustleigh
Day 31 (2018) Southwest Across the Moor from Lustleigh
Day 32 (2018) South to Ugborough
Day 33 (2018) Ugborough to Ringmore
Day 34 (2019) Around the Avon Estuary to Hope Cove
Day 35 (2019):  Hope Cove to Prawle Point
Day 36 (2019) Prawle Point to Start Bay: The End
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The Last Post

That's All Folks - The Odyssey is done.