Cirencester - Day 4

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Well, I crashed into bed at about 8.30pm last night and slept just about straight through until the alarm went off at 7.25am this morning. Ah, sleep, it is a truly wondrous thing that enables the body to rest and repair itself. I felt so much better after a good night’s sleep.

Apart from suffering something of a moral crisis that is. Bernie has been quite prepared to ignore the fact that he has had respiratory symptoms and just carry on regardless. This morning I am in a moral dilemma, should I go downstairs and confess to Kathleen that I have respiratory symptoms and ask her if she would prefer to put our breakfast on a tray for us to eat in our room???

I checked the UK’s COVID website. Hmn, it seems that under the current rules here we are under no obligation to test ourselves. It seems it is very much down to individuals to consider their symptoms and then test … if they think they need to. However, if you do test AND return a positive result then you are supposed to isolate for five days and up to ten days before you have contact with vulnerable individuals.

Bernie is very much taking the ‘ignorance is bliss’ line with this. If we don’t test, we don’t know that we have COVID so we can continue with our itinerary as planned. I think the only way I have been convinced to follow this course of action is: we do not have razor-blade throats and we have not lost our sense of taste or smell. We sure could smell the organic fertilizer on the garden at Snowshill Manor yesterday afternoon!! Since we don’t have these classic COVID symptoms, just a bit of a sniffle and some sinus congestion we are, rightly or wrongly, carrying on. Perhaps we can just say that we are enthusiastic adopters of a COVID-normal approach?

Of bigger concern to Bernie was looking at the photos on his phone and finding there were dozens that were various shades of grey. He thought something must have happened to corrupt the photos on his phone. Oh, no, but better that than having one of the memory cards in our cameras corrupt. Then, after we went out to the car and he had a bit better look at his phone he realised that he had taken lots of photos of the inside of his pocket, ha, ha, ha. Still laughing!

This morning we returned to Bourton-on-the-Water hoping to find it much less busy than it was when we drove through a couple of days ago late in the afternoon. Thank goodness, it was much more pleasant in Bourton at 10.00am than it was at 5.00pm. We even managed to take some photos of the picturesque bridges over the Windrush River without them being clogged with pesky tourists!

After a pleasant stroll through Bourton we went in search of the 13^th-century Tithe Barn at Middle Littleton that is looked after by the National Trust. We ventured north past Broadway Tower again and then onto the roads less travelled through Saintbury, Weston-sub-Edge and Honeybourne. We only set the SatNav for Middle Littleton thinking that a tithe barn would stand out like a sore thumb.

Um, no, we drove straight through Middle Littleton without seeing a single sign for the tithe barn and certainly didn’t spot a whopping great barn. Very disappointing. Everywhere else we have visited so far has been well signposted even when we have approached from the smallest of roads.

We pulled over and programmed the tithe barn into the SatNav which then proceeded to take us on a magical mystery tour through Offenham and Offenham Cross before returning us to South Littleton to try approaching Middle Littleton again with, we hoped, more success. Finally, finally we spotted a National Trust sign, partially obscured by an overhanging tree and covered in green algae so as to be all but illegible. We pointed the nose of the Lexus down a very tight lane and still couldn’t see any evidence of the barn. Fearing that if we went into the lane, we might not be able to get out, we gave it up as a wild goose chase and decided to proceed to Croome Park.

Except now we found ourselves with insufficient coverage to program in Croome Park! Argh, let’s try it the old fashioned way, using the road atlas. Follow the signs towards Evesham I said and then we want to try to get to Pershore. All went well until we took the wrong exit on a roundabout and found ourselves IN Evesham rather than on the road to Pershore. We pulled over again and finally had enough signal to program Croome Park into the SatNav before the day could end in the divorce courts. Navigating and driving in unfamiliar places is the Achilles heel of every marriage!

The SatNav had us in Pershore in no time and then directed us through Ramsden to Croome Park, another property administered by the National Trust and, thankfully, with much better signage than the tithe barn!! It also had a large car park filled with lots of cars so seemed rather more like a tourist destination.

We joined the queue for food in the café and started talking to man behind us. He told us it was busy at the park today because there had been a ‘Wellness Walk’ organised for today. Seems like it’s a program to encourage OAPs to get out walking and explore places of interest. He picked pretty early on that we are Australians. Oh, my cousin lives in Australia, but you probably won’t know the place, she lives in Drouin!! Sure, we know Drouin, Bernie was raised there and his parents still live there. A very small world moment.

We took our sandwiches outside to eat which proved to be a big mistake. If we thought the wasps were bad at Snowshill Manor, we were mistaken. The wasps here were awful. I’m not scared of them, but they were hovering so close to my sandwich and my face I was very worried about ingesting one along with my sandwich. Ugh! We finished our lunch as quickly as we could so that we could leave the food area and, we hoped, the wasps behind us.

It might be another day, another NT property but, once again, this holding was quite different from others we have seen this week. The current building dates from 1751, but the 6^th Earl reimagined the earlier red brick house that had been the home of the Coventry’s since the 16^th-century in a much grander Palladian style. The gardens here are perhaps more significant because it was the first commission undertaken by Capability Brown who would later become famous for his English landscape garden style.

Tragedy befell the family when the 10^th Earl was killed on the retreat to Dunkirk in 1940. By 1948, the Croome Estate Trust was faced with rising maintenance costs and, with agriculture depressed, the upkeep of the house could no longer be supported by the estate. The trustees sold off almost all of the original furniture and fittings and the house itself to the Roman Catholic Archdiocese in Birmingham. The church fitted it out as a boarding school for boys and occupied it for the next three decades.

Then for something completely different. In 1979 the Hare Krishna movement had outgrown its premises near Watford and was looking for a new home. When a House including a chapel, stable and two walled gardens was found it was purchased and became the British headquarters of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness. At this time, it was renamed Chaitanya College after the 16^th-century Hindu saint. Croome remained the home of around 150 devotees until 1984.

From 1884 onwards various owners tried to use the property as a training centre, apartments, a restaurant and conference centre and a hotel and golf course. In 1996, the National Trust acquired the landscape park and began its restoration. The NT also preserved and refurbished some of the surviving RAF buildings that date to the land being requisitioned during WWII for an air-force base.

In 1999 the house was purchased privately and was lived in as a family home until late in 2007 when it was purchased by the Croome Heritage Trust. The trust has leased the house to the National Trust for 999 years. This enabled the NT to open the house to the public in 2009 after six rooms had been conserved. Conservation efforts continue to this day, but in 2016 the NT was able to secure some key historical objects from the 6^th Earl’s collection and return then to the house after 70 years. Because of the intervening time and the variety of uses the property has seen the pieces are presented differently from how they would have been in the 6^th Earl’s time. Exciting for the Trust to be able to obtain some pieces original to the house after so long though.

After exploring the house and extensive grounds we had a look at the RAF museum. The RAF base at Croome was heavily involved in early experiments with radar during the Second World War and played an important role in many of Britain’s victories due to their groundbreaking work. Two completely different experiences in one place which made this destination an interesting one.

We had to conclude our visit with ice creams on a stick … again. The ice cream kiosk here wasn’t open either. We wondered if they sold all the ice cream over the hot weekend? Or, maybe, all those OAPs concluded their Wellness Walk with an ice cream, ha, ha?

Thank goodness the SatNav was on the air when we left as there is no way I could have navigated us onto the M5 heading south the way she did. We took several very small roads until we merged onto the A38 and then the M50 which then fed us onto the M5. We rocketed down the M5 until the exit for the A417 which took us straight into Cirencester.

Tonight, we thought we had better try the Malt & Anchor for dinner as they were recently awarded the 2023 title of ‘England’s Best Fish and Chip Restaurant’. Only runner up in the UK though. A pub in Ireland won the UK title. The fish and chips were good but … arrived before our entrée. And then two out of three beers that Bernie asked for weren’t available. We finally shared our entrée, after our main course, and we were disappointed. That was our fault though as we misread the menu and what was delivered to our table was very different from what we were expecting and had far too much chilli in it. Oops, note to selves, read the menu carefully!



Steps: 12,994 (8.78 kms)

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