Nearly 40 years since I drove my family to Stourhead in Wiltshire to see the wonderful National Trust gardens designed in the mid-18th century by Henry Hoare (far more inspired than ‘Capability’ Brown, who seems a hack by comparison).
I revisited the place courtesy of Bullocks Coaches of Cheadle. I was picked up near Edgeley Library and we left Bullocks’ at 8.30am.
Our first and only stop was at the badly designed Strensham services nearly three hours later (mainly because of motorway accidents), just in time for me to avoid wetting myself, as the diuretic had kicked in 90 minutes before.
We arrived at Stourhead at 1.40pm, 40 minutes later than the ETA, thanks to bypassing Bristol and Bath, but inching though Bradford on Avon, where the festival was reaching its climax.
Arriving at Stourhead so late left little time: the Palladian mansion (admission £16, party groups £9.90 each), with its wonderful riches of Dutch art and ceramics and Chippendale furniture, shuts at 4.30pm. Moreover, the vast grounds need a day to walk from the mansion to the lake.
On a busy sunny Sunday the catering was a shambles. At around 2pm, there was a huge queue being served with grossly overpriced main courses by two people. Earlier, I’d seen the beef casserole costing well over £8 (£8.35?) looking like a dog’s breakfast, served with seasonal vegetables including agreeably al dente carrots and courgettes and woefully undercooked potatoes, so hard that they could not be crushed by the back of a fork, even if one could fork them to hold them still for cutting.
By the time I returned at 2.15pm, the queue had gone and so had the beef casserole and the red onion and cheese quiche (£7+ something). All that was left was locally sourced sausages (pale and probably undercooked) and vegetable crumble (£6. 35?). This last was dry (heaven forbid that the NT should provide gravy or sauce) and difficult to eat.
Our co-drivers Malcolm and Richard, realizing that this was one day trip far too short (Stourhead deserves a full day) waited until 5.30pm before they set off on the return journey, an by a different route.
On the way in, they’d diverted to Westbury so we could see the huge white horse carved into the hillside and last restored in 1996.
On the way home we missed out Bradford on Avon and went straight to gridlocked Bath. A once elegant city destroyed by stationery cars which jam the streets. Traffic lights and filters don’t seem to be co-ordinated. Malcolm seized the chance to take us up and down Pulteney St, which includes the Georgian Bathgate Road post office, recently closed. At the head of the street, popular with film-makers as a setting for costume dramas, is a perfectly proportioned palladian building, now a museum. On the Bristol road out, once one of my favourite walks in Bath, little has changed, though many are empty. Chinese takeaways offer free delivery.
Three hours later we were back at the unspeakable northbound Strensham services where an espresso americano to take away from costachef cost £1·95 for three small mouthfuls. (A fellow traveller paid £1·55 for a takeaway cuppa tea). The lavatories in the gents stank and what few wcs are available (half have to handles) were full to the rim. In fairness, a cleaner called John was tackling the problem.
We arrived at Cheadle at 10.09 and I was dropped on Edgeley at 10.25 after travelling 688 kilometres.
Thursday, 25 September 2008
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