Senior Morton's World Tour

Kids are done, work is done, Grand Kids…Eh… they'll be here when we get back!

Destination Plymouth

Posted by laurie and jill in Adventures on 10 16th, 2011

Tuesday 11th October

Everyone is tired now, not just not us! We are all fighting a bug that has been going around the bus and it doesn’t help.

We left Cardiff and headed to Newport, over the River Severn on a very big bridge and into England once more. We then continued on down past Bristol and onto the historic city of Bath. Wow! What a fantastic and interesting city, with wonderful architecture and of course the famous Roman Baths which we toured. Fascinating walking on the very stones the Romans did some two thousand years ago. The mechanics or plumbing that allows water in at 44C and excess water out through a viaduct to the Avon River was quite ingenious. They have found artefacts used by stone age man 7,500 years ago, so this place has had some spiritual significance for a long time.

As we walked around the town we found the Royal Theatre where one Shaun Morton is going to be in a couple of weeks. The flyers were up, advertising the forthcoming show. There were a number of street performing singers in the square, especially two superb young soprano singers so we stopped to enjoy them for a few minutes. This is a city that could justify several days of exploration and study.

After leaving Bath, we briefly stopped off at Wells which had a very large impressive Cathedral and a massive Bishop’s Palace, surrounded by a moat and accessed via a drawbridge. These were dangerous times for every one (Note. Only bishops or princes and higher could live in palaces, all other nobility lived in castles).

Next we stopped at Glastonbury for lunch where there is the remains of a huge cathedral or abbey. Now it is alleged that Joseph of Aremathea brought his nephew Jesus here for a visit when he was a young lad, so this is an area of great significance for Christianity. It is also alleged that Joseph thrust his staff into the ground and a thorn bush grew on the spot and that is still alive in the churchyard. This is why the Queen always has a sprig of thorn bush hanging at the Palace at Christmas. Inside the Abbey is where the monks are supposed to have buried King Arthur and his Guinevere. Strangely though, the town is now full of alternate shops and pagan promoters and lots of hippies.

Just outside Glastonbury we passed through the little town of Street, where Clarks shoes are made.

We then moved into the Devon county, through Bridgewater and on to Exeter, which is situated on the River Ex with Exmouth at its outlet. Travelled past the renowned Dartmoors where Sherlock Holmes had problems with the Hounds of Baskerville and where they get around 100 inches of rain each year. We finally reached our destination Plymouth, which we will explore tomorrow.

Tonight we went for dinner on the Dartmoors. We went to a little village called Princetown which is in the middle of the moors and is a gaol town with about six hundred inmates. The gaol was originally built to house prisoners of war from the Napoleonic War. We had our dinner in the Dartmoor Inn which was situated out of town, alone and covered in mist. It has been there since 1625 when it was used by farmers to leave their produce there to be picked up by people from the plague ridden areas. We had a nice dinner (another three courses and a couple of beers) and then we had a storyteller to entertain us with tales about the Dartmoors. When we left the Inn there was a very heavy fog that added to the atmosphere and the lights of the bus picked up the eerie grey stone houses, appearing out of the fog. There was also the issue of that coach that travelled around and around the area with a headless driver and M’Lady who had murdered five husbands sitting in the coach. We were all on the lookout for those large black hounds of Baskerville but we were very alert when we came to a bend in the road where it is reputed that a big black hairy hand would come out of the fog and had claimed three people over the past thirty years! Despite all of this, we did manage to get back to the hotel safely, ready for another day!