East Sussex: a pocketful of Rye

At the end of our wonderful wander around Rye Harbour Nature Reserve I was feeling a little peckish – all that sea air and exercise, you know – so we headed to the nearby town of Rye, partly for a little exploration and partly to find somewhere to enjoy an early dinner.

Built on a hillock that was once surrounded by the sea, Rye is an ancient town. It was probably a shipping port in Roman times; it was gifted to a Norman Benedictine Abbey by King Aethelred and remained Norman property until 1247; and it was part of the Cinque Ports Federation, an important port in cross-Channel trade and commerce.

During the 18th and 19th centuries Rye was a strategic base for local smuggling operations – apparently the two pubs shown in the photo above, the Mermaid Inn (right) and the Old Bell Inn (left), had a secret passageway between them for use by the smugglers.

The steep and narrow streets are very photogenic, if a little tough on old leg muscles after a long day’s walking. However, as I might never go there again, I just had to walk up to the top of the hill, where sits St Mary’s Church, and back down the cobblestones to the quay alongside the River Brede. It was very lovely, awash with beautiful black-and-white buildings and with the type of charming old houses that look like they cost a fortune to own (I checked property prices later – a fortune, indeed!).

However, I do have one negative comment to make about Rye. In the middle of summer, at the height of the tourist season (and there were a lot of visitors about), the local cafe and restaurant proprietors should not be shutting up shop at 5pm! I’m quite sure we weren’t the only people looking for a riverside cafe to enjoy a bite in the late afternoon sunshine. Rye’s loss was Battle’s gain – we enjoyed a delicious cod-and-chips dinner at The King’s Head pub on the way home.

England: Speke Hall and Garden

When the opportunity arose, I just couldn't resist visiting one more black-and-white stately home before leaving the North West of England so off we went to Speke Hall, a rare Tudor timber-framed manor house.  

Speke Hall sits on the edge of the River Mersey, right next to John Lennon Airport – and I do mean right next to it – the sound of the planes taking off and landing seemed very incongruous during our stroll around the grounds. As rain was forecast for later in the day and it was already spitting when we arrived, we decided to explore the grounds before heading inside the house.

The Coastal Reserve pathway leads down to the river, directly past the end of the current airport runway onto a concrete taxiway that once connected the previous airport on the other side of Speke Hall to the new one. A red line leads walkers along this concrete wasteland then off to the left onto a pathway that runs along the top of the low coastal cliff. Looking along the Mersey to the left, you can see a long metal gangway running out into the water – that’s actually a lighting gantry that helps to guide planes in to land. Apparently, it’s also a favourite perching place for local cormorants but we saw none the day we visited.

We continued along the path to the yacht club, then retraced out steps back to the house. As there was no signpost, we didn’t realise we could actually continue inland and return to the house by a slightly different route, but I don’t think we missed anything much. It was a grey day and the view – across the Mersey to factories and large industry – was rather bleak.

Fortunately, the house itself was superb. Built in stages between 1530 and 1598 by the Catholic Norris family, Speke Hall has had a long and interesting history. At one stage, it was even being used as a cow shed! Luckily, the hall was restored and renovated in the 19th century, so much of what you might think is original Tudor is actually the Victorian interpretation of Tudor, with a heavy mix of Arts and Crafts influences. Don’t let that description put you off – it is still amazing.

The hall’s layout is, in many ways, similar to that of Little Moreton Hall, built around a central courtyard – with two ancient yew trees estimated to be 500 years old, with a Great Hall in the same position but without Moreton Hall’s wonderful Long Gallery and its rollercoaster-ride flooring. 

The house is heavy with dark-wood panelling and ornately carved dark wooden furniture which has lots of little heads and figures incorporated in the designs. The predominance of dark wood made some rooms seem rather gloomy but was relieved in several by the amazing Jacobean ceilings of white plaster, richly decorated with roses, lilies, pomegranates and vines.

Though no spectral images appear in my photographs, Speke Hall has a reputation for being haunted. Dark shadows have been seen gliding through the rooms, visitors have supposedly heard footsteps and children crying, and an ‘overwhelming sense of oppression’ has been reported, though I wonder if that can be attributed to the decoration. 

As with most other National Trust properties, Speke Hall has excellent facilities. There are two eateries – you can enjoy light snacks in the Stables Tea Room or, like us, enjoy lunch in the main restaurant. I tried a local Liverpool speciality, appropriately enough called Scouse, which was basically just a beef casserole but very tasty. As we visited during the school holidays, there were lots of families with screaming, uncontrolled kids, both in the restaurants and in the house – not my favourite sightseeing scenario.

Luckily, the rain held off so we escaped the noise by walking along some of the woodland trails close to the hall and checked out the pretty gardens, which give some wonderful views of the outside of the house. It is such a photogenic place that I have gone rather overboard on the photos I’ve included here. I hope you enjoy them as much as I enjoyed my day at Speke Hall.

 

England: Chester and the Scottish play

We were really lucky with the weather the day we went to Chester for the open-air production of Macbeth at Grosvenor Park. We’d had thunder and lightning in the night and more, plus heavy rain, was forecast for exactly the time the play was on but, in the event, there was only one heavyish shower towards the end of the play, which almost everyone ignored – quickly pull on rain jacket, put bin bag over knees, focus on play – because it was riveting!

What a play it is! The Scottish play has long been my favourite Shakespeare, ever since we studied it in high school under an English teacher who sparked with life and enthusiasm and made Shakespeare come alive for a group of usually-bored-with-English-literature 16-year-olds. And this production was exceptional, with both Macbeth (played by Mark Healy) and Lady Macbeth (Hannah Barrie) performing their roles most excellently, and almost all the bit actors doing a splendid job.

It was superb to see Shakespeare performed live in a round make-shift theatre to an enraptured audience. I have no photos of the actual performance as photography was not permitted so you’ll need to be content with this panorama of the arena and a link to the website.  

We caught the train from Northwich to Chester, as it was easier than parking in the city. The journey only took about 30 minutes, followed by a short bus ride from the station to Chester’s city centre.

I adore Chester’s inner-city buildings – they have so much character, so much history to admire and absorb. There are black-and-white half-timbered buildings aplenty, and most have carved and painted figures adorning their fronts and gable-ends. 

The oldest streets in Chester also have a kind of double-decker shopping arrangement called the Rows, a series of first-floor covered walkways with shops all along one side – very sensible on a rainy day, I can tell you. Some of the inner city streets are also turned over to pedestrians during the daytime – as a non-driver, I heartily approve of this measure.

Chester is home to a very impressive Anglican cathedral, a glorious building of great age – construction of its various parts ranges from 1093 through to the 16th century. The nave has a fabulous high roof, and the wooden choir stalls are very finely carved. 

The interior also contains the tombs of an 11th-century bishop and a 12th-century monk, as well as several chapels (dedicated to St Mary Magdalen, and Sts Oswald, George, Nicholas and Werburgh). The stained glass windows, some old, some modern, are particularly beautiful as you can see from the photos.

There is a café in the refectory hall, appropriately enough – though we didn’t eat there, and a well-stocked gift shop – though we didn’t buy anything. The Cathedral is a Grade 1 listed building, and definitely well worth a visit.  

Chester’s Roman past is of particular interest to me, as a former Classics scholar, but we didn’t have a lot of time for that during this visit. We did take a quick look at the remains of the Roman amphitheatre and garden and, in the late afternoon, after the play had finished, we took a turn around half of the city walls.

We strolled along the riverside where boats were taking visitors on trips and a band was playing in the rotunda, we ate, and Sarah did a spot of shopping. Apart from the occasional shower of rain, we had a thoroughly enjoyable day, and then as ..

            Light thickens; and the crow

Makes wing to the rooky wood;

Good things of the day begin to droop and drowse;

(Macbeth, Act 3, scene 2)

… we caught our train home before the witches came out to play.

England: Little Moreton Hall, Cheshire

This must surely be my favourite of all the historic places I visited in the UK on this trip!

The Tudor-era Little Moreton Hall, a wonky black-and-white complex of buildings, was built progressively from the late 1400s to around 1610. As the Moreton family’s wealth accumulated and they wanted to impress their peers and betters, they added extra wings to their manor house, which now ranges around three sides of a central courtyard.

We took a guided tour so had an informed introduction to some of the history and features of the house. In the Great Hall sits the trestle table where the lord of the manor would have sat to eat. The table consists of two separate pieces, the supporting trestle and the one long wide piece of wood that sits on top, the board. As our guide explained, a lot of modern English expressions originate from that board. For example, when you played games on it, you were playing ‘board games’. To ensure you didn’t cheat at those board games, you had to keep your hands ‘above board’.

Actors would stand on top of the table so everyone could see them perform, hence the expression ‘treading the boards’. A couple of smaller planks would be fixed to the walls to hold the cups, hence the word ‘cupboard’. ‘Board and lodging’ refers to food and accommodation because the guests’ food was served on the board. ‘Half board’ and ‘full board’ comes from the same idea and depended on how much food was placed on the board for the lodger to eat. ‘Sideboard’ came from moving the board and trestle to the side of the side of the room to make space for other things, like dancing. Fascinating stuff!

There were many more interesting things to be found in the sparsely furnished interior. The bed is a modern reconstruction of a traditional Tudor four-poster, with a truckle bed alongside that was pulled out from under the main bed at night for the occupant’s servant to sleep in. The drapes on the four-poster were for privacy, as much as for keeping out the drafts! Next to the bedroom is one of the house’s toilets, an exceedingly drafty garderobe. Did you know clothes were stored next to these rooms because the stink of ammonia (from the urine) helped keep the moths and other insects at bay?

One particularly striking feature, to be found in the Parlour adjacent to the Great Hall, is the wall paintings, dating from c. 1575-80, which were only discovered behind the Georgian wood panelling in 1976. The paintings include imitation marble and Biblical scenes, some painted directly onto the plaster and others painted on paper which was then pasted on to the walls.

Two impressive fireplaces can be seen by visitors, both dating from Elizabethan times. The one in the Upper Porch Room (above right) depicts the figures of Justice and Mercy, on either side of the Moreton coat of arms and those of the Macclesfield family – John de Moreton married Margaret de Macclesfield in 1329.

Little Moreton Hall was almost completely constructed of green oak, which is partly why nothing is square or right-angled, with undulating floors and skewed window-frames. It’s the Victorians who were responsible for the black and white colour of these old buildings – originally the oak was just left to weather so would have ranged in colour from brown to silvery-grey and the plaster, which includes cow dung, would have been a more creamy colour.

The 68-foot-long Long Gallery (above) was a late edition at the top of the southern range, meaning the two floors underneath it were not intended to carry its weight, meaning its floor is extremely wonky and the whole has had to be reinforced with an ‘invisible’ steel support structure to prevent the house from falling down. The Long Gallery became popular during Elizabethan and Jacobean times, as a place to entertain guests and a place to walk for exercise when the weather outside was inclement.

The Hall Porch (above left), constructed around 1480, has some particularly fine examples of the type of decorations popular in those times. According to a signboard at the house: ‘The Elizabethans delighted in “grotesques” – an unnatural or un orderly composition for delight sake, of men, beasts, birds, flowers, etc ... They also loved “dainty” and intricate patterns, derived from the Moslem “moresque” and Flemish strapwork, and used them to embellish everything from friezes, windows and ceilings to gardens.’ In this photo of the porch, you can see trailing vine designs, cable mouldings in the columns on either side of the doorway, and the very popular quatrefoil patterns that were carved out of solid wood.

I particularly liked the wide range of window designs to be found throughout the house, with patterns of rectangles and squares, circles and triangles that all seem to complement the decoration of the timber framing. 

The large bay windows (above) were added to the Great Hall in 1559, as you can tell from the words that run along their tops: "God is al in al thing: This windous whire made by William Moreton in the yeare of oure lorde MDLIX” and above one of the windows on the ground floor (shown here at left): “Richard Dale Carpeder made thies windous by the grac of God." 

Note the small line above and between the letters ‘e’ and ‘d’ in the word ‘carpeder’ – this indicates that the person painting the inscription realised they’d left a letter out.

Little Moreton Hall is one of the most fascinating, atmospheric, intriguing, pretty, evocative, engrossing, and enchanting places I have ever visited. If it’s possible to fall in love with a house, then I did that day. The whole place seems to have been lifted straight out of a fairy tale!

England: Northwich, Cheshire

The weather was sunny once again – though not renowned for its balmy weather, Blighty was very kind to me during this trip – and Sarah needed to collect some shoes from the repairman in her closest large town, Northwich, so we decided to walk there and back, about an hour each way. 

It was a pleasant stroll and good exercise if rather hot. The first part of our walk was on a footpath along the roadside then we veered off onto trails through the Northwich Community Woodlands, where there are ‘flashes’ – a local word for lake, or, more accurately, areas of land that are filled with water in the winter and spring but mostly dry out over the summer months. These are havens for water birds and, though this was a quiet time for the birds, we saw, at a distance, black-headed gulls, white swan, lapwings and more. It must be a twitcher’s delight in the wetter seasons.

My lesson in the local vernacular continued as Sarah explained that ‘wich’ on the end of a town’s name refers to salt production. There is salt under the surface here – the locals hereabouts have been drying brine to produce salt since Roman times. Rock salt has also been mined in the surrounding area, though this has left large caverns underground which have, in turn, caused problems with subsidence. As part of a major redevelopment of Northwich, the mines have now been stabilised by removing millions of litres of brine and replacing it with a mixture of pulverised fuel ash, salt and cement.

Hopefully, the redevelopment will not overshadow Northwich’s pretty little shopping area, which contains many examples of typical black-and-white half-timbered Cheshire houses, some of which are genuinely old, others made to replicate the old architectural style. According to Professor Wiki, ‘the black-and-white revival was an architectural movement from the middle of the 19th century which reused the vernacular elements of the past, using timber framing’. The Victorians seemed to like the idea of painting the wooden framing black and the panels in between white, as part of their revival of Tudor architecture.

Left, the nightwatchman, with the innkeeper and his wife in the centre, and the towncryer at right

It certainly makes for picturesque images and my photo of the day was of one of these buildings (above), now a shop, that has dragon and monster heads adorning the jettied, carved window heads, and four figures (carved and painted) on either side of the mullioned windows. The figures apparently represent the town cryer and the nightwatchman, and the couple holding cups and plates, the innkeeper and his wife. Other buildings had similar types of decoration and my neck was soon stiff from craning upwards to look at them all.

Northwich also has two very unusual swing bridges, which usually carry road and pedestrian traffic but still have the ability to swing from one end to the side of the river to allow taller river traffic to pass. Hayhurst Bridge, built in 1898, and Town Bridge (pictured here), built a year later, are believed to be the first electrically powered swing bridges in Britain. Two bridges were built so that, when a ship was passing through town, road traffic would always be able to pass over one of them.

The waterway pictured above is the River Weaver (and the River Dane also runs through Northwich) but there are also canals aplenty in this part of the country – used in the past to transport the salt and now for pleasure, with many narrowboats and broader canal boats to be seen. There is something romantic about these boats – imagine living on one and exploring England that way!

My fascination with England’s pub signs began on this day in Northwich, when I first saw the sign for The Swinging Witch. From what I could discover, the name is recent and simply an invention – there is no historical story about the hanging of a local witch to go with it, though local resident Phil Thompson was kind enough to send me information about the case of the supposed demonic possession of a young Northwich lad in 1602. The signs of his ‘possession’ were: ‘the wagging of the head without intermission, supernatural strength, senselessness during his fits, utterance of wonderful speech’ – sounds like the poor lad simply suffered from something like epilepsy.

The Iron Bridge does not have such a colourful story attached – as the sign indicates, it is situated beneath an iron railway bridge – though there is a mystery hanging over it. It was formerly called The Thatched Tavern, though the roof is not thatched and, as the building actually consists of three terraced houses knocked together, it may always have been tiled. Perhaps the name recalls a previous building on the same site. (There will be future blogs on pub signs!)

Northwich, then, was an interesting town to explore. We wandered from one end of town to the other, Sarah got her shoes, and we enjoyed lunch and some people-watching sitting outside a local bakery. Afterwards, we walked back the same way we had come, and it was even hotter! I was to discover the delights of a refreshingly cool jug of Pimm's later that afternoon.