Rochdale – part 2

Posted on 24 November 2017 by Katrina

Rochdale is the birthplace of the Society of Equitable Pioneers, the beginning of the Co-operative Society, something that they’re rightly proud of.

We visited a couple of interesting museums and walked around the town which has a river running through it, always a plus as far as I’m concerned. Apparently until recently the River Roch was completely hidden from view as a road had been built over it, now parts of it have been revealed, the bridge in the photo below is 800 years old.

River Roch

Since that photo was taken the work to open the area up has been done and it now looks like this.

Rochdale is the only place that I’ve seen old cars used as planters, it’s a great idea I think. This isn’t a great photo though as I had to snap it while Jack was driving past. They used various types of old cars, well it keeps them out of landfills!

Rochdale Town Hall, Lancashire

Posted on 23 November 2017 by Katrina

We stayed in Rochdale for a few days last month, visiting friends who live there. I knew very little about the place, apart from knowing that like many towns it has a very grand town hall built in the Victorian Gothic Revival style. We had just missed a tour of the building and they only have a couple of them a week, but we were being treated to afternoon tea in the tearoom there so we were at least able to see some of the interior. I can highly recommend the afternoon tea – delicious.

It’s a good setting for a wedding if you live in that area.

Sue and I made a trip to the loos and we were held up a bit because there was an old lady in front of us, obviously not able to walk very quickly – and leaning on a man’s arm. Luckily they veered off in a different direction and Sue said to me “Did you realise who that was?” No I didn’t. It was the actress Julie Goodyear, better known as Bet Lynch of Coronation Street fame! And – blow me down – she had been wearing her trademark leopard print too, just in case people failed to recognise her I think. We all saw her from the front later on so Jack and I feel we got the authentic north of England experience of seeing a ‘soap’ actor around town. With Emmerdale also being filmed nearby actors can apparently be seen around and about quite often.

If you have no idea who Bet Lynch was you might like to see the clip of her below, when she was in her heyday. This is probably from around when I gave up watching Corrie as they went from two episodes a week to just about every day of the week. Too much.

It was obviously too much for Julie Goodyear as she seems to have retired from acting to concentrate on breeding horses. Martin and Sue pointed her property out to us, on the outskirts of Rochdale, she has a good view anyway.

Rochdale has come in for a lot of flak in recent years but I was quite impressed by it.

Blackpool Illuminations – and more

Posted on 19 November 2017 by Katrina

Last month when we were visiting friends in the north of England for a few days we were taken to see the Blackpool Illuminations – a first for both of us. I had heard that Blackpool was like lots of British coastal resorts, very much down-at-heel and that’s true for some parts of it. The sad truth is that it’s often cheaper for people to travel to Spain for a week than to stay in a seaside hotel in Britain.

You can’t go to Blackpool and not buy some rock, it comes in all sorts of weird flavours nowadays, not just the mint of the past. So chilli, salted caramel and cheesecake flavours purchased, it was time to look at the Blackpool Tower. The TV programme Strictly Come Dancing must have been a godsend to Blackpool as it must have brought a lot of visitors to the place, to see the famous ballroom. But there was something going on in it when we were there, probably filming so we didn’t see the actual ballroom although there are still good Victorian details to admire in the rest of the interior.

We were treated to a splendid afternoon tea at a posh hotel, The Imperial – see above, but the framed celebrity photos on the walls spoke of a grander history when the likes of The Beatles and Jayne Mansfield visited.

It was dry but windy and a wee bit chilly, so after filling up on delicious sandwiches, scones and cakes – twice as many as in the picture! – we got all day tickets for the trams and took a ride out to Fleetwood, about fifteen miles from Blackpool, but by the time we got there Fleetwood was shut! We had a walk about and Martin, who had gone there on holiday as a nipper, found a lot of changes although to me it looked fine, but was lacking the bowling greens and crazy golf of the past. There are a few buildings that would be recognisable by Edwardians who flocked to Fleetwood in its glory days as you can see from the photo below.

When we got back to Blackpool it was time for dinner, so we headed to a fish restaurant – as you do. Fish wrapped in batter is really the only kind that I like as it doesn’t taste very fishy.

By the time we had finished it was dark and the show had started, illuminations were lit up. I’ve known loads of people who go to the illuminations every year and I never really had any idea of what it was they were going to see – so now I know!

It’s a mixture of tableaux aimed at children I suppose, but I liked the Alice in Wonderland one.

The trams are festooned with lights making them look like riverboats and old steam trains, and the street on the long esplanade is decked out in a variety of designs. I was really quite impressed and I was surprised to discover that the illuminations are so temporary. It seems strange that they don’t have them there for the Christmas and New Year celebrations. Sadly most of our photos were too blurry but you can see more photos of the illuminations here.

They certainly brighten up a cold dark night but I suppose could be thought of as being a bit tacky, I think it’s just a bit of fun to try to prolong the tourist season after the summer holidays are over. It must use up a lot of electricity though so I hope in future years they can power a lot of it by solar!

I thought you might like to see posters of Blackpool and Fleetwood in their heyday in the 1920s and 1930s.

Blackpool

Fleetwood

Battlefield/Langside in Glasgow

Posted on 15 November 2017 by Katrina

One day last month we decided to travel to my beloved west of Scotland, all of seventy or so miles away from where we now live, but a miss is as good as a mile – as THEY say. We were aiming to visit Holmwood House, an Arts and Crafts house which is now owned by the National Trust. I’ll blog about that house sometime in the future.

On the way back from that part of Glasgow I mentioned to Jack that an ancestor of mine (great great uncle?) had designed a church and monument in Battlefield, which happened to be the area we were in, just as I said that we passed the monument which is now situated on a traffic roundabout! The Wiki link is wrong, I think that must have been his son who went to Australia.

It’s much bigger than I had imagined. The monument commemorates the Battle of Langside in 1568 which ended with the defeat of Mary, Queen of Scots’s army on that site, or certainly nearby. Alexander Skirving designed the monument in 1887 which was the 320th anniversary of her defeat.

As ever, we in Scotland are always in a bit of a quandary, would we have supported her or been on the other side? I suppose it depends which religious leader you favour – the Pope or John Knox. What a choice!

The church is now a bar and eatery, as so many of them are nowadays, if they haven’t been turned into flats or demolished. We had already had our lunch at Holmwood, we’ll try that restaurant out another time though.

After that the only thing I wanted to seek out was the street that I knew must be fairly nearby, named after the architect and also of course my own maiden name. With a bit of help from a passerby we found it, as you can see it’s typical Victorian tenements, it’s actually quite a long street the photo below is about half of it.

There are shops further up, including a bookshop which very annoyingly was closed for the day. It was a bit surreal to see my surname above a Chinese take away. They’re usually called Lucky Date, Golden Moon or some such thing, but I suppose it means that people won’t forget where it is! It’s something that Alexander Skirving could never have foretold when he designed buildings for this area.

There aren’t that many of us about with that Skirving surname, in fact I’ve never met any that I wasn’t related to. It appears in ancient Scottish surname books, but not in ordinary ones, and is of course originally Scandinavian/Viking. Some people like to think that in Britain our ancestors have been here forever and a day, but like everywhere else we’re just a bunch of mongrels when you get right down to it.

Doune Castle in Stirlingshire

Posted on 5 November 2017 by Katrina

A couple of weeks ago we visited Doune Castle which is not far from Stirling, we hadn’t visited it before although we’ve been to Doune quite a lot and even looked at a house in the village when we were house-hunting prior to J’s retirement. The castle was built in the 14th century.

There’s some work requiring scaffolding going on at part of the castle.

Like many such places it has been used as a location for TV programmes and films and probably because of the plummeting pound it has seen a big increase in visitor numbers, especially from the US. I’m beginning to think that Diana Gabaldon should be given some sort of award from the Scottish government – for her services to tourism in Scotland.

There was also a wedding going on in the kitchen of all places while we were there and the bride was due any minute so we only got a quick look at the kitchen, the guests were already waiting for her to arrive.

Doune Castle has been famous for quite a long time though as it was used in Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Game of Thrones.

Internally it has some quite grand rooms that would have been more suitable for a wedding I think, but maybe that would have meant closing down most of the castle and they wouldn’t want to do that.

You can see more images of Doune Castle here.

The staircase below started off fine but got progressively narrower and steeper, it’s amazing to me that people manage to negotiate them without breaking something, although I did hear of one lady who got stuck in a staircase at Culross Palace!

Most of these National Trust properties have a dressing up box for the children, but at Doune it’s for adults who fancy dressing up as Clare from Outlander! One lady was desperate to try a dress on but I think they were all in Claire’s size so she had to give up trying. In the shop they have for sale replicas of Claire’s riding jacket priced at £200. I think you would have to be a fairly dedicated fan (or nutter) to shell out that sort of money.

We went for a walk around the castle and it was only then that we realised how well positioned it is. They built it on high ground at the confluence of two rivers, the River Teith and the Ardoch Burn so it wasn’t going to be easy for any attackers to gain access from those sides. There were a few men fishing in the Teith.

There isn’t a tearoom at the castle but we enjoyed coffee, scones and cake at Willows Dell which is in the village of Doune nearby. You can see photos of the village here.

The Cavern, Liverpool

Posted on 8 October 2017 by Katrina

For some reason I had been under the impression that The Cavern had been demolished years ago, but it turns out that they only knocked down 25% of it, so it was a must visit destination for us during our recent trip to Liverpool with our friends Martin and Sue.

Just imagine how many famous performers have traipsed down the stairs into The Cavern! It seemed a long way down too.

The place was packed out with drinkers and people like ourselves who were just there to soak up a wee bit of the atmosphere. There was a chap on the stage playing guitar and he discovered that a woman at the front had come over from Belfast, Frances was celebrating her 40th birthday and she asked him to play Give Peace a Chance which he did. Perfect for a sing song! And I imagine something often in the mind of a person from Belfast.

I had a good walk around the place, the walls are covered with old photos of the many people who have performed there over the years, not only The Beatles. But it was their photos that I found strangely moving, it’s all so sad that the best two are no longer with us.

Fans from all over the world have written their names all over the brickwork. Above the photos a sign says that The Beatles played there 292 times between the 9th of February 1961 and the 3rd of August 1963

A very young looking Chuck Berry was one of the many others who have played there.

The photo below is of the entrance, which is ‘new’, well certainly not the original, presumably that one was what was demolished for some reason – years ago – that 25%.

If you’re going to Liverpool, even if you aren’t a huge Beatles fan but are into music then you should definitely make time to visit The Cavern. I think there will always be a bit of a Beatles sing-song going on mind you!

Stromness, Orkney, Scotland

Posted on 9 August 2017 by Katrina

I liked this really quaint looking house in Stromness.

Stromness is a really small town with just one very narrow street of shops strung along the edge of it, and as you can see it’s very narrow, you have to press yourself to the wall whenever a car goes past – which is often, and sometimes you even have to dive into a doorway if it’s a big vehicle. We were never brave enough to actually drive along this street – not wishing to kill anyone!

The pavements/road surfaces are interesting though, there seem to be fossils embedded in a lot of them.

This very old doorway is just off the High Street .

Stromness like every other High Street in the UK has at least one charity shop, it’s a cat charity and Moxy the cat is apparently NOT FOR SALE.

There are some cracking photos of Stromness online, you can see them here.

St Magnus Cathedral, Kirkwall, Orkney

Posted on 19 July 2017 by Katrina

After a few decent days of weather on Orkney a storm rolled in, terrible high winds and torrential rain, so we decided to drive to Kirkwall which is the main town on Orkney. We dashed from shop to shop in a bid to avoid the worst of the rain, not that there are that many shops in Kirkwall.

St Magnus Cathedral beckoned us over the road and although there were quite a lot of people inside – that didn’t detract from the beauty of the place. I usually much prefer the atmosphere in small churches (not that I am at all religious) as some large places of worship often have that ‘fear of God’ about them, but this cathedral felt like a place of peace.

The floor is particularly lovely.

As is the font which is encrusted with semi-precious polished stones.

I love this model of a Viking ship.

There are more images of the cathedral here.

Sneek, Holland

Posted on 30 June 2017 by Katrina

One town that we visited on our recent trip to the Netherlands was Sneek (prounced snake). It’s one of those places that I would have been very happy to settle down in, or at least have a small holiday house there, but as I haven’t won the lottery – it won’t be possible. Lots of canals means lots of bridges and this one dates from 1887, it’s unusual I think.

It doesn’t really look like it’s meant for cars to go over it, but they do – we did.

To me there’s something lovely about being able to moor a wee boat right outside your house so you can hop in and sail along a canal any time you fancy. It’s one way of avoiding the road traffic anyway!

The canal leads eventually to the North Sea, but presumably it can’t cope with boats big enough to sail across it to Scotland, but it would be tempting (or crazy) to try. Below is a photo of the waterpoort.

The town itself is very historic, but there are also independent shops, which is such a nice change from towns in the UK which always seem to have the same chainstores – or often nowadays – empty shop premises.

If you ever find yourself in north-east Holland you should definitely have a keek at Sneek – or even a cake at Snake!

Ypres

Posted on 30 May 2017 by Katrina

After spending an afternoon in Bruges we drove on to Ypres or Ieper as the locals prefer to call it nowadays. We were there last year for the first time, mainly because we wanted to attend one of the services of remembrance that are held every evening at 8 pm at the Menin Gate. You can just see the edge of the massive gateway to the town in this photo. It has thousands of names of the ‘fallen’ on it. The road is closed off every evening which does annoy some of the locals, but as so many visitors are going there just to track down family graves, and it brings a lot of money into the local economy, I think it’s something that they’ll just have to put up with.

The photo below is another view of the Menin Gate taken from the west.

Below is another view of the Menin Gate and the moat which surrounds the town.

The photo below was taken from the ramparts near the Menin Gate and the houses are on the other side of the moat. They’re all individually designed and some are very smart looking.

I didn’t take any photos of the town of Ypres this time but you can see some I took last year here.

And we stayed at the same hotel which you can see here, we had much better weather last year.

This year we just took the photo below, in the evening.

Pining for the West

Meanderings about recipes, books, craft and more

Category Archives: Towns