Alcester, Warwickshire

Posted on 14 August 2012 by Katrina

Sadly the school holidays are over now in Scotland and Jack is back at work, the six weeks always seem to go so quickly but it seems such a long time since we were down in England at the beginning of the holidays. We had planned to go up north too but just didn’t get around to it.

When we were in Alcester the town was still festooned with Diamond Jubilee bunting and they were obviously looking forward to the Olympic Games as they had that bunting up too. It was definitely the most decorated town that we saw.

Alcester is a really small town but I like its atmosphere and they seem to have a good commmunity spirit there.

These cute wee houses are just at the top of the High Street, behind the church, and that seemed to be where the bunting stopped. It looks like a very quiet area but I think the church bells will shatter their peace quite often.

These Tudor buildings are so different from the grey stone and grey/purple slate houses that I’m used to in Scotland, that I can’t quite get over how fragile and pretty they look. Like something out of a fairy tale, it looks like a few huff-puffs would blow them down, but obviously not.

There are quite a few drinking establishments in and around Alcester’s High Street, just imagine coming out of one after you’ve had a drink or two …. and finding these buildings leaning at you as you lurch home!

I suppose they’ll be taking all the bunting down now that all the celebration fun is over. I wonder what the town is like at Christmas? Oh! I can’t believe I said that word!

You might wonder what took us to Alcester in the first place, it’s a very small town but ancient as you can see but it’s far older than Tudor times, the Romans had a settlement there. We hadn’t even heard of the place until we bought an old clock which has Alcester painted on its face along with the maker’s name – T. Jorns – which I think is a Scandinavian name. I’m sure that there was still an electrical shop with that name above it not too long ago but by the time we got to Alcester there was no trace of the name anywhere and nobody could remember anyone with that unusual name. I thought it would have been great to get a photo of the place where our clock was made. Anyway, it could have been ‘born’ in any of the shops in the town or even in a house, the clock led us to a pleasant part of England anyway and I imagine we’ll be going back in the future as it’s well placed for travelling to different parts of the country. I found this interesting site of the principal inhabitants of the town in 1791, it’s amazing how many different traders there were. Thomas Jorns is mentioned but there’s no clue as to where he lived or traded.

Coughton Court, Alcester, Warwickshire, England

Posted on 16 July 2012 by Katrina

When I opened the curtains on the last day of our recent trip down to England I could hardly believe what I saw – blue sky and sunshine, and the forecast had been for yet more rain, not that I’m complaining that they got it wrong!

Anyway, after journeying across to Wales it was now time to visit the more local places, so Coughton Court, just a mile or so from where we were staying in Alcester was our destination. So we used our National Trust membership cards yet again. It’s a Tudor house/mansion which has been in the hands of the Throckmorton family for centuries. The Throckmortons were a very high status Catholic family who must have had a great survival instinct as they managed to avoid the grim destinies which so many Catholic (and Protestant) families endured due to the politics of the Tudor/Elizabethan times.
This is a view of the front of the house.

And the house from the back.

This is a bit of the formal gardens.

The house and gardens are lovely and it was such a plus that it was a lovely warm sunny day, perfect for wandering around the gardens. Inside the house there are all sorts of interesting things to see like a chemise which supposedly belonged to Mary, Queen of Scots, apparently the one which she was wearing when she got the chop. It’s suspiciously clean, no bloodstains, so I have my doubts about that but I suppose it is possible. Bonnie Prince Charlie’s garter is on display too, they were obviously keen on obtaining things belonging to prominent Catholics.

The house was used as a meeting place by the Gunpowder Plotters who had rented it, the owner had the sense not to be there when they were so he couldn’t be implicated.

There are lovely tapestries but no photography was allowed as they’re 450 years old and would be damaged by the light from flashes. There’s a priest’s hole which you can peek down into and a wonderful view from the top of the tower. Despite the fact that the place is so ancient the rooms do have quite a homely atmosphere. There’s a Mrs Throckmorton still residing in the house and although the house has beeen handed over to the National Trust the family has been given permission to live there for the next three hundred years.

This is a view from the top of the tower, I have no idea what the house in the distance is but they have a very good view of Coughton Court.

It isn’t all absolutely ancient stuff and some of the rooms are as they were in more recent times with a wind-up gramophone featuring in a sitting-room. If you want to see and read more about Coughton Court have a look here. Follow the instructions and you can go on a virtual tour.

Temple Grafton part 2

Posted on 9 July 2012 by Katrina

This is the primary school in Temple Grafton, Warwickshire. As you can see it has had a fairly nasty looking extension tacked on to what was a lovely wee building, but no doubt they needed the extra space. When we parked our car nearby it was morning break time and they certainly sounded like a very healthy and noisy bunch of youngsters. The school is across the road from the church, just down the road a few yards.

These houses are called ‘schoolhouses’ and they’re almost right across from the school. They must have originally been for the teachers to live in, they certainly didn’t have far to go when they got up in the morning. As you can see from all the building stuff lying around – one of them is having building work done in it at the moment.

Considering that Temple Grafton is such a small village, there are a lot of different styles of houses, thatched wattle and daub cottages, red brick houses, stone terraces, representing the times they were built in and even 1950s, 60s and 70s houses.

I think this is just about the biggest house I saw there, it’s quite grand looking really and probably beautiful inside, I don’t know about you – but if it was my house it would drive me nuts that it isn’t symmetrical. It doesn’t look as if it has had bits added on to it so I think the builders must just have been rubbish at measuring. Typical, in my experience men still aren’t very good at measuring things.

Temple Grafton is quite hilly and I took this photo from outside the thatched cottages which are in my previous blogpost. We puffed up the hill from the church so we could get a closer look at the houses, they’re a real novelty to us as there isn’t much in the way of thatch in Scotland. There is some heather thatch but I can only think of one roof like that in the whole of Fife. Anyway, as you can see, they have a nice view of the rooftops and the church spire in the middle of the village.

A bit of Shakespeare information outside the church. It says that the church is open every day but I think we must have been there too early.

This is the back view of St Andrew’s Church, I think you’ll agree that it’s a handsome building and I would have thought that people would be queuing up to get married in it, even if it didn’t have the Shakespeare connection.

And that’s all the photos I have of Temple Grafton. I couldn’t see a shop or even a pub in the village, which is a real shame, so many places are losing their community spirit because there’s no place for people to congregate, but the fact that the school seems to be thriving is great, as what with all the cut backs that we’ve been having, small schools have been closed down all over the country. I think the buildings are all fairly typical of Warwickshire and I hope that it gives you a bit of an idea of the place, particularly for Debbie.

If you want a bird’s eye view of the area have a look here. It’s all very rural and if you zoom in on the fields you can often see strange circles and outlines of ancient buildings which have disappeared over hundreds of years. I find things like that fascinating.

Temple Grafton, Warwickshire, England

Posted on 8 July 2012 by Katrina

We visited Warwickshire for the first time at Easter and when I blogged about it Debbie at ExUrbanis commented that she had had relatives who had lived in Warwickshire years ago and she mentioned Temple Grafton. Well I had never heard of the place but when I looked it up I realised that it was just four miles away from where we had been staying, the small town of Alcester. I told Debbie that the next time we were in that area I’d take some photos, and here are some of them.

Temple Grafton is a tiny place, but absolutely ancient, it’s mentioned in records as far back as 710, it does have a few modern houses but there are also thatched ones, like the ones below. They are leaning and bulging every way you can think but, it’s quite something to think that William Shakespeare might actually have been in these houses as this was the village where he ‘courted’ Ann Hathaway and it’s thought they got married in the church here. Although I think that to say that he courted her might be just a touch too romantic as they obviously weren’t your typical love’s young dream couple as Ann was so much older than William and was pregnant. Methinks she took advantage of the poor lad!

This is the very church, St Andrew’s – it’s big for such a small place but of course there might have been a lot more houses way back in Shakespeare’s time.

The photo below is of the front view and gateway, it’s really a very pretty church and it has quite a lot of gravestones in the churchyard, I walked around checking them all for names linked with Debbie’s family but didn’t find any.

This photo is of the First World War Memorial which is situated just to the left when you walk through the church gateway. Not many names really but no doubt each one was a disaster for the family involved.

This is a close up of the names, just in case anyone is interested in such things. I’m sure you will be Debbie, there are two Odells on it and they were in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment so you’ll be able to look them up in military records.

I still have a few more photos of buildings in Temple Grafton but I’ll keep them for tomorrow, or I should say – later today as it’s almost 2 o’clock in the morning.

Road Trip to Warwickshire

Posted on 7 July 2012 by Katrina

You might have noticed that it has been a wee bit quiet here recently. I’ve been away in England again, just for a few days and quite spur of the momentish as we had been planning to go later, then we remembered that everywhere gets very busy once the school kids are on holiday down in England, which won’t be happening for another week or two. So we dashed down, just for three nights this time, which was long enough as we were beginning to miss our own bed by then.

As usual I added my Netbook into the luggage, intending to blog whilst I was away – and as ever, I didn’t get around to turning it on.

We stayed at Alcester, Warwickshire again, it is a nice wee quaint place, and we also visited Temple Grafton, Great Malvern, Worcester, Haye-on-Wye and Ross-on-Wye.

We had intended visiting Blenheim, but the weather wasn’t great so we decided to leave that for another time so that the gardens would look their best. Coughton Court is actually just a hop and a skip from Alcester and is a National Trust property so we went there. Then on the way back home we dropped in at Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire. So I’ll be putting some photos on ‘pining’ very soon.

Alcester, Warwickshire, England

Posted on 9 April 2012 by Katrina

We travelled on from Morecambe to Alcester in Warwickshire which is a small town with around 9,000 inhabitants. Of course you’ll know that when an English place name has chester, caster or cester in it it means that their was a Roman camp there. Castris is Latin for camp. So it’s no surprise that there’s an interesting wee museum in Alcester (which the locals pronounce Ulster, exactly like the place in Ireland) and it has quite a lot of things in it which have been found locally. Apparently Roman Alcester is only a few centimetres below the soil. As someone who was brought up in Scotland and north of the Antonine Wall, the Roman Empire stopped just a few miles south of Dumbarton, I find it really exciting to think that you could be digging in your garden and discover Roman artefacts. If I lived in Alcester I think I’d be forever poking around in the soil.

Anyway the town is only 8 miles from Stratford-on-Avon which we also visited but Alcester turned out to be a really lovely wee town although like many places it’s feeling the pain of the downturn in the economy. There are lots of charity shops, which I’m not really complaining about because as you can imagine – I did rather well out of them bookwise!

This is the main street, I think it’s really lovely, it’s pretty enough to be on a jigsaw puzzle or chocolate box. I’m used to grey stone buildings which can be quite depressing at times so whitewashed buildings make a nice change.

This is one of the pubs, I have to say that Alcester is well served with boozers!

This road is just off the main street in Alcester and I just had to take a photo of it as the buildings are leaning every way you can imagine but still managing to stay up somehow.

This small road or alley way close to the main street feels like Shakespeare could have been a frequent visitor, I’m sure the place has hardly changed since those days.

This is the buildings on the opposite side of the street. Our own house is over 100 years but it always amazes me that there are actually people living in these types of houses which must be about 500 years old, or maybe even older.

These brick houses are at the bottom of the same street.

Yet more cute, chocolate boxy English buildings.

Obviously Jack took this one as that’s me in my raincoat on the left hand side, not realising that he was taking a photo. As you can see it wasn’t actually raining at this point, things did get much worse!

So that’s Alcester, a small town that I would definitely visit again, I’m sure there’s much more to explore in the area. We hadn’t even heard of the place until we bought a grandfather clock for a spot in our hall which was just crying out to be filled with one. I had wanted a Scottish clock but I had been looking for years but in Scotland they tend to go for silly prices so I gave up and bought an English one as you can see.

It has the name T. Jorns ( a very unusual name) and Alcester painted on the clock face and when we looked it up we discovered that it was in Warwickshire, which accounts for the apples painted in the corners of its face as it’s apple growing country. I’m sure that when I started to do some research that I discovered that there was still a shop in Alcester which was owned by a Jorns, an electrical shop. Sadly there’s no trace of one now, which isn’t really surprising as there are hardly any independent electrical places around now. Thomas Jorns did actually make the clock, sometimes the name and place on a clock just tells you where it was bought rather than made. It’s just a 30 hour one which means that you pull a chain to wind it up instead of using a key but it keeps good time and has a lovely sound to the bell when it strikes the hours, and as it’s nearly 200 years old I think that’s not at all bad. If I forget to wind it up and it stops – I notice immediately because it sounds as if our house’s heart has stopped.

Pining for the West

Meanderings about recipes, books, craft and more

Tag Archives: Warwickshire