The Midlands--The West Ones

I had to look up the name for this part of the country--the part of England hugging the border of Wales. It's the West Midlands, guys. There's an East Midlands, too, you might guess, but it's the west ones we went to after leaving North Wales.

Tony and Sue’s good friends, Rob and Karen, who visited us in London earlier in the summer, invited all of us up to their cottage in the countryside near the charming medieval city of Ludlow. Since it was more or less on the way home from Wales, we decided to spend a couple of nights there before heading back to London. Rob and Karen are a lovely couple (I have met only lovely couples, really--England is apparently full of them) who found each other again later in life after raising separate families. They’re now building their dream life in a cozy sixteenth-century cottage, tucked into the hills of Herefordshire. “Charming” is not really an adequate word to describe their home. My photos won’t do it justice, but I tried my best:

Rob and Karen's 16th-century cottage.

Potatoes from their garden!!

They live on a little road called Kill Horse Lane, so named because part of it is a steep hill--hopefully it wasn't named from real life events...

Let’s backtrack just a little bit, though. On our way to Rob and Karen’s, we stopped in the charming (that word again) Welsh town of Llangollen, with its steam train and river running through it.

We made another pitstop in Shrewsbury, just across the border (my brother tells me to use caution in applying that word here) into England. Shrewsbury has the half-timbered medieval buildings I’ve come to expect in these little towns, but it’s main claim to fame is as the birthplace of the one and only Charles Darwin. We were only really there to grab lunch and take a quick walk through the city, though, so I didn’t see any Darwin-related things.

Shrewsbury.

We only really had one and a half days with Rob and Karen. One morning was spent going to Barrington Hall, to kindly satisfy my desire to visit a stately manor house. It did not disappoint.

Barrington Hall. Not much to look at from the outside.

Inside, though, it was all very Downton Abbey-esque. Downtown Abbey, of course, is filmed in a real state house outside of London, but you have to book tickets months ahead of time due to the popularity of the show.

A barn AND a bookstore! Amazing.

The grounds.

Karen stayed behind to do some work, so I borrowed her National Trust membership card to get into the house for free. It worked, despite the fact that I was wearing my Vancouver Olympic sweater with “CANADA” emblazoned on the front and despite, well, my decidedly North American accent, which I did my best not to reveal by staying quiet. This trip has brought out the worse in me in terms of getting questionably legal deals on admission.

We picked Karen up after a snack of scones (sans cream) in Barrington Hall’s tea room (housed in the former servant’s hall in the basement--very Downton Abbey, again), and drove back across into Wales to visit the town of Hay-on-Wye. Hay-on-Wye is famous for being a centre for second-hand books. I’m not really sure how it came to be this way, because it’s a teensy tiny little town in the middle of quiet, bucolic countryside, but certainly there were a great deal of second-hand bookshops that we had fun perusing.

Hay-on-Wye.

The Wye.

Another heron for Angie.

On our last day at Rob and Karen’s, Tony, Sue and I went for a long walk while Rob and Karen dealt with contractors who came to advise them on renovations they want to do to their centuries-old cottage. We happily occupied ourselves by marching through fields of sheep and cows in a light drizzle--something the Scots call “Scotch mist.” Our walk took us through the tiny, itty-bitty village of Elton, with its own stately home, Elton Hall. Unlike Barrington Hall, though, Elton Hall is still a private residence, but public footpaths lead through the estate into the wooded hills beyond. The thing is, we couldn’t seem to find the not-very-well-marked path, so we ended up doing some accidental trespassing.

Really, though, this sign should have tipped us off:

That path took us up to a gamekeeper’s cabin and a giant fenced off area within the woods where they were raising poor little pheasants or grouse or something. Later on, wandering back from our misadventures, we came across the lady of the house, an aristocratic woman really wearing tweed and walking about seven dogs at once. She was kind, though, and we asked her about that sign, which she said was one of her husband’s jokes. It was a real sign, in that it had once been meant in full earnestness, but it had originated from another estate.

The back of Elton Hall.

The chapel next to Elton Hall.

This is the "town" of Elton. Note the mailbox has the initials "VR," for Victoria. That's a pretty old mailbox, people.

We spent our final afternoon quickly exploring the hilly town of Ludlow, which may just win the prize for the prettiest town I’ve been in so far--a close tie with Conwy in North Wales.

Ludlow Castle.

What, you don't have a set of stocks in your front yard?

This was a 13th-century chapel turned into a house. Someone lives there now.

I loved the mix of medieval half-timbered houses and Georgian brick townhomes.

I loved this sign, too, and I loved that whatever heritage committee made this sign up also recognised how amazing it all is that this house was "newly built' in the 1600s.

Before getting back in the car and heading back to London, we refueld with some cream tea by the river in Ludlow. A pretty great way to end a day, really.

Cream tea by the river with its ducks, in Ludlow.

CREAM TEA COUNT: 11