The Hadley Bowling Green Inn

Just over a week ago Mum, Dad, Mark and I went out to the Hadley Bowling Green Inn for a meal to celebrate their 49th Wedding Anniversary.  It was a lovely evening.  The food was a little bit different, showed some originality on the part of the chef and it wasn't too pricey.  When Mark and I first moved to the area, it was a fantastic place to eat and it was a treat to walk over there to sit next to the log fire with sandwiches and a bottle of wine.  Unfortunately the quaint atmosphere of the place was ruined by a really unsympathetic modernisation of the bars about 12 years ago.

 

We stopped calling in because it didn't feel so 'special' anymore.  We heard through local gossip that it wasn't doing well as a business and it was eventually closed and boarded up.  Recently new people have re-started the business and they seem to pitched things right.  There's a lot of really good 'eating pubs' in our area so they had to create a menu that was going to attract people to a pub in the middle of nowhere.

 

Luckily for us, it's also conveniantly placed about halfway round a six mile walk.  Perfect for a lunch stop when the sun is shining!  Here's the walk that we did today...

 

We crossed the Droitwich canal at a little hamlet called Ladywood.

 

 

We then dropped down into the shallow Salwarpe valley..

 

Even the little river Salwarpe showed signs of flooding from earlier in the week..

 

 

Here's the front of the pub. 

It's a delightfully quaint old building and it's lovely to see windows again rather than boards.

 

Here's the bowling green that gives the pub it's name.

 

And here's the fireplace in the bar...! 

 

 

We had sandwiches and chips (very nice) but my days of drinking a bottle of wine at lunchtime are well and truely over!!!

 

Thank you to everyone who left comments on my last post.  It really helped me to read your experiences too.  Also a huge welcome to my new follower - Marina.

 

Free.. and Really Interesting!

While we were on holiday near Crickhowell the other week we popped over the hills to visit the Blaenavon World Heritage Site.  We spent ages exploring the Ironworks.  The photo at the top shows the remains of the huge lift that moved trucks from the works to the tramway that crossed the moors.  The photo below shows Mark by the mouth of one of the huge furnaces.

My favourite part of the ironworks were the old workers cottages.  Some of them had been gutted and housed a display about the ironworks and the town.  The majority were intact and furnished as they would have been at various times since 1789.

There was mock up of the shop for the workers and a very interesting explanation of the 'truck system'.  (I'd learnt about this system of exploiting the workers when I studied O Level History but I'd completely forgotten about it since then!)

Some of the cottages had a 1930s theme.  The green doors are the 'privies'.  I started to tell Mark stories of visiting my Great-Aunt when I was a little girl.  She lived in a cramped cottage just like these in a small mill town near Mancester. 

I was just on the point of explaining about her 'kitchenette' when we walked into the next cottage and there was one right in front of us!  I just had to take a photo.  I remember that my Great-Aunt's had a small foldaway table and masses of useful storage.  It was perfect for her tiny kitchen. 

It took us about an hour and a half to read our way through the displays, listen to all the information posts around the site and walk through the cottages.   I was surprised that such a great site was completely free. 

We then walked the short distance down the hill to the World Heritage Visitor Centre. The old buildings on the right house further displays and an Art Gallery. The glass extension is a really lovely cafe.

This was the view across the valley from the cafe. The low buildings on the right are part of The Big Pit - the National Mining Museum. We spent quite a bit of time chatting to a few local people. They explained that visitors tend to come to The Big Pit but they don't tend to come down the hill and visit the rest of the site. We really enjoyed a fascinating morning.

Other news from 'Stand and Stare land'... My Lovely Pregnant Colleague had her baby at 1.30 this morning.  She's had a little boy.  Another colleague within the Arts Faculty had a baby girl last night as well - in the same hospital.  Apparently they were in next door beds!  They had joked about this happening before the event and it was amusing to hear that it actually happened.

I've got a performance with my Year 9 Btec class this evening so it's been rehearsals and keeping them all calm since lunchtime.  To be honest I feel really tired at the moment and could just curl up into a ball and sleep! I'm sure that this lack of energy comes from our ridiculous weather.  Never mind - almost the Bank Holiday weekend!

Jolly Hockey Sticks!

When I was in my early teens I was completely obsessed with old fashioned school stories.  I liberated all my Mum's old books from the loft - Billy Bunter, Angela Brazil stories (from the 1920s) and The Abbey Girls series.  Half the time I didn't have a clue what was going on.  The slang was antiquated (even in the 1970s!) and I hadn't a clue how Lower 4b related to my school year!  To a certain extent I think it was the 'other worldliness' of the books that gave them their appeal.

However my all time favourite series had to be 'The Chalet School' series by Elinor M Brent Dyer.  This series is epic - the first book was written in the mid-1920s, the last one in the 1950s.  Some of the books were split where they were published as paperbacks, so there were about 60 books in total in the series. Armarda never had more than six or seven of them in print at any one time.  It became a bit of an obsession and I religiously collected as many as I could - even when I'd really out-grown them.  By my early 20s I probably had about half the series.

Then, one day, I hit lucky in a second hand bookshop near Manchester.  Mark noticed a box with some familiar titles under a table. We pulled it out and discovered almost all the books that I was missing in the series.  It was a 'now or never' moment... we bought all the books I needed to complete my series in one go.  I think the owner of the shop thought we were crazy - seeing two adults pouring over a box of rather tatty vintage school stories!

My Chalet School series sits on a couple of shelves in a corner of my study - chronologically ordered ofcourse!  In reality, I still have one book missing but I don't think it was ever published in the paperback series.  I still read them from time to time and I'm immensely proud of a collection that took almost 20 years to complete.

Do you have any on-going collections that have kept you occupied for years?

12th January 1985

Mark and I met through a mutual friend in Sixth Form.  Mark had gone to another school and left after his CSEs.  As a result, he had been working for a couple of years and had his own car.  I remember car ownership being a pretty rare thing for 18 year olds in my area.  The boys I knew either cycled around, had a moped or borrowed their Mother's battered old Mini.  Anyway, Mark didn't just have a car... he had a sports car!  He was the proud owner of an almost new Inca yellow MGB Roadster.  Very nice!

(A pic I found on the internet of a car just like Mark's)

Anyway, we'd met at a couple of parties before Christmas and he had kept ringing through the holidays asking for a date.  Eventually I rang him and we agreed to go out the following Saturday.  He would drive over and pick me up, then we would decide where we wanted to go. 

(Did we really communicate using these things?)

The beginning of the date was full of those awkward moments. My first attempt at getting into a sports car was very inelegant.  Then Mark suggested that we could go into Oxford and go to a club.  I was horrified becuse I knew that my parents would be hysterical if I didn't get home until 2.00 am on a first date!  We settled on a few drinks at a quaint old pub by the river Thames.  To be honest it was the only pub I knew in the area that wouldn't be full of all my Sixth form friends....

(The Trout at Godstow - still a nice pub for a date!)

This date set plenty of the themes for the 27 years that have followed.. I suppose that I must have talked about my music, my A levels and the people that we both knew.  I know that Mark talked - for what seemed like ages - about banger car racing and I didn't understand a word of it!  We still go the pub and talk for hours about school and cars.  Sometimes I still don't understand what he's talking about if his descriptions get too technical! 

I'm glad that we made the effort in the early days - so that we can be where we are now...