It's just the way it changes ...

Springtime trips to Teignmouth and Shaldon in South Devon to mark the birthdays of one son or both have become almost an annual event (pandemic notwithstanding). Yesterday our party comprised just me and Son the Elder, Son the Younger currently working and residing up north in Coventry.

It was also the first time we'd been down to our hallowed ancestral grounds since the death of both of my parents, with whom we'd spent so many holidays there. We discussed how this felt on the way down in the car, and decided the main emotion was one of gratitude for the happier times of our childhoods, many of which happened there. 

The darkness of summer was already evident in Smuggler's Lane in Holcombe, with the first Hemlock Water Dropwort beginning to flower on the edge of the stream running down to the sea ... 

... and, judging by the noise from the trees overhead, a rook, dead and tyre-flattened, poor thing.

We pressed on, past incipient clumps of thrift and sea campion ... 

... and up around the steps beyond the railway bridge ... 

... to the sea wall. I never tire of this approach, or the view to Shaldon and beyond, even though some of the South West coast path books advise cutting this section of the walk out altogether because it's so urbanised and spoilt. (This is a fair point when you compare it with the wilder, wildly beautiful sections of the path, but Son the Elder was carrying 31 years' worth of memories with him, and me 60, and this makes all the difference.) 

Yesterday even the ordinary was beautiful to our eyes. 

Chips on Teignmouth front for dinner

Teignmouth dock was devoid of ships, something I hadn't seen since before the miners' strike, when Polish coal was imported through smaller, non-unionised ports and changed their fortunes, in stark contrast to the mining communities, though I might be reading too much - Brexit, war in Ukraine, etc - into this. 

We had to wait a turn for the ferry to Shaldon, which was loading passengers hard by the jetty rather than in its customary spot at the end of the slipway. A holiday maker ankle-deep in water some feet out from the steeply sloping beach suggested that the tide had done something interesting to the contours of the beach that were still underwater. 

Once we were out in the estuary it became apparent, if only for a moment, that we were actually in Turkey or on the Adriatic ...

... at least as long as you kept looking in the right direction. 

Once in Shaldon we decided to walk around the Ness the back way, which turns the long steep drag up from the Ness Hotel into a descent, and is thus more comfortable for me these days.

Even so, we sat on a bench around the back of the cliff-top zoo for a breather, where we were joined by robins and blackbirds that are clearly very used to humans and have little fear of them.

The trees on top of the Ness have only been there since the late 19th century, but some of them are looking pretty venerable these days.

I don't think I'll ever quite get used to the absence of the red-painted mine that used to stand at the Ness Viewpoint, and which we always put a few pennies in for charity - I think it was the RNLI. Though it's there in my head, of course.

Back in the village we had a drink at the Clipper, and then Son the Elder walked back to Teignmouth across the bridge, while I took a return trip on the ferry, passing a few favourite crannies on my way, remembered from earliest childhood, when we used to stay locally in various B&Bs and chalets.

Over on Teignmouth back beach the earlier issue with the beach and the ferry had been revealed by the falling tide. 

It was a bit like being in the sort of dream where a place is really familiar but the lie of the land is wrong. 

My meeting point with Son the Elder was the bench in Northumberland Place, where we hoped to get an ice cream from Amanda's, and this allowed me to wander through my favourite part of Teignmouth, with its narrow side streets and glimpses of the estuary. 

A shaft of sun was shining directly on Keats' House (which might or might not be some days but definitely was yesterday).

Amanda's isn't called Amanda's anymore, but you can still get ice cream with a dollop of clotted cream on the side so that's OK.

We made friends with a pied wagtail while in post-ice cream recovery.

Poor foxes

I see sea slater on the sea wall

Back at the Holcombe end of the sea wall, we sat for a time while I investigated my pockets for treasure. Clearly my eye was in for sea glass yesterday, rather than stony representations of the cosmos. 

Then back down the steps, up the hill to the car and home. A gift of a day.

Five go to Big Pit

I confess that the inclusion of the word 'World' to the title 'Heritage Site' often bugs me, but as Dru pointed out, in the case of Blaenavon it is entirely justified. This is where the Industrial Revolution began.

It is three decades since Thatcher turned on the mining communities of Britain, and their struggle to preserve their livelihoods has passed into history.  Unfortunately the Tory party has not, and in the week preceding the biggest cuts yet aimed at the poorest in our society, Big Pit served as a reminder of the callousness of the right and its drive to preserve privilege at the expense of others.

(Again, most of these pictures are Dru's.)

When I was last up here, years ago, it was a hot summer day.  This time snow lent the valley an unwonted beauty, softening the bumps and bruises of excavation and turning the rusting relics into ghosts.  




Jan being a bit wary of going underground and John being cold to the bone and Dru being a kindly soul, only Colin and I opted to go down the mine.  The ex-miner kitting me out with my helmet, lamp and battery pack assumed I was a teacher, and when I told him I wasn't, he looked at me very straight and asked me what I was.  'A poet,' I answered and he said 'There's lots for you here'. 

The stories of working underground are not easily forgotten, but the ones that hit hardest are those concerning the children and the horses. 

Children would work 12 hour shifts, six days per week, from the age of five.  The youngest were 'trappers', tasked with opening the air doors to let the trucks of coal through when they heard them coming.  This involved staying alert for hours with no food (because of colonies of rats) in complete darkness.  Although the employment of children under ten in the mine was outlawed in the Mines and Collieries Act of 1842, in practice it lasted for decades afterwards

because there was only one mines inspector for the entire country.  

Horses were not so lucky.  They only worked one shift per year, but that was 50 weeks long - at the end of July each year, they had a two week holiday above ground - and probably the last horse to work underground, Robbie, retired from nearby Pant y Gasseg in 1999.  It was vital that horses were kept as injury-free as possible to minimise the likelihood of attack by rats, but the impossibility of keeping their feet dry in the wet conditions made this difficult and I don't like to think any further than that.  

We had a pleasant late lunch in the canteen.  

After the darkness of the mine, the snowlight was dazzling.  

Then we explored the outlying buildings, including the state-of-the-art pithead baths built in the 1940s, which must have lightened the load of miners' wives, who, in an earlier era, had a lower life expectancy than their husbands.  

A photograph from the exhibition at the Pit had stuck in my head for years, since my previous visit. It was of women waiting at the railings for news after a major accident at a nearby pit.  I knew I had to write about it but I couldn't remember which disaster it was, just the look on their faces.  I recognised it as soon as I saw it again - Six Bells Colliery Disaster in 1960, in which 45 men died and three were injured.  

This is the picture.  

 

                Dru Marland and poet, John Terry                                    John Terry and Jan Lane

Time had run away with us and it was too late to pop Dru's Partrishow cards into Abergavenny Tithe Barn, which, having vetted them for religious content, is going to sell them, so hooray! There's another trip in the offing,  this time hopefully taking in The Guardian Of The Valleys, a memorial to the dead of Six Bells.