Tag: A303

Cornwall 11.5.25

12 May 2025 / admin

Pencarrow House

Jamaica Inn will only accept bookings for two nights at weekends so we delayed our return home to Monday morning and needed to find another destination today – which turned out to be Pencarrow House.

On the way there using the A389 I find that the somewhat surprise find of rail embedded in the road between Bodmin and Dunmere where the L&SWR line used to cross the road which I first encountered in 2013 remain in situ. I gather from online resources that the same applies on other minor road crossings in the Camel Valley. Regrettably it all closed long before I could ever visit it.

Arriving by the advertised route (and ignoring the sat nav instructions) requires the car to pass through the site of an Iron Age Hillfort – so it has been an area which has been inhabited for many centuries prior to the house being built. It is possible to walk through the extensive grounds to see the Fort – but when we arrived it was raining and when we had finished the tour of the house it felt that it might rain again – although it did not actually do so but was enough to discourage a lengthy walk. Reportedly there are peacocks in the grounds but we did not see them today.

Pencarrow House, unlike most of the locations visited on this holiday, is not National Trust owned and it remains used to a limited extent by the Molesworth-St Aubyn family and so the arrangements are slightly different. We are met at the front of the property by the guide who then discourses for over an hour as she leads us around the open rooms of the house to show off the family heirlooms which remain in situ. No internal photographs are permitted as it remains private property due to insurance limitations.

Unlike most properties the front door does not open onto a magnificent hall as one might expect – it actually leads into the library – and we are assured that at some point the books have been read, many of them being State papers as family members were local MPs and similar. Why the library? We only find this out at the end of the tour when we are in what was once the hall.

One of the owners had the former front of the house laid down as an Italian Garden and visiting coaches and horses were regularly disturbing the beauty of this which led to a new front entrance into the library being constructed to prevent the garden from suffering damage and needing regular repair.

Colour at Pencarrow

Some of the stories told as we go around the house relate to relatively recent generations of the family. For example there is on display a Meissen Duck and the daughter accompanying tours used to remark that there were no mice visible, so some mice were added in a model which hides behind the duck and is brought out just in case she visits and asks after her “Mice and Duck” – much in the same way we were told a story about a Loch Ness Monster at the Castle of Mey. A couple of the other stories revolve around a rambunctious Labrador and his ability to behave unpredictably. A light lunch is taken in the tea room.

We return to Jamaica Inn for the evening meal and the following (Monday) morning we head off home. A30, A303, M3. Jackie doing just about half of the driving as far as Podmore and then I did the second half. It is one of the few long distance trips we have made over the years where we managed it in the time predicted by the AA route planner.

Cornwall 2.5.25

3 May 2025 / admin

Stourhead 2.5.25

The room in the Nog Inn, Wincanton is a decent size and we were forced to have the window open because of the high temperatures – some of the warmest ever days to start May. Consequently we also discovered that Wincanton has some pretty noisy birds as the sunrise bird song was impossible to ignore, added to which people in one of the adjacent rooms were very early departures and were not as quiet as they might have been.

However breakfast is excellent and was a great start to the day. Car loaded we then headed ever so slightly east as we finally make it to Stourhead. We had been due to visit it at the end of July last year but our plans fell apart when we encountered a pub room that was not a patch on the excellent quality of the Nog Inn and decided to drive home rather than to endure two nights in a less welcoming environment. No names – but we had intended to visit Stourhead then but headed home instead.

We had never been to Stourhead before, although have obviously seen pictures of the gardens and one or two appearances on television programmes, so the views are known – but until one is actually standing there it is perhaps hard to visualise the reality – which is beautiful. We did most of the main walk – taking one shortcut at the expense of a steep gradient to leave out some of the meander.

The house was reconstructed by the Hoare family with monies originally derived from goldsmithing and banking until such time as more difficult periods were suffered as is often the case with later family generations. The grounds have been maintained and have now matured perhaps beyond what the originators could ever have imagined. Visitors to the Hoare family were required to navigate the full garden walk – but I suppose it was a good way of developing an appetite.

The inside of the house is currently open only at ground floor level – but perhaps the most stunning room for me was the library. However the picture gallery on the other side of the house again has a size and contents which were intended to prove to the visitors of the wealth and standing of the family in a fashion similar to that demonstrated by Bess of Hardwick and Hardwick Hall which we visited a few weeks ago.

Leaving Stourhead we then took to the A303 and traversed the Blackdown Hills. I first remember driving this road with an uncle in 1973. There was one particularly sharp curve at Barton which I struggled even then to believe should be allowed on an A road. In the intervening 52 years the curve has been eased a little through road widening, but it remains a huge surprise on an A road. Much of the remainder of the route (except at Stonehenge) has changed significantly over the intervening period and indeed this trip encountered a completely new section a Sparkford (opened in November 2024) which was unknown to the satnav as it tried to tell me which exit to take at a now non-existent roundabout.

Our destination today is Lympstone Manor which is almost in Exmouth even if it is called Lympstone. Road works slow our final approach as we are diverted around the countryside and then get caught in particularly slow traffic due to an invisible set of lights for the road works (invisible in that we turn off before reaching them).

Lympstone Manor is a gorgeous hotel, owned and run by Michael Caines. He has developed the property and it has some wonderful views out over the Exe estuary and with the clear fine weather we can see large numbers of little boats in the estuary.

Pre-dinner we sit on the terrace in the sun – it feels warmer out there than in the lounge and sup a glass of the hotel’s own sparkling wine from the vineyard in view between us and the water. And a great start to the evening. Unusually we decide to go with the fish only menu – most of which is local.

Lympstone Manor menu

Regrettably something goes wrong and we get the courses in the wrong order and that takes the shine off the evening slightly. Apologies are made and charges reduced – so the right things are done but it is a shame that it was not right. The ravioli lobster course and the rhubarb soufflé were both excellent but perhaps because of the mix up we felt it was not quite as good as last night.

Devon and the South Devon Railway

29 May 2017 / admin

Monday 22 May 2017

With the football season over we can take a holiday without missing a match – so this is an inexpensive Monday to Friday break.

We are taking another cheap(ish) and this time short holiday. It is Monday to Friday courtesy of the Daily Mail special offer which including a few extras has cost about £80 for a caravan at Challaborough which is on the coast on the western side of the South Devon Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, west of Kingsbridge and south of Ivybridge.

Unfortunately we are badly held up on the M3 due to an accident near Basingstoke. Heading west means the dear old A303 and it is a bright sunny morning which is a great start to any holiday but as we were held up we have to move along at the speed limit. As it is on the way to our eventual destination I have planned a trip on what is now known as the South Devon Railway but when I first visited the line in the late sixties it was known as the Dart Valley Railway. When we do arrive Jackie is unimpressed by the catering offering as she gets some sandwiches for us to eat during our rail journey.

The railway looks nothing like that early visit or even a subsequent trip in the early nineties. On that first trip it was possible to walk around the out of use stock and nothing was undercover. Like other preserved railways, it can no longer pretend to be a quiet bucolic branch line as patronage is now, even on a sunny but non-holiday Monday, vastly greater than the passenger numbers pre-closure.

The trains now run to Totnes Riverside and here the changes are even more dramatic; flower beds on the platform and sign posts to attractions as well as clear routes to the mainline railway; I don’t think we even went that far on the first visit. Working of the branch line into Totnes itself proved too costly and the railway retrenched to their own station. My photos of the railway are here.

With the return train trip completed we motor on from Buckfastleigh, more south than west to our destination at Challaborough Bay Holiday Park. This is at the end of some narrow roads so we get quite close to the hedges and with traffic coming the other way keep needing to find reverse gear. And of course sometimes it is walls and not hedges so even more care is needed, especially with a couple of blind corners!

In the evening we dine at the Oyster Shack. Finding it requires travelling along some very narrow roads, one of which is called Tidal Road alongside the edge of River Avon – and there is water across the road at various points.

I started with some breaded whitebait and here is my main course of crab linguine with spring vegetables which was very nice.

Jackie wanted hake but there was none available. In its place she had yummy cod:

And to ensure we knew we were at the seaside here is the ice bucket:

Photos come once again from Jackie’s camera.

We find a slightly different route back with a few less back roads!