Day
5

CHEDDAR

TO

BRISTOL

Don’t believe what you read about Cheddar being ruined by tourists and gift shops. It’s true that both are present in abundance, especially in the summer months, but Cheddar is still an amazing place – and not just for cheese. Cheddar Gorge is Britain’s largest gorge and the road that snakes up through it is spectacular; sheer rock towering above with rooks and kestrels wheeling around the cliff faces, as well as a pair of peregrine falcons which have been breeding there for many years. At the top there allegedly nestles one of Britain’s rarest flowers, the Cheddar pink. The plant is unique to Cheddar Gorge.

At the foot of the Gorge are the magnificent Cheddar caves: the two ‘show caves’ are Gough’s Cave and Cox’s Cave, and both are packed with exquisite limestone formations. Beneath the show cave in Gough’s Cave, a climb down a narrow fissure leads to Lloyd Hall, a huge underwater cavern. I went on a trip here once with a local caving club, and remember well the eerie, still green water, glimmering in the light of our lamps. The water disappeared under the rocks at the end of the pool, beyond which only those strange creatures known as ‘cave divers’ can venture. Being underground in a place like that feels primeval and timeless.

Today we only had 25 miles to get under our belt, so we took a short detour up the gorge, although Mick put his foot down when I suggested going on a quick visit to the caves as well. We then turned about and headed along the road to Axbridge. Axbridge is a Somerset town with 2,000 inhabitants, while Cheddar, although it has three times as large a population, is a village, demonstrating the changing fortunes of both places. Axbridge was a major cloth-producing town in the Tudor era but the town stultified as the cloth industry declined. Today it is picturesque, with a large central square dominated by the magnificent early Tudor wool merchant’s house known as King John’s Hunting Lodge.

We headed out of the village up the High Street, which runs alongside the lodge. As I stopped to take a photo on the way out, a woman opened the door on one of the houses on the main street and put a board outside listing various films with dates. Intrigued, I stopped to have a look. She introduced herself as the owner and told me she and her husband had bought the house, which had once been a pub, the Axbridge Lion. Unsure of what to do with the room that had been the public bar, they decided to convert it into an art deco cinema (as you do). The seats were scrounged from the Colston Hall in Bristol, after a neighbour saw them being thrown into a skip when the venue was being refurbished, and a National Lottery grant had helped to pay for some of the other work. It is now the Roxy, a not-for-profit cinema run by Axbridge Film Society. She kindly invited me in to take a look and I had a very enjoyable time nosing around. Mick was waiting at the top of the road, wondering where on earth I had disappeared. He looked slightly disbelieving when I said I had just been to the cinema.

At the top of the village we joined the Strawberry Line cycle path to Yatton. The path gets its name from the famous Cheddar strawberries, which used to be carried along this section of the Great Western Railway, until it was closed in 1965 – a victim of the infamous Beeching Axe. In the early 1960s, Dr Richard Beeching was the author of an influential report on Britain’s transport system, The Reshaping of British Railways. He did not believe railways should be run as a public service and recommended wholesale closure of 6,000 miles of branch and cross-country lines – a colossal third of the total network. Beeching has rightly gone down in history as being responsible for decimating the rail network. Curiously, however, despite his unpopularity at the time, almost no one remembers Ernest Marples who, in my view, should stand alongside Beeching, shouldering as least as much of the blame.

Ernest Marples was the Conservative minister for transport who, in 1963, appointed Beeching to conduct his review. Marples was co-owner of a construction company, Marples Ridgeway, which had turned its attention to road building and was remarkably successful at winning road-building contracts in the early 1960s. During his stint as transport secretary, Marples also introduced yellow lines, parking meters and traffic wardens. Unsurprisingly he was not universally popular; a huge piece of graffiti appeared on a motorway bridge, which said ‘Marples Must Go’, and car transfers with the same slogan became very popular. In 1975 Baron Marples of Wallasey (he had, by this time, been made a life peer, although hopefully not for services to the railway) fled to Monaco to avoid paying thirty years’ overdue tax. Although not all the cuts recommended by Beeching were carried out, many were and the railways in this country have never recovered. Beeching later stated his only regret was that his recommendations had not been carried out in full. On the plus side, however, we now have some lovely traffic-free cycle routes, and cycling the Strawberry Line is much easier than going over the top of the Mendip Hills.

We left the track at Yatton where we had a brief argument about nothing in particular (we were both very tired), before heading down the busy A370 to Bristol. By 2 p.m. we were sat outside a pub in the city centre enjoying a pint of Brigstow Bitter, exactly 96 hours after we had set off from Land’s End. We thought we had done rather well. That evening we met some friends for a celebratory drink. They didn’t say so, but I had the feeling they were surprised, nay amazed, that we had managed to get this far.

I feel I should say something about Bristol, but it’s hard to be objective about one’s home town. It’s rather like trying to be objective about a member of your family; you spend the whole time slagging them off to your close friends, but if anyone else criticises them then you get all defensive and suggest they step outside for a fight. However, in an attempt at objectivity here is a list of the top five things I like and dislike about Bristol:

LIKE

1.   The Docks, as we locals say; also variously called Bristol Harbour, the Floating Harbour or Harbourside. Before 1805 the tides of the Avon and Severn, with a differential of 30 feet between low and high tide, caused endless problems for shipping. Bristol was fast losing trade to its rival Liverpool, so a scheme was put forward to construct a harbour free of tidal fluctuations with a lock at each end. At the time, although this solved the tidal issue, it caused another huge problem, as it did not occur to anyone that the sewage, which at that time was discharged directly into the river, wouldn’t have anywhere to go. For some years afterwards the centre of Bristol stank to high heaven. Now, thankfully, the sewage is carried off underground and the Floating Harbour is much more pleasant. In the summer it’s a great place to wander around, with its cafes, art galleries, museums and, of course, boats of every shape, size and age.

2.   Clifton Suspension Bridge and the SS Great Britain – two of Brunel’s masterpieces. I can still remember standing in a huge crowd waiting for the SS Great Britain to be brought back to Bristol. It was 1970 and I was seven years old. I couldn’t see much, but I could sense the excitement my parents and the rest of the crowd felt. There had been huge media coverage of the ship’s limp home from the Falklands, where it had lain abandoned for decades, and it struck a chord with Bristolians. The previous year the good old planners at Bristol City Council had announced plans to fill in the harbour to make way for a road system and the people of Bristol had been fighting a campaign all year to stop it going ahead. A turnout of 100,000 people cheering Brunel’s ship into the harbour scuppered that outrageous plan once and for all.

3.   Sustrans and the Bristol to Bath cycle path. In 1977 a group of environmentally minded cyclists formed a group called Cyclebag (Cycle Bristol Action Group). Within two years, thanks in large part to the efforts of one of the founder members, the indefatigable John Grimshaw, permission was granted to allow volunteers to convert the old Midland Railway line into a cycle path from Bath to Bitton, with work continuing west to Staple Hill tunnel on the edge of the Bristol City Council boundary. The path was formally opened along the entire length in August 1985. I can remember in particular the section through Staple Hill tunnel. In the early days the path through the tunnel was not tarmac, but stony track, and there were no lights. Making one’s way through, lit only by a feeble bicycle light and listening to the drips from the tunnel roof was slightly unnerving. Now it is tarmacked and lit throughout, which makes travelling through it easier, if less exciting.

Cyclebag reformed as Sustrans (Sustainable Transport), when it formed itself into a charitable trust, and over the next ten years or so, with Grimshaw as chief executive, went on to build many more paths. Sustrans is now responsible for the National Cycle Network – more than 10,000 miles of cycle routes. Although not all the paths are without criticism, cycling in the UK is definitely a far better experience thanks to them.

4.   Banksy. I always thought he was overhyped until I went to his exhibition at the Bristol Museum, which I thought was just brilliant. The image of Metropolitan Police in riot gear skipping though a field of daisies is one that will stay with me for a long time. Practically everyone in Bristol knows someone who knows someone who knows Banksy. He’s not popular with the people at the Keep Britain Tidy campaign, though, who claim he is just another vandal. Rather misses the point of street art, I think.

5.   The accent – ‘Alreet me luvverrr? Grrt lush! Cider I up landlord!’ There is now even a T-shirt company doing a roaring trade in Bristol phrases such as ‘Theyz me daps, mind!’ (Excuse me, those are my plimsolls) and ‘Coz ize wurf it.’

DISLIKE

1.   Bristol’s shameful history – with most of the city’s wealth being based on the slave trade. From 1698 until abolition in 1807, an average of twenty ships a year left Bristol on slaving voyages. Bristol merchants made huge profits from the trade and huge numbers of Bristolians were employed either directly or indirectly in trades related to slavery. Bristol still suffers from a feeling of collective guilt about its history.

2.   A hopeless and ludicrously expensive public transport system. Thanks, First Bus!

3.   Killer hills (Bristol has a street which claims to be the steepest residential street in Europe). Bristol is supposed to have been built on seven hills. Any local cyclist will tell you it is many more than that.

4.   Kingswood. A nondescript and uninteresting area to the east of Bristol where the BNP tends to do well.

5.   Scrumpy. Proper scrumpy I mean, not the namby-pamby stuff. I used to like it. As a teenager we would go down to one of the Somerset farms clutching containers to fill with scrumpy from the cider mill on the farm. The liquid had the appearance of cloudy urine with bits of apple floating in it. We would go off camping and spend the night looking at the stars and getting out of our heads on two or three pints of the stuff. That’s the thing about scrumpy. After one pint you feel fantastic – you have never felt happier in your life and the world is filled with a rosy glow. After two pints the world feels slightly lopsided. And after three you stand up and realise your legs have lost all feeling and you crumple gently into a heap. One evening at a party I drank too much of the stuff. I spent the evening throwing up into the sink – lumps and all. That was thirty years ago and, sadly, I have not been able to touch it since.

 

 

Stats
Miles: 28
Total miles: 247
Pints of beer (each): 2
Pints of scrumpy: 0
Pointless arguments: 1