Day 2 - A Tale of Two Cities
Day Two - Truro to Plymouth
If I had been attempting to make this journey a century ago, I'd have failed largely due to the lack of buses. If I’d tried it a century before that, though, I’d have failed because of a rather more fundamental lack - the lack of roads.
We rather take them from granted now but the UK’s road network is a much more recent addition to British civilization than you might think. True, the Romans left us a huge number of well-paved highways linking most of the important bits of the British Roman Empire, as well as a fair number of ‘Stratford’s or ‘Stretford’s and towns with names ending with ‘le-Street’ to show that they’d sprung up close to these old Roman ‘Streets’. But the Romans’ departure in the 4th century left something of
a technological black hole. Having built the roads, they then used them to march themselves off back to Rome, leaving the early Britons confused but worrying less about the deteriorating state of the highways than about how they were going to find oil to light all those hundreds of little Roman oil lamps they'd been left (no wonder it was called the Dark Ages).
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| Roman road |
The roads bequeathed by the Romans were gradually absorbed back into the landscape and the peasantry, who generally had no need to travel any further than from hamlet to market, carried on doing what they had always done – going cross-country.
By medieval times Britain's roads were little more than rude tracks, as deeply furrowed as a ploughed field in summer and more like deep muddy ditches in winter. The countryside was still mostly unenclosed so as soon as one track became impassable, people would simply find a drier alternative route somewhere near to the original until this too became impassable. After a while, a road would become little more than a wide, muddy smear on the landscape down which wagons, drovers and ordinary villagers would battle at a rate of little more than a few miles per day. As nobody was actually responsible for the roads, repairs were perfunctory and often limited to a few rocks flung artlessly into some of the deeper, more treacherous ruts. Needless to say, progress could be painfully slow.
The roads in Sussex were particularly notorious. One unfortunate barrister wrote to his wife in 1690 that “the Sussex ways are bad and ruinous beyond imagination... the country is a sink of about fourteen miles broad, which receives all the water that falls from two long ranges of hills on both sides of it, and not being furnished with convenient draining, is kept moist and soft by water till the middle of a dry summer, which is only able to make it tolerable to ride for a short time.” It was even suggested that the reason why Sussex girls were considered so long-limbed was due to the tenacity of the mud in which they travelled which, from long practice of pulling one’s foot out of the sucking mire, led to stretching of their leg bones.
Some ancient by-ways became so worn by use that they could end up as much as ten feet or more below the surface. These became known as ‘hollow ways’ and many are believed to date back to before the Norman invasion. The presence of just such a track on the outskirts of London is inferred by its present name of Holloway, and there are many other examples throughout Britain.
My own journey today is similarly cross country, but fortunately not straight across the fields. And it is another propitious day for travel it seems, it being the birthday of the Roman god Mercury, the messenger who was said to be able to travel at the speed of thought. I suspect my journey might take a little longer.
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| Truro in the morning sun |
Almost anywhere looks great on a bright sunny morning, but I don't think it was just today's weather that made Truro look so ravishing. This is a charming little city of cobbled streets and fine old buildings dressed in pale warm local granite. Prince’s Street, for example, has a subtle old-world grandeur to match it’s name. It’s wide enough to march a regiment of fusiliers down in full military order, and is ringed with fine old buildings like the solid-looking City Hall and the proud and ancient Coinage Hall, which nowadays provides a rather grand home to a pizza restaurant. Just behind the market place is the splendid Truro Cathedral, which somehow manages to look both restrained and decorative at the same time.
Look a little closer and you’ll find all sorts of back streets and crooked ways tucked away behind the Caffe Nero's and the British Home Stores, and with half an hour to kill before my bus arrives I plunge headlong into them and get gently and blissfully lost. Truro's narrow streets remind me somewhat of York and on a bright morning like today Truro's pale granite gives the city the appearance of having been sugar-frosted.
I am unwilling to leave but I have a bus to catch, so I head for the bus stop for my bus to Newquay which is a little off my route but there is a reason. The majority of bus services in Britain are provided by just a handful of major companies so today I'm spending the day exploring Cornwall with local operator Western Greyhound to see how the smaller companies compare with the big boys.
I arrive at my bus stop to find Albert, who is actually waiting for a different bus to mine but is more than happy to share his waiting time with me. He clearly feels it is his Christian duty to make sure I catch the right bus, not that this is particularly straight-forward. Albert is afflicted with what seem to be perilously loose teeth and, combined with the extravagantly curly vowel sounds imbued by his rich Cornish burr it takes me more than a few minutes to get my ear in sufficiently to work out what he is telling me. But it proves well worth the effort. We discuss the bus route I am proposing to take, exchange a few humorous observations on the world and enjoy the opportunity to share a sunlit summer morning with a fellow traveller. A nice bloke whom I would probably have never met if I'd been driving.
Albert safely on his way, my own bus promptly pulls in and we are soon threading our way uphill out of the city centre.
Truro's shining streets quickly make way for a countryside of open downland and soft rounded hills under a vast, blue airy sky. There is cultivation aplenty up here but hardly any trees apart from a few scratchy specimens leaning away from the incessant Atlantic breeze. Below the downs are steep little valleys and crooked lanes for our driver to test his skills on.
With so much farmland hereabouts it is no surprise to find ourselves crawling along behind a tractor, but this one appears to be towing an unfeasibly-large tented contraption which I learn from one of my fellow passengers is a device for picking cauliflowers. It is so improbably vast that it’s driver seems completely oblivious of the presence of a large and increasingly irritable double decker bus behind him, and proceeds to make his slow, methodical way through the lanes without any apparent care in the world.
Not so the bus. Our increasingly inflamed driver with his strict timetable to keep to snarls and growls at the slowly trundling tractor ahead. Eventually, after much bad-tempered leaning on the horn, the tractor driver finally turns casually into his farmyard with just the merest backward glance. That glance leaves the impression that we had just witnessed what was but the latest skirmish in some sort of long-standing and deeply personal battle between farmer and bus company. All very odd.
As soon as we get rid of the tractor, we find ourselves confronted by no less than six cars, including a police car, coming towards us down a steep and narrow Hollow Way. By now, though, our driver is in no mood for messing about, so much so that the other drivers take one look at him and hastily reverse their vehicles back up the hill out of his way, including the constable.
A little while later, we pull up at the end of a lane in what appears to be the middle of nowhere, and a lady and her Labrador appear out of nowhere and climb aboard.
“Ooh, hello Doris,” I hear someone downstairs call out.
“Well, hello me dear, how are you, then…”.
This, apparently, is Doris.
“Hello , Doris, my love…” someone else calls out, obviously from the back of the bus.
“Hello, Geoffrey, how are your veins, then..” she says, finding a seat.
“Is that Doris?”, I hear someone murmur behind me. “Hello, Doris!”, he calls out.
Seven more people greet her as a long lost friend. Who on earth is she?
Our bus seems to have been suddenly transformed into a 1950's village shop full of old friends meeting up by chance, asking how each of them are, where they were going, and wasn’t it cold last night… I half expected Miss Marple to get on further up the road, or people to start swapping jars of chutney or something. It was utterly joyous, even if I did feel a little left out. It's funny. I’d never thought of an ordinary double decker bus being so completely a part of its community like this, yet here it was – not just a means of getting to the shops or the post office, but a communal meeting place for friends. I never discovered who Doris was but I was starting to get a sense of what public transport might actually mean to a rural community.
Newquay must have been quite grand during Victorian and Edwardian times, but like many seaside resorts it has fallen on harder times since. It's still a-buzz with activity, though, thanks to the youthful surfer crowd who now swarm over this coastline and who are catered for by dozens of brash and noisy bars which have sprung up around the town centre. That this youthful influx is not always appreciated by residents - despite the income they clearly bring to the town - is evidenced by signs in shop doorways informing people that "this is not a toilet" and that CCTV cameras are being trained on them.
After a stroll around the town, avoiding Senor Dick’s Mexican Restaurant and Fiesta Bar which appeared to have been lifted from the set of a spaghetti western and built, astonishing, right in the middle of the road, I made my way to the bus station for the 556 to Padstow.
Our driver seems genuinely pleased to see his passengers and carefully greets each one of us. Smiling, I find a seat behind a pair of old ladies enjoying the early summer sunshine and who are clearly heading back home from the shops.
“Well, this is a complete contrast to yesterday,’ says one. Her friend tuts and nods.
“I mean, I got the Tesco bus in the morning and by the time I’d finished my shopping, it was absolutely pouring.”
Her friend tuts again and nods a bit more.
“I got soaked to the skin,” she adds, proudly.
“..Yes,” says her friend, with evident satisfaction.
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| Newquay bus station |
We drive out of Newquay at the start of a spectacular run up the coast - a run, I have to say, which is entirely spoilt by a party of noisy, giggly, and downright annoying… well, I can hardly bring myself to say what they are.
“Ooh, er! That telegraph pole looks a bit close (giggle)”
“Eeek, eeek!(giggle, giggle)
Oh, please….
“Jeff, you see that headland over there. Well they say that if you can see it, then it’s gonna rain. And if you can’t see it, it’s already raining…!”
“Tee-hee-hee! Oh, you are one…”
I am subjected to this aggravating ‘Two Ronnies'-type behaviour all the way from Newquay to Padstow, past the miniscule Newquay Cornwall Airport, Cornwall’s largest (and, I strongly suspect, only) airport, through pretty St Mawgen with its beautiful old church and wisteria-covered pub, past the former Coastal Command airbase of St Eval which is festooned with tall stands of sinister aerials, through affluent Constantine Bay where expensive detached houses greedily block out the sea view from the road, and all the way into Padstow.
“Oh, Geoffrey! Tee-hee!”
There are six of them, and they are all around me. They have thermos flasks, pac-a-macs and Shrewsbury biscuits. They are caravanners. More than that, they are caravan enthusiasts and are probably all members of a club or something. And they are infuriatingly silly.
“Ooh, Jeremy, didn’t we go to a rally on that farm once?”
“No, my dear, now if you remember... it was the farm next door, the one with the barn and the slurry pit which that Norman’s Cynthia fell into…”
“Yes, dear, I’m sure you’re right… anyone fancy a bon-bon?”
Amazingly, I manage not to kill any of them before I get off, but they will never know how close they were.
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| Undeniably pretty Padstow |
And so to the pretty seaside village of Padstow, regrettably a place which today (it's a Saturday) is now so full of tourists that its difficult to see much that is pretty. The setting is fabulous, of course, a cluster of small shops and bars around an achingly-picturesque stone-built harbour with a warren of narrow, crooked streets behind. But now there are two centres to Padstow – the harbour obviously, and a fish and chip shop in a strikingly modern building a little further along the quay owned by the renowned TV chef Rick Stein. On a bright and sunny day like today, the crowds seem equally split between those who are in and around Rick's chippie and are devouring fish and chips as if cod is about to become extinct (which, of course, it is), and those who have already eaten their fish and chips and are now contentedly burping their way around the harbour.
It seems rather sad that, in effect, the Padstow which everyone comes to see no longer really exists, certainly not at week-ends anyway. Yes, the harbour is gorgeous, the streets are quaintly twisted and the views across the water are fabulous, but the town itself is plainly not the place it was. It’s congested, slightly gaudy, and filled with people who have come to look and imagine what Padstow must have been like before people like them came in their thousands to visit it. The irony is crushing.
And, damn it, Padstow is where I buy possibly the worst Cornish pasty I have ever eaten, at a slick emporium supposedly specializing in Cornish pasties. Is it any wonder I’m so grumpy? Perhaps I should have gone to Rick’s...
As a result, I'm afraid leaving Padstow is something of a relief, though I leave with a favourable impression after all thanks to a fine, lusty cup of tea in a Portacabin cafe on the site of the long-demolished railway station which now serves as a car park. Proper tea, proper mug, no fancy prices. It quite cheered me up.
My next bus - to Wadebridge and Bodmin - is a rattly old Mercedes minibus with coach seats. It's especially narrow, too, so it can navigate all those Cornish lanes in safety. It's clearly a bit of a handful for the driver, though, who seems to be working up a proper sweat getting it in and out of gear and up over the wind-swept downs to Bodmin. We pause briefly at Wadebridge for our driver to have a swift cough and a fag, so I get out and join him for a spot of passive smoking. We chat for a while and he helpfully suggests a different bus for my onward connection to Plymouth, offering to set me down at the right bus stop where I’d have a wait of only 30 minutes or so. Nice guy. Shame about the cough.
We soon arrive in Bodmin, and with 30 minutes to fill I decide on a stroll around the town. Originally I had meant to keep a record of how long I had to wait at each bus stop on my journey, so I could total it all up at the end and tell people during one of those aggravating ‘did you know’ moments that I had to wait around at bus stops for the equivalent of five and a half days or whatever. But the fact is time spent between connections is anything but wasted as it’s giving me the chance to explore.
Bodmin has all the features of a fine Cornish town – narrow, higgledy piggledy streets, stately granite buildings, cunning little lanes – but the presence of empty shops and numerous 'To Let' signs suggests that Bodmin is feeling the effects of the current economic climate.
Though not by any means a maritime town, Bodmin can still boast a connection with the sea and to transport, thanks to the clockmaker John Arnold who was born here in 1736.
Arnold is believed to have been the first to design a watch that was both practical and accurate. More than that, he is credited with having perfected that most crucial piece of maritime navigational equipment, the ship’s chronometer. On a modest plaque above an anonymous alleyway in Bodmin, near to where he was known to have lived and worked, he is described as 'the benefactor of those who journey on the sea’. Its a pity so few people know of his huge contribution to travel.
Thanks to John Arnold, I now have the scent of the sea in my nostrils, so I head off to join my fellow Plymouth-bound passengers at the bus stop. Our bus duly arrives but the driver pointedly stops us from getting on. I’d seen him giving the evil eye to a young couple who were getting off and he is soon out of the driving seat and searching his bus – another elderly minibus masquerading as a coach. Finally, he emerges triumphantly clutching a carrier bag which he’s recovered from the crack between two seats.
“Vomit,” he says, making for the nearest litter bin as if somehow that explained everything. We passengers look at one another and I can immediately tell what they are all thinking - 'Bloody hell – looks like we are in for a bumpy ride'.
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| Not much for bus passengers to smile about here... |
We are soon off to Plymouth. The countryside is softer now with the road picking its way through stands of beech and oak which seem improbably tall after the miles and miles of stunted wind-blown shrubs I’d grown used to. There are primroses scattered under the hedgerows, and an overall gentler aspect to the countryside. And a few surprises.
At Two Waters Foot near Liskeard, we pull into what appears to be a Tyrolean village, though its soon apparent that it’s a Tyrolean village specializing in the sale of DIY materials, carpets, home furnishings and the like. The bus winds its way through a vast car park past crudely-fashioned statues and, equally bizarrely, a Chinese gateway. This, ladies and gentlemen, is Trago Mills, a vast shopping and leisure park offering all manner of household comestibles at bargain prices, as well as picnic areas and lakeside restaurants like the "Keg and Kettle", which apparently is also a tea room and, oddly, an aviary, which sounds a little unhygienic.
“Waiter, waiter, did you know there's a budgie in my soup...”
“I'm sorry, sir. Perhaps you'd prefer the duck..?”
Such strident consumerism seems odd after all the wide open spaces and quaint Cornish villages I’ve become used to, so I cower slightly in my seat until we are once again barreling down the road to Plymouth.
The countryside now takes a greyer turn, the view slowly filling with dual carriageways, industrial estates and out-of-town shopping centres. The fields seem to shrink back away from the road and soon all I am aware of is the onward rush of the A38.
Coming into Saltash, I spot the vast grey bulk of Dartmoor on the horizon. It’s much bigger than I expected, and seems to glower threateningly over Plymouth. But that’s for tomorrow. By now we are crossing the Tamar Suspension Bridge using a bus lane which seems almost to have been nailed to the outside of the bridge as an after-thought. The views are windy and a little scary, though once you come to terms with the sense of extreme exposure you find it offers some pretty fine views of the river and of Brunel’s mighty Tamar Railway Bridge a little further downstream.
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| Plymouth Hoe. Bowls, anyone...? |
I get off in Plymouth's city centre, today's second city, and I immediately fall in love with the place. It's all the fault of the Germans.
Even by wartime standards, Plymouth had a hard war. Thanks to its proximity to Devonport and its naval dockyards, the city found itself on the end of a regular right old clobbering from the Luftwaffe. In March 1941, local people gained a full and proper understanding of the term ‘Blitzkrieg’ in the course of 59 bombing raids against the city, raids which entirely flattened the city centre apart from the medieval Barbican area which miraculously survived. However, planning for the city’s reconstruction began almost immediately and work started in 1947 under the supervision of the distinguished architect Sir Patrick Abercrombie, the architect of much of the post-war rebuilding in London, Edinburgh, Bournemouth, Bath and Hull.
Plymouth's new city centre, with its broad open squares and expansive walkways, was built in the mode of the modern-thinking 1950's but using architects that had trained pre-war, with the result that today's Plymouth boasts a grand, rather elegant central shopping centre crafted from that most dignified and old-fashioned of building materials, creamy Portland stone. The city centre is elegant in an ambitious post-war sort of way, airy and uncluttered,with a broad green processional way linking the city's heart with the sea at Plymouth Hoe. Frankly, it’s an utter joy and as it's clearly a commercial success, I suspect everyone else thinks so, too.
I’m staying at a neat, hospitable little guest house in Alfred Street between Plymouth Hoe and the city centre, where I am greeted with an impromptu pot of tea, the keys to the front door and a street map. I’m absolutely loving Plymouth and I’ve only just arrived.
NEXT Plymouth to Weymouth – via a very unsavoury bus station, more destroyer tactics in a public loo on Dartmoor and a truly stunning trip along the Jurassic Coast.
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