Devon and Cornwall

Hiring a car was the best decision! Not a cheap decision but a wise one.

We picked it up at Heathrow and drove west through Wiltshire to North Devon.  We took two days to do this and stayed over night in Marlborough very near Avebury. North Devon was extra special to me as we were staying with my Auntie Margaret and Uncle Bill - two of the world's wonderful people - and it has been a long time since I have seen them.  We stayed with them for a week and had a glorious time! SO MUCH FOOD!

On the first day they took us to Clovelly a very old and very steep village. No cars can go down into the village so we parked at the top and walked - usually a landrover brings everybody back up, but to our misery not in winter.  Luckily at the bottom of the walk through the village is a pub - the Red Lion - of course we are in England a pub always comes to the rescue. The locals all have sledges to take down their groceries - it is so cute!! Margaret and Bill then wanted to take us to Hartland, but we happened to drive past an 800 year old church - so we spent the next hour walking around the graveyard and exploring the church.  It is so fascinating to think what that church has seen. We did reach Hartland finally after driving up and down and round and round very narrow lanes - VERY narrow lanes. And they had two way traffic - aargh! Guess what was at the bottom - a pub!

Our exploration of North Devon continued the next day with Appledore, Westwood Ho and Bideford; loved the first, ambivalent about the second and found the last cute.  In fact I loved Appledore (photo on the right) so much I want to live there. 

A road trip was then necessary to explore Cornwall - we stopped firstly in Redruth to do some family research for me and then stayed the night in St Ives. Redruth was where my great great grandad was born and worked as a copper miner.  Pauline and I spent a couple of hours (a cold couple of hours) in St Uney cemetary looking for a Trevena grave! Don't know if we found it, but we found the house that he lived in 1850! Bit mind blowing. The following day we drove around the very bottom tip of Cornwall and visted Land's End where the Royal Navy were practicing life saving (the free show was great) to end up in Penzance.  We both had such high expectations of Penzance, but it was nothing but a shopping centre - NO PIRATES! On this drive around the coast we came across another stone circle - the Merry Maidens - it was just there in the middle of a farmers paddock!  After an adventurous two days we headed back up north to Bideford through Truro, apparently it is the oldest town in Cornwall. The navigator (me) was rubbish on the trip north and the drive took at least an hour longer than it needed to, but we would never have seen those endless hedge-lined narrow nail-biting lanes otherwise. 

Obviously we are gluttons for punishment and the next day we decided to head back to Cornwall to Bodmin Moor to check out more stone circles! And took Uncle Bill and Auntie Margaret with us - they now have the stone circle bug as well.

We have said goodbye to the lanes, the pasties and relatives (alive and dead) to spend a few nights in Somerset before heading to Wales.  There are a few stone circles in wales for us to find!!