Over breakfast this morning we agreed that we would take a
break from our frantic travel, and spend the day doing laundry, shopping and
checking out the National Trust attraction adjacent to our camp, and so that is
exactly what we did. Chris confessed he found the UK roads rather stressful,
particularly finding our way through the more built up areas and so I was glad
that we did all our “travel” on foot today, leaving our Ford Chausson Flash 2
in situ.
After walking across the Tredegar House park to the ASDA
superstore (note the British term “superstore” as opposed to “supermarket”),
returning and storing our provisions away, we set off once more to the entrance
of the House, were given our little entry stickers (which play havoc with the
fibres on one’s fashionable cotton sweaters), we spent an hour and a half
wandering through the house, joining a tour of the upper floor and thus cutting
ourselves short of completely viewing the ground floor. The volunteer guides
gave us a fascinating insight into the history and family stories, the
eccentricities of the generations and the staged decoration of that part of the
house open to the public.
Set in a beautiful ninety acre park, Tredegar House is
apparently one of the best examples of a 17th century Charles II
mansion in Britain. It served as the ancestral home of the wealthy Morgan
family until 1951 when the last of the family, cousin to two generations of
squanderers, sold it to a clutch of nuns who ran a girls' school. Later it
passed into the hands of the Newport Council, where it remains even today,
although now under the management of the National Trust.
While the Morgan family had lived here for generations dating
back to at least the beginning of the last millennium, it was William Morgan
who died in 1680 who built this massive red brick mansion as an exercise in
self-aggrandisement and who bore the burden of a mad second wife who tried to
run him through with his own sword, who in turn was committed to Bedlam for the
term of her natural life for her attempted crime. Several generations later,
Sir Charles Morgan (1760 – 1846) grew the family wealth with extensive land
holdings covering a staggering 92,000 acres. It was said that you could travel
from Cardiff to Hertfordshire without leaving Morgan land. It was this Morgan
who cannily gathered rent from the mining companies on his land, royalties and
tolls for the coal that passed down the canals through his land, tariffs as
that same coal passed through the port at Newport, and anything else that might
occur during the process.
His son survived the Charge of the Light Brigade in the
Crimean War, proved a diligent steward of the family fortune while being a
generous public benefactor to the community about. Sadly his grandson, who attempted to hide his queer tendencies
from the society of the time by marrying twice, was a big spender like his
father, a host extraordinaire, who dabbled in the dark arts while acting as a Papal
Chamberlain. He kept a menagerie of weird and wonderful creatures; a foul
mouthed parrot, a baboon who was introduced to house parties should a lull
occur, a boxing kangaroo, to name but a few.
The factual accounts heard this afternoon left fiction for
dead; these were a weird assortment of people indeed. Perhaps it as well that
the line fizzled; does a society really need such folk?
Interestingly I learned that Henry Morgan, famous for many
roles; a Caribbean buccaneer, a brilliant mariner upon the high seas with Water
Raleigh and Francis Drake, was the nephew of William Morgan. I say
“interestingly” because only recently I read of this Henry Morgan in James
Michener’s “Caribbean” and John Steinbeck’s “ Cup of Gold”.
We completed our afternoon with camping ground showers,
lengthy affairs under endless hot water, in a heated ablution block, washing
our hair and attending to all those other matters that one can when there is
endless light, water and heat in bathroom facilities; pure luxury!
Over lunch we drew up a “calendar’, pulled out the maps and
planned out an itinerary, one that is far short of our original plans “to see’
Great Britain. Our tour will be a very abbreviated taste of just some corners
of these Isles. We will not see Cardiff,
and this “omission” will be typical of the weeks ahead, but the mere fact that
we have passed close by and contemplated a visit, and in that contemplation,
spent some time studying the guides and literature we have to hand, we will at
least come away a little wiser than we were before we set off.
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