Gors Farm, Pwll Trap, St Clears, Carmathenshire, Wales

                                    

Our last day in Gloucestershire was mostly spent in Worcestershire, but then our week’s touring has covered the counties of Herefordshire, Gloucestershire and Worcestershire, as well as venturing into corners of the Welsh counties of Powys and Monmouthshire.

Another sunny day dawned, promising more of the very warm temperatures the country has enjoyed over the  past week. We popped down the road to top up the diesel tank and replenish the cupboards with groceries, and then after fresh pastries washed down by mugs of coffee, we headed on foot across to the Tewkesbury Abbey. I had wandered through on Sunday when Chris had been otherwise engaged with armchair sport, but after I spelling out the wonders of this glorious structure here on our doorstep, he was keen to check it out for himself. He agreed it was specatular, and reckoned it to be more impressive that the cathedral at Worcester.

After lunch, we headed north toward Worcester for about ten miles before turning a little eastwards to visit Croome, another wonderful National Trust property. Again we were surprised by the number of cars already in the car park, this a weekday when most folk were either working or at school.

Croome Court is a mid-18h century neo-Palladian mansion surrounded  by parkland landscaped by our old mate Lancelot “Capability” Brown. In fact this was Brown’s first large scale commission and is often described as his “first and most favourite child”. He was hired in 1751 by the 6^th Earl of Coventry who had inherited Croome at the age of twenty eight, having survived his older brother.

Brown also designed the replacement church, St Mary Magdalene, and worked beside Robert Adam, who was to become very famous and sought after as a designer in later years.

There is much to discover at Croome; apart from the legacy left by the Earls of Coventry, Croome also served as one of the most secret places in the country during the Second World War and the Cold War years that followed. It was here as RAF Defford  that airbourne radar was tested, developed and proven, this providing a decisive factor in victory for the Allies.

The actual genesis of Croome Court is still a bit of a mystery, even with the modern methods of research and archeology, however there is proof  of a residence here at least in the 1640s. But by the time Gilbert Coventry, 4^th Earl of Coventry  inherited from his nephew in 1712, substantial changes had been made.

The title slipped side ways through lack of direct heirs, and it was when the 6^th Earl, George Coventry who inherited the estate in 1751 that the recorded story begins, as alluded to above. These stories surround two wives, one a painted socialite and the other a soulmate, years of living in the middle of  a building site and major changes to the landscape. The church that had stood adjacent to the Court was demolished and rebuilt on the hill above the house and gardens on the proviso that the large and elaborate tombs of the Earl’s predessors be reestablished in the new church. River extensions and a lake were dug by hand and a complex system of culverts was installed to bring water to the new reservoirs, an area previously a boggy marsh called “Seggy Mere”. 

Second wife, Barbara, was a keen gardener and over 5,000 different species of plants were brought from all over the world. By 1801 Croome’s botanical collection was considered second only to Kew.

The 6^th Earl died in 1809, and the following years brought years of stability although by 1902 the 9^th Earl was struggling financially and sold the Croome wall tapestries to help pay off the debts of his errant son, Viscount Deerhurst. These now grace a museum in New York, along with as much of the room they came from purchased sometime later. In 1930 this Viscount, now the 10^th Earl,  inherited from his father, but lived only until 1940 when he was killed near Ypres during the British retreat to Dunkirk.

Just months later Croome Court and part of the estate was requisitioned by the government, and provided that very important role in the War, with over 2,200 service personnel stationed here.

Prior to these tragic events, the property was placed into the care of the Croome Estate Trust, all part of estate and death duty avoidance smart wealthy folk endeavour. In 1948 the Trust sold the Court  along with thirty eight acres of land to the Roman Catholics and the Grade I mansion became St Joseph’s Special School, a boarding school run by nuns from 1950 until 1979.

It was immediately taken over by the Hare Krishna movement which used it as its UK headquartes and a training college. During the five years of their tenure, they painted the plasterwork in the dining room, picking out the detail of the fruit and vegetable bunches in bright colour; a strange legacy but one that can still be enjoyed today.

In the subsequent years, various owners tried to use the property as a training centre, appartments, a restaurant and conference centre, a hotel and golf course and finally a private family home.

The house was purchased by the Croome Heritage Trust in 2007 and is now managed by the National Trust as a tourist attraction. It opened to the public two years later, at which point six of the rooms had been restored costing £400,000.  Today £4 million has been spent to make the house safe, but there are still trillions to be spent before the house will look anything like the elegant properties to be seen elsewhere. Perhaps it will remain in its half-baked state to demonstrate what happens when repairs and maintenance are so neglected.

It is not surprising, given the National Trust reveres Capability Brown so, that the restoration of his landscape work has taken precedence. £8 million has been spent restoring the parkland so far and there is still more to be done.

We could have spent longer at Croome than just the few hours of the afternoon; we took a tour of the house concentrating on a few women of the house, which was most interesting but did limit time to wander about the lake and grounds. And then it was time to head home and prepare ourselves for departure the next day.

So this morning we left our most excellent camp at Tewkesbury, which had not only served as a well located centre for our touring but provided top notch facilities. Before our departure, I power-walked to the Tesco Metro to pick up the weekend paper which offered, if purchased at a Tesco Metro, a free CD compilation of classical music. Since discovering the CD player in our car at Longleat when we were given a CD to guide us about the safari park, I thought it might be rather nice to have at least one other CD to accompany us on long journeys.

We have also just recently discovered our panoramic sunroof roof, providing the next best thing to having a convertible. Of course we knew we had both a CD player and an opening or tilting roof hatch in our Sorrento, but had never before bothered with these mod-cons. Now we can join the trendy set and blat along the narrow lanes in our Chelsea-tractor, our hair whipping about our faces and Mozart or Beethoven in competition to the discreet English birdlife.

As it turned out, the volume of this aforesaid music and the lack of hearing aids (too often kept in their smart little charging box) nearly caused an accident today; we were approaching a many tentacled roundabout, the sort that require the vehicle to remain in the correct lane, when my instruction and those of the Tomtom became entangled with the uplifting orchestral strains and we were left changing lanes more often than safety or signage would dictate. Soon after I turned the stereo off and we returned to our normal intermittent chatter and commentary.

We could have travelled to South Wales via the M5 to Bristol, crossed the Severn Estuary on the toll bridge, and then continued on around the Welsh coastline mostly on the M4 motorway. Or we could have come on a route halfway between that and the one we did take. Whatever route taken, it was still a journey of about one hundred and thirty miles. 

Today we chose to travel down to Ross-on-Wye on the M50, the same route we had taken twice whilst staying at Tewkesbury, then on the A40 across beautiful rural landscapes to Abergavenny, continuing across the Valleys through mining moonscapes, now mostly abandoned, following the southern edge of the Brecon Beacon National Park, then south west down the Vale of Neath, to meet the M4, which soon merges with the A48, then the A40, bringing us to the end of the lane where our little camp was to be found.

We arrived sometime about 2 pm and have spent the rest of the afternoon doing very little apart from tour planning and watching more World Cup games on the television. Right on dinner time, as the plates of hot food hit the table, our host turned up with his equally friendly Mountain Bernese to welcome us to his corner of the world. What a delight he is, the Welshman that is, although his timing was lousy. By the time he left, our dinner was cold; this didn’t bother me much but the same cannot be said for my more discerning husband.