Salisbury Club Site, Wiltshire

    

It was Chris who encouraged a visit to Longleat, an attraction he remembered from fifty years ago, soon after the Safari Park was opened. I knew it was a private enterprise and likely to cost an arm and a leg, however he was keen, and booking online as OAPs, our entry fee was quite fair. 

We headed off early yesterday morning, westward for about fifty minutes, arriving well before opening time, however it takes a quarter of an hour to travel from the main entrance to the Safari Park entrance; we were amongst the first half dozen in the gates, after driving up through a lovely wooded section of the estate, so lovely it warranted the entry fee all by itself, or perhaps not. 

Longleat is a stately home and the seat of the Marquesses of Bath, the current a rather alternative looking specimen, a cross between Kenny Rogers and an aged Richard Branson. Alexander Thynn’s son, with the more modest title of Viscount Weymouth, took over the running of the family enterprise back in 2010, and his wife made the headlines when she presented the first surrogate heir to the British aristocracy, however Alexander still holds the important title.

The house was built on the remains of an Augustinian priory by Sir John Thynne, who started his working life as a lowly kitchen clerk for Henry VIII and ended up hosting Elizabeth I to dine on several occasions. Didn’t he do well! It is set in one thousand acres of parkland landscaped by Capability Brown, with a further four thousand acres of let farmland and the same again in woodland which includes a holiday village and the first safari park outside Africa, opened in 1966.

Longleat was the first stately home to open to the public in 1949, in an attempt to rescue the estate from bankruptcy; death duties threatened to end of the family fortunes. Land was sold off before a full scale tourist operation was put into action and the finances of the family seem to have held in the interim.

The house is still used as the private residence for the Thynn family, with only about one third of the house open to the public. However the rooms that are open for view are quite spectacular, warranting more than an hour’s exploration and were all the better for the lack of indoor tourists.

We spent about an hour and a half driving slowly around the safari park, mostly with the doors locked and the windows up as per instructions all about. We saw deer, vultures, giraffe, zebras, rhino, tigers, lions, cheetahs and wolves, but not the monkeys. Signs at the gates to their enclosure warned that the inmates were prone to leaping upon vehicles and tearing the windscreen wipers and aerials from the bodywork, and that it was very much a case of “buyers beware”. We decided we respected our car too much to risk entry.

Apart from the safari park and the house, there are gardens to be seen, a cruise upon the lake to discover hippopotamus, Californian sea lions and Eastern White Pelicans, the Jungle Kingdom enclosing meercats, anteaters, mara and a laid back binturong, the walk through aviary filled with rainbow lorikeets, the Monkey temple where we spotted one little marmoset and Penguin Island and Stingray Bay where we watched Humboldt penguins and motley coloured stingray.

Other attractions we left for others were the two kilometre miniature railway, playgrounds , cafes and  other various enclosures housing other small animals. Longleat is apparently home to over five hundred animals and we did not see them all yesterday. It is also part of an important international breeding programme for endangered species.

After six hours of enjoyment, we headed back to Salisbury and were caught up in a terrible traffic jam after calling into the supermarket. We cursed our bad timing.

Chris has been feeling a little poorly over the past few days, the word “poorly” having a more nefarious meaning DownUnder than that here in England. Here one might be admitted to hospital when feeling “poorly”, in New Zealand one might be excused from walking a charity half marathon. Anyway, in full sympathetic mode, I suggested we spend a quiet day at home, reading, resting and watching the soccer world cup being played out on the television. And as a bonus there was always the tennis at Queens being televised. In fact, to an armchair sportsman, this promised nirvana, but I had misjudged the situation; The Chauffeur suggested we head toward Bath to check out a couple of villages celebrated in our Rough Guide.

And so after a hastily packed eski, we set off a little later than normal, heading nor’ north east across the Salisbury Plains, passing the entry to Stonehenge and the tank crossings which the army use when they are driving these hefty craft about the agricultural expanse of the Plains. (As an aside to this, there have been great booms and bangs and rumblings heard all the way south here at Old Sarum this week apparently prompted by military exercises to the north. I do wonder at the wastage of ammunition when there are no real enemies to decimate.)

We pulled into the Sainsbury car park in Devizes, the  service centre for a large agricultural area all about, a town of more than 17,500 folk and the area from where one of my ancestral lines ventured forth to Australia from.  Wiltshire is a beautiful area and one wonders why they would venture across to the other side of the world, however as agricultural labourers and the like, life was not as cushy as it is today, and the grass is always greener on the other side.

After shopping for a few supplies, we walked across the market centre to the Town Wharf, one of seven in Devises, which once had several warehouses; a bonded or secure warehouse for spirits and tobacco for snuff, a house for the wharf manager and a corn store. Today there is little here but a café, a small volunteer-run museum and seating for the local art group to sit and draw the scene in front of them. The canal opened in 1810 but died the same death so many did when steam trains arrived. Years later the Kennet & Avon Canal Trust, working with British Waterways, restored the canal and it reopened in 1990.

From here we headed north west, travelling across and over Bowden Hill from where we had the most wonderful views toward Bath and Chippenham before we descended to photographic Lacock. The entire village, Abbey and museum is owned and managed by the National Trust, although in truth about 30% of the residences are privately owned. Still there is a fair rental coming in from those who do reside here and no doubt the tenant farmers, not to mention the tourists who arrive by the coachload and don’t have membership to give them free entry. 

Lacock has provided location for popular films such as the Harry Potter series, Pride & Prejudice, The Other Boleyn Girl, Cranford, Downton Abbey and Wolf Hall, a fact that draws the tourists and hopefully raises funds for the National Trust. 

The abbey has a back story common to so many similar properties: Ela, 3^rd Countess of Salisbury, inherited title, fortune and lands at the tender age of nine when her father died in 1196. As a minor she came under the protection of the king, who arranged a marriage for her to his half-brother, William Longespee. They produced nine children, one of whom became Bishop of Salisbury.

Ela is a real feminist success story, despite having been made a ward of the king, married off and a prolific breeder; her husband died when she was still only thirty nine years old and she took over his role as Sheriff of Wiltshire, firstly as a fill-in, then in her own right. With money to burn, she started to plan the founding of what was to become Lacock Abbey. In 1232 she laid the foundation stone, and six years later she retired to the abbey as a nun.

Of course the abbey went the way of all abbeys; in 1539 it fell victim of the Dissolution.

The first owner of the reinvented abbey was Sir William Sharington who converted the convent into a residence for himelf and his family. The house was built over the top of the old cloisters which makes it rather special; abbey cloisters invoke a peaceful grace even to heathens like me. But the house is rather a mish-mash of styles and the rooms that are open to the public today are dull, drab and austere.

Interestingly Sharington was imprisoned for treason in 1549 but was later pardoned. Three years later he was appointed Sheriff of Wiltshire, following on in the footsteps of the abbey founder.

The house remained in the same family, or at least passed from one connection to the next until the last occupant, Matilda Talbot, who inherited the property in 1916, gave it to the National Trust in 1944 when it all became too much for her.  

There is a wonderful little museum in the entry building all about William Henry Fox Talbot and his contributions to photography.  It was he who inherited Lacock from his father in 1800 when he was just five months old. The estate was in debt and was let out until Fox Talbot moved in with his mother and stepfather in 1827. A pioneering scientist and keen mathematician, Fox Talbot is one of Lacock's most famous residents. He is considered to be one of the founder members of British Science Association, set up in 1831 in competition to the existing Royal Society which was considered too elitist. 

In 1835 Talbot created the very first photographic negative while the Frenchman Louis Daguerre came up with an alternative before Talbot was ready to tell the world of his own successful invention. Hence there has been much controversy over the years as to who came up with the invention of photography, however while the Daguerreotype was a beautiful silver plate with a magical looking image, it could not be reproduced in the same way that Talbot’s calotype image could be. And it is the ability of an infinite reproduction process that made Talbot’s invention superior to his French counterpart, or at least until digital photography came to light.

Apart from the abbey and museum, there is a café situated in the attractive courtyard, a small but pretty rose garden and acres of parkland to wander about. We enjoyed our visit very much but did not hang about to explore the museum in detail; we had other places to go, other places to see.

Our Rough Guide suggested that Bradford-on-Avon was an even better destination and less crowded with tourists, so we headed southwest through more lovely countryside, descending into a steep valley surrounded with stone buildings along the River Avon. While it is much smaller than nearby Bath, the latter with a population of over 84,000 in contrast to Bradford’s less than 10,000, there are similarities.

We parked up right in the centre of the town and set off on foot looking for all the features listed in our guide book, and while we did find the old shops and the narrow alleys of The Shambles absolutely delightful, we felt we were missing something. We managed to get our hands on a map and located the Kennet & Avon Canal and realised we should have either paid for more than an hour’s parking or parked elsewhere. We drove further on sacrificing our unused parking ticket for yet another at the Barton Farm Country Park; here we were able to access the canal via a path through the Tithe Barn complex administered by English Heritage.

There, beside the canal, we watched a couple of narrow boats pass through the Bradford Lock, and wandered along the canal for a while, pausing to chat with the barge dwellers. Before returning to the car, we called into the tithe barn and explored its massive interior. At fifty one metres long and ten metres wide, it is one of the largest medieval barns in England and apparently one of the architecturally finest. It was built in the mid-14^th century to serve Barton Grange, a manor farm which belonged to Shaftesbury Abbey in Dorset, the richest nunnery in medieval England. After the Dissolution, it passed into private hands and was part of a working farm until 1914.

It had been a full day; far more so than planned and there was still at least an hour’s homeward journey ahead.  We arrived back just after 5 pm, battling slow traffic through Trowbridge, but otherwise without hassle; we had cunningly done our shopping in Devizes thus avoiding the need to shop here in traffic jammed Salisbury.