Thread by @holland_tom

To the seas of Suffolk, there to embark tomorrow with @jamiembrixton on a journey across England to Blackpool: coast to coast, as directly as we can, stopping off along the way to admire & explore what may lie in our path...

And so it begins.

@jamiembrixton kneels in admiration before the spectacle of the river Deben, as it meets the North Sea. 2 Martello towers stand on sentry in the distance. #CoastToCoast

Bawdsey Manor: built in 1886 by thé splendidly named art collector & Liberal MP, Sir William Cuthbert Quilter; requisitioned in WW1; bought in 1936 by the Air Ministry to serve as a centre for radar research. Amazingly, it continued as a RAF base into the 90s. So Dr Who…

I keep expecting to bump into Jon Pertwee & a Brigadier anxious about Daleks…

And now, having admired the remains of the technological infrastructure that enabled Britain to keep a German invasion at bay, where better to head than Sutton Hoo?

The medieval church of Alderton - alas, no longer with its steeple. In 1821, so it was recorded by the Ipswich Journal, the structure, “which had for many years been in a ruinous condition, fell down with a loud & tremendous rash.”

Brooch in the form of a horse & its rider, found at Rendlesham, on display at Sutton Hoo.

Coin minted by Justin II (the nephew of Justinian), & found at Rendlesham. Featured in the excellent display at Sutton Hoo of the funds made during the recent metal-dectectoring / excavations at the site.

Sheep atop the ship burial #SuttonHoo

Amazing that the anti-glider ditches cut across the burial site at Sutton Hoo during WW2 are still such a prominent feature

Not going to lie, it reminds me of a golf course #SuttonHoo

The forests that surround Sutton Hoo, & screen the view of the river Deben were, so I learn from Tom Williamson, only relatively recently planted.

“The best thing @nationaltrust could do enhance the experience of the site would be to chop down every tree in Top Hat Wood.”

Now looking forward to a delicious Rædwald burger…

Rendlesham Forest, aka the British Roswell. Here, in late December 1980, various USAF personnel, including the deputy base commander, claimed to have seen UFOs in the trees beyond the perimeter fence of their base…

St Gregory’s abuts the site of the royal base which, in the words of Bede, “dicitur Rendlæsham” - “is called Rendlesham”. Various claims are made for it: that it stands on the site of a pagan temple, that Rædwald was baptised, that his body was taken from here to Sutton Hoo

So Detectorists…

The charming village of Woolpit, where, in the reign of Stephen, two mysterious green children appeared. They ate only raw beans. The boy died, but his sister, once she had learned English, reported that they had come from an underground land where everyone was green.

I was obsessed by this story when I was a child, so am delighted finally to be visiting the very place where it happened!

The church in Woolpit is very handsome, & features a pre-Reformation eagle, a wodewose, & "Suffolk's most perfectly restored angel hammerbeam roof".

We visit the West Stow Anglo-Saxon village, built in 1973 by students at Cambridge as an exercise in experimental archaeology. They called themselves the West Stow Environmental Archaeology Group, adding the word ‘environmental’ “as someone told us it would help with funding.”

Definite couple-from-London-who-get-lost-while-on-holiday-&-find-themselves-unable-to-escape-a-mysterious-village-in-which-all-the-teenagers-wear-white-robes-&-there’s-a-sinister-hooded-man-with-an-axe vibe here

.@jamiembrixton feeds an early medieval pig

View over the Fens towards Manea, where Charles I hoped to build “an eminent town in the midst of the Levell, & to have called it Charlemont, the design where of he drew himself.”

Local MP & top NIMBY Oliver Cromwell condemned it as scheme "contrary to the law of God & nature".

It was Charles, however, who enjoyed the last laugh…

Does what it says on the tin

Very Dutch scenes on the road to Crowland…

But will no one think of the eels?

We approach Crowland Abbey

Imagine having this as your parish church

Guthlac, warrior turned saint, a Mercian from the heroic age of the Staffordshire Hoard, came to Crowland when it was still an island. Here he was assailed by demons, but beat them off with a whip, given him by St Bartholomew.

The abbey stands on the site of his hermitage.

The quartrefoil depicts scenes from Guthlac’s life. The bottom image shows him arriving by boat at Crowland; in the middle image he is lashing a demon; in the top image he is being taken to heaven by an angel. On the left he is ordained; on the right he effects a miraculous cure.

“A noble building, wonderful in its situation, unique in its beauty, and a valuable Relic of Christian Devotion, interesting to the Architect, the Historian, and the Antiquarian. May its shadow never grow less!”

"The greatest curiosity in Britain, if not in Europe" - Richard Gough, in the 18th century, on the 3-way bridge built in 1360 by the monks of Crowland over what were then a river & a tributary.

The statue has been identified variously as the Virgin, or Christ, or a Mercian king.

And now, like King John on the day he lost the Crown Jewels in the Wash, we bid a fond farewell to Crowland.

To Grantham!

Arrived in Grantham, @jamiembrixton & I amuse ourselves trying to identify these famous Granthamites, portrayed in a painting on the wall of our hotel.

Aided by Wikipedia, we have Margaret Thatcher, Isaac Newton, Nicholas Parsons, Thomas Paine, Edith Smith & Judy Campbell…

We take breakfast in the very room where Richard III, on 19 October 1483, sent a letter requesting that the Great Seal be sent to him, so that he might issue the death warrant against the Duke of Buckingham.

The Angel & Royal in Grantham is a wonderful hotel. Reputedly dating back to 1206, it features a host of medieval features & royal connections. John may have held court here; Edward III, Philippa of Hainault, Edward IV, Charles I, Cromwell, George IV & Edward VII stayed here.

I wish all hotels were like this

It’s what he would have wanted #Grantham

The birthplace & statue of Grantham’s most famous daughter

We arrive in Southwell, which @jamiembrixton visited on our last road trip (thread attached). We’re back because the famous leaves of Southwell Minster, one of the great glories of medieval sculpture, were mostly inaccessible when we last came.

Hoping they’re not this time…

“A degree of truth to life is reached which never before the 1st & the 13th century had been attempted in the West. Leaf, the sculptor felt, must remain leaf & never be reduced to abstract pattern. He respected his material, stone, just as much as his subject, leaves” - Pevsner

“These artists were no longer as obsessed by monsters as their elders 100 years before. There are few animals altogether at Southwell, & they are nowhere very conspicuous. It is a humanised & strangely civilised nature that the genius of the carver evokes” Pevsner

“The most important preserved textile heritage site in the world”: Cromford Mills, home to the first water-powered cotton spinning mill, & what in effect was the first factory of the industrial age.

Now a pleasant backdrop for an ice cream….

Where it all began: Arkwright’s very first factory, built in 1771, as painted by Joseph Wright & as it looks today

“These cotton mills, seven stories high and fill’d with inhabitants, remind me of a first rate man o’war, and when they are lighted up on a dark night look most luminously beautiful.”

Viscount Torrington, following a visit to Cromford in 1790

In the same year, John Byng expressed a more jaundiced view. “These cakes,” he complained, “have lost their beauties; the rural cot has given way to the lofty red mill.”

A sense that industrialisation spelt both grandeur & squalor seems to have been there from the beginning…

Cromford, it has to be said, remains amazingly bucolic for a birthplace of the Industrial Revolution

Arkwright, blazing a path for future British industrialists, had no sooner made his millions than he was building himself a swanky pile

The path to an eerie stone circle, much loved by Julian Cope…

The 9 Ladies, dating from the Bronze Age, & so named after 9 women petrified for dancing on a Sunday.

“This circle is so exquisite,” writes Julian, “tiny & so very Pagan. Practical & feminine, it's surrounded by trees & the bleating of young lambs filters across on the wind.”

The stones are surrounded by ash (human?), & in the middle of the circle is the “darkened patch of soil” noted by Julian Cope - “possibly,” he speculates, “from recent Wiccan rituals.”

Here, just to the north of the 9 Ladies, is the King Stone - originally the fiddler responsible for the music played on the Sabbath, & punished as the women he had led astray were punished.

The name carved on it - BILL STUMPS - features, bizarrely, in The Pickwick Papers

#SolitaryVotiveGrape

‘A boulder stone 15 feet high atop a Peak District mountain. Oh, we have seen heaven today in these hills. No man-made ancient heaven - an earth mystery of sublime perfection.’

Julian Cope on the Andle Stone

‘This stone is so vast and so ancient - the setting of this jewel within bushes and its low wall is even beyond the Neolithic monuments that I cherish. For it represents a time even before the decision to farm. This stone is for the very heart of hunting gathering man.’

A carving on the Andle Stone commemorating the Duke of Wellington, carved to mark his death on 14 September 1852

The Monsal Dale Viaduct, built in the 1860s. Ruskin hated it.”The valley is gone, & the Gods with it; & now, every fool in Buxton can be in Bakewell in half an hour, & every fool in Bakewell at Buxton; which you think a lucrative process of exchange – you Fools everywhere.”

The Bugsworth Canal Basin. “In 1808 alone, workers moved enough limestone here to fill over 2,000 canal boats. It would take you 6 hours to walk along an imaginary line of so many boats.”

But now all is calm & stillness…

To the Devil’s Arse (disappointingly renamed the Peak Cavern in the 19th century so as not to offend Victorian sensibilities).

A complex of caves with the largest entrance of any cave in Britain, it was hailed by William Camden as a wonder not just of Derbyshire but of England.

We re-emerge from the Devil’s Arse, one-time haunt of - variously - bandits, rope-makers & Victorian tourists; and a thoroughly fascinating plunge into the bowels of Derbyshire it was…

On the left, the Devil’s Arse - once a stream that passed through a narrow opening, & was only accessible to tourists lying in what were effectively coffins - is next to Queen Victoria’s Back Passage, blasted to permit Her Majesty access to the great cavern beyond

Cavern in the Devil’s Arse, in which Lord Byron would fire his pistols, just for the bants

Now to Bolton, via the road that - I think - snakes up this very gorge!

Does it never rain in Lancashire?

Pumped to find Top Lad Richard Arkwright, whose factory in Crompton we were admiring only yesterday, given pride of place in @BoltonLMS. He spent 18 years in Bolton, honing the skills there that would enable him to go the full Industrial Revolution in Derbyshire.

Bolton was where, in 1937, the Mass-Observation project was set up by an assortment of middle-class anthropologists, painters, film-makers, photographers & spiritualists. Their aim was to hang out in in the town, & “systematically... record human activity."

“It stops you having babies” - middle-aged woman “dressed in good coat & skirt,” urging snuff on her female friends. She then offers the male observer some: “Eeee, it’s lovely,” she tells him, “makes your navel perk like a whelk!”

“Good health - hope t’queen never gets t’measles.”

Toast overheard in a Bolton pub (1938)

Intrigued there’s no mention in the otherwise comprehensive section of @BoltonLMS devoted to the town’s history of the storming of Bolton by Prince Rupert, & the massacre of over 1,500 of its inhabitants. I doubt they are so reticent about Civil War atrocities in, say, Drogheda…

Astley Hall, the Jewel of Chorley (or possibly the Mycenae of Chorley)…

There’s been a lot of (frankly) very disappointing behaviour from my Dutch followers this week, gloating over the anniversary of a certain event on the Medway that shall not be named, so I am delighted to find in Astley House a reminder of happier times

Preston Bus Station, built in 1969 by Ove Arup, & as redolent of the late 60s as Woodstock & Abbey Road…

BLACKPOOL!!!

From sea to shining sea

I love it #Blackpool

Blackpool is, of course, chiefly famous as the place the disgraced Rector of Siffkey came to raise £££ against his dismissal by the Bishop of Norwich. He did this by charging people to see him sitting in a barrel, sandwiched between the Bearded Lady From Russia & a flea circus.

When the Rector of Stiffkey gave up on Blackpool & left for Skegness (where he was killed by a lion), he was replaced as a popular attraction by ‘Colonel Barker’: a woman who not only dressed as a man, but had claimed to be a decorated war hero, become a Fascist, & taught boxing.

Huge excitement, as @jamiembrixton finds his father on the Blackpool roster of fame!

Kudos to Taylor, for his excellent tartare sauce, & Blue, for his welcome to two weary out-of-towners.

Any visitors to Blackpool, @jamiembrixton & I combine in heartily recommending Papa’s!

Goodnight, all

Sorry, I’ve got to stop tweeting pictures of Blackpool, but it’s so beautiful here tonight, it’s like a Turner painting

We check into the Imperial Hotel in Blackpool, where Dickens, Churchill, Erroll Flynn, the Queen, Jayne Mansfield, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair & others too numerous to mention all stayed

Only one thing could possibly persuade me to stop watching the Ashes - Blackpool’s Pleasure Beach!

Fun times, 1922-style

Beneath a 1920s dinosaur, @jamiembrixton asks whether it’s really true that false teeth have been found at the foot of the rollercoaster (it is, & they have been)

Sir Hiram Maxim’s Captive Flying Machines, designed in 1904, are the oldest ride in Blackpool - & quite possibly, I learn, in the whole of Europe. Sir Hiram, inventor of the eponymous machine gun, was born in 1840.

atlasobscura.com/places/sir-hir…

Now to the world’s oldest Ghost Train, which originally opened in 1930, & is haunted by a long dead ride operator known as Cloggy, due to the sinister clacking of his clogs

Breathing the very spirit of Stanley Baldwin #Blackpool twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

And so I bid a fond farewell to Blackpool Pleasure Beach, to Blackpool itself, & to our journey of discovery from #CoastToCoast.

It has renewed my sense of how lucky I am to live in a country so beautiful & infinite in fascination.

My thanks, as ever, to @jamiembrixton