An Englishman’s home might be his castle. It might also be a fake castle. Or a Tudor hall. Or a mock Tudor semi. ‘B’ has thrown up a real mixture of places with little to tie them together other than the fact that wildly varying weather forecasts demanded multiple plans. In the end we just decide to do them all.
Saturday is all about snow and views. Soupy Dave battles in manly fashion through the snowdrifts on his spanking new winter tyres to Beeston Castle. Famously you can see eight counties from the top, though disappointingly you can’t see any neat demarcations from there so I can’t prove it one way or the other. Neither can I find anything telling me which counties I could see so I opt for Cornwall, Yorkshire, Kent, Rutland, Cumbria, Marlboro and ‘surprise me’. I can definitely see the Welsh mountains rising in surly fashion to the West, and the Peaks lurking reluctantly Eastwards. Cheshire could really use some proper mountains, although it would be hard to criticise the plainness of its plains. There is plenty of snow in the castle grounds – it is only a Poma lift away from being quite a decent blue run down to the gatehouse had we brought skis. The modern bridge into the keep is a strange piece of design: a forty five degree incline fashioned from concrete and sheet ice – wheelchair accessible apparently (presumably if you’ve also brought a winch) Perhaps someone should have told the architect that he no longer needed to keep invaders out.
Across from Beeston Castle on an adjacent hill lies the utterly fake Peckforton Castle which is now a very Cheshire-y hotel.. We enjoy a circular walk designed almost entirely to not let you quite see it, taking in part of the Sandstone Trail. There may be sandstone underfoot but, if there is, it is well hidden by the six inches of snow and squelchy thaw. The walk back down the drive is punctuated by the occasional need to jump out of the way of orange people arriving in 4x4s slithering sideways towards us on the wrong tyres. Peckforton Castle was apparently the site of a dramatic fire when a disgruntled groom set fire to the Drawing Room. If this sounds romantically medieval however, think again as the fire took place in 2011 and the perpetrator had got married that day and was half-cut. At the bottom of the drive stands the Peckforton Oak, famous for being very old and very fat. Which is OK if you’re a tree. As many have done before us we dutifully line up in front of it to demonstrate how big and oaky it is.
Second B of the day sees us warming up in Burwardsley, just down the road. We skip the excellent Feathers inn in favour of a dubious coffee accompanied by a view over the hills back to Beeston with a snowbound plastic camel in the foreground. This is the Cheshire Candle Workshop. Twizzly candles are duly dipped ‘Into the wax, out of the wax, drip, drip, drip. Into the water, out of the water, wipe, wipe,’ and Dave is treated to a personalised egg cup, currently the only eating utensil he possesses – we’ll have to take it in turns to have an egg. Disappointingly the promised penny arcade moved out several weeks previously (but didn’t take its web page with it) so that was that. Back home to dry out shoes.
Sunday and we’re further afield in the fiefdom of the Cadbury family. They didn’t build themselves a castle to keep people out, instead they built the rather lovely village of Bournville to keep people in. Engaged in that peculiar nineteenth century Quaker alms race to see who could be nicest to their workforce, they built schools, sports facilities, parks and nice arts and crafts semis cunningly designed so that no two are quite alike. Having given the inhabitants all this, as probably the greatest altruistic act of all they built a whacking great chocolate factory in the middle of it. Bet the inhabitants of Port Sunlight were jealous as hell. ‘All the soap you can wash with’ doesn’t really compare.
The kids are perfectly happy to admire the unusual gables, manicured greens and the Carillon (kind of a posh bell tower operated by an elderly man hurling himself at a keyboard) but we drag them into the factory anyway. It’s pretty good. Apart from scoffing Dairy Milk every six feet there are slightly bizarre attractions. We see an exhibition explaining Cadbury’s success: the original Mr Cadbury apparently opened a small tea and coffee shop and then projected his face eerily onto an adjacent house – must have caused quite a stir in the early nineteenth century. There is a tour of the packing plant where vast quantities of chocolate are stuffed into cardboard boxes. There is a vaguely hallucinatory ride involving the Cadburys parrot and various animated Crème Eggs hanging upside down from ski-lifts. Several days later I still feel a little sick and don’t really want to eat chocolate, which is presumably the opposite of what the ‘experience’ designers actually intended.
Cadburys are no more of course. They’re now owned by Kraft and Bournville chocolate is made abroad. To my knowledge Kraft never added much to the lot of the working man, their main contribution to civilisation being the individually wrapped cheese slice. But still, it’s not a bad legacy for a family is it? Beats a castle, fake or otherwise.
SoupyDave 