Recipe for a grand day out. Plan a trip to Somerset with a good friend Robin in his fancy car that has the very latest 'Jane' Sat Nav ( when I typed that at first it said satanic, perhaps that was an opinion ) Good weather, it arrived! Not too hot and not too cold. Terms of engagement all set out, make your own sandwiches and drink,meet at Priddy with other good friend Richard, who knows the route around Priddy and is always good for a wry comment.
Looking at the map to get there is rather like a child's drawing of a tree.Big trunk stick of the M5 goes into a scribble 'tree like effect as you get to Somerset. Satanic Sat Nav wants us to go through Bristol. Wisely we ignore this dark advice and rely on Robins route, but before we get halfway down the M5 I get the feeling that I forgot to lock my front door.
Plan amended. Phone call to neighbour finds him on the golf course, so no help there. Makes me dislike golf even more, why could he not have been pootling about at home with nothing better to do than check my front door? Some people? We turn round for what Robin reminds me is now the" Tour of the M5".
The door was locked.
Tour of the M5 restarts and we get into the lollipop. At least we had no plane to catch, though Sat Nav Jane took us past Bristol Airport for reasons beyond me.
Our rescheduled start time put back an hour so we arrived at the pub and the least I could do was buy R&R a beer at the Queen Vic in Priddy. Here they have a set of sheds outside the pub each with their own name. It's a left over from Covid when they had them installed so that they could keep trading. Clever idea, now redundant thank goodness, and the sheds are now for sale.
The walk starts from here and the you strike off over fields for a while. Forget about locked doors and then set down for picnic when reaching the 'Big Reveal' as Richard called it. A view over meadows fields and small villages for miles around with Glastonbury Tor in the distance. Silent chomping of home made sandwiches and for me a flask of tea to gargle.
Glastonbury Tor is over there on the horizon, this is the view from our picnic
It's amazing at times how few people do these walks. I've walked in LA and their trails tend to be full of people with headphones on walking their dusty tracks, not many places can replicate what we have hear in the UK. Freedom of access and footpaths must be one of our most treasured national assets. Places where you can walk with friends and talk nonsense about all sorts of things. There was one item of discussion about getting a rhyme to the line ' I'm having no joy from my Pac Choi' , a reference to my gardening problems with an oriental vegetable, we didn't get far on that but by the end of the conversation we'd got down the long steep hill, met and said hello to two other walkers coming the other way, and were chatting about knee problems. As you would on a hill as steep as this. Some careful traversing was necessary and some clever stick work involved with my trusty walkers stick without ferrule. Walking with it on metal roads made me sound like Long John Silver on a day out and was the source of the odd dry comment from R&R. At least it took their minds off LockGate, Put gate at the end of any word that's a crisis and you have the crisis described. Why do we do this?
At the foot of the hill we walked into Wookey Hole Amusement Centre. A large old mill building near the famous caves made to look like a very mini Somerset Disneyland. I promised to buy my friends and ice cream so we wandered into the very large cafe where the only people there were staff at a table having their dinner. How on earth can these places survive when they are so devoid of customers? We were in the wrong section anyhow and needed the ice cream parlour over the road. It too was devoid of customers to a large degree. The black guy with pink hair served us. Richard and I who have done this walk a few times before know that we had quite a tough climb back to the top of the hill and that we 'needed the sugar'. And we did.
Lovely deserted gorge, quite steep and rocky but like a garden with some very healthy well watered plants.
A short stroll up out of Wookey and then up a beautiful small wooded valley followed, this valley getting narrower and narrower as we passed the previous walkers coming down. Exchanged information on ice cream then onwards and upwards.
We were soon climbing over boulders and narrow gulleys like 14 year olds rather than three grandads all with twin grandchildren. Robin with twin grandsons, Richard with twin granddaughters and me with twin grandsons. We took our time and conversation had stopped for a while as we concentrated on getting the next breath. 'Who's idea was this?' did enter my head.
We were at the top and on the home straight when Richard reminded me of a broken barn that I photographed last time. I like broken barns and it was still there. It was the highlight of the day for me, even beating the ice cream.
Priddy's collapsable barn with corrugated iron, lovely work of art
Back to the pub, into our cars and then some considerable time arguing with Satanic Jane the Sat Nav. 'No Jane, I'm not going there' became a familiar phrase. One could almost hear her getting a little tetchy, trying to get us to u turn onto her preferred route out of the lollipop. Richard followed us for a while, we're not quite sure why. By the time we got back to glorious Gloucester I had visions of him driving around the Somerset tree until well after dark.
Thoroughly good day.
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