Grange Court.....

I really like this building......

Grange Court

The building is in Leominster and it is called Grange Court...
It was built in 1633 and is the last surviving market house known to be built by John Abel a local master carpenter.

It was moved to it's present location in 1859.
It is now on the edge of a park area in the town but it's original location was closer to the market square area of the town but needed to be moved because it was starting to cause an obstruction with the ever busier roads...

The timber framed building is extravagantly decorated with carvings including mermaids, angels, animals, flowers and grotesques.
The entablature above the columns includes a number of carved texts praising god.

When built this market house was open at ground level with the upper structure supported on twelve oak columns.
If you look at the photo above you can see the columns and where the building has now been filled in. 

It was used for public meetings and also meetings of the town guilds and  the Quarter session courts were held there...

Nowadays it is a civic building and used for such events as exhibitions.. weddings etc....  

As I said at the start I really like this building...
I like the shape...The black and white structure and the condition and neatness of the whole building.... A bit of a historic gem really.

Another Move and a Visitor.....

Last Monday we moved on from the Malverns and are now about thirty miles further west just north of Hereford.....

We are at one of my favourite sites close to the village of Moreton on Lugg. This is a privately owned adult only site which at this time of year at the start of the school holidays is absolute bliss..

For a few hours today between people moving on and new arrivals there were only four units in our camping field. See the picture above to check out the almost empty site....
It has filled up again now but most people on site seem to be fifty years or older....

This is the third time that we have been here since 2015 and it is an ideal site for us as it ticks all of our boxes...

The day after we arrived we had a visitor.
My cycling and walking buddy Peter had cycled up from Poole in Dorset to spend four nights with us...

He had made the journey on his touring bike and we had a few days of chat and banter as well as a look at Hereford and it's cathedral on the Wednesday and also a walk and picnic on the Thursday.

Peter headed off back home on Saturday morning and expects to be back home before Tuesday.
It's always nice to see Peter and he has managed to visit us at over eight of our camp sites since 2015.....

He slept in his Hilleberg Akto tent that he has used for both cycle touring as well as backpacking trips...
I have an Akto myself and I always remember when we were walking the Pennine way together a few years ago joking about how our tents looked like a couple of coffins pitched side by side....
The slight fading of the grass where Peter had pitched his tent seems to bear that out...

S

Peter packing for his return trip....

An Open Door...... Double Take!

Since we have been staying here near the Malverns I have cycled a number of times to Tewkesbury and Anne and I have also driven there so we could have a proper look around the town.....

The stand out place in the town for us was the Abbey which we both thought was stunning.
It was a really interesting and historic  place that gave me lots of subject matter for my monochrome photography.

I am planning to ressurect my photography blog 'Aura of Past Shadows" a little later in the year and the abbey gave me some good b/w images.

One of the other things that grabbed my attention was a front door on a terraced house in the town.....
The owner had painted the image of an open door leading to a garden on the front door...it really did need a double take...
The image of that door is shown below ......
the other image is a shot of the wonderful Abbey...

Grow Your Own Dog.....

The jazz festival that I mentioned in my last post took place at Upton on Severn.
In lots of ways the town is almost a step back to the 1950s.
The high street has lots of small independent shops with no multi nationals that we could see.

There are a number of pubs in the town and during the jazz festival they all seemed to host various bands. We went back again earlier this week to have a better look around.

One of the things that really captured our attention was the large dog near the tourist information office...
It looks like a large Old English Sheepdog but it is in fact a plant of some kind.....

It could well catch on...

No need to go to the breeding kennels for your next dog just grow your own.......

Below is a photo of the local garage...usually this style of building would have been modernised but thankfully this one is original and has been maintained like that....

 Here is the high street...... This too hasn't changed much over the years.

 View of the Severn from the pub garden where we had lunch.....

 Finally a picture of the town museum....

Malvern....Still No Awning...

Last Monday we moved on from our site at Cropredy and are now at the Blackmore CCC site close to the Malvern hills.
We have stayed here before but that was about ten years ago and on that visit we were camping in a tent.

Having received a replacement air tube for our awning we were planning on putting the awning up on our arrival here.
We got the awning out of it's bag and unboxed the new tube but after attempting to insert the tube in the outer zipped pole tube it became obvious that we had been sent the wrong tube.....

So we are still using the canopy and windscreen (wind break) set up that we have been using since our stay at Salisbury.

A quick call to Cameron at Automotive Leisure and Cameron admitted it was his fault...
He said that he had been sent the complete set and had obviously sent the front arch out to us instead of the rear as we had requested.

Unfortunately there are issues with the CCC receiving parcels on behalf of campers so we will have to wait till we get to our next site in a couple of weeks time and get it sent there....
Still with the hot weather we have had this past week the canopy has probably been a better set up than an awning anyway..... 

Current set up...great in hot weather..

 Since we have been here I've been to a Jazz Festival  at Upton on Severn as well as getting out on the bike in an area that I've not cycled in before and we have also been out walking some of the many footpaths that there are surrounding the campsite....

This coming week we are planning a trip to Worcester which is a place that neither of us have ever been to before.

View of part of the Malvern hills on today's walk.

This past weekend the site has been rammed with a lot of people trying to take advantage of the good weather with a weekend camping trip.

Apparently 77 units packed up and left the site at lunchtime today. Mind you as they were leaving more units were arriving although not quite as many as had left......

Tomorrow I am planning a cycle ride down towards Gloucester so I am now going to head off to bed for a good nights sleep in preparation for the cycling effort...

Banbury or Eccles....

Wherever you travel to in the UK you can usually find somewhere that will sell you an Eccles cake....
I don't dislike Eccles cakes but I have always had a preference for Banbury cakes...

It must be said that they are very similar.
They are both made from a flaky pastry with a spiced fruit filling although the Banbury cakes are more oval in shape whereas the Eccles are round and deeper.

But I feel that it is in the eating where there is the biggest difference....
The Banbury cakes to my mind have a more spicy and nicer texture in the mouth.

I have always liked them but over the years they seem to be more and more difficult to find in the shops as I said most places will sell Eccles cakes but very rarely will they have Banbury cakes.

A lot of the people working in cake shops don't even seem to know what they are.

As our current location is only a few miles away from Banbury I was able to find some for sale but even Tesco in Banbury stocks Eccles cakes but not the nicer Banbury cakes...Shame on you Tesco. !!!

I found my beloved Banburys in a shop selling sweets and a few types of cakes but I just don't understand why they are so difficult to obtain...after all they have been made in the region to secret recipes since 1586...
Maybe that's the reason....the recipe is so secret that not enough people know how to make them.....

Aviation Interference and a New Location....

We have moved on from the Salisbury site and are now at a private site in North Oxfordshire close to the border with Warwickshire.
It is a very nice site that seems to be a mix of residential and touring pitches very similar to the site in Devon where we spent last winter....

All the grass around the site is neatly cut and the hedges are well trimmed. The toilets and showers are clean and tidy and there is a small information room with lots of ideas for places to visit.
There is also a well equipped laundry room.

All in all the site has everything that we look for in a site and best of all it is cheaper than a site operated by either of the two UK clubs...

We are less than a mile from the village of Cropredy where Fairport Convention hold their annual music festival.
Unfortunately that takes place in early August so we will miss that event.

Intrestingly we only heard of this site during a chance conversation with another camper at the CCC Moreton site back in April....
They come here each year in order to attend the music festival.

While we were at Salisbury something happened that hadn't happened at anytime during our previous four years of touring.
When I tried to operate our motor-mover it wouldn't work properly...it just kept jerking and then turning off...

I mentioned this to Cameron at Automotive Leisure and he said that it sounded as if it was interference from something that was transmitting on a similar wavelength as our motor-mover hand control.

He suggested that when we leave the site if we were still getting the interference to try operating it with the controller held just inside the caravan door...
Apparently the steel frame of the caravan would help to shield the transmission from my hand control from the transmission from whatever was interfering with it...

So that's what we did with Anne shouting directions and me operating the mover with my arm held through the caravan door effectively driving the caravan blind.
We managed to get the caravan hitched up with this method but were happy when we got here to find that all was working again as it should.

There was an airfield not far from the Salisbury site and there was a lot of small airplane activity and it seems likely that was the source of the interference....