Steam-Driven Things

Today we are going where the past meets the present, where hard old-fashioned graft rubs shoulders with recreation and leisure, where the laughter of children overlays the roars of huge machines, and where the tang of coal smoke mingles with the aroma of beer and fish and chips. We're off to Stotfold Mill Working Steam Weekend.

It's a fairly small show and you could get around the whole site in an hour or two, but others linger for the whole day and still don't see everything. Unlike other shows there's no central ring where all the action takes place and if there is a programme then I didn't see one. You wander around aimlessly and there's always something happening in several places. It's probably the last show of the year for many enthusiasts and there's a laid-back, end-of-term feel to everything.

The Watermill

We arrived soon after the show started, at the civilised time of 10:30. There were not too many people about, so it was an ideal time to visit Stotfold Mill itself.

In 1992 there was a disastrous fire which destroyed most of the historic building; all that remained were some brick foundations and metal parts including the overshot waterwheel. A group of local volunteers got together and made the courageous decision that the mill must be completely rebuilt. This involved their travelling all over the country, looking at similar mills to see exactly how they were constructed.

Although it's something of a showpiece, with explanatory notices and collections of historic items that have only tenuous connections to milling, it has a quality which older mills lack. You see, watermills and windmills didn't just shut down while they were in full productive mode; they limped along for decades, being used occasionally when other more modern facilities were busy or a local farmer had some animal feed to be ground. During this time the fabric of the mills deteriorated until one day they were completely abandoned. The crisp, new woodwork we see at Stotfold is much closer to how these mills must have looked in their heyday than other more antiquated mills.

The machinery extends over three floors of the building and everything you see is powered by the waterwheel.

There's a remarkably life-like model of the miller totting up his profits. We also made use of the small tea-room which is nowadays attached to the mill. We're off to get a nice pot of tea and some hot, buttered teacakes. After that we'll explore the show.....

Stationary Exhibits

While they are preparing the working machines we'll have a look at some of the stationary items on display.....

To one side of the showground there are some stately old motorcars.

Many knowledgeable authorities were to be found drooling over this ancient steam-powered Foden lorry. They told us that this is a rare visitor to shows in this area and one they hadn't seen before. It's also remarkable in that all its paintwork is original.

There was an impressive line-up of elderly tractors to be admired, though some of these would disappear from time to time to demonstrate a little ploughing, or else to tow other machines that had broken down.

This unusual design is "not that old", by which I mean of course that they were used during my lifetime. Every now and then some heartless person reminds me that that could still mean "ancient" to younger eyes. Anyway, this is a David Brown 2D Row-Crop Tractor that was launched to much fanfare in the late 1950s. It was revolutionary in that it was rear-engined and had a range of cultivating tools which could be mounted just in front of the driver, exactly where he could see what was going on. Despite their optimism, production ceased in 1961.

Here's an altogether more ancient beast. This is a Renault PE tractor that was first manufactured in 1926. We can take a little circular historical journey here:

   At 4 am, one morning in May 1896, the inventor Dan Albone jumped out of bed, much to the annoyance of his wife, with a new idea buzzing in his head. He had just conceived the modern lightweight tractor.

   By 1902 the new tractor was undergoing its first trial.

   In 1903 Dan realised that, with a covering of thick, bullet-proof metal, his new vehicle might be used by the army.

   During the 1914-18 war the new "tanks" were used for the first time. Renault in France began making similar machines.

   After the war Renault reversed the process and made agricultural tractors, based on their tanks.

   In 1926 they made the PE, their first proper agricultural tractor.

   And now here it is back in Bedfordshire, just five miles from where Mrs Albone was rudely awakened 127 years ago!

Ploughing By Steam

Periodically the relative peace was interrupted by loud blasts from a neighbouring field. If we go through a hole in the hedge we can see what's going on.....

Amid a certain amount of head-scratching they are about to begin ploughing another strip of land. The reversible plough on the right of the picture needs to be tipped down and will then be pulled up the field by another steam engine at the far end....

Like this! Once at the top of the hill, the plough will need to be tipped up again and man-handled into position to begin the next furrow. Then the whole apparatus will then be pulled back by.... 

...."Princess Caroline", patiently awaiting her turn. You can see the great drum beneath the machine which will winch in the steel cable to pull the plough. When everything's ready to go the drivers of the vehicles signal to one another with ear-splitting blasts, like this....

This is how ploughing was carried out in this area before Dan Albone's new tractors took over. If you hadn't guessed we were among the visitors who spent the whole day there. I'll be back in a day or two with more from the Working Steam Weekend.

Take care

Echoes Of Old Mistley

Mistley is easily missed! Just a small railway station on the branch line from Manningtree to Harwich. Or a place passed through on the B1352 road that meanders through the handful of villages that lie between those same two places. A birdwatcher might pause for a while where the road runs beside the muddy Stour Estuary.

In summer the local people gravitate towards the strip of grass between the road and the shore. A couple of ice-cream vans and a tea waggon loiter nearby and people bring deckchairs to sit beneath the trees and gaze out across the water.

We found a few Redshanks and an assortment of gulls as we wandered along, ice-creams in hand. 

You can never be too sure with gulls, but I'll say that those with a small dark patch behind the eye are, confusingly, Black-headed Gulls, while a couple of the larger Herring Gulls lurk at the back.

On reaching the end of the muddy shore we turned briefly inland.

If Mistley is famous for anything, it's these two towers standing in an old graveyard. They are what remains of a church built in 1776 and designed by Robert Adam.

Adam was a leading architect of his day and developed his own style in which many buildings were perfectly symmetrical. So when he was asked to design a church it had to have two towers, rather than the usual one, bookending the nave of the church. When the church was demolished it was decided to keep the towers as they provided a useful landmark for boats negotiating the estuary. That's the village sign in the foreground.

The door to one of the towers was open so we poked our heads inside and peered up at the painted ceiling, which is supposed to represent The Holy Trinity.

The graveyard has many surprising memorials including this odd group of graves, which look like coffins converted into beds! Very strange.

Lichens have conspired to give this plain cross a mystical inscription.

Around the back of the towers (and partly in their shadow) is this Egyptian-style mausoleum. The design was all the rage for just a few years around 1830, though it later came back into fashion when Tutankhamun's tomb was discovered. The material used here is actually polished marble, though the years have not been kind.

I became entranced by the weathered handle and keyhole to the door.

But how come such a prestigious architect was hired to build a church in such an obscure spot? For that we can thank Richard Rigby of Mistley Hall. He had an ambitious plan to turn Mistley, which at that time consisted of a quayside with granaries and malthouses, into a saltwater spa town. Adam was originally supposed to design the spa but it was decided that many other buildings, including the old church, needed to be replaced to be in keeping with the proposed fashionable resort.

One side of the village sign records Mistley's history as a port, when sloops and barges transported wheat, flour and brewers' malt around the coast to London. John Constable's father owned such a vessel. The quay still stands and I was keen to find out if there was any public access to the present-day facilities.

This huge building, dating from about 1896, was part of the old maltings, where top-quality barley was turned into malt for London's brewing industry. It appears to be flats or offices now. At one time there were seven large malthouses in Mistley.

Further along the quayside is an old kiln, also part of the malting industry. This shot was taken with a long lens as a sign warned against proceeding further without a hard hat! You can see that some kind of goods is still stored here.

That lens also came in handy for spotting a seal sunning itself on a sandbank.

On the way back along the High Street we came across The Swan Fountain. Along with the building behind it was designed by Robert Adam as a centrepiece for the planned spa town. Nothing else of the ambitious scheme was completed. Note again the symmetry of Adam's work - it's a wonder that swan doesn't have a head at either end!

Across the fields rises the lofty spire of the Church of St Mary and St Michael, the latest version of Mistley church, dating from around 1870. So there we have it - boats, birds, ice-cream, stylish Georgian towers, peculiar graves, a village sign, dockside kilns and malthouses, a sunbathing seal, a decorative fountain and a church. And looking at the map of listed buildings in the area I can see there's plenty more that I missed in Mistley!

Take care.

Down London Way

The main road from London to Cambridge used to pass right through Melbourn, though within my lifetime a by-pass has been built around the village and a whole new motorway, the M11, provides another link to the capital city. Nowadays I stroll along Melbourn High Street as part of one of my regular walks.

As you can see it's fairly peaceful early on a Sunday morning, but there are reminders of its busy past...

An old milestone is set, none too squarely, into a wall that I pass and several of the larger houses have names like The Old Rose, which betray their former importance as roadside inns.

And the rather quaint residence above bears the name of Turnpike Cottage, harking back to the days when travellers would have paid a small toll to use this section of road, the money thus collected being used for the upkeep of the highway. This system, which was introduced in the seventeenth century, was a huge improvement over the previous piecemeal road repairs carried out sporadically by local authorities.

A little farther along I come across a sign for London Way. But it doesn't refer to the old turnpike road as you might think, but to a minor track now used by purely local traffic.

It starts off as a roughly-surfaced track beneath overhanging trees and is wide enough to suggest that it's been a major road in fairly recent times, but that's deceiving. This lower section is used by farms and some building companies who have premises a little way off the track.

The further you go the rougher and narrower it gets and you also realise that you're in a sunken road with banks rising above head-height on either side. This usually denotes a very old road indeed. These "holloways" as they're sometimes called may date back a thousand years or more. Occasionally you'll hear it said that the Saxons constructed their roads like this and used them to mark boundaries. 

However most of the sunken roads, in this part of the country at least, occur in hillier parts of the county and the steeper the hill, the deeper the roadway. They are almost certainly caused by erosion. Rainwater soon found the ruts made by waggon wheels and washed any loose soil downslope, gradually lowering the road-surface below the surrounding fields.
The fact that boundaries, which are known to survive from Saxon times, follow these sunken ways just shows how very ancient some of these routes must be.

But was this rural byway ever the main route to London. Well, yes - and no! Before the turnpike system regularised the roads people tended to go where they could. Roads became flooded, muddy or impassable and travellers, of necessity, took to the higher ground along any route that was open to them. And I think that's what would have happened here and this was just one of the possible ways to London.

I met this peaceable old soul along the track who seemed to be taking herself for a walk. I'm pretty certain she's a Lurcher, a type of dog originally bred by gypsies to hunt rabbits and hares.

Eventually my track "comes up for air" and, no longer restricted by high banks, gives views out over the recently harvested fields. And soon it rejoins the modern London road.

But my footsteps may have been traversing a path which dates from a time before people ever troubled themselves with which way it was to "dear old London town", before London was a place of any importance at all. And the evidence for that lies just to one side of the track, just before its highest point.

This is Grinnel Hill, a Bronze Age burial mound, that's probably around 3,000 years old. So maybe this same path I walk today, wearing my lightweight boots and carrying my camera and binoculars, was once walked by a prehistoric tribe on their way to bury their former chieftain. Makes you think.


Take care.

The Boats Of North Norfolk

I've just returned from a few days break on the Norfolk coast and as usual I seem to have taken a lot of pictures of boats. So here are just a few....

This stretch of coast used to be lined with commercial harbours with ships sailing around the British coast and across the North Sea to the rest of Europe. In those days East Anglia was the industrial heartland of the country, particularly because of the wool trade. However as ships got larger, inlets and harbours silted up, and the wool trade failed, so the ports of Norfolk, like Wells-Next-The-Sea (above), became fishing towns and villages.

Gradually the fishing trade failed also and nowadays, although the remnants of the fishing fleet still operates, many former fishermen find employment in tourism, like the ones above taking visitors over to Blakeney Point from Morston Quay to see the seals (more of that in a future post).

On the way they may see Juno, a reconstruction of a sailing barge. This traditional type of vessel is capable of sailing into the shallow creeks along this coast and also putting to sea. Their secret is that, instead of the more normal keel which most vessels have, the Juno is fitted with lee-boards, one on each side, which can be lowered to stabilise her in deep water, or raised to give a draft of just 2ft 6 inches (76 cms).

Or they may see one of these little sailing boats used by youngsters learning to sail in these relatively calm waters protected from the open sea by the shingle bank of Blakeney Point.

Or perhaps even Mary, who started out in life as an open lifeboat propelled by oars before being de-commissioned and remodelled with the charming addition of a garden shed! If this picture reminds you of something from childhood then it's probably Noah's Ark from those little illustrated books of Bible stories.

Looking across this wide area at high tide it's difficult to believe that in just six hours or so all the water will have departed leaving these vessels high and dry till the next tide.

Here's the scene at low tide at Freshes Creek near Stiffkey. Students of the idiosyncrasies of English place-name pronunciation will be thrilled to learn that Stiffkey is pronounced locally as Stew-key !

The boat above is going nowhere till the tide comes in.

If you can't wait for the tide to come in, or if you can't afford the £1,500 it will cost you to charter the Juno for the day, you could try one of the colourful kayaks stored near Wells harbour.

"O' course if you int got no boat at all you can always go on your boik!"

Take care.