We weren’t going to see dragons in Wales we were going to see Peregrine Falcons, but they are possibly the closest thing to a perfect fast killing machine. In any event we left early to breakfast at T Bay on the M6, lunching at the Crooked House Inn further south in the Black Country – a subsiding inn which has rooms at all sorts of angles – quite disturbing walking in sober and staggering around.
Fortified we headed to the famous Cheese Rolling hill – where rounds of Double Gloucester cheese are rolled down a 1 in 2 hill followed shortly by suicidal people tumbling after them. The tradition was enacted unofficially this year but we wanted to see the hill even without the 5,000 spectators. Local bylaws prohibit clambering up the hill and throwing anything down apart from on the Spring Bank Holiday!
The next tourist feature was the Keith Hardie World of Mechanical Music – a delight of working player pianos and musical boxes. We followed a chap in a wheel chair with his parents to hear various painos playing before the request came from the wheelchair for David Bowie. And amazingly there it was the theme from Labyrinth played on a large disk like a reverse gramophone record with raised hooks instead of pits. It played on a record player but it picked like a musical box and lo and behold beautiful music appeared. Apparently Mr Jones turned up one day and asked for the disc to be created for a low budget movie (it turned out to the David Bowie for Labyrinth). Juke box musical boxes and organ grinding later we left the Cotswolds to cross the 80p olde toll bridge with new automatic toll meter into Hay-on-Wye for a pee and a quick jog around the closed bookshops and on into Wales.
Crossing the Welsh border meant trying to find somewhere to stay – tripadvisor on an iphone as I drove at speed through the countryside towards Carmarthen found Kim wooping beside me with delight as she had secured a Georgian mansion for bed and breakfast. Enroute we had a lamb shank, not rhyming slang, in the Fox and Hounds (which served Wainwright beer which I hadn’t even seen in the Lake District as well as Rambler’s Ruin a great Welsh beer) and then after several wrong roads – thanks to Mike a few pints down and still navigating and the disagreeing sat navs – we drove up to a friendly greeting and parked outside the splendid B&B.
Early morning walk around the grounds was a delight, Kim watching the leaping fish in the green pond and a wander around the walled garden. Filled with a full breakfast we left to find ourselves in a labyrinth of roads to emerge as directions dictated to shortly be cuddling young peregrine falcon chicks whilst sipping tea. An international teleconference later whilst reading photo books about falcons and we were off around the coast and back on tripadvisor to find somewhere to stay.
I hadn’t realised St David’s Head was a huge religious significance for Catholics (2 visits equals a one visit to Rome) but we bypassed it for honey and ginger ice cream and a promenade along Fishguard harbour in the sun watching small boys hurl themselves off the harbour walls with the cry of ‘We are fucking hard’ as they plummet into the freezing waters. Although we almost never found it as I confidently told Kim to turn left here and she was wondering why we were going around Somerfield car park…
Typically we were lost in the Welsh countryside with 2 satnavs, 2 iphones and the B&B website how to find us. The woman I called said that the owners husband was in hospital critically ill and his wife was at the hospital and she had come from Spain to help – so we weren’t too sure what was going to happen. As it was we chanced upon a field of clay figures – a family, an old man sitting and a horse – which was quite bizarre, before passing the same vehicles in different directions several times before finally 1 sat nav said we were 2 miles away and the other said we were 18 miles away and heading away from it and the iphones could get no signal whatsoever – we took the chance on the 2 miles one and lo and behold arrived. It was now 8:30 I rushed in met the woman I spoke to and said ‘we won;t book in just now as we need to find somewhere to eat before they stop serving at 9 – can you recommend anywhere?’ In her best Manuel from Fawlty Towers – ‘I know nothing, I have arrived from Spain only 2 days ago’ – we left and headed in any direction and chacned upon the Falcon Inn (which having spent most of the day with Falcons we reckoned was an omen). They had a golf party arriving so couldn’t feed us anything but a basket meal (was this the 70’s?) – but the barmaid was really nice and helpful and there was real Welsh beer on tap – so we munched through scampi and beer.
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