Castle Combe and the Cheddar Gorge.
Another really nice day, although it ended with a car problem that led to some anxiety about how easy it would be to take care of it. After all, we have days to go before returning to London.
Castle Combe at the southern edge of the rolling green hills of the Cotswolds, about 17 miles northwest of Keynsham, is fabulous. Let me say that again. Fabulous. It is sometimes referred as England’s prettiest village. That’s a fair assessment. The road in is very tight, like so many of the small and narrow country roads in this entire region, but it’s also filled with visitors in cars and walking, making it even tighter. Driving seems like an adventure here.
First driving through the small village and the then walking back in after parking was so lovely. It is a classic British countryside town. It’s just one picture perfect photograph after another.
And then there’s the Manor House, now a hotel but at one time the Manor House of the village. Beautiful (of course), with gardens and surrounding woods befitting of John Constable, the British landscape painter of the 19th century.
The whole village is spectacular, and after spending some time walking the grounds of the Manor House we went back into the village, and walked some more, winding up at the White Hart for a pint (beer for Tom, lemonade for me).
Then, time to move on to yet another incredible place… the Cheddar Gorge, about 35 miles southwest of Castle Combe, and just outside of the village of Cheddar in Somerset where Cheddar cheese was originally named, and for which the cheese is named. Wow!
The gorge is as magnificent as anywhere, and perhaps not what you might expect in this part of the country, with all these quaint villages and country roads. But this is the Mendip Hills, a small range of limestone hills stretching west to east from the Bristol Channel, and far more rugged and dramatic than the Cotswolds. Great motorcycle road, I might add.
We walked through the marvelous gorge road for about a mile,. and then found a trail head leading up the hills, with some mighty steep steps taking us up and up and up, to about 1,000 feet, where we walked the ridge overlooking the gorge, and eventually into the village of Cheddar, which lies at the western end of the gorge road. Great views!
The village of Cheddar itself, which the train took us down into after a four mile walk from our starting point was nice, and quite pretty, but very much a tourist town, almost strip like with its tourist store after tourist store. I’ll tell you this, it’s no Castle Combe.
Then a little little less than a mile walk back to the car, walking eastwards out of the village into the gorge, and we headed back to Keynsham and the Crown Inn.
We arrived back the Crown, hung out for a short while, and then drove back to the Lock Keeper pub, where we ate and sipped yesterday, for dinner. It was dark by the time we left the pub to return to the Crown Inn, around 10:30 pm, and busy talking and maneuvering these small roads in the dark, I hit a curb on a roundabout and caused a warning of “battery charging failure,” with an instruction to stop the vehicle. Just five minutes from the Crown Inn, we kept going, parked the car, and then began a long evening of calls to the car rental company, first reporting the incident and then waiting for a call back to first pick up and tow the car as the warning made it undrivable until repaired, and then arranging for a replacement, which we hoped would happen tomorrow.
Reporting the incident was the easy part, getting through to Europcar to arrange for a replacement vehicle was not, and we went to bed anxious, wondering how smoothly this would go the next day. I was up until 2 pm, waiting for the Automobile Association to call to arrange the vehicle tow, but they never called. Anxiously I went to bed. Spoiler alert – although a pain, a big one, things worked out the next day.