September 2020
Post from John
Any form of
planning this year has turned out to be an exercise in futility…
When we
returned from Chertsey, we decided that we would have another trip in the van
in mid-September, before having Mum to stay with us at the end of the month. We
booked sites up for 10 nights in the Brecon Beacons and Elan valley in Wales.
Then family circumstances changed and we would need to travel a bit
earlier; bookings were duly amended and the planned trip shortened. The week
before we were due to go, Ruth was doing her daily check of Covid-19 infections
in family-relevant areas (you can take the woman out of Public Health, but you
can’t take Public Health out of the woman….). Mid-Wales had seen an increase in
infections, to a considerably higher level than Warwickshire, so it didn’t seem
wise to head that way.
So, plan C was
concocted, involving a complicated decision tree of where are infections not too high, where are there available pitches, and do we want to go there anyway?
The upshot was that we booked 5 nights at the Camping and Caravanning Club site
just outside Tavistock. We hadn’t been to Dartmoor, so we were looking forward
to the trip.
We’d had to
start the trip on a Saturday, which we realised was a bad move once we got onto
the M5. Stop-start traffic from North of Bristol to well into Somerset meant a
somewhat protracted journey, and we arrived at the site late in the afternoon.
We’d booked a
slot at the National Trust property at Cotehele, just over the border in
Cornwall, for the next day. It was about a 30-minute journey in the morning
sunshine, but the last couple of miles involved typical Cornish lanes.
Allegedly 2-way roads had high hedges on both sides almost brushing the van’s
wing mirrors; thankfully nothing was coming the other way.
Cotehele House
dates back to the 15th century, and was home to the Edgecumbe family;
the grounds stretch down to the River Tamar, with views of the magnificent
Calstock viaduct a little way upstream. After the obligatory coffee and scone,
we walked through the various sections of the garden, including the orchard
where visitors could pick their own apples and pears from over 200 trees. Then
we wandered through the terraced Italian garden and onto the pleasant woodland
walk down to the river.
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| Cotehele House and Italian garden |
 |
| Calstock viaduct |
The track leads
down to Cotehele Quay, once a busy loading and unloading point for trade with
Plymouth, but now a pleasant place to enjoy an ice-cream or cold drink in the
sunshine. We took the path which follows the stream up to Cotehele Mill, also
on the estate. This Victorian watermill is still used for grinding corn, but unfortunately
closed at present.
 |
| Cotehele Quay |
 |
| The mill |
Sadly, the trip
went downhill from here; I’d been unwell during the day, and we thought it best to have it checked
out. We took the reluctant decision to abandon the trip and headed home on Monday morning. Thankfully it was nothing serious, but I am
now awaiting some minor surgery in the New Year.
2021 can only
be better than this year – can’t it?
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