Category Archives: around home

around home, engineering, history, national park, UK

New Forest tiki-tour

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The forecast for the weekend’s weather was all around pretty pants, so with a new book arriving on my Kindle I read that for a while & then it started to clear. If I had have known it was going to such a stunning day, I would have gone for a ride. Alas, I headed in to Lyndhurst eventually to wander around at leisure – having only ridden my bike through multiple times previously.

Last week, I finished a rather long historical novel centred on the New Forest for the last millenium – so my historical interest was piqued. The New Forest museum was well worth an hour to add a little bit to my appreciation of the past of the area. It was pretty pleasant wandering around the small town in the sun & it wasn’t as busy as it gets in summer. About the only thing I’ve noticed on previous rides through, is that there is a disproportionately large Ferrari & Maserati dealership at the bottom of the main street – I still can’t really figure that out, it’s not really central & while there is a bit of money around the Forest, I didn’t think it was that much. Still, the cars were nice to look at for a few minutes.

After an exquisite salmon lunch, I was off up tiny little lanes north, through Minstead & across the busy A31 to go & see the Rufus Stone. It’s supposed to commemorate the spot where William II was killed by an, apparently, stray arrow while hunting in 1100. However, it is now thought that he felled close to the coast down near Beaulieu.

More windy little lanes took me away from the main roads & I continued past home to Calshot – which sits only a few miles from where I live on a spit at the west of the entrance to Southampton Water.

Over to the Isle of Wight, ignore the gravelly beach

Those curious things – I’m still intrigued that you have to shelter from the weather so much, that it’s worth building a hut at the beach

Across the bay, Fawley Power Station on the left, Fawley Refinery centre background – not that I expect anyone else finds that noteworthy

On the spit, there’s another castle that Henry VIII built in his chain of coastal defences.  This one is a little smaller than Hurst Castle, where I went not so long ago.  The area was perfect for setting up a Naval Air Station just before WWI for sea boats.  There are still a couple of the hangars, Sopwith & Sunderland (which is now home to a dry-ski slope, climbing wall, velodrome & other such indoor sports facilities).  My enjoyable wanderings continued as there was little traffic on the rather circuitous route I took home.  A nice day to be out before the summer rush arrives.

Not wanting to spend the entire rainy Sunday inside reading another good Ian Rankin, I popped out to have a look around the couple of villages further up the west side of Southampton Water – mostly because I had the time to finally check out the Eling Tide Mill, which I’d been seeing signs for since I moved in.  In Marchwood there’s a big military port (where the Mulberry harbours were made), a big waste incinerator & a shiny new CCGT (combined cycle gas turbine power station).

But really I wanted to see the restored tidal mill – only one of two still operating in the country. It’s not overly big, but then there wasn’t much need for it to be big when a mill was first built here to harness the tides a thousand years ago.  The incoming tide floods the mill pond & when the outgoing tide is low enough the undershot Poncelot wheel starts to turn the various gears and eventually the millstone.  Only one of the two systems is restored – this is good because the working one is guarded, but you can still see all the details on the stationary one. With all the old gears, control systems (I use the term loosely), transport mechanisms, hoppers & so on I was well pleased to see the flour being made as it has been for centuries. I’ll stop boring everyone but Dr Hodge/Beavis now.

around home, bikes, MTB, UK

Last rides

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For my last weekend of riding for many months, winter finally decided to turn up – just a little bit. Saturday dawned beautiful & clear – Ady & I headed out for a similar loop of the Forest to the previous week’s. With an extra layer on in deference to the -5ºC, it was great to have the Forest dry for a change. With a slightly slower pace than last time, the best part of the riding (apart from being out on such a great morning) was riding across all the frozen puddles & either locking up the wheels to slide across or suddenly breaking through the ice.

Sunday’s news was of course dominated by the UK coming to a grinding halt in places with a few inches of snow. Pleasingly, it just rained a bit down this way & I set off up the M3 with Dan towards Winchester – meeting at Chris’s house in Otterbourne. As soon as we got off the motorway the snow starting showing up on the side of the road. We set off through a few inches using a variety of bridleways & side-streets to go around Winchester anti-clockwise through some rather posh patches. A few centimetres of snow is great fun as there is still mostly traction, but a just enough sliding around for the front wheel to make things interesting. Eventually we were off the roads & cutting through the countryside avoiding puddles & trying to keep our feet warm. It was noticeably warmer, but damper than Saturday’s ride.

There were some big wide tracks that provided plenty of amusement snaking around many puddles. Unfortunately by this stage, our feet were starting to get wet from the constant spray. In the end, our three different methods for keeping warm feet all failed well & truly – at the first decent food stop, there was much walking around on the road to try & warm our feet.

Through more fields, down bridleways & the occasional piece of singletrack we carried on. After a particularly wet, muddy & slow field crossing, during which we were delighted not to have the large-horned steers impale us, we hit the South Downs Way and headed back towards Winchester. It wasn’t long after that we stood around cursing our cold feet as Dan extracted a large thorn from his tyre & patched a tube. That was about the time I took this photo – apologies for lack of nice photos, stopping to satisfy my shutter-finger wasn’t a large priority.

Strangely, as the snow was mostly melting by now, we hit the deepest drift of the day in the middle of an open field. More fun sliding around, it was a pity that the spring that holds my brake pads apart somehow got bent in part & then started rubbing annoyingly on the rotor. There was no way I was changing that with so little distance to go until home – it took long enough to remove the calliper from the frame & cable-tie it to my seat. The 50 km were up with a lot less resistance for me (you never realise just how much your brakes are rubbing when you gradually get used to it). Back at Chris’s it was time to painfully remove socks, warm up & hose bikes, shoes, clothes & backpacks of much splatter.

So there you have, my last ride report for quite some time (“and there was much rejoicing”).

around home, history, UK

Salisbury Sunday

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Having learnt my lesson by being exhausted going out for a ride in the forest on Saturday morning with a workmate who whizzed round the trails using the big ring, while I spun my only chainring furiously – Sunday was set aside for a day off the bike & going for a little drive to do something touristy while I still had both arms.  It was a cool, gloomy day – but one of the advantages of surviving a long Canadian winter is that anything above freezing point is warm – for my trip half an hour north to Salisbury.

The famous cathedral (tallest spire in the country) dominates the still-nicely-sized city & it wasn’t long before I spotted that curious English sight of someone standing in a river in the middle of the city trying to coerce tiny fish on to a hook.

It was a lot sunnier when I came here with Mum forty odd months ago. But the cathedral is no less impressive

I had hoped to fill in the some of the day at a museum or two before a quick wander around the cathedral.  Inexplicably, the main museum was closed so I was wandering around the cloister & over all sorts of gravestones well before I expected.

This stone is a lot newer than most & is only of any significance in that it was unveiled just as I was taking my first breaths half a world away in New Zealand – not sure how I spotted that.

I was pleased to discover that there was a tour you could take that was basically climbing a few stairs (332) up to the top of the tower/base of the spire.  I was even more pleased to find that there was a single spot left on it – I couldn’t leave that empty, so promptly took it.  I still had plenty of time to wander around the nave & appreciate the oldest working mechanical clock in the world, the general incredibleness of the masonry in a building over seven hundred years old & the best surviving copy of the Magna Carta (in the Chapter House) – the new font is very neat too, but I didn’t get a good picture.

After the opening spiel from our good humoured, but very proper, guide we set off up the first of five progressively narrower spiral staircases.  In the picture three above we climbed up the left front corner halfway, then walked across the end of the nave to the right corner before another flight of stairs.

We were then up in the roof space of the nave.  It was neat to see the crude, but solid, structural pieces holding up this huge building.  The top side of the nave ceiling wasn’t nearly as attractive to the eye; we could see some of the two acres worth of lead sheeting through the oak-work that still forms the roof after all this time.  We walked towards the centre of the cathedral, ducking out to a tiny balcony to check out the view of the Close & look towards Old Sarum (where Salisbury originally was on top of a hill, before they decided they were sick of no easily accessible water supply) over modern (it’s a relative term) Salisbury.

Inside the tower there was the bell ringing mechanism – even if the bells were further above.  The bells used to be rung manually & when the mechanism went in they decided it was too big & cumbersome to get up to the bells, so just ran some ropes up.  The framework below had to be put in by Christopher Wren to stop the after-thought tower (it went up in the 1300s) slowly heading towards collapse.

Up even more rickety spiral staircases we managed to get pretty close to all the bells – thankfully not quite at the right time.  It was pretty noisy on the floors immediately below & then above when they did ring out on the quarter-hours.

Finally we were at the top of the tower looking up in to the huge spire.  The scaffolding that was left after construction was almost as impressive – nothing like the scaffolding I’ve seen around the many plants I’ve worked in.

There was just enough room for the thirteen of us out on the balcony so we could look up along the face of the spire & out over the city.

You can just see the top of the tallest spire in England – 123 metres

Looking down along the roof under which we walked

Another interesting unplanned & unexpected outing – the Tower Tour is well worth the extra few quid if you have the time.

around home, history, UK, vehicles

Bond cars & some more rides

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With Saturday morning gone spent looking for ski clothes in Southampton (I found a jacket – at least I’ll be a little easier to spot now on the slopes), I was keen to get out for a little ride before it got dark. As the new Bond car exhibition has opened properly just down the road at Beaulieu, I struggled against a huge headwind through the forest to get there for a free look. It’s quite the impressive collection of about fifty various Bond vehicles (cars, motorbikes, boats) from most of the series (not much from Dr No) – with the more recent movies being better represented obviously. The best of the lot were the two from Goldfinger – Goldfinger’s Rolls Royce & the quintessential Bond car, a DB5. The Aston Martin from Living Daylights was a particular favourite of mine – the cello case would be one of the stranger ones.

Sunday’s MTB club ride was miles better than the previous one I went on. I joined a group just because I heard the word “hills” mentioned. As it was in the New Forest, it was all bridleways & byways – but some of them quite old & also muddy to slow quite a few of our group down. I think Dean, our leader, was used to a faster group – but I was pleased to have a crazy singlespeeder to keep up with. The hills weren’t much to speak of, but at least they were there & I could stretch my legs out a bit on them. We were slowed by a couple of punctures, but still managed to find time for a pub stop after the ride.