Visiting Brizzle
And Nempnett Thrubwell
When visiting Bristol I didn’t actually stay in the city itself as trying to cross the city takes me roughly fourteen hours and seven minutes via all points in Avon and Somerset.
On one occasion I even ventured a little further west and stayed in Clevedon. Before I booked the hotel, I Googled whether Clevedon was worth visiting and the first website that came up told me that Clevedon pier was, and I quote: “the only Grade I listed pier you can visit in England, so it is well worth a visit. Clevedon Pier the perfect place to take a relaxing stroll, breathe in the fresh sea air, admire the Victorian style architecture and take in the stunning sea views.”
So, that sounds like a good start. I arrived at my hotel at around five-thirty - the hotel whose website had given me the information about visiting - and I strolled the half a mile to the pier along Wellington Terrace, which is a mix of three-storey buildings that were once grand and newer three-storey additions which never will be.
Clevedon Pier
Clevedon Pier opened on Easter Monday 1869, its eight wrought-iron spans are forty-eight feet high and together they stretch 842 feet out into the Bristol Channel. Reading the history of the pier, it seemed to be mainly a tale of how enormously expensive it was to keep it standing. In the previous twenty years I counted at least four million pounds having been spent on the pier, including an amazingly specific £797,601 in 2012 for renovation and repainting.
Its history seemed to include very long periods where it was closed while people decided what to do with it, raised money to keep it standing, applied to have it demolished, or thought up amazingly specific quotes to repaint it. Bearing in mind the fact that my internet search on whether Clevedon was worth visiting threw up only the answer that the pier was nice, I was not too pleased to find out that it was closed. Apparently, this time it was closed while they built a new two and a quarter million-pound visitor centre.
One Direction
I’m sure, now that it is open, it is very nice but, on my visit, I wasn’t able to find out for myself. All that I could see was a small brass plaque which told me that One Direction had filmed a video for their song You & I on 23rd March 2014. Marvellous news though this was, it was not, by itself, worth the drive from East Anglia. In October 2016, the Clevedon Pier and Heritage Trust made an appeal for more volunteers to come forward to support the pier. Given the number of times that the pier has been threatened with collapse, I can’t help thinking that they could have used a better turn of phrase.
It turned out, though, as the sun sank on a warm June day, that Clevedon is worth visiting just because it’s Clevedon, with or without the multi-million-pound pier with its Grade One listing and plaque commemorating One Direction. Watching the ships and boats and tiny yellow canoes going back and forth through the Bristol Channel and the youngsters leaping loudly from the rocks into Ladye Bay is a marvellous way to while away an hour.
Everybody should spend at least one evening of their life in Clevedon. If possible, they should do it in June when the sun doesn’t set over the Bristol Channel until nine-thirty at night, painting everything, sky and water, deep, burnished bronze and copper and gold. It eventually disappears as a deep, dark blood orange disc behind the low, wooded hills to the north of Newport over in Wales.
The next morning, I awoke at four-thirty because I had left the tiniest gap in the curtains and the light had penetrated that small chink and found its way into the room. A laser like beam of light made its way across the bedroom and up the bed, in my half-asleep state I almost heard Blofeld saying: “No, Mr Bond, I expect you to die.” I stumbled to the window and, while wrestling with the curtains, opened them rather than closing them. I recoiled like Christopher Lee in a Hammer horror movie and banged my toe on the end of the bed before hopping a bit and swearing at the curtains as I closed them. The room returned to darkness and I, who had so recently been staring straight into the midsummer dawn, could now see nothing. I tripped over a stool and fell flat on my face. This is not the way to start a day or conclude a trip to Clevedon.
When in the area, I stayed most often in a hotel in a converted eighteenth-century manor house just three miles west of here. The original house still exists somewhere in there but so much has been built onto it that you only get to glimpse the odd turret or gable. It bills itself as a boutique hotel but I didn’t see any frocks for sale. The view out over the village of Yatton is quite beautiful, though.
A Hill Made of Chocolate
The hotel is set in some gorgeous countryside, though, and a walk up to Cadbury hill fort on a warm summer’s evening after dinner is not the worst way to finish a day’s work. The hillfort was probably built by members of the Dobunni tribe who lived in what is now Gloucestershire and the surrounding counties before the arrival of the Romans in 43 AD. Their coins still exist and show depictions of horses, cartwheels and something which is either a fern or a five-place rowing scull seen from above. From the other side of the coins, their kings seemed most to resemble Daggett and Norbert, The Angry Beavers. Bury, of course, relates to a fortified place, probably built by someone called Cada and so, sadly, has no chocolate connotations at all.
Unlike most hillforts, this one seems to have been occupied again after the Romans marched off home. The area is now a scheduled ancient monument and nature reserve. Through the trees you catch glimpses of the villages of Yatton, Cleeve and Congresbury. I walked down into Yatton, an old, stone-built village with a rather odd church. St Mary’s church is massive compared to the size of the village and on top of a fairly ordinary church tower is a sort of hexagonal hat.
It appears that it had a stone steeple added in the middle of the fifteenth century which, by 1595, the villagers had grown bored of. They employed some builders to take it down and, as is the way with builders, halfway through dismantling it they were called away to an urgent job. That left this odd, stone stump, a half-steeple sticking out of the top. The builders have apparently called though to say they’ll be back next Tuesday, Thursday at the latest.
One of my favourite things to do in a new place, to get an idea of what it’s like, is to look in the local estate agent’s window. The type and price of houses giving you all sorts of clues. The prices in Hunters Estate Agents in Yatton suggested that the surrounding area was highly sought after. My favourite thing, though was finding a house for sale in such a wonderfully named village nearby. This, you should bear in mind, is an area with placenames like Chew Magna, Temple Cloud and Goblin Combe, so finding a name which stands out is not an easy task.
The village a dozen or so miles southeast of here which had a house for sale is one of my all-time favourites, though. It is called Nempnett Thrubwell, surely an evil money lender from an abandoned book by Dickens rather than a place to buy a cottage. I’m going to write it again, please try to read it out loud: Nempnett Thrubwell. Savour it like a fine wine on the palate, chew over each syllable as though it were a mouthful of particularly fruity Dundee cake.