The Lulworth Triangle: Where Plod Fights the Wicked Plot and Zombie~Dom

CONTENTS

1.  Pirates & Rogues

2.  The Age Of Steam, Jake’s Passage & The Wumps

3.  Toad Of Toad Hall

4.  God & The Apple Tree

5.  The Brickys Go Mad

6.  The Bhg

7.  Plod Fights The Wicked Plot & Zombie-Dom

8.  The Mirror Of Reflections & The Snatched Prophecies

9.  The Plan

10.  Back To Square One

11.  The Life Of Riley & The Great Groaning Bowl

12.  John De Novo Burgo In The Egg & Cauldron Race

13.  A Wood Henge Goes Up On Eggardon

14.  Lulworth Castle & The Monster

15.  The Army & Strange Happenings At The Castle

16.  The Grey Lady, Roman Legion Man & The Oath

17.  The Ogre & The Shadow Ministers

FOREWORD

Have you ever wondered about those inexplicable things and weird noises of the day?

The Magi-Wumps that go: gobble-de-gook? The Monster, that starts with a Chuff and finishes with a Chug-chug-chug? Worse still are those scoundrels, the young twerps that go: Werp, burp and Arhah! And just what is the perplexing: Wooddle oo teep a dop or the dreaded: Eke eke?"

At night, of course, everything becomes wildly exaggerated, for then there are tooidy things that go: Hoo-hooo, Flop-flop, Thump-thump. And you could be afflicted anytime with a dreaded attack of the Nag-nag-nag-Noo’s!

This book may go someway to explaining some of these strange phenomena and sounds that are always around us, then it may not and the rest, unfortunately, is left to your own imagination.

The Lulworth Triangle is a tale, or rather a collection of tales, that catapults the reader through Jim ‘The Sparrow’ Warrens’s surprising, and quite frankly, weird childhood in Post-War Dorset. The narrative bounces around through times and places, as we share the mischief and adventures of ‘The Black Hand Gang,’ an intrepid band of be-wellied village boys. There is magic, tragedy, joy, mystery and thoughtfulness along this extraordinary journey.

Fasten your seatbelts and be prepared, if you can, for an unconventional, thought provoking off-rail rollercoaster of a ride through time, through Dorset, and goodness knows where else.

Here you will find out nonetheless—maybe—who was trying to square the circle in The Lulworth Triangle.

Alex Roberts

BACKWARD

Jim Warren was born under an erratic star on St. Patrick’s Day, March 1952 to unconventional parents. He was not educated at Goathurst, Enmore, Hemyock or Wool primary schools where he attended. At Wool primary he received frequent bashes to the head from the blackboard rubber as he sat at the back of the class; he has never been the same since, and hence this book. He made a valiant and final attempt at obtaining (for the seventh time running), that rather essential, yet elusive qualification; ‘O’ Level English language. He was trying every examination body in the land; normally, he just tried everybody. And despite occasional allegations to the contrary, for him, there was an alarming consistency in their marking. True to character it was achieved at long last, whilst sat under a glazed roof in The Royal Horticultural Hall. Normally he was just looking out of the window, but this time he was completely under the table, during a freak heat wave which cooked his noddle back then in June 1976. The next day however, this turned out to be the last straw for his English tutor, who immediately disowned him and not because of his noddled condition. Now a broken reed, she promptly went down the pub to drown her sorrows. Some thirty five years later, by which time the author had sobered up, there was still to be no sign of his old English tutor, upon which he became frantic. The author pleaded with the heavens demanding: Please send me a sign! Having to admit finally, (whilst at the same time soberly realising), that at long last he was clearly on his own, and wasn’t going to hang around either. Subsequently, ‘The Lulworth Triangle trilogy,’ one of England’s spot-on recollections of post-war pre-adolescent plots was born; collections of some of the truest and daftest stories were drafted, some tall whilst others were short on acumen, but mainly short on acumen. One of Dorset County Council’s sexist road panels then fell on his head, proclaiming the obvious, Danger men at work! It was a warning sign of the times.

So here it is at long last; the first book of absolutely atrocious grammar (oy, watch it!!—ed.), a special trilogy including some words newly created, some old words un-crated, yet others uncreated; nothing less indeed than the long awaited book that nobody’s been waiting for.

Welcome to the world of Wumps: Shadow-Wumps, Chuckle-Wumps, Chatter-Wumps, Mug-Wumps, and Magi-Wumps, who all live on the island of Wumpland; along with those strange: Fumps and Gumps from foreign lands, somewhere on Planet Earth.

DEDICATION

To my father, Alfred Stanley Warren

South West Wumpland

PIRATES & ROGUES

O ur family are descendants of two distinct lines, with the ambiguous honour and unique distinction of having outlaws for in-laws, in the form of pirates and rogues of the 16 th and 17th centuries on my mother’s side, and respected entrepreneurs and inventors on my father’s. They only had one thing in common; both sides were descended from generations of Mug-Wumps. That’s just the way it is in Wumpland. Even in this they were different; one side was reputable in character and the other crazy. It was going to make an interesting mix.

The first imposition on wool duties and subsequent high tariffs on other goods in 1275 created the incentive for smuggling and a twilight zone which would endure for centuries. A baffling problem for Custom Officers, as the law was either brusquely ridden over rough-shod, or traffic in illegal goods continued as though a coach and six had been driven through the statute books. People in privileged positions were often in collusion with the smuggling fraternity.

Consequently, the evasion of law & order flowed through the blood on our maternal side, with the renowned Pill seafaring pirates demonstrating superior seamanship over the Customs Officers. It was as though rough taxing seas and rough living avoiding taxes made for accomplished pirates. Pill’s motley crews of buccaneers were joined by a common desperation and a common purpose, where on such ventures the risks and rewards were highly stacked. The pirates’ unconquerable spirit in the face of adverse conditions and adversaries, along with their uncompromising zeal, forged ruthless sailors in the heat of the moment, making smuggling successful and subsequent voyages possible. These were Pill’s successful underground movements upon the high seas; high seas which formed their hunting ground for bounty where daring spirits and sea interpenetrated. As a result they were rarely caught, and to add injury to insult, when the Officers demanded: Give up your arms, the pirates’ parrots cried defiantly and indecently at the Officers: Piss orff, we’re keeping our arms and our legs! This often incited an Officer to take a wavering parting pot shot at one of the mocking birds, which was only met with a screeched riposte of: You’re pissed, you missed! You’re pissed, you missed!

In pre-historic times, the elephant, woolly mammoth, and wild boar freely roamed this region. Later, as primitive man evolved, wild horses and deer and perhaps humans too were driven over the cliffs at Cheddar Gorge. The tribal settlements of Pill and the Cheddar Caves were established as early as 13,000 B.C. They had the redoubtable reputation for being cannibals, with a certain instinctive savoir-faire in the culinary field, for they certainly knew a thing or two about highly nutritious delicacies. Eyeballs and brains were cooked over an open fire, whilst femurs were cracked open to extract the nutritious bone marrow. Pill Pirates and Sharks from the 1600’s obviously went on to capitalise on this image, with the skull and cross-bones being depicted upon the flags of the ocean going pirates ships.

Wild Boar Hunt by David Risk Kennard

Now, by 400 A.D. the painted warriors in the north of Wumpland had at long last managed to scale Hadrian’s Wall. They had been delayed somewhat, by those shorter Picts who had perceived the wall as being on a 2:1 scale (a 20ft wall having been originally built by the Romans to keep those fearsome and formidable Picts out). The Romans had good reason for considering them to be most formidable adversaries, despite possessing battering rams, massively horned rams, catapults and vulgar blasphemies, all which could be physically or verbally thrown at the enemy. The real threat lay in the fact that the Picts also wore skirts, known as kilts, and rather grudgingly the Romans had to admire the balls of these tribal people who were so hardy that they too defied the raw elements, wearing their kilts au naturel in the true Scottish tradition. This was too much for the redoubtable Romans, which would have certainly resulted in brass monkeys for the invading Roman army intent on conquering; whose conkers would have been conquered instead, and the same for any of those daring native tribes of Wumpland. On one occasion the Romans witnessed the awesome tossing of fir trees to form kindling for their sacred camp fires. This was to be the last and final straw. The Romans just didn’t have the balls to take on the formidable Scots; their fleshy swords would have been painfully stretched beyond all means, with eyes out on stalks, and they were obliged to turn the other cheek and run for their very lives. They would of course be be foregoing the regional delicacies of oatmeal cakes, herrings and the reputable malt whisky.

Pill pirates, on the other hand, prudently wore joey glassenbreeches (awesomely impressive in or out of weather worn trousers), and gave that notorious village North West of Bristol, its illustrious history of smuggling. They departed on quest after quest from the Creek, sailing out through the Bristol Channel armed with an assortment of blunderbusses, carbines, cutlasses, and quarter-staffs along with short handled poleaxes for cutting through the enemy’s rigging and ropes, fortified with rum as they fearlessly hoisted the Jolly Roger defying both the authorities and Davy Jones’ Locker, freely engaged in stealing about in the seven seas in every direction of the compass in the pursuit of bounty. Some ships and their crews disappeared entirely, vanishing for ever into one of the two illusory seas; which one depended upon the predisposition of the master, his crew, and the hand that fate dealt.

Later, ships departed not only pregnant with food supplies including live pigs and chickens along with essential equipment, but often with their women too. On heavily armed boats this gave rise to daughters and sons of guns. Here aboard the pirate’s boat ‘Destiny,’ sailing North in the tropically verdant and humid Indian Ocean, the setting sun would disappear quicker than in temperate zones, just like the schools of anthias fish, darting about in the seas, and then disappearing too, as soon as the reef of Poivre Island to the East fell under the twilight. The association alone made several of the crew sneeze; a phenomenon known locally by the Seychelloise as the ‘Poivrelovian Response’ in honour of the French botanist and Administrator of Ile de France, Pierre Poivre. Here there are few of those trees loved by boat builders, the takamakas of the coast, their large leaves giving a deeper green and a deeper shade. More abundant are the coconut palms, forever bowing towards the ocean along with a few stands of casuarina trees reaching for the sky, which gave a straight and richly coloured durable timber for flooring. The moon that evening was nearly a full one, as it ascended to the West over Desroches, glowing casuarina blood red and enormous, rising over the island’s palms until its rays caught the crests of the waves, making that part of the Indian Ocean special, as though it was only shimmering for the pirates. The principal route that the copper-lined Briggs scudded was not far from here. Briggs that were destined for the port in the Gulf of Bengal and returned loaded with spices, cinnamon, cloves and pepper. A more valuable yet rare cargo left Ille de Palme (Praslin) from time to time: that mythical and rare object of mystery as confirmed by Pierre Poivre after the 1768 Dufresne expedition. This was the highly sought after coco-de-mer, a double nut in the form of a female’s pelvis. Because of its voluptuous feminine curves, it was renowned for its aphrodisiacal qualities. The white semi transparent jelly from this double coconut is pleasant to eat, but if left for a few days will have the odour, colour and consistency of semen.

Pirate ship by David Risk Kennard

Meanwhile, let’s return to our seamen confined for the present on Destiny. For them, at long last that long awaited time had now arrived, the time to satisfy a day’s aching and to bring it to fruition; for new life was often conceived between the cannons, as couples engaged in observing the movements of the heavenly bodies. Doubtless time and body stretched eternal too before this blissful love, as the ship, with its sails full to swelling, rose and plunged with each ocean swell that it traversed. The occasional wave would swell higher before peaking later, pounding and rounding off; in time percussioned by the ocean’s cadenced and measured breathing in and out of the hull, giving a sporadic shudder, as the oceans surge heaving wave upon wave. Whilst other sole crewmembers are fleetingly gripped by the tossing waves, as the bow dives and the magical surges splash bountifully upon the deck, and the Captain cries out from below: Disfigure not my boat! This is just dismissed with an even bigger wave from the ocean; a tropical one which washes across the decks in that hot humid climate, as the frigate Destiny gracefully makes her sinuous voyage between the outlying islands of the Seychelles to her destined berth in Victoria, Mahe.

Whilst a newborn arrived to the sound of rejoicing bow bells and cause for celebration, the ringing of stern or poop deck bells announced the regrettable arrival of stormy weather, and a demand for all hands on deck. Pirates and sailors were in great awe and respect of nature’s power, never to be underestimated. Forewarnings were often foreshadowed when the white foam started to fly and men saw spectres of four-winged flying fish and the skies appearing as flying mackerel. With the wind building up and ringing in the shrouds, even the most spirited of crews soberly realised that their world risked being turned upside down too, so lowered the mainsails in response. They frequently responded just at the critical moment when drunken rollers combined with a driving sea and when the guiding stars were lost. The bow would reel and the stern swing in the trough, with the relentless howling winds taxing the resolve of the dog tired crew. There is another moment, a most disquieting one, when time stands still and quiet for an instant, only to be rudely interrupted as a startling wave crashes onto the foredeck. For when nature lost her patience freedom could be snatched away in an instant by the howling predatory jaws of the dragon green sea, that legendary and prodigious monster with an insatiable appetite, only later to be served up by a serpent arising from the haunted depths. Sometimes it would only swallow the crew, spitting out the boat like an inconvenient fish bone stuck in the throat. The ship would be left to sail the oceans as a phantom vessel until such a time, an inevitable time, as the sea or man laid claim to the wreck. Just some 65 miles away from Pill, as the sober crow flies south, lies the Purbeck’s, giving bounteous evidence to such salvage being re-utilised for trusses in houses and pillars for stone handling gibbets. A sailor’s loss and hapless landfall was the shoreman’s auspicious windfall and islander’s birthright, with a winch often operated from a salvaged ships wheel, a sobering reminder to cliff top stone handlers who wished to leave their post and slake their thirst with drink.

As these swashbucklers stole across the seas, they had departed leaving the publican’s role of holding the fort to our great-great-great aunt, the ever ingenious landlady of Mulberry Castle. You can bet your life that our aunty knew the tricks of the trade, and a few more besides, which will be revealed later in the chapter. For starters, she sold contraband from her premises directly behind the Customs House at Pill; the moral here being that if you are going to commit a crime, do it right under the noses of the law enforcement agencies as they are often too busy looking elsewhere—recurrently all at sea following up false pistes.

Over time, the family prospered and became more respectable with the likes of our great-great grandfather George Hodges, known as ‘Bunker Balls’. That son of a gun took up a more honourable activity on the high seas and became a merchant sailor as the illicit trade was taking its last active breath at Pill Creek, to be surrendered to yet another day and another place. Bunker Balls looked seawards with a different spirit; loading spices from the East and most likely Conch shells and coconuts from the Seychelles and this is also where the world’s best copra is obtained. Then he would race across the ocean, hoping to be the first sailing ship back to Bristol. Market shortages consequently meant better prices, and of course the prerequisite for this meant his ship had to be the first to dock at Bristol.

The fisherman heralds the catch of the morning

at Bel Ombre, Mahé, Seychelles

After a good number of centuries, the days of our scandalous family mavericks were finally behind us, and what emerged was a family that became far more ‘respectable’. But as they say there is always one black sheep in the family; in our case it was great-great aunt ‘The Dear Lord Minnie!’ a spinster who knitted her own skirts. Whether it was the lack of a man in her life, respectable religion being too stifling for her or some other risk-taking knitting activity, she had this rather bizarre habit when flustered of picking her skirt up by the hems and inviting divine intervention by exhorting: The dear Lord! and exposing her fetching Avon brown bloomers to the world. One plausible explanation for this most strange and rash gesture, may have been a genuine need for essential cooling. For who knows? These bloomers may well have been knitted. As you can imagine, warm coarse woollen underwear would lead to an incredible itchiness and a dreadful prickly heat, climaxing in inflaming the vital areas, which in the long run would end up breaking out into dreadful sores and an appalling red hot rash.

Pill

Pill in Anglo-Saxon means a Creek, and, was for many generations, an extremely isolated island type valley community, considered by some outsiders to be inhabited only by savages and cannibals, but in fact it was principally a refuge for outlaws. It was quite cunningly protected by the entrance signs to Pill which happened to be formed from various bones of their victims including the skulls. Other skulls and bones often encircled a nearby tree, a domain reputed for its one-way dinner tickets, and a place from which no nosy, foolishly brave, or utterly foolish Chatter-Wump ever returned, and all evidence of their previous existence was gobbled up. According to our grandfather, Pill was a veritable den of smugglers, occupying tiny cottages off steep winding narrow cobbled streets which echoed to the distinctive sounds of cart wheels and wooden clogs. This was an overpopulated community giving off an incredibly odious whiff and an all pervading pong. Even when there was a plot afoot in the village, the odour was so bad that Officers wouldn’t smell a rat, even if the hook was being baited right under their noses. Often having only misinformation to act upon, official orders were issued to find things that did not exist in the first place and were often sent on a wild goose chase at the authorities’ expense, leaving the smugglers to go about their business as best pleased them. Later, when trusting Preachers visited Pill, it would be described as a den of immorality consisting of the most neglected and spiritually destitute people known to man, infected with infidelity, ignorant of the good book and prone to revolutionary principles, and well beyond the pale of Gospel truth.

The stench of the dead was even worse of course; coffins were often delivered through the bedroom window and left the same way with the corpse, whilst the immortal spirit, it was hoped, had spiralled up and away. The inevitable ensuing delay gave time for the corpse to bloat up; necessitating a number of people sitting on the coffin lid to enable the undertaker to screw the lid down and this would cause even fouler air to leak out. So, as you can imagine there was no way that swollen and rigid mortal body was going down those narrow spiral stairs of timbern hill; this was a local unique window to window service that never saw the light of day nationally and was surpassed unsurprisingly by express door to door service.

Another potted history that nobody wanted to look into was the mind-blowing foul stench, especially repugnant at Pill’s high tide on the strength of the sewage that drained directly into the River Avon. With Bristol up river only adding to the problem by discharging ever increasing volumes, this watercourse was the dumping ground, so to speak, for most of Bristol’s sewage until as late as 1964.

Insinuating those incessant inner bowel movements of man, that relentless outpouring of effluence upon the outer bowels of Earth’s vital ebb and flow, and subsequently as the city’s population grew with all the new births, the river died. During the very high tides, boys living in the flood prone areas like Pill’s Pump Square were kept away from school and given the task of collecting the clay-mud from the river slipway. This they plastered over the lower sliding shutters as a barrier against the execrable rising open sewer. However, these tenacious waters would still penetrate the floorboards and rise into the toilet, eventually putting the fire out in the range; a floodwater that would be studied by the errant boys, as they retreated up the stairs. The houses concerned were always stinking, cold, and damp. To disguise this dreadful stench once the waters had receded, the housewife would often wander around with a burning rag. Officially the Pill Rag Season was in November but with the spring’s high tides it became a daily event for these equally tenacious housekeepers. Often the boys, with the cooperation of a friendly boatman, used the tides to their advantage, going out as far as the river’s mouth, to engage in scraping up coal from the sand. With the rising tide, the boat would expediently float off the sand bank and back to Pill.

Finally and fortunately, since the mid sixties the outpouring of effluence has been banished to the bowels of the earth before it arrives at the Avon’s mouth and the treatment works. Today, a four turbine wind farm is under development on this brownfield site (I mean, did you really expect any other colour?) This is an ambitious project by Wessex Water, funded by no less than that brilliant bank with a social conscience, Triodos. As soon as the turbines are operational, they will turn and transform this into a greenfield site. However, in times past, even before renewables were even heard of, the sewage created other problems apart from the health issue, because sometimes, on a dark foggy night one might hear whilst downing a welcome pint in good company, an unwelcome, lone, distressed, and strained voice crying out: Help, I’m up shit’s Creek with only a turd for a paddle!

At Pill it was said that if you stuck a flag on a stick into a turd you would see it floating up and down on several tides before it disappeared. A number of these floaters would make it a local competition of endurance; a contest that was never to make it into the Olympics. This could have been a forerunner of pooh sticks, a cleaned up race of speed which as kids we later played much to our delight in the enchanting open stone culvert of Honiton’s High Street.

Pill was a village strategically situated in northern Somerset. It was referred to by local boat pilots as Pill-on-the-mud, for many boats, some secured only by anchor to an oozy bottom and a tired rope to shore, settled into the mud at low tide at Pill Creek. The ever challenging River Severn and River Avon required the most superlative boats and pilots, all of which proudly originated from Pill. These rivers are renowned for having the second highest tidal rise and fall in the world, and the Bristol Channel is one of the most difficult seaways on this earth, with its strong currents, extreme tidal ranges, along with shifting sand banks and the Earth at this latitude spinning at around 500 m.p.h. making navigation an incredible challenge.

When the Pilot had achieved the no mean feat of boarding a ship, a Hobbler or Waterman would, meanwhile, often be occupied with slipping under the bowsprit and detaching any salted meat that might be hanging there; this way, the boat often got in with no duties being paid on goods and local families got fed.

In its heyday this village had dry docks, Wither’s Saw Mills, and Cooper’s Boat Yard all by the railway viaduct, with ‘Cracker’ Rowles’ boat building yards by the old Customs House. This is where the sounds of ropes slapping against masts, numerous hammers hammering away against copper nails and roves, oak planks, and caulking rang out. Occasionally, smacked thumbs caused the air to go blue with flying expletives. Here the pungent pong of pitch, oakum, oak, larch and tobacco was far more agreeable than the stench in the rest of Pill.

It was in such an environment that Googom, our grandfather worked. Not as ‘Popeye the sailor man’, but as ‘Popeye the hewer man’ at ‘Crackers’ alongside the ‘Oakum Boys’ who would caulk the vessels with hemp that had been treated with tar for filling the seams in the boats’ planking. Googom was not only engaged in constructing pilot skiffs, but at other times involved in fitting out splendid sturdy yachts. The Nancy, constructed in 1900 by Edwin ‘Cracker’ Rowles, was one such beauty. She was a yacht built to specification and had the luxury of being fitted out with a lead lined sink and commode in the open cockpit. The Nancy was launched on a spring tide, shipshape and Bristol fashion. Incidentally, the last Pilot boat to be built before the yard closed was the Leti, costing all of £350. These were large boats overseen by Cracker Rowles who was born in 1841 at Clifton. Later, he and his wife Isabella lived in the Customs House. He was a short man with an even shorter temper, which would sometimes result in reciprocated intensity with his wife, a passion they’d share with the community when they touched a cord in each other. Once fuelled and ignited, their tempers exploded into a fight inside the house, with domestic utensils inevitably flying in all directions and they would soon be out the door to continue their brawl on down the street.

Cutter rigged skiffs were consistently better at weathering the storms which were thrown at them, and were often named after the pilots’ wives or new born daughters, giving to such names as Unexpected and Hope; for there was nothing more certain in labour and piloting in those days than the uncertainty of it.

Pill also had an unusual amount of pubs for its number of residents; it was said that every other house was a tavern. This was, perhaps, an exaggeration, as there were 22 public houses. Smoky and beery tales of colourful and sometimes exaggerated reminiscences of smugglers’ escapades of distant glories, contraband and tunnels, were often told around the fire of fairy isles; legends that lingered and swirled like mist around the creepy Creek. Now there are only 5 pubs, but in the past it was reputed to be one of various reasons why the Officers of Customs House were reputably unfit to carry out any of their duties, in a village where the pirates’ audacious plans were concocted and something was always brewing.

Having to be a largely self-sufficient village, it boasted its own breweries: Alley’s and Lodway’s both equipped with drays for deliveries. Henry Wyatt, the milkman, also owned an attractive white horse for his rounds, whilst William Adams the coal merchant sensibly selected a black one. Except this black horse took to giving Mr. Adams an askance look every morning, as if to say: Have you lost all your marbles or what? Or are you taking the piss out of your poor old horse? For at 7 in the morning, every morning, this horse was led out of its field at Ham Green to begin an incredibly strenuous hard day’s work and William, with his unbridled religion and wishful imagination, was prone to sing at that ungodly hour Baring Gould’s song:

Now the day is over,

Night is drawing nigh,

Shadows of the evening

Steal across the sky.

The bakery was as ingenious as its owner Edward Crouter. Due to the calling of his trade, he had to get up before he’d gone to bed, in the pitch black, just like his ally and competitor Maurice Gerrish, alias Crusty. To one side of Back Lane stood the flour store, whilst on the other the bakery, the two being usefully linked by a covered 2nd storey bridge. The ferocious heat given off by the oven was so tremendous that over time it warped the heavy ferrous oven door leaving enormous gaps. So once the oven was loaded with a batch of bread the gaps were then sealed by packing with bread putty. After which Mr. Crouter sent some local lads who had been loafing around, packing up the hill to ‘Lodways’ with a bucket to collect brine for glazing the crusty loaves. On their return, each boy was given a length of newly baked packing for his trouble. Hence the current term: ‘to be sent packing!’ And a real mean employer would add: And you’re not getting your dough either, on yer bike!

Pill Creek 1949

Since Roman times, the infamous ferry crossing has been the gateway from Somerset to Gloucester. It helped traders and travellers avoid both a long trek and the hazard of being potentially side-tracked by some of those 850 salubrious watering holes in Bristol. The marvellous cobbled stone slipway was laid by skilful monks in the 13thcentury, some of whom fell into the water and came up with dirty foul habits; it was originally built for the Lords of Berkeley, their knights and diverse entourage who often spent Christmas at Portbury Manor, consuming overwhelming quantities of ox, wild boar, geese and other wildfowl that had been shot on the boggy marshes of the Avon. Accordingly and not surprisingly they suffered from crapulence something terrible.

In my grandfather’s time, and even up until 1974, access could be afforded by the river boat Margaret, the notorious Pill Ferry. Earlier in the century an old lady was employed