Europe 2013: Into Wales

August 20, 2013

When I left the campground near Preston, the weather was cloudy, but didn't seem like it was going to rain. I stopped in and talk to Mike and Caroline, the RV campers next to me, who'd provided good conversation, and had loaned me a USB cable to check on my GPS's ailments. I also walked along the buildings of the closed and now-condemned Whittingham mental hospital and took a bunch of pictures. I'm going to have quite a collection of photos of old buildings and ruins by the time I'm done.

Then I was off, for one of the more boring, and thus productive, rides to date. On this ride, I discovered that I really only have patience for about half an hour of motorway before I feel the need to drop off and use an A road. I discovered that the GPS blows through batteries far faster when it's trying to route me to somewhere than when it's just showing a map or trip computer information (so I left it on trip computer to try to keep the battery life going longer). I discovered, or perhaps re-discovered, that just because a road starts out going in the right direction, there's no guarantee it will continue in that direction.

One of the things about navigating in the British Isles (and, I suspect, the rest of Europe) is that you really need to know the names of the towns or cities that lie along your intended path. There's only rarely any indication of north or south or east or west on the roadway signs. There's just the name of a town. So despite knowing that I wanted to generally go southward, I had to know that I wanted to go in the direction of Birmingham or Market Drayton or Shrewsbury or Monmouth. Since I haven't memorized the layout of the Welsh border towns, this meant that I occasionally got it wrong, and ended up doing an unnecessary 20 mile round-trip along a separated roadway, and had to stop more frequently than I would have liked to check the map and make sure I was headed in the right direction. The cleverer among you (ie, all of you) will no doubt be thinking, "Isn't there some way to use a map on a motorcycle without having to stop?" The answer is, yes, of course, but I wasn't thinking about it. So I had a few missed turns.

Along the way, I was riding into Hereford, when I spotted a retail center, including a Maplin store (the UK equivalent of Radio Shack). I pulled in, and spent 15 minutes going over my options to replace the non-functional USB power supply. Fortunately, the power thing I initially bought came in several pieces, and the handlebar mount had a standard-sized hole in it, which also fit a normal cigarette lighter socket. So I was able to re-use the mount and wiring, and got myself a perfectly standard cigarette lighter socket. Then, I was able to find a comparatively small two-outlet, 2.5A USB power adapter (which I can now easily pull from the socket and store away when it's raining). This was a big load off my mind.

Anyway, I did make it to Newport, where my friend Amy lives, and once I was in the city, I finally plugged her address into the GPS and had it route me the last few miles (good thing too, I never would have found her street otherwise).

Amy's house, where she lives with her Welsh husband, is one of the connected row houses that I've been wondering about as I passed them by in every town I rode through in Ireland, Scotland, and now England and Wales. So it was quite interesting to be able to walk through and see it all. It also turns out that historical buildings are a fascination Amy shares, so she's been able to fill me in on a lot of details, which has been quite cool.

Today, finally having a built in tour guide in the form of Amy and her husband Anthony (usually abbreviated Ant), I got to see some sights that I hadn't previously known about. The first of these was the Big Pit. This is a coal mine that's been converted into a very realistic -- because it's real -- museum on coal mining. We were all given a set of equipment which consisted of a hardhat, a headlamp, a battery pack, and a metal cannister (which turned out to hold a thing like a gas mask) on a leather belt. Then we were stripped of anything containing a battery or capable of making a spark, and packed into a large metal cage which descended 90 meters below the surface. Each of us was looking around to the sight of multiple swinging beams of light from the various headlamps. With the 15 of us (more or less, I didn't count), there was never a feeling of being in the dark.

Since we weren't allowed to bring anything with a battery, I couldn't bring my camera, so I don't have any photos from the mine. I wish I did, because some of it was really cool (granted, most of it was also extremely dark). The hardhat was definitely necessary for some people, and I heard and saw a number of head strikes against the occasionally very low roof. I brushed my helmet against the ceiling twice, but like I told Amy, I am usually pretty aware of my head and not running it into things.

Our guide was a bit of wit, and his presentation was deadpan and fun and easy to listen to. We learned about the various jobs in the mine, including who would do them: children from age 5 -- this is back in Victorian times, although the practice continued until the 1860s -- would sit at a door in utter blackness (not being worth a candle), and listen for the sound of an approaching horse, then open the door for the horse (which was pulling a train of coal carts). Older children would help load drams (individual train cars, each about 5 feet long and three wide and maybe three tall, capable of holding a ton of coal), and women would push them. Men would go down to the end of the shaft and extract coal, trying to keep the pieces as large as possible (more pay for larger pieces). They were, of course, paid in tokens for some of this time period, which only worked at the company stores, forming a typical indentured-servant, company-town economy.

One of the interesting things to me was the vast range of times and technologies the museum and guide had to describe. There were horse-drawn trains (I've already forgotten the name of the train), and conveyor belts and water-counterbalance lifters, not necessarily in that order. There were hand picks and giant nightmare chainsaws (seriously, like a chainsaw 5 feet long and a foot wide, mounted on a powered cart). There were rotary boring machines, all the way up through the giant tunnel borers like Big Bertha, which is currently tunneling very slowly under Seattle's waterfront. There were everything from wool-cap-mounted oil lamps through to the LED safety lamps some of us wore on the tour.

I was put strongly in mind of Terry Pratchett's descriptions of the dwarves mining in the Discworld series. Obviously he basically took technology and terminology wholesale from coal mining and applied it to his fantasy world. I was particularly interested, for whatever reason, in the various terrifying gasses which can build up and cause problems in mines: firedamp (methane), blackdamp (carbon dioxide and nitrogen), stinkdamp (hydrogen sulfide), etc. Blackdamp doesn't sound so terrifying until you remember that it'd be heavier than air, and what are you doing in a mine except making deeper and deeper holes. The blackdamp rolls downhill and collects, and doesn't smell like anything. You just suddenly fall over because the air you're breathing in contains no oxygen.

The technology on display was also pretty fascinating to a systems-understander like myself. I loved seeing the various lifting systems, and found myself holding forth to Amy and Ant about how they probably functioned (explaining all the while that I had no idea what I was actually talking about, and it was all well-educated conjecture). There were signs explaining most things, but they didn't ever explain how a thing actually worked beyond the simplest mechanical principles ("Pour water into this bucket to make this side go down, thus lifting the other side up!").

As our guide had predicted (he razzed me a few times for my technical questions, and my easy intuition of why there were man-sized holes in the wall next to the train track -- obviously so a guy caught by the train could get the heck out of the way), I ended up spending an hour in the information exhibit which had been packed into the bath house ("The bath houses were commonly understood to make life better for the wives of the miners than the miners themselves").

It was a really interesting place. I wouldn't ever want to be a miner, but the processes and technology they used were practically custom-made to hold my attention.

One of the things Amy had poined out, and which was again pointed out at the museum, was that huge swaths of Welsh landscape are, in fact, spill from the mines. You could clearly see from the summit of Big Pit where there were massive piles of dirt, for miles and miles, that formed the hills and valleys as effectively as any glacier. In a way hugely impressive (particularly considering the volume of spill which was generated using solely animal labor), yet also quite depressing. I wondered what Wales must have looked like before coal mining literally reshaped it.

Our next stop was a meeting Amy needed to attend, about getting a grant to help with improving the environment around the Navigation Colliery (in case you, like me, have never heard the word, a colliery is the place where they mine coal). This was literally them sitting in a room discussing for an hour, and I ended up taking a tour of our host's garden which was nothing short of magical, plus spending some of that time listening attentively to the grant discussion. My theater training (both incidental acting lessons, and lots of discussion of funding sources) left me well prepared. Apparently Dr. Who, which is filmed mostly in Cardiff (next town over in Wales, also the capitol of Wales), has filmed scenes at the Navigation Colliery, as well as at St. Fagans, another living-history museum we're going to visit tomorrow.

Our next stop was the Skirrid Inn for dinner. This is an inn which (according to signs hanging inside) has existed in that spot since about 1100 AD. No biggie, just 900 years. I had mentioned seeing a sign on my ride down which advertised a working inn from the 1600s, and was all impressed. Little did I know that Amy would beat that by 500 years. The Skirrid (named for a nearby mountain with an odd cleft, which legend has it was either split off by the keel as Noah's Ark sailed by, or by lightning from the heavens when Jesus was crucified) has an interesting history, with the most prominent bit of it being that it used to be the place where the judge would come around, and pass judgement on criminals, and when they were found guilty, he'd hang them right there in the inn. This was, obviously, centuries ago. Dinner was quite good, and I stuck with (comparatively) traditional dishes, in honor of the ancient nature of our host building. I had a nut roast with vegetarian gravy, and a toffee pudding with custard for desert. What can I say, if there's an option, I'm going to stick with the veggie thing.

Our final stop was the Ffanthony Priory, a ruined building that was first built in the 1100s. More tremendous pictures and pointing out the various amazing features. We discussed why they don't build 'em like this any more, and I mentioned how, you know, the architect might or might not expect to see the building he designed completed in his lifetime. They were generations-long projects to complete. Very few buildings are worth that kind of investment these days.

On the ride back from the priory, I related the story of my leg getting stuck in the hole near Glenuig, and framed it in the Half Brothers song about being a werewolf, in which the singer was traipsing about in Scotland and woke up the next morning covered in blood with his clothes missing. Tonight is, completely coincidentally, the full moon. Total coincidence. I'm sure. Many jokes were had about werewolves. I'll let you know if I wake up covered in blood or anything.

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Created by Ian Johnston. Questions? Please mail me at reaper at obairlann dot net.