Another Trip to Mum's House

The Fovant Badges

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Attraction | "Lest we Forget"

A little bit of history Photo - The Fovant Badges, Fovant, Wiltshire

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There are many places that get referred to as ‘landmarks’ but relatively few are literally worthy of the name and the Fovant Badges qualify in every sense of the word. Why do I say that? Because they are marks carved onto the land, in this case the chalk hills of Fovant in Wiltshire. Despite growing up in the area and being familiar with a lot of chalk hillside carvings, I don’t recall ever seeing the Fovant Badges until earlier this year on the way back to Salisbury after my parents surprised me with a flying lesson at Compton Abbas airfield. Fovant is a small village on the road between Wilton and Shaftesbury about 12 miles west of Salisbury in the south of Wiltshire. The badges can best be vi...Read More

There are many places that get referred to as ‘landmarks’ but relatively few are literally worthy of the name and the Fovant Badges qualify in every sense of the word. Why do I say that? Because they are marks carved onto the land, in this case the chalk hills of Fovant in Wiltshire. Despite growing up in the area and being familiar with a lot of chalk hillside carvings, I don’t recall ever seeing the Fovant Badges until earlier this year on the way back to Salisbury after my parents surprised me with a flying lesson at Compton Abbas airfield.
Fovant is a small village on the road between Wilton and Shaftesbury about 12 miles west of Salisbury in the south of Wiltshire. The badges can best be viewed from a layby on the A30 where the road runs roughly parallel to the chalk ridge where the badges can be seen.

Up to this point you can be forgiven for wondering what I’m going on about as the term ‘badge’ probably doesn’t seem like something you’d find on a hillside. The Fovant Badges are military insignia carved into the hillside just outside Fovant which date back to the First World War. Salisbury Plain has long been associated with military matters so it should be no surprise that many of the servicemen preparing to be sent overseas, or returning from the battlefields found themselves in camps in the area. Fovant and the nearby villages of Sutton Mandeville and Compton Chamberlayne were adapted to provide accommodation and training facilities as well as hospitals and other facilities.

Carving of the badges commenced in 1916 and by the end of the war as many as 20 different regimental insignia had been carved into the hillside. Over the years some have been lost as grass grew back over them, some were less well constructed than others and by the end of the last century, only 12 of the badges could still be seen on the chalk downs. A voluntary society of ex-servicemen formed the Fovant Badges Society in 1961 working to keep the remaining badges in good order as a monument to the men who cut them so long ago. Today just eight can be seen from the viewing point and faced with the cost of upkeep, the Society has had to let some of the badges in poorer condition to go back to nature. It’s hard not to be moved by the idea of the young men, full of fear and excitement on the eve of battle who worked to leave their mark and commemorate their regiments, many of which have long been disbanded.

My mother was amazed that I hadn’t seen the badges before and I do sometimes suspect I went through my teen years with my eyes closed. Taking my camera I shot photographs across a glowing field of rapeseed which contrasted with the lush green of the hillside and the crisp white of the badges. I was there for perhaps less than five minutes but found myself very moved by the insignia and what they stood for so much so that when I got home I wanted to know more.

The badges you can see are for the Royal Wiltshire Yeomanry, the 6th Battalion The City of London Regiment, the Australian Imperial Forces, the Wiltshire Regiment, the London Rifle Brigade, the Post Office Rifles and finally the Devonshire Regiment. I’m not au fait with modern military regiments and brigades but I don’t recognise too many of those names. The largest of the badges is the Australian one (no surprise there!) which the Fovant Badges Society website describes as just under half the size of a football pitch.

The unrestored badges are for the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, the 7th Battalion City of London Regiment, an outline map of Australia, a YMCA Emblem. We can only hope that funds may one day be found to recover those badges too – perhaps an appeal in a few years for their centennial might be appropriate.

If you are interested in First World War history, the local church is also home to a large number of war graves, many of them for the injured brought back to Fovant who didn’t make it home due to their wounds. Today the Wiltshire town probably most associated with the military would be Royal Wootten Bassett in the North of the county. Fovant and Royal Wootten Bassett together bracket nearly a century of marking the deaths of young men and women who never made it home to their families and friends and mark the strength of the county’s association with the British (and other commonwealth) military.

You won’t need to stop for long to see the badges, but I’d be very surprised if they don’t stay on your mind a lot longer after you’ve driven away.
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Member Rating 4 out of 5 on August 27, 2012

The Fovant Badges
Chalk Hill, Fovant Down
Fovant, Wiltshire

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Gold Hill

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Attraction | "On Hovis Hill"

Gold Hill Photo - Gold Hill, Shaftesbury, Dorset

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In my best impression of Radio 4's cryptic show 'Round Britain Quiz' I challenge you to find the connection between the director of 'Blade Runner', Czech composer Antonín Dvořák, a Thomas Hardy Novel, and the nation's favourite branded wholemeal loaf.It's not difficult to know - especially since you'll have seen the name in the listing – that the answer must be Gold Hill. The connection is Shaftesbury's most famous attraction – quite possibly its ONLY attraction - the location of the iconic 1973 'Boy on Bike' advert which made Gold Hill more famous as 'Hovis Hill'. In the advert a small boy delivering bread on his bicycle struggles up the hill to the bakery before turning around and riding...Read More

In my best impression of Radio 4's cryptic show 'Round Britain Quiz' I challenge you to find the connection between the director of 'Blade Runner', Czech composer Antonín Dvořák, a Thomas Hardy Novel, and the nation's favourite branded wholemeal loaf.

It's not difficult to know - especially since you'll have seen the name in the listing – that the answer must be Gold Hill. The connection is Shaftesbury's most famous attraction – quite possibly its ONLY attraction - the location of the iconic 1973 'Boy on Bike' advert which made Gold Hill more famous as 'Hovis Hill'. In the advert a small boy delivering bread on his bicycle struggles up the hill to the bakery before turning around and riding down the hill again at great speed. He must have nearly killed himself in the process. If Wikipedia is to be believed, it's the nation's favourite advert. The director was Ridley Scott and the haunting music was Dvořák's Symphony No. 9. Gold Hill's more than a one hit wonder, though, having featured in the 1967 film of Thomas Hardy's 'Far from the Madding Crowd' and – if the Shaftesbury website is to be believed – was also the location of an advert for an album by the Salvation Army Band. Is there no end to the excitement? Well by local standards, this is a pretty fine pedigree. It's a shame that thanks to the accents in the advert, most people assume that the hill is in Lancashire.

Back in April my parents treated me to a flying lesson at Compton Abbas airfield and on the way back to Salisbury, we decided to take the scenic route and drop into the small Dorset town of Shaftesbury. I've been a few times before but I'm rather fond of Gold Hill and was happy to go back for another look. I'm ashamed to say I'd seen it several times but I don't recall ever going down and up the actual hill. I say 'down and up' rather than 'up and down' because the town sits at the top of the hill and once you've gone down, there's not much alternative to turning round and going up again.

We parked up in the car park, taking advantage of my mother's disabled parking badge. My advice, if you have to pay, is don't buy a ticket for too long. You really won't need long to see all that Shaftesbury has to offer. Not surprisingly, given that I've just revealed my mother's disabled status, we left the old folks to look at an antiques and collectors' fair in the hall at the top of the hill whilst we went for a wander. For others who don't want to tackle the slope, there's a handy pub at the top of the hill as well as a couple of arty shops selling things you don't really need.

You don't have to walk Gold Hill to enjoy the place and if you're feeling lazy or aren't too stable on your feet, you might want to think twice about it. From the top of the hill you can enjoy views out across the countryside and take in the quaint houses on the steep slope but if you can, you really should walk down the hill and back up again. It won't take long as the hill's not as long as the old advert would have you believe but it is very steep. Even if you're determined to take as long as possible, to look at all the shops, take lots of photos and sit down for a while on a conveniently placed bench, you'll probably struggle to make a visit to Gold Hill stretch to more than about 15 to 20 minutes.

Family folklore says that my step-father's brother-in-law, Uncle Stewart, once re-laid all the cobbles on Gold Hill. He was a builder with a gang of men so he wouldn’t have personally laid every cobble, but I have no reason to think it's a lie. It must have been a heck of a job. I assume you cobble it from the bottom to the top because if you tried to do it in the other way round, you'd risk the cobbles rolling down the hill with the force of gravity. As a builder, he'd have had to watch his lunch box and Thermos flask didn't roll away as well.
I took a lot of photos. The gentle curve of the hill is very photogenic and the houses, their rooftops all higgledy-piggledy, are pretty and it’s hard not to think it would be an interesting place to live. Mind you if you had to park your car at the top or bottom of the hill and carry all your shopping up or down, I think the novelty would wear thin quite quickly. A rather unlovely metal rail marks the edge of the roadway and could be handy when the hill is icy or if you just need a bit of help to pull yourself up. Benches are provided to regain your breath or just sit and enjoy the view.

I won’t lie or exaggerate and suggest that Gold Hill is a ‘must see’ attraction. It’s pretty, it’s quite fun to wander down and up, and it’s a nice place to take a few photographs, but unless you have a passion for 1970s advertising or an obsession with bread, it’s not a place I’d suggest to drive out of your way to go and see. Shaftesbury is not a big town but it’s pleasant and has a lot of small independent shops, a thriving range of charity shops, a half-decent auctioneers and a variety of places to eat or drink.

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Member Rating 3 out of 5 on August 21, 2012

Gold Hill
Access from High Street
Shaftesbury, Dorst SP7 8JW

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The Greyfisher

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Restaurant | "Cheap and Noisy"

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Some of the landmarks of our lives are marked by particular pubs and my 18th birthday is eternally linked in my mind to the Greyfisher on New Bridge Street in Salisbury. I don't remember too much about the evening – not a case of too much drink though because I was driving. I remember instead that I left the car lights on in my mother's car and when I came out at the end of the evening I had to be push started by my friends. They – over enthusiastic at such times – managed to push the car into a small wall with the door open. The door never opened properly again – but with some kind of extraordinary luck, my mother either never noticed, or never worked out that it was me who'd caused the damage. ...Read More

Some of the landmarks of our lives are marked by particular pubs and my 18th birthday is eternally linked in my mind to the Greyfisher on New Bridge Street in Salisbury. I don't remember too much about the evening – not a case of too much drink though because I was driving. I remember instead that I left the car lights on in my mother's car and when I came out at the end of the evening I had to be push started by my friends. They – over enthusiastic at such times – managed to push the car into a small wall with the door open. The door never opened properly again – but with some kind of extraordinary luck, my mother either never noticed, or never worked out that it was me who'd caused the damage.

The Greyfisher used to be quite a classy pub in the 1980s. It wasn't one of the regular haunts of the crowd I hung out with (we much preferred the Rose and Crown nearby) but today it has moved down-market into the 'bargain meals and cut price 'deals'' end of the market. However, it has one big thing to recommend it – it's extraordinarily close to where my parents now live. We were last in there on the evening of the royal wedding. We didn't eat or drink, we just used it as a cut-through to the Red Lion (shh, don't tell them) and had quite a giggle after a smoker near the door told us 'Aled Jones is in tonight'. In fact it was a guy in a wig and ludicrous specs doing Elton John songs.

Last year I wound up my relatives by telling them we'd save mum the bother of cooking and all go to the Greyfisher for Christmas lunch. Even my sister – who's seldom fussy – exploded at the idea of it. "I'm not going to that horrible pikey place" (footnote for the non-locals – Wikipedia defines 'pikey' as a pejorative slang term used mainly in the United Kingdom to refer to Irish Travellers, gypsies or people of low social class"). Not exactly politically correct but until recently this was a big problem at the Greyfisher although I'm told the new landlord laid down the law to his clientele and banned quite a lot of the trouble makers.

The Greyfisher is now part of the 'Hungry Horse' chain. It offers some astonishingly good value meals which might make the nutritionists wince but they are extraordinarily cheap. We've had a few Sunday lunches there and when my parents can't face cooking they often pop round in the evening. With four Australian relatives turning up to see my parents, my sister and her partner, my husband and I and my very strange cousin we all needed feeding and my parents proposed going round to the pub for curry night. They had planned a rather more upmarket celebration but the Australians were going to leave the next day and there was no time to book something more exotic. So we all shuffled round to the Greyfisher.

The Greyfisher is a tidy looking place in good decorative order. They have some 'booth' type tables down one side of the room with rather annoying televisions screens at the end of each booth. I'm not a fan of televisions in pubs since regardless of what's on them, you find yourself watching. Not surprisingly they don't have tables for eleven but my uncle and aunt got stuck in moving tables around until there was enough space for everyone. You don't HAVE to eat curry on a Thursday curry night but it does seem to make sense to do so, especially since curry with rice, poppadoms, chutney and chopped onions costs just £5.99 – and that includes a drink. As you can imagine even with a really easy menu and limited choice it still took a long time to get eleven people to decide what they wanted and even longer for my step father and sister to place all the orders for nine curries and two steaks. I don't eat meat so my choice was simple – take it or leave it on a roasted vegetable curry. I have absolutely no idea why anyone came up with the idea of combining roasted veg with curry

Various relatives brought the drinks over. I don't normally drink pints but my sister was determined that if it was included, then I was having it – thanks sis. The food was brought to the table after about 20 minutes and the portions were generous. Each person got a metal karahi-style dish with curry in it (clearly not cooked in it – just decanted in for serving) with a mound of yellow rice, two little paper tubs with chutney and chopped onions in and two poppadoms perched on top. Sounds great, doesn't it? Sadly it was one of the worst pub meals I've had in years. I think the meat eaters did a lot better than me but my veg curry was absolutely awful. The roasted veg were combined with a rather dry sauce which made the whole thing a bit sticky. The poppadoms were weirdly oddly just plain wrong. I suspected that there was a box filled with pre-cooked long-life poppadoms in the kitchen since they were perfectly dry to the touch but didn't look or taste like grilled pappads. Instead there was a strange taste to them that made them taste a bit like a giant Pringle. Being placed on top of the rice meant they were a bit soggy which didn't help. Everyone else seemed happy with their food – although they agreed the poppadoms were disastrous. It felt like hard work to get through my meal and with a pint of lager sloshing around in my tummy there was no room for pudding. Mum volunteered to knock up some pavlova when we got home so we called it a day and headed home.

The Greyfisher is not the pub it once was in my teens but it's much better than it was a few years ago. The problems of the rowdy clientele seem to have been addressed but it's still a very down-market kind of place and at risk of sounding snobby the bargain meals and daily specials play to the very cost conscious consumer. This is not the place to go for a romantic night out but for a rowdy gathering of my relatives it was just about perfect – especially since dinner for the eleven of us with drinks was around £70 in total.

As they say, Hell is other people – and whilst at times that sums up even your own family, I was getting really irritated by children running around the dining area although my sister's partner pointed out that they are legally allowed in until 9 o'clock at night. Personally I think there's a difference between saying kids are allowed in a pub with their parents to have a meal and letting them run riot in the pub with their parents ignoring their behaviour. My sister could see I was getting close to breaking point. It's not my first choice for a night out but for feeding a lot of people cheaply and quickly without breaking the bank, it's not awful. Read Less

Member Rating 3 out of 5 on July 30, 2011

The Greyfisher
New Bridge Road, Ayleswade Road
Salisbury, England

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Stourhead Estate National Trust

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Attraction | "Heaven is a Place on Earth"

Stourhead Church Photo - Stourhead Estate National Trust, Wiltshire, England

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Each time we go to visit my parents in Salisbury my husband asks if we can go to Stourhead. It's a lot nearer to them and to my sister than it is to us but even so, once we get to Salisbury, there always seems to be something else – weather or my mother having other plans - that comes up and gets in the way. Even though Salisbury and Stourhead look to be quite close on a map and are about 25 miles apart, the route is cross-country and it takes about three-quarters of an hour to get there. On this occasion we drove my Australian uncle and aunt to my mother's house and soon after my aunt's brother and his wife showed up too with nowhere to stay and our plan to stay with my parents when out t...Read More

Each time we go to visit my parents in Salisbury my husband asks if we can go to Stourhead. It's a lot nearer to them and to my sister than it is to us but even so, once we get to Salisbury, there always seems to be something else – weather or my mother having other plans - that comes up and gets in the way. Even though Salisbury and Stourhead look to be quite close on a map and are about 25 miles apart, the route is cross-country and it takes about three-quarters of an hour to get there.

On this occasion we drove my Australian uncle and aunt to my mother's house and soon after my aunt's brother and his wife showed up too with nowhere to stay and our plan to stay with my parents when out the window and we were dispatched to stay at my sister's place. Since we needed to keep out of the way until all the relatives had moved on, we took the opportunity to spend the day at Lacock Abbey and Stourhead. Stourhead was our second stop of the day.

We arrived mid-afternoon and the sky looked threatening. As we'd gone to visit the gardens and not the house, we knew there was a high risk that we'd get wet and on the drive between Lacock and Stourhead we'd had monsoon-like rains. We parked up in the car park, showed our membership cards and headed down the hill towards the gardens. It's quite a long walk before you even get to the entrance so if you're not too steady on your feet, ask for a transfer on one of the site's golf-buggy like shuttles. The path down the hill is quite steep but once you can get down to the actual entrance to the gardens, the path around the lake is fairly accessible and wheelchairs are available if required. The paths are compacted gravel and there's a bit of 'up and down' but nothing terribly steep.

Before reaching the gardens there's an interesting courtyard of craft and art shops and the Spread Eagle Inn offers food and drinks indoors or on the terrace outside. Looking at the sky we wanted to get a move on and decided to look at the shops on the way back and not delay any longer.

My husband has been to Stourhead before and knew already that he loved the place. I'd only seen a couple of photos on the National Trust website and knew that they often make a place look more attractive than it really is. Stourhead bucks this trend and is far better in real life than in any of the beautiful photos you may have seen.

The gardens were laid out in the 18th Century for the Hoare family who had the local river dammed in the 1740s in order to create the lake which is the central feature of the gardens. Up to that time garden design tended to be very formal and full of straight lines and geometric designs so Henry Hoare II's decision to recreate a more natural and undulating landscape went against the trend of the time which had been heavily influenced by the French garden designers. It was also a period when the wealthy liked to take trips round Europe doing the so-called 'Grand Tour' and many returned with big ideas based on what they'd seen. Whilst we're content to bring back a fridge magnet of the Acropolis or a snow dome of the Eiffel Tower, the travellers of the 18th century came home with big ideas to build their own classical follies in their gardens. I was reminded of the gardens at Stowe, near Northampton, where the landowners filled their landscape with rather cheesy looking statuary and mini versions of great buildings. Stourhead is an altogether classier garden where the follies and buildings are tucked temptingly and tantalisingly amongst the vegetation to be glimpsed rather than stared at.

We passed what I assumed was a war memorial by the entrance to the gardens, showed our membership cards and headed in. You really have only one decision to make and that is clockwise or anti-clockwise and once that's decided, just follow your nose. I am always a bit frustrated by gardens with too much choice and too many different parts. My desire to not miss anything drives me crazy and means I'm almost always left with the sense of missing something no matter how hard I try. That's one of the reasons I loved Stourhead – all you have to do is follow the path and you really can't get lost and equally important, you can't miss anything.

The circuit is about one and a quarter miles in length but it feels much shorter because there's so much to see. We went clockwise since we've spent a lot of time in Buddhist countries and learned to always go that way but also because there's just something contrary about going widdershins. The first feature of note is the Palladian Bridge, a stone bridge with five symmetrical arches. It seems to be placed primarily for aesthetic purposes since walking across it would save only a few paces compared to walking round and I suspect it's there to reflect in the water but I suspect it's intended to give the impression of a river running out from the lake. The water around the bridge was a bit scummy and less clear than elsewhere so it was clear that there was no river draining under the bridge.

Walking with the lake on our right hand side we took pictures the whole way around. In the old days of 35 mm film, these gardens would have been a 'two-reel' attraction – guaranteed to need at least a second reel in order to get all the pictures you would want. The next building we came to was the Temple of Apollo, a rotunda-like building sitting above the lake. You can walk up to it but we chose not to, our eyes always on the colour of the skies.

The grandest of the buildings is called the Pantheon, named after the Roman temple to all the gods which was built by Marcus Agrippa. The Stourhead version is more modest but takes the heavy frontal columns and the triangular facade above the pillars. This is about half way round the lake so we stopped to sit down and take more photographs. The next building was a small cottage which I decided not to photograph as a woman covered in tattoos was determined to get her boyfriend to shoot dozens of pictures of her and I didn't particularly want her in my photos so we moved on to the grotto.

The grotto is a fine example of how even someone with the most sophisticated taste and almost unlimited funds can have a bit of a brain-burp and build something hideous. It would need only a few gnomes and some shells in the mortar to look like something from the most down-market of seaside resorts. Clearly a lot of manpower went into creating this ugly grotto as the pattern of pebbles on the floor must have taken weeks to put together. The final building I remember was the Temple of Flora, not unlike a smaller version of the Pantheon, it was another handy place to stop and watch the ducks and swans on the lake.

July was a good time to visit. The long days and traditionally rubbish English weather meant everything was lush and green. The rain held off long enough for us to get round though it certainly wasn't warm enough to linger as long as we might have done if we'd been less concerned about getting really wet. The swans and ducks were entertaining and getting there before the school holidays started meant we pretty much had the place to ourselves and – tattoo lady and her beau excepted – nobody really got in our way or made us modify our plans. The walk back up the hill was completed with the rain still holding off which we felt was reason enough to celebrate with big hearty slices of cake and a couple of hot drinks. Having seen it in summer, I'm now really keen to go back again with my camera and see it in autumn, winter and spring. Sounds like my Mum might be getting more visits than she expected. Read Less

Member Rating 5 out of 5 on August 14, 2011

Stourhead Estate National Trust
River Stour Near Meer
Wiltshire, England BA12 6QD
+44 1747 841152

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