After all the troubling pictures I've given you recently, or failing to put one up at all last week, I thought I'd make it a bit easier today. Certainly one of my favourite towns, it has a very fine and comprehensive viewpoint on the south side, for which I am very grateful. I first saw it on a December morning in 1978, with folks gathering to buy mistletoe in the market hall and round-ended boxes of 'Eat Me' dates on a fruiterer's window sill. Visiting again recently, I'm pleased to report that a stroll around the streets is as rewarding as anywhere, particularly on a sunny Sunday morning with the bells from that church tower ringing out over the rooftops, as indeed they were when this photograph was taken. Extra toast and black pudding for anyone who can remember the poetry which has this couplet about the town in it: Oh I have been to ------ fair / And left my necktie God knows where. Or something like that, I haven't got it immediately to hand.
Halifax, West Yorkshire
2 days ago
14 comments:
Ludlow, home to some fine butchers! I shall be going there next month.
The poetry was by A. E. Houseman
Ludlow it is. The lads in their hundreds to Ludlow come in to the fair. And when Housman was dead and cremated they buried his ashes right there.
Well done Lemon Kelly. When you go to Ludlow, go and look at Rickards Ironmongers windows and the lettering on the stallboards of De Greys tea shop. But I suspect you may know all about them already.
I shall indeed pay close inspection to the aforementioned exhibits, after purchasing a bag of Unmitigated pork pies from Griffiths opposite The Feathers. I have been going to the area since the late 1950's, staying in Kingsland just over the border in Herefordshire. This area together with Radnorshire is one of the most magical places in Britain, there is something almost primeval about it! I have fond memories of the old Ludlow Museum up some stairs behind the market hall, also a '60s milk bar by the castle replete with brightly coloured melamine tableware and a seething geyser of a coffee machine, probably an early Gaggia 'though I don't remember espresso being available... just milky and frothy!
Thankyou Lemon, a lovely evocation of the place- I love the name 'Radnorshire', very Rev. Kilvert. And talking of pork pies, which I know I do often, I must recommend the Gloucester Old Spot pies to be had in the wonderful delicatessen in Cley-next-the-Sea. After the excitement of steam at Holt we all gorged on them on the beach, helped down with cold tins of Shandy Bass as the waves crashed up the shingle.
For the first time I recognised one of these at once.
Blame it on Malcolm Saville.
Who he? (Ed.)
The thinking child's Enid Blyton.
I was once intimate with a punk rocker who rejoiced in the name of 'Des Troy' round the back of Ludlow Castle. Do I win anything?
Of course you do WH. Be in touch.
WH, you don't win anything, but you may well have caught something!
Well it WAS a chilly night but it was also 30 years ago, so my cold has gone now thank you.
I got rather stuck on the wall above the river trying to take a closer look at a garderobe.
Love the famous parody lines of Housman:
"What still alive at twenty-two,
A clean, upstanding chap like you?
Sure, if your throat 'tis hard to slit,
Slit your girl's, and swing for it."
Apparantly Housman thought this funny, too.
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