Mostly Ships

I decided a lazy day was in order, my knee is fine after yesterday’s minor accident, but a little sore and stiff (wet paper towels help!) I did find later on that my back was aching but that may be completely unrelated, it does that. 

One of the reasons I have a paper road atlas in the ‘van is for just these sort of days, particularly as I made sure it’s one with attractions clearly shown. The one that caught my eye was the North Devon Maritime Museum, near Bideford. The downside was it meant driving back out the way I’d been the last two days, past Barnstaple, but not much I could do about that. 

I started with visiting Bideford itself, just wandering round and grabbing a coffee in the Pannier Market. These, and Butchers’ Row seem to be a feature locally as there’s a huge one in Barnstaple. They were, as the name suggests, where people brought produce in panniers on pack horses to be sold. I had a brief chat with a cyclist whilst there, he was recharging himself and his bike battery! The cafe had kindly let him plug his charger in, he was heading for Plymouth and reckoned he’d need two more charges to get there. 

Unfortunately one of the town’s  model shops, Osborne’s, went solely online due to COVID and haven’t reopened but there was another smaller one that distracted me for a few minutes. It’s always worth looking round these places as they might just have that accessory you need, possibly from a supplier that’s long been out of business; sadly that wasn’t the case here. 

I then headed round to Appledore and the Museum, fortunately there’s a car park almost right outside, even better they weren’t marked spaces so the length with the bike rack on wasn’t an issue (I parked next to a much larger motorhome). The museum is a reasonable size and worth the few pounds entrance fee. We tend to forget just how much maritime trade there was in and around the South West and the level of boat and ship building. 

Quiz time, no prizes, does anybody know, or can guess, what this is? Answer in the next blog if I remember! 

Something I did find slightly strange is that one of the larger Appledore based shipping lines had all their ships built in the North East when it seems there were local yards capable of taking on the work. The museum shop suffered from a common problem, an obligation to stock self published books by local authors! They’d got a couple very heavily discounted, one of which was a very nice hardback but was basically a copy of the Lloyds Register entries for every ship associated with the place, even at £5 (down from £25) it would have a very limited appeal. 

That’s about the end of things for the camping part of the trip, I’ll wrap up tomorrow after I’ve moved on to the hotel I’m at for the rest of the week.