Roundabouts, aqueducts and codebreakers

On our return to Manchester  we used an Ibis budget hotel in the Salford Quays.  This is a beautifully redeveloped area of Manchester on the Manchester Ship Canal. The wiki pic below shows some of the residential units built around these pools and canals – very pretty alongside some stunning modern architecture.

English: , Manchester, England. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It was exciting to find!  Many roads were criss-crossing each other as we got closer to the centre of the city.

This is where we first learned two valuable lessons.  One: There is a certain point where you need to abandon the road map and switch to the cell phone sat nav!   Knowing where that point is however is a key part of that transition!  Two: if you’re confused about which exit to leave on a roundabout, just go round another time – it gives time to see what all the exits are offering and by the time you exit the next time all the cars which were travelling with you are way down the road and don’t know you made yet another mistake!  I couldn’t believe Roger was daring to make this brave move the first time he did it, but have used it myself more than once since.

The budget hotel was newly renovated and intriguingly pared down to the essentials.  Personally I wouldn’t want to travel budget all the time, but it certainly showed what is necessary rather than what is nice to have in an hotel room

We still don’t know how we got out of Manchester!!!!  It’s a mystery which may never come clear.  Probably we should NOT have assumed that ‘simply’ going in reverse over the route we took coming in would get us easily back on our way! (How hard can that be?)  It is all a blur – perhaps the blur caused by the number of times we needed to circle the roundabouts twice!

However, we got on our way and after a quick squizz through the centre of Chester which is known for its black and white Tudor buildings/houses/shops and Roman city wall, we flirted with the border of Wales. (Chester city wall below)You know you’re in Wales when the welsh place names are written first with English following below for foreigners.  Exploring one valley we persisted in looking for Llangollen.  Checking the guidebook, we knew we should be able to see an aqueduct some time soon.  Then there it was.  How’s this for a name?  Poncyscyllte Aqueduct. This neat pic is courtesy wkikpedia.

The aqueduct runs over 300m across the valley carrying a canal full of water 38m above the river below!  I think the concept of creating a metal trough and suspending it in the air to transport 1,670 tons of water ( and anything else that floats along the canal) is amazing – especially in 1795.  Others thought it was amazing too at the time (as in crazy!) but some capital adventurist was prepared to back them.   Wikipedia says: “It was opened on 26 November 1805, having taken around ten years to design and build at a total cost of £47,000. Adjusted for inflation this is equal to £2,930,000 as of 2013…”

This second pic is the lead up to the canal from the side.  Where the reflections run out, that’s approx where the aqueduct begins

A brain teaser from Roger:  How much stronger would the pillars need to be to carry a canal boat with 1000 tons of coal compared with the normal 20-50 tons? We’ll try and work it out by the next blog.   Below is his pic from the other end of the aqueduct – in a very small village called Trevor which looks and sounds better in welsh – Trefor.   At this side there was heaps of canal boats just waiting for someone to take them for a ride…….

We had to keep going rather after that to make our dinner date with Roger’s former Antarctic boss in Cheltenham, though by dodging and diving managed to drive through some Cotswold villages which looked like chocolate box tops, some with newly replaced thatching – Roger’s first view of such roofs.  Again, the local stone had changed and was a warm honey colour.  

This is Chipping Camden.  We diced with death and impatient following vehicles to get this shot – even though it was a calm and peaceful looking village, there w as a steady flow of traffic all the time .  This was another place we didn’t know how we got out of and had to depend on the phone to do its magic for us.  We have since found a postcard which says: “Thank goodness for sat nav, now we can get lost much more accurately!

Next day we lunched at Stow on Wold looking over at these galleries, facing the town stocks,(but fortunately not in them!).  They didn’t look like they’d been used for a while.

Wandering round the square we found this plaque (below) which made sobering reading.  There are reminders of the civil war all over this part of the country. Considering the usual ‘tightness’ between the Crown and the church it’s a particular irony royalist prisoners were kept in the church.  More recently, we’ve stumbled across Oliver Cromwell’s house nearer Cambridge (He led the Parliamentary forces named on the plaque) and heard the legend that his body (plus his later decapitated head) are buried in one of the Cambridge College grounds and that only three people know where.  It is said that if one of them dies, the other two have to find a third to keep the secret!  Do I hear you saying something about the futility of war?

It’s hard to capture the otherwise charming-ness of town squares like this one – houses are mostly all slightly crooked, leaning in different directions .  You get a definite feeling owners must give daily thanks for the next door house propping theirs up!  The quaintness doesn’t come across well on amateur film (at least, not ours).   This was one of the first days we thought spring might really arrive for real one day.

We had a lovely dinner at the local pub with Roger’s former Antarctic boss Hamish and his wife Shirley in Cheltenham.  Then next day we took off overland to, eventually, Milton Keynes where Bletchley Park is situated (passing very close to Blenheim Palace on the way home to Winston Churchill’s extended family – he is a son of the third son of the family).

Bletchley is where German codes were cracked during WW II.  There were  9,000 workers came there daily during the peak of its work.   Some socialised around this pond during breaks.  Only some worked in the ‘Mansion’ behind the willows.  Initially only 200 worked in the house and outbuildings.  Over time, more and more workers served in many huts dotted around the property.  These retained their original names e.g.  Hut 8 or Hut 6, but evolved over the years into substantial brick buildings, together forming a campus bigger than your average high school of 6000 students!     Only recently have those working there have been able to say what they did in the war and have been awarded pins to commemorate that.   http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/1991827/government-honours-veterans-bletchley-park   Some young women had to put up with their landladies thinking they were prostitutes when they kept on going ‘out’ on the night shift!  The sign on the gate just said ‘Government Communications Bureau.’  Winston Churchill said later that the workers there were his golden geese who laid the golden eggs and never cackled.

The heritage group which runs the place for tourism have recently built a working replica of the machine which broke the Enigma code in wartime ( see below for one of the stages of this project).

Bletchley is fascinating, especially if you have followed the Enigma code breaking saga at all.  New books have come out on the subject in recent years.  The scale was enormous and compartmentalization of departments so thorough that workers at one end of a hut didn’t know, let alone understand, what workers at the other end of the hut knew.

Post-war, West Germany continued to use Enigma, thinking it had never been broken.  It wasn’t until 1960 that Britain at diplomatic level, told West Germany that they should upgrade their code system.    The Germans were absolutely stunned.  (Britain had thought it should confess even though Bletchley was still under the Official Secrets Act, as W. Germany was now an ally.)

Alan Turing (now credited as one of the three fathers of the modern computer) was featured as through his thinking along with others, the code cracking machine was built, and post-war, the first computers constructed.  A brilliant mathematician, he took his life after the war after having been prosecuted on a sexuality charge.  It made my blood boil to read the exhibit and wondered if anyone had seen the irony of it all.  Having gone to war to defeat people who gassed homosexuals, Britain was still treating them as second class citizens too.   I was pleased to see the government had been petitioned and a generous letter of apology from Gordon Brown, PM of the time, is displayed alongside the story.  What harm we do to people who are different!  The apology was too late for Alan Turing!

Fortunately a day’s pass at Bletchley can be used for a year.  I think a return visit will be needed, perhaps also to see Alan Turing’s version of Monopoly which he devised and which has been produced for sale.

Where is the spirituality in this eclectic collection of travels?  Think of the designer and bankers who committed themselves to  a project others thought was crazy.  Ten years of being thought crazy is a long time.

Think too of the code cracking team of thousands of people, content to work in their small corner, not necessarily understanding what it was all about and what that took in self control and discipline each day and week.  There is a spirituality in self discipline, in the courage of one’s convictions, of committing to a cause and not failing. (What was that the Bible says about putting one’s hand to the plough and not looking back?).

When in the church or in any part of our lives, there is something which is vital to do – whether for our own well being or for others, these people are an inspiration to ‘go for it.’

Cambridge next post!

Susan