Blanchard Visit

While in County Durham we visited the nearby village of Blanchard. It is a picturesque village. Imagine, if you will a small village in any agatha christie novel and you have Blanchard. It's tiny. It had a beautiful looking pub, but It seemed to possess only three shops, a post office general store, a deli and a hat shop?! The kind of shop every village in the middle of nowhere is famed for; the obligatory bespoke hat shop, because they don't sell hats in towns or cities so you'd drive miles to an almost ghost village to buy a hat. Bizarrely we did see someone drop off people for the hat shop while we were there! But it wasn't at the hat shop because the lady whom I presume runs the hat shop had a notice on the shop door saying, she was at home and please go and see her there. There was a giant hat attached to her house's driveway gate as a help. But here are some photos from the very lovely but strangely empty village of Blanchard

Bay Bridge

This was taken from the children's playground which was pretty good. But the best thing about the playground was the scene when you turned 180 degrees, it looked like











This......

Truly, if you were tasked with visually describing an English rural idyll on a sunny day, you'd be hard pressed to present anything that deviated greatly from this. It's almost a Constable painting, really. It's a breathtaking location and the benefit was that the local authority had created a pathway around some of this. I didn't have time to explore it all as I walked far enough to keep the youngest, Joshua asleep, through the continual movement, but I reached that treeline in the distance and the path turned to a trail path, so I have no idea how far it stretched off into the distance. But having reached a fair way down towards the horizon I turned and photographed the playground, which sits in front of the village.

Shows how amazing the day was, weather wise, like a pure Summer day, the only thing missing between me and the playground was a village cricket team and you'd have that long quoted and oft dreamed of 'golden age' of England, as so often lamented by the Daily Mail, as no longer existing, which explains why our country, to them, is an abject shadow of this so called 'Golden Age of the 1950's'. Slightly moving off topic one of my perennial bug bears is this, I call it the Daily Mail fixation that life was better 'back then', these generational/mythical golden age's and how they hark back to these times and wish we regressed. Wrong on so many levels and I always found that my view was summed up by the lyrics to the Talking Heads song 'Nothing But Flowers' There were no golden ages, nor will there ever be. We may look back fondly on different generations, but each have good things and terrible things. So often we are told that in the 1950's that you could leave your door open and not get burgled, which is true I am sure because the country was still bankrupt and people had nothing really worth stealing. Yet the way it is portrayed the 50's according to the Daily Mail was a crime free age. Not a society that could produce acid bath murderers, etc. How people knew all their neighbours and everyone was friendly an tolerant, try telling this to the first generation West Indians who invited over by the UK to fill the servile, unskilled jobs post-empire were treated like second class citizens. There is no golden generation; even today we live (in the western world) with a standard of living unimaginable even just 20 yrs ago. We are wealthier, more energy hungry, more advanced technologically and still? with all this wealth and all this waste 85% of the rest of the world lives under corrupt regimes, half starved half terrorised with no sight of redemption. In 30yrs time no doubt, this time will also be seen as a golden age I am sure.

Removing myself from the soap box, before my wife shouts at me for being a bore, I shall continue the journey into Blanchard. Lets visit the town centre;

And there it is flanked on one side by small, almost 'alms' type housing (top) and on the other side some kind of gate house (associated with the abbey?) which leads into some more housing and the shops. Opposite the Gate house (bottom) is the pub, the 'lord Crewe' (I presume the 3rd Baron Crewe, Nathaniel Crewe, Bishop of Durham, hence the close association).

The Lord Crewe Pub

As someone who has frequented the odd hundred or so pubs during what I call my 'Pub Years', if my skill at drawing was better and the high chief of CAMRA cam to me and said, 'Tony, please draw me a picture of your ideal pub.' This pub would be in the top ten lookalikes. It's a beautiful pub and it looks as though it should serve beautiful real ale, it probably doesn't (refer to earlier paragraph of harking to fantasy). What it certainly would have in the height of summer is a great place to sit outside and feel the sun on your back while having a drink with friends and chatting. It's a pub Inspector Morse would drink in and that's usually enough for me.

And Finally, here it is, the bottom of the town square and between those two properties runs, the main road in and out of the village. On passing through you are almost immediately hit by a huge climb up a hill out of the village, whether this signifies that you are climbing into the modern world or not I can't say. All I can say is it's a wonderfully picturesque village, yet it has the feel of a living museum too. I cannot truly believe there are huge amounts of work in the village and I can't remember seeing a school, in fact the only building which seemed to be an old school house, was a tea shop, the population is quoted as 140. Small but perfectly formed?