When I go into a public toilet, which I do frequently on this trip so we don’t have to pump out the holding tank as often, I expect to find soap. I’m an old fashioned bar soap kind of a guy, but I’m willing to put up with liquid soap from a dispenser, or even a quick squirt of foam. What I got today was a Lemon & Black Pepper Fragrance Explosion Hand Wash.

Seriously? I have some fish in the fridge that might go well with lemon and black pepper, but I don’t necessarily want a fragrance explosion when I wash my hands. I’m going to have to have a shower now to wash the soap off.

That was at Kinver Edge, a sandstone hill notable for the houses carved into the cliff face.

No one is sure when people first started digging holes in this rock face and living in them. The earliest reference to people living there was around 1770, and the last cave dwellers moved out in 1963. However the National Trust has restored this one to the state it was in around 1900.

That’s because they have a painting of the occupants of this cottage done in 1903.

If you look in the painting you can see that the mirror on the wall was crooked. In the restored cottage, the National Trust has hung the mirror at an angle and won’t let anyone straighten it up.

If you want to drive your OCD friends crazy, this is where to bring them.

You might think it is hard to remodel when you live in a cave, but when some later inhabitants of that house bought a grandfather clock and the roof was not high enough for it at the edge of the room, they carved a niche in the ceiling for it.

At one point this house was combined with the one next door by digging a tunnel.

The cottages used brick for the front wall and in one case had a brick chimney meandering up the rock face.

Higher up the face some two story cave houses were crafted with a frontage of the local sandstone.

Recently Kinver Edge has been colonized by an invasive species of Hobbit from New Zealand.

In order to control the population, the National Trust is planning to reintroduce orcs and let natural predation take its course.

Meanwhile in Kinver main street there is a Tudor building converted into a chip shop, and another one (below) which houses an architect’s office.

It says something about the failure of modern architecture that they would prefer to work in a five hundred year old building painted shit brown.