Here we are back in Rugby, this time having approached from the north. This time I made it into the town center, by a route known as The Black Path. It sounds a bit like the black death, and you can imagine carts full or corpses being dragged along it but in fact it was just called that because it used to be surfaced with cinders. It connected the homes in Rugby with the British Thompson-Houston (BTH) factory site by…
In the first volume of À la recherche du temps perdu, the narrator remembers his childhood when tasting a madeleine cake dipped in tea. I get pulled back to my childhood by the sight of a wall topped with blue bricks. The house I grew up in had this sort of wall facing the street, and I hadn’t really noticed it was a regional thing until this trip. The blue bricks are made from Etruria Marl, a red clay found…
The original live/work lofts. These houses were built by John and Joseph Cash in 1857, to provide both housing and workspace for ribbon weavers. The first two floors were accommodation, and the top floor with the big windows was a “top shop” or weaving workshop. The ideas was that all the weavers could use a single steam engine for power, while working on their own looms. Though the idea of independent weavers sharing a power source did not work out…
This morning I went to the Coventry Transport Museum, while Paula plotted some decorative enhancements on Pegotty. First of all, it should be the Road Transport Museum, as all the vehicles there have wheels. But, if bicycles, motorcycles, tractors, and cars are your thing, then this is the place to be. Coventry has a long history of vehicle manufacturing, first with bicycles then with motor vehicles. Jaguar is still headquartered here (though now owned by an Indian company) but the…
Coventry is famous for two things and this is neither of them, but it’s my favorite thing in town. Here’s a close up of the important bit. Looky there! Punched cards. This is a Jacquard Loom (actually, a British knock off of a Jacquard Loom I think). A chain of punched cards pulled the control strings to weave intricate patterns. A new pattern could be programmed simply by changing the cards used. The punched card idea from these looms was…
This morning I cycled back to the glass blowing studio to see how that bowl we has watched being made turned out. Very nice. We were running out of various sorts of food, so we decided to head for the nearest Tesco, which is on the way into Coventry. Unlike the Ashby Canal, which does not get to Ashby, the Coventry Canal actually makes it all the… Ooooh, look, first Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy boat name. As I…
We started making our way back down the Ashby Canal today, and moored up for the night near Dadlington, a one pub village. The pub hadn’t even been able to make it and had been foreclosed by the bank and shut down when a roving American restauranteur bought it up five years ago and turned it into a successful gastropub. The Dog and Hedgehog (known by the locals as The Woof and Prickle) has been recommended to us on the…
The Ashby canal gets its name from Ashby-de-la-Zouch (rhymes with douche) though it doesn’t actually go there, and never did. It used to end at the nearby Moira Mines noted for their high quality coal production, and not to be confused with the Mines of Moria, noted for their high volume orc infestation. It’s an easy mistake to make, as I said when they stopped me dynamiting the mine entrance. These days the canal ends eight miles short of there…
There are few more decisive moments in English history than the Battle of Bosworth. In the white corner King Richard III (York), who got to be king by disposing first of the claims and then of the bodies of the Princes in the Tower (probably). In the red corner, Henry Tudor (Lancaster) who had been living in France planning his comeback tour. In the middle (politically and physically) the Stanley brothers, Thomas and William, and their army. Thomas Stanley, the…
MORTICIAN: Who’s that then? CUSTOMER: I don’t know. MORTICIAN: Must be a king. CUSTOMER: Why? MORTICIAN: He hasn’t got shit all over him. That great historical documentary Monty Python and the Holy Grail was as accurate as ever. Sewage disposal in Roman times (if you were lucky enough to live in a town) was usually an open sewer in the street. Though there were some underground sewers they were rare enough that the Latin word for gutter is the same…