Cotswolder Travel Guide

Today’s BBC Radio 4 Broadcasting House show was broadcast from the Hay-on-Wye Literary Festival. You can listen to it online or by Podcast. Broadcasting House is a Sunday news show that reviews the weeks news and picks interesting stories from the newspapers.

The Hay-on-Wye Literary Festival is held every year in this town in the Black Mountains, on the northern edge of the Brecon Beacons National Park, right on the border between England and Wales. Some sources say Hay-on-Wye is in the county of Herdfordshire (England), some say it is in Powys (Wales), so I suspect part of the town is on each side of the border. Read more about Hay-on-Wye. The town is famous for its used bookshops.

This is the festival’s 21st year. Their website is a bit confusing to me, but you can download the program as a PDF. The festival is on this week - May 22 - June 1. Many well-known British authors speak at this event.

I have never been to this festival, but hope to attend some year. I thought we had been to the town of Hay-on-Wye years ago, but when I look at the map I see we were in Ross-on-Wye and Symonds Yat, on the edge of the Forest of Dean. So the photo for this blog entry is from Symonds Yat, not Hay-on-Wye, where we did a hike down the River Wye, across on a bridge, up the other side, to return by a small ferry shown in the photo.

At the end of the Broadcasting House program there is a charming interview with the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, Deborah Mitford, the last surviving Mitford sister. The six Mitford sisters grew up in the Cotswolds, in the village of Asthall, just east of Burford on the eastern edge of the Cotswolds. Nancy Mitford wrote “The Pursuit of Love” (1945) and ”Love in a Cold Climate” (1949), semi-autobiographical novels about the family (link to Amazon).

According to the program, it was pouring rain today at the festival. You could hear the rain in the background. Accuweather shows rain all next week. Looks like rain in the Cotswolds too (Stroud weather). We had rain for the last two weeks in Santa Fe, but it looks like hot sunny weather is starting again today.

Before our recent trip to the Cotswolds I spent at least 10 hours studying the train schedules and fares for trains from the Cotswolds into London. The many types of fares was confusing and I could not easily figure out what fare was best for us. The schedules were confusing too, but as I got to know the area better, they started to make sense. There are only two train lines that go into the Cotswolds.

• The Southern Cotswolds line goes from London to Swindon, Kemble, Stroud, Cheltenham.
• The Cotswolds Line goes from London to Oxford, Moreton-in-Marsh, Worcester.

These train lines are good for getting from the Cotswolds to London, but are not good for traveling around in the Cotswolds. Cotswolds AONB has PDF versions of Train/Bus schedules for the Cotswolds.

Train travel in England is expensive

An off-peak return on the day of travel is expensive - $80 return per person from Stroud to London and $40 from Oxford to London. Off-peak means you leave after 10am and cannot return from about 4pm to 7pm (peak travel time). $160 for the two of us to have a day in London (and that does not include the amount I would probably spend at Liberty)!! A Standard Open Return ticket, which you can use any time of the day, is well over twice the Off-Peak price.

You can buy advance tickets for 1/4 of the price, but you have to book it for a specific day and train - that never works for us because we are not good at planning ahead.

We ended up driving to Oxford (an hour drive from where we were staying near Stroud) because trains were more frequent (every half hour, compared to once an hour from Stroud), the ticket was half the price of one from Stroud and you could take slow trains back, even during peak hours. Driving back in the pitch black during a big snowstorm, we wished we had taken the train from Stroud!

Train travel in England is expensive, but so is driving. Gas (petrol) is over $8.00 per US gallon. However, you can rent a diesel car that gets 40 - 50 miles per gallon. Since US gas is now almost $4.00 per gallon and a typical mid-size car gets 20 - 25 miles per gallon, this makes driving in the UK about the same price per mile as in the US.

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Bath is one of my favorite places in the world, and this summer it is going to be even better than usual. Starting on May 19 there will 100 pig statues, life size and individually decorated, all over Bath - King Bladud’s Pigs in Bath. In October the pigs will be sold at auction.

There have been similar projects in other towns. The Cow Parade has been done in many cities. In Germany they did Storks on the Danube (Flickr). The Trail of Painted Ponies started in Santa Fe in 2001.

Pigs were chosen for Bath because of the legend of King Bladud and his pigs who discovered the natural hot springs in Bath.

Kaffe Fassett is one of the artists making a pig. Fassett is an American, from Big Sur in California, who moved to England decades ago and “revolutionized” needlepoint and knitting in the 80s. His family owns the wonderful Nepenthe restaurant in Big Sur. This is a great place to stop for lunch when doing the California coast drive. They also run the Phoenix shop beside the restaurant which sells many Kaffe Fassett things. They used to have a couch that he had covered in needlepoint, but it was not there the last time we visited.

The money raised by the Pig Project goes to the Two Tunnels Project which I had not heard of until today. This is a project to restore a four mile path - involving an old railway track, a viaduct and two tunnels - to connect the center of Bath with the Sustrans path NCN 24 (Sustainable Transport - National Cycle Network route 24) south of Bath near Milford. From there you connect to many biking and hiking trails. The route will be for bicyclists and walkers. One of the tunnels is one mile long and goes beneath Combe Down (high area south of Bath). See a detailed map.

Currently you can walk from the Center of Bath to Milford, but the path is longer and more difficult. With the Two Tunnels Project the path will be shorter and level.

I found out about this event when I was writing about Knitting Socks for my Views from the Slow Lane blog. I was reading Kaffe Fassett’s website to find out about his sock wool, and there was the information about the Pigs in Bath!

I am not an expert on politics in England, but thought I would post a summary of the results from Thursday’s local election and some links to articles with more information. 

The Labour Party, headed by Prime Minister Gordon Brown, are currently in power (and do not have to have an election until 2010), but the local elections put Labour in 3rd place with 24% of the vote, after the Conservatives (44%) and the Liberal Democrats (25%). This is Labour’s worst local election results in 40 years and may signal a change in English politics.

Tony Blair brought the Labour Party into power in 1997. Gordon Brown took over the leadership in June last year. David Cameron is the leader of the Conservatives.

Read more on BBC News - Cameron hails Tory ‘big moment’

London gets a new Mayor

Boris Johnson (Conservative) beat the incumbent Mayor Ken Livingston (Labour) by just over 50% of the votes (of over 2 million total votes). Livingston, called “Red Ken”, was mayor since May 2000. This is going to be interesting to watch because Johnson is quite a controversial figure in England. I love that floppy hair!

Autolycus, who lives in London, posted his comments: Cripes!

Read more on BBC News - Johnson wins London mayoral race
Read more on BBC News - The Boris Johnson story 
Read more on BBC News - BNP wins seat in London Assembly
Read more on the New York Times - Colorful Tory Beats Laborite to Become Mayor of London

Friday Night Comedy from BBC Radio 4 - Podcast

The Friday Night Comedy show on Radio 4 broadcasts with “The Now Show” or ”The News Quiz”. Both are very funny shows with local comedians discussing the week’s news. The News Quiz, which we get on our iPod as a Podcast, is my current favorite thing on the radio (for now it has slightly beat out my devotion to Michael Feldman’s What do you Know? on NPR). Yesterday’s broadcast had some funny bits about the election.

The Friday Night Comedy is best appreciated if you listen to the daily BBC news - then you get all the jokes!