quantocky surveying

As I said at the start of the recent avalanche of book review posts, the reason for the logjam is that we've been on holiday recently - two holidays actually, though most of the reading was done on the first one. It wasn't all reading, though, my goodness no. 

• We stayed here, just outside Washford a couple of miles inland from Watchet on the north Somerset coast. Not massive for five people but perfectly fine, especially given that the sunny weather enabled a lot of sitting on the verandah reading or outside in the garden eating barbecue food. 
• We made an initial foray into Washford to have a look at Cleeve Abbey, which is quite interesting but which we had to whizz round at high speed as they were about to close. Free entry, though, thanks to our Cadw membership and their reciprocal arrangement with English Heritage.
• After being ushered towards the door there we went up the road a couple of hundred yards to the charmingly rustic White Horse Inn for a cheeky pint. I had an Exmoor Gold, not my favourite thing but perfectly quaffable on a warm day.
• On the Saturday morning Nia and I did the short drive into Minehead to bag their parkrun for our collection. It's a bit of a funny one, all along the seafront so it's very flat but the course is only a kilometre long, so there are five 180-degree turns and it's quite narrow, and consequently not as fast as you might expect. In any case I'm struggling with chronic back pain and sciatica at the moment so I was happy just to trundle round and finish. 
• We'd set aside a day for going back to Minehead and spending some time at Butlin's, one of only three remaining under the original name (the other two being at Bognor Regis and Skegness). It's easy to imagine that there were dozens of these in the holiday camp's heyday in the second half of the twentieth century, and of course it was enough of a cultural trope to generate a whole long-running situation comedy in Hi-De-Hi!, but there were only ever ten of them. The main idea in terms of us visiting was to make use of their water park, which is perfectly fine and has all the usual waves and slides and flumes and the like, but is probably not as good as similar facilities at places like Bluestone, Bracknell's Coral Reef and CenterParcs, the bruising full-body rapids at CenterParcs being the gold standard all other water parks should aspire to. Elsewhere in the park we pumped a few quid into the tuppenny waterfalls, had a ice-cream and went (or at least the kids did) on some fairground rides, which commendably were free with the day pass we'd bought.
• Last Minehead-related thing - if one of my kids had asked me: Dad, why is it called Minehead, I would probably have sat back in my chair, put my slippers up on the table, lit up my pipe and said, well, they used to do mining there and the village was where the, if you will, "head" of the mineshaft and associated workings came out. Good job that didn't happen as that would be completely wrong; in fact the name is an Anglicised version of the Welsh word mynydd, which means "mountain", a very generous description of the modest hill west of the town. 
• We also visited Dunster Castle, again, gratifyingly, for free by virtue of our National Trust membership. I'd never been before (and it is quite interesting) although I had visited Dunster village with Hazel back in 2011. We had a quick wander round the village this time as well and rectified an omission from the previous visit by going to the pub, in this case The Stag's Head where I had a pint of St. Austell Tribute. One very exciting thing that happened during our visit to the castle was Alys spotting a namesake (a fairly rare occurrence), in this case Alys Luttrell, lady of the castle in the first half of the twentieth century. You will of course be able to verify that that is Alys' hand doing the pointing by the size of her thumbnails.
  

• I hadn't been to the area since spending a couple of days here at the wedding of some friends of Hazel's (spoiler alert: they have since divorced) back in the very early days of this blog when I was still charmingly giddy about having recently hooked up with my future wife. Having much more recently done some walking in the Malverns and the Cotswolds and, in passing, bagged the highest point in each, I was keen to do something similar in the nearby Quantocks while we were here. My original notion was to do some sort of point-to-point walk making use of the West Somerset Railway, which has a station at Washford and runs diagonally down the west side of the Quantock ridge between Watchet and Taunton. I couldn't find a way of making this work without constructing an absurdly long walk that was mainly on the flat getting to and from awkwardly-placed railway stations to catch awkwardly-timed trains for awkwardly-large ticket prices, though, so in the end we drove to Crowcombe, parked in their handy village car park and did a round trip walk incorporating Wills Neck (the highest point in the Quantocks at 384 metres or 1261 feet) and a portion of the Quantock ridge before dropping off and coming back into the village from the other side. I say "ridge" but you really have very little sense of it being a ridge in the way that you do on top of the Malverns; it's just a broad plateau. Thirsty after our exertions (just under twelve kilometres or seven-and-a-half miles) we then went to the Carew Arms for a refreshing beverage. I was in need of something cold so I had a pint of Ice Breaker, about which I would say, eh, it's fine. Route map and altitude profile (this one is from GPS Visualizer) are below in the usual way.