The Beyond Series and Mancunian Crime Tales: Travelling UK Coastline in a Motorhome - Week 45 - Paignton Railway - Agatha Christie - Bovey Castle - Buckfast Abbey

Thursday, 2 July 2015 Week 45

Hello, so we are still in Paignton for the last week of Devon. We went on a steam train ride to Dartmouth and back. It was a lovely ride through Agatha Christie land on an old 1930s first-class Pullman coach. Currently writing a novel in this time period, so it all felt very exciting and a bit surreal. Just wish we could have gone to look around Greenway, the famous crime writer's holiday home.

I did, however, get to look around Dartmouth's old museum. It's not big, but King Charles II visited the rooms, and there were plenty of interesting maritime stories of Sir Francis Drake and connections with Sir Walter Raleigh. The best thing I read at the museum was a ghost story of Laura Dimes, the sad wife of a rich merchant who was found in the garden lake of the now burnt down house. (Shell still standing) She was found drowned, standing upright with her hat still on and arms outstretched as if strangling or fighting someone off her!

The only room in the house that was not singed by the fire a few years later is Laura's bedroom, where people say she is seen looking out onto the lake to this day! Spooky! I love a good ghost story. So then we went on to spend a morning at Paignton Zoo. The big kid in me loves the zoo. I petted a Lima. Very soft and friendly. And discovered that Giraffes in love like to taste their partners wee wee! I wish I recorded the giraffes on video rather than photographing them. Seeing is believing It was gross to see, though!

We visited Torquay's famous Bygones museum. Streets are set out like Victorian times. A look into Victorian Edwardian life and a lot of interesting things about life in World War Two. As I'm writing a historical novel era I'd take lots of photos, but I won't bore you with them all. Some were purely for research purposes. But I do really love museums like this, so you can actually see what life would have been like.

Below is a Victorian parlour set out for high tea... complete with a man in a chair with his foot up on a rest stool for gout! I do not know why. Was gout rife in Victorian England? I may have to Google.

The entire museum was started because a husband came home with a steam engine, and his wife allowed him to start collecting all kinds of antiques. The collection got so big that they decided to buy an old cinema and make it into a museum. Pretty cool?

The creepiest thing in the museum, though have got to be these puppets (below). Like the Punch and Judy puppets at the Guildhall Museum in Looe, I posted about recently, I recently blogged about puppets similar to these that used to be in a glass box at Pontins when I was a kid.

You put ten pence in, and they'd dance about to some creepy music, and this was classed as entertainment for kiddies at holiday camps back in the 1970s! No Barney Bear or Lizzie Lizard fan clubs... It's no wonder I grew up with a fascination for witches and vamps and things that go bump in the night! We also stayed in Sidmouth for the last leg of the Devon part of the tour. Very lovely in a God's waiting room kind of way.

We received a lovely experience gift for Christmas. Tea for Two at a posh place! So we held on to the voucher until we came across this very posh hotel called Bovey Castle in the middle of Dartmoor. So we spent the afternoon wandering about the stately home, then had a very lovely High Tea! Bovey Castle from the front.

On the way to Bovey Castle, we stopped off at Buckfast Abbey - the famous beekeeping and wine-producing Abbey by their resident monks. Sadly, the Bee Keeping Monk has left, and they got rid of all the hives, and there doesn't seem to be enough of them left for the public to go round the monastery part, which is a shame really. The gardens and grounds were beautiful, but it seems everything is done by a workforce of civilians now, and the monks are hardly ever seen.

Our Cream Tea at the five-star hotel. Del had Granny's Garden Tea (which was a raspberry and vanilla fruit tea) while I had the Bovey Rose special, which also had rose petals in the teapot! So be careful, my friends, when I get home and invite you over for a brew, don't be surprised if you get some garden flowers in your cup!

This was the cocktail bar. You can't really tell from the photo, but there were fresh herbs and bowls of spices to make any cocktail imaginable. It was amazing and all very... Perfect! They also had the most amazing whisky, Brandy and Port collection. This picture was just the Scottish Islands Whisky shelf, Mainland Scottish Whisky collection was on the other side of the fireplace!! And the most expensive drink was a glass of Remy Martin Brandy for £165 per shot!!!

So that's Devon. Last month of the trip and last county of Dorset to do.

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