mutteringhousewife

Hooray for a rest day in what felt like the bustling metropolis of Richmond. Comparatively. We thought we’d hit all the top tourist sites in the town and discovered, consulting Google Maps, that they were all within approximately 200 metres of our bed and breakfast.

First up was the Georgian Theatre Royal, the oldest theatre still operating as a theatre in England. They couldn’t say continuously operating because it had a breather from being a theatre for a bit over one hundred years. There’s a one hour tour and it was brilliant. It was built by Samuel Butler (not the author) in 1788 to take advantage of new laws not requiring player troupes to get written permission from London to put on plays anywhere in England, and to give something for race goers and militia stationed here to do. It currently seats around 150 theatregoers, but they used to pack in hundreds more on wooden benches. I won’t go into the whole history, you can look that up, but it was very lucky to have the stalls preserved and is in terrific condition today.

Then it was into the Richmondshire Museum, one of those marvellous community run museums that houses an eclectic mix of stuff of local interest, stuff that the British Museum couldn’t be bothered with, contents of shops from a hundred years ago, and in this case part of the set of the movie version of All Creatures Great and Small., complete with stuffed dog.

Walking around the Friary Gardens took up the best part of ten minutes, but there is a chunk of Friary not pillaged by the local villagers upon the Reformation to inspire a little bit of awe.

But the big feature of Richmond is its Norman castle. It’s going to be the only proper castle on the route, so we had a lovely explore of it.

Bits of it have slipped down the cliff into the River Swale beneath, but most of the outline is still there, as is the tower with an unphotographable spiral staircase, bits of the great hall, wall latrines and other fun stuff. The Commander had a lovely time at the top of the tower mapping out the superb view of the surrounding landscape, where we’d been, where we were going. I found our B&B.

After that the Commander was keen for the local military museum, but I gave it a miss and left him to it. I thought I’d look at some touristy shops, but for some reason there aren’t any. There’s a pie shop selling a bewildering variety of pork pies, but I’ve never understood the appeal of them (yes, I’ve tried one). There were a couple of little shops selling soaps and candles and cushion covers and such like. There were a surprising number of charity shops. So I came back to the B&B to rest the joints, pick up our laundry (our hosts did it for us for an extremely reasonable fee), and get ready for dinner with some American doctors from Oregon we keep bumping into. We overheard some people at breakfast complaining about the lack of any horizontal lines in this place, their bed had been on a bit of a slope. They asked our host how old the house was, and they hadn’t the faintest. I like it, but then our bed is luckily level. It did make me notice that our door isn’t, though, this isn’t a quirky camera angle, it has been taken straight on. The door jamb has been built to suit the current angles on the house.

It’s one of the things I’ve loved about this trip, all of the visible history around us in these villages that the locals kind of take for granted. I’m sure if I lived in one of these places I could write the novel of the century.