retiredmartin

May 2024. Kinver.

Herefordshire complete, our campervan overnighter at the Waterworks in Hereford’s posh bit (I know !) was quiet apart from the alarm going off twice, the second occasion prompting a security van to come out. Probably just a werewolf.

Better than the alternatives at the dodgy-sounding St. Martin’s car park.

Never mind the “nosey” locals looking in your van ! I’d be more worried about the moroccan’s exclamation frenzy !

2 nights and home, via Mrs RM’s Instagram feeding frenzy at Kinver Edge’s Rock Houses,

in what a generous person might call “Greater Black Country”.

I could have parked at the rock houses, but instead stopped 20 minutes short at the entrance to Kinver Edge so Mrs RM would have something to moan about, and some views towards Stourbridge to match those from the Malverns 20 miles south.

No, they really are great views, and a walk through a forest of blue bells (albeit in rather chillier weather a week ago) leads to the National Trust hut. £7.50 well spent; 20 years ago National Trust membership was the in-laws default Christmas present to us, and I grew to detest those stately homes with pompous volunteers explaining hereditary lines.

But the staff at Kinver are wonderful, cheery and engaging and full of tales about their own lives (including Kinver Constitutional Club),

which is only right because they either remember the trips up here for cake before the NT took it over 30 years ago,

or in the case of one chap (below) his own Dad was the last person to leave here, in the late ’60s.

I wanted to ask him where the Black Country started and stopped, but he’d grown up in London and didn’t seem a big Batham fan or anything.

Not much for the beer enthusiasts,

though of course the NT have packed the two main rooms with period appropriate tat,

but this is a wonderful way to spend an hour or two hearing about the life of folk who lived in these houses built into the rock, homes without running water the internet and Beer 52 deliveries. But even more astonishing was the revelation that 17,000 people arrived at these caves by tram on ONE Bank Holiday in 1905,

and there was only one (1) toilet.

Bit like a Stourbridge micropub, then.

Great view, attractive gardens, terrific tea shop;

Blimey, we’re sounding awfully middle-aged, aren’t we, Mrs RM ?