Cardiff to Marhamchurch

On Maundy Thursday, lunching with my sister at the Pen and Wig pub near Cardiff University we caught a glimpse of the Queen distributing Maundy money (on TV). We'd met my sister at the University bookshop where we couldn't resist buying two little books in Spanish, one in Italian and (Chris' choice) Procopius' Secret History of the reign of Justinian (the Roman Emperor of Constantinople in the 6th century.

We left Cardiff the next morning driving down the M4 and the M5 towards the cathedral city of Exeter. The wind was blowing strongly so that the car we'd hired was hard to steer at times. South of Bristol we were held up in a traffic jam for a while, eventually passing the scene of a motorbike accident, the rider lying on the road; perhaps a gust of wind had caught him too. It being Good Friday, I noticed three crosses on the summit of a hill we passed, Brent Knoll, an outcrop of the Mendips. We were to meet Emma, Peter and Alexander when their train reached Exeter St David's station, after stopping at a motorway "services" for lunch, where several men and boys were dressed as pirates for a charity stunt, enjoying themselves.

Our plan for six of us to meet John and Gill at the station worked perfectly, so then we could drive on in two cars, skirting Dartmoor, our last few miles into Marhamchurch down narrow, cow-manured country lanes. In this aerial shot taken later in the week you should be able to make out the tennis courts that were part of Court Farm's facilities. (While we were there it was too cold for tennis but we did make use of the swimming pool).

The village of Marhamchurch, a mile or two inland from Bude, with its pub, village shop, village hall, bus stop, village conveniences, village school and so on, is built around the St Marwenne's church. Marwenne may either have been one of the twenty-four children of the celtic King Broccan or Brychan (from Talgarth in Wales) or an abbess from Romsey; at any rate she established a hermitage at the spot where the Marhamchurch war memorial (see my picture above) now stands. The church dates back to the fourteenth century and the Cornish flag flies from its tower. At the weekend Mum and I took a look inside the church, its porch colourfully decorated for Easter by the Marhamchurch Primary School Gardening Club who'd left a row of globe flowers in pots on the stone bench. Inside and in the peaceful graveyard were carved tributes to young men of the village who'd joined the Navy and had perished in wartime, one in the Battle of Jutland, for example.