The second bank holiday in May
provided the opportunity to travel to the picturesque south west of England to
the banks of the River Tamar for a few days. This trip fell under the category
of a stag weekend for a friend, the type of event where a group of everyday
blokes get together for a bit of a laugh and somehow collectively become
invincible, as if they have turned into every comic book superhero dreamed up
by Marvel. The location of our trip was near to Weir Quay, just outside Bere
Alston in Devon.
Getting to this area was not too
much trouble as the route chosen was taking the M4 to Bristol and M5 to Exeter
before merging with the A30 trunk road that runs through the heart of Devon and
Cornwall. The road gets more interesting when you have to turn off around
Okehampton and take the A386 around the western perimeter of Dartmoor National
Park. This can be quite a fast stretch of road that rewards enthusiastic
driving and also the senses as you are greeted with a majesterial, panoramic
view of Dartmoor with its many ancient tors. The road then reaches the old
market town of Tavistock, the home town of the famous mariner, Sir Francis
Drake. After negotiating the town, we had to take the A390, another quiet and
twisty road that will please many drivers in sporty cars. The last few miles of
the journey are completed on single track B roads that sometimes don’t have
many passing places and overgrown hedges before finally emerging down at the
riverside.
The trip was memorable for a
rowing experience organised by the local sailing club in their 2 gigs, Ginette and Belinda O’Flynn, the former of which was crafted from wood and the
latter was a more modern fibre glass construction. We learned that gigs were
originally used to take pilots out to vessels coming in from the Atlantic. The
racing element came in from the fact that the first pilot to reach the incoming
vessel would get the payment for the job of navigating the ship from the open
sea to the port. These days, the sport of gig racing is thriving in the south
west Most of our group hadn’t any sailing experience and we had an experienced
rower from the club to add more horsepower to the group. Our cox was a pleasant
lady who had much patience in the face of some erratic timing in the early
stages of our trip as we went against the tide. Eventually, we got into a
coherent rhythm and both gigs had a race as we travelled back upstream. The
worst part of this experience was placing the gigs in the freezing cold Tamar
and lifting them out again.
We also had an experience of clay
pigeon shooting, an activity that was well received by the group. We were ably
assisted by a local farmer who had all the natural instincts for gun handling
that you would expect from one who works the land. As we crossed the fields in
his Mitsubishi pick-up on that beautiful sunny afternoon, he said that it would
be cloud and rain the next day, a prophesy that I took more seriously than
anything that could’ve came from complex computer modelling at the Met Office
in Exeter.
Our first round of shooting
involved standing at the top of the field and tracking the target as it flew
down towards the trees. This was then followed by standing at the bottom of the
field and tracking the flight of the clay as it flew towards the area where we
were standing. This scenario was rather like a reconstruction of the enemy
rockets flying towards Israel and being intercepted by the Iron Dome, although
it’s fair to say that some of the shooting lacked the precision of the famous
missile interceptor system and I even got hit on the left leg by a piece of
clay pigeon shrapnel. There was a scary moment when one of our group almost
shot himself in the foot, but thankfully the bullet buried into the ground and
the show went on. Our final round involved moving back to the top of the field
where there was an informal shooting contest with two guns targeting one clay
pigeon, an event that produced my best kill of the day, although the armed
forces won’t be signing me up any time soon.
This part of the country is made
up of many small close knit communities and it was also nice to have a drink in
the Olde Plough Inn pub at Bere Ferrers, a pub that is on the Tamar Valley
railway line’s “Rail Ale Trail” recommendation list. The pub had all the character, convivial atmosphere
and good choice of ales that you would
expect from such an establishment.
I have been on many family
holidays to the Devon and Cornwall since 1989 and it never fails to captivate
as you will always stumble across a nice view or sleepy hamlet that you hadn’t
seen before. The experiences of the May bank holiday weekend added to that rich
tapestry of memories of the west country but as for any other aspects of the
stag weekend, this information is filed under the code of omerta.
