Base Camp Journal - On the Coast of the Bristol Channel
The Hurne Lane Caravan and Motorhome Club site is just four miles south of Weston-Super-Mare, and very close to a village called ‘Berrow’. It is on the Somerset side of the Bristol Channel. Being only a 1.5 hour drive, it seemed an ideal location for our first trip with Bertha this year.
I thought the Hurne Lane CMC site was very basic, maybe because, unlike the typical CMC site, it’s a large expanse of pitches without trees and bushes dividing them into sections. But it has a very friendly atmosphere, and it was pleasantly quiet, despite being surrounded by static caravan parks and suchlike resorts. I do recommend rocking up to the entrance slightly before the opening time, to avoid being left with a pitch next to the play area.
Troubleshooting Problems with the Swift Base Camp Water System
Robby was the first to notice there was something wrong with the hot water tank after we’d connected Bertha to the electricity and water supplies. The pump was drawing cold water through the system perfectly fine, but hadn’t filled the hot water tank first, and the warning light came on for the heating - typically that means it was trying to heat a tank full of pressurised air, and the simple fix would be to open all the hot water taps until water circulates.
That didn’t work, so we tried holding the reset buttons on the tank and on Bertha’s main power unit. We spent about twenty minutes trying that, hoping there’d be that one reset that fixes the problem.
The next thing I did was go through the electrical system itself, checking the MCBs, inspecting each fuse and having a good look at the wiring. As far as I could tell, the heating and pump systems themselves were functional. Robby was frustrated at that point, and not happy about the possibility of having to take Bertha in for servicing. I was more curious.
Then it occurred to me: Before our last trip, Robby had the ingenious idea of using a rigid tube to hold the water filter near the bottom of the main tank, as a workaround for another slightly annoying problem. Bertha’s water pump was designed to draw water into the system, but, with the filter being held near the bottom of the tank, the water was being forced in by ~25Kg of pressure, probably causing a sensor-related thing to switch the pump off. We removed the tube, and everything worked fine.
The Area
Of course, Robby and I wanted to know where the nearest pubs or bars were, and which were within walking distance. There weren’t many showing up on my map.
The nearest one we found was the Sundowner Beach Bar, which is less than a kilometre north along the main road. It’s more of a cafe that serves drinks, rather than an actual bar, but it was dead quiet and very friendly, and I think the interior decor makes it a perfect place to have breakfast early on a summer morning. The Sundowner is actually on the most direct path to the beach. All the other routes will take one down a winding path of mud, brambles and undergrowth.
The beach itself would be pleasant enough when it’s warm and sunny - it’s certainly the nicest beach we visited in the region, and one would have a perfect view of the sunset. Being an estuary, what passes for sand on most the beaches in this region is more silt and mud. Maybe it dries quicker in the summer, between tides. I could see the lights, in the distance, of what I believe was the Aberthawe Power Station. It didn’t seem more than a few miles away.
Just across the road from the Sundowner Bar was the entrance to a large static caravan site, which Robby wanted to explore. Maybe there were shops and a proper bar there. We did pass a convenience store, but not much else. The site looked very much like the archetypal quiet American middle-class suburb, as we see in films, with the grass and roads immaculately maintained. But it was too vast, uniform and sterile for my liking.
Eventually, after walking down a long road, we spotted motorhomes in the distance. ‘That’s our caravan site! I can see motorhomes down there.’, Robby said. ‘I doubt it. Ours should still be about 400 metres further on.’
Robby was sort of right. We’d covered more ground than I thought, and had walked into another caravan site that just happened to be right next to where we were staying. The problem was the site we’d walked into was vast open ground, it was well after dark, and there were no exits to be seen anywhere. We could have easily jumped the fence into our site, if the site wasn’t surrounded by a deep trench of water too wide to jump across. We ended up walking the entire perimeter of the vast site before finding a main gate.
It wasn’t until we travelled in the direction of Brean Down much later that we discovered all the ammenities in the area are just a hundred metres north of the Sundowner Bar.
Brean Down
I knew there was a place nearby called ‘Brean Down’ that had a few sites of historical interest probably worth visiting, such as forts that were used during World War II. It would have been an ideal point from which to see everything that went across the Channel. I’d imagined Brean Down would have been a relatively flat area of land, just above sea level, extending into the estuary. Unfortunately, it turned out that piece of land is actually a giant rock, which towered over the beach, and it looked like quite a climb to see anything of interest.
The climb wasn’t as difficult as I thought, but everything at the top is exposed to strong blasts of cold wind that seemed to come from the direction of the Atlantic. It’s probably inhospitable in winter. On one side, we could see the lands of Somerset for miles. On the other side, we had a clear view of Weston beach, which appeared to be almost directly below us, and the pier seemed only a short walk from where we stood. And looking out across the Channel, we could see the white buildings near Cardiff Central, and the wall of rain there that was heading our way.
Western-Super-Mare
A 15 minute journey through a few country lanes, past some farms and static caravan parks, took us into Weston-Super-Mare. I used to drive there regularly, a few years ago, but hadn’t visited the beach in more than 20 years.
Weston is a little more run down than it was. There is a high street, with the usual betting and charity shops that we see everywhere these days. I think there was once a giant indoor market close to a hotel, and I’m sure it’s not the current shopping centre.
The pier is obviously different to how I remember it, since the original pavilion burned down a while ago, and was replaced by a building that houses a large amusement thing and a couple of cafes.
Axbridge
I’d heard about Axbridge recently, as a small town that apparently looks like the film set of a mediaeval drama. It is somewhere between Bristol and Cheddar. It definitely sounded like it was worth a look, since we were heading that way.
There isn’t much to see in Axbridge, as it’s mostly a quiet residential area, but it’s picturesque and there are a few mediaeval buildings near the village square. It’s a place where people stop to have a look as they’re passing through.
Curiously, most of the historical items in Axbridge - some in the church and others in the pub - date from the late 18th century.
Cheddar Gorge and Cave
Slightly further east of Axbridge is Cheddar Gorge, which is impressive enough to attract tourists, mountaineers and rock climbers. Robby thinks it’s the British equivalent to the Grand Canyon.
Was there much of a village in Cheddar, historically? We know there were settlements of sorts around there thousands of years ago. Most the buildings near the gorge today are shops. I learned recently that Cheddar has been renowned for cheese production since the 13th century, which is probably why it became so intrinsic to British culture and ubiquitous enough to be bought anywhere. However, there is an expensive variety of Cheddar cheese that’s matured in the caves.
There were quite a few very nice performance cars going up and down the pass through the gorge, and there were quite a few boy racers showing off their riced vehicles with 1.2 litre engines. We decided to take our car there (Kuga, 2.0 litre turbo edition), to see for ourselves where the pass led.
A visit to Cheddar Gorge wouldn’t be complete without an exploration of one of the caves, so I bought us tickets to enter Gough’s Cave - it costs around £25 per person. Robby and I had the place to ourselves, more or less. I vaguely remember visiting that one with my parents, in the mid-1980s.
The cave path was quite lengthy, and very cavernous. The people maintaining it had set up colourful light sculptures, for some reason. By the way, I discovered that the Canon IXUS 285 HS has pretty decent night vision.
I don’t know what natural process made this cave in the first place, but it was definitely water erosion - perhaps the sea level was high enough, in the distant past, to erode tunnels through the limestone. Some of the rock surfaces look like they’re covered in a pinkish sludge, but it’s actually a thick layer of solid calcium (I think), deposited by water percolating from the surface over millions of years.
Also in the cave were caged shelves where the more expensive variety of Cheddar cheese is left to mature, because the cave has the ideal temperature and humidity.