Transport rant

Market Rasen station - I think someone must have been having a bonfire

I am coming up for my first year at Market Rasen.  I do love it, and I am deeply in love with the countryside, but I am beginning to get really rather cross about certain things.  I chose my house, which is five minutes from the train station, because I have children in their teens and twenties with friends and family around the country, and I wanted it to be easy for them to get to see them.  I also had hopes that we'd be able to get jobs in Lincoln, which is the nearest big town.

While I was able to commute back and forth down the Metropolitan Line to Aldgate every day in London without a problem - and find about 15 other ways of getting there if there were problems on that line, there are only two ways of getting to Lincoln on public transport:  there are three trains in the early morning, or a bus once an hour.

However, despite the fact that one's best chance of being able to get a job is in Lincoln, if you're wanting an office or shop job with normal opening hours, there's not much public transport to help.  The 6.22 will get you to Lincoln at about twenty to seven.  Pretty early for a 9-5 day.  The 7.39 will get you there at around 8am - again pretty early for a 9-5 day, but wait, there's quite a good chance that you won't get on the train at all.  Having come from Grimsby, and being a single carriage train, there is every chance that you may fail not only to get a seat but to get on the train at all.

The situation is just as parlous on the way home.  So if you were lucky enough to get a job working 9-5 in an office somewhere in Lincoln, you'd have every chance of having to spend at least the first hour of the day kicking your heels in a cafe somewhere, and the last hour too.  And if you don't manage to get on the 7.39am train?  You'll be waiting two and a bit hours for the 9.55am! 

I had no conception of the difficulty of living in a small town if you don't drive.  It is true my son does drive, but he's in University at different times every day, and some days has to leave at 6am to do a shift at BBC radio Lincolnshire.  It would not be an easy option.

What annoys me the most is the lack of any understanding that this is a problem locally. The new local plan calls for new housing to be built all over the area, with hardly a mention of the inadquate public transport provision *anywhere*.  I plastered the plan with my objections to this fact, but the other members of the Market Rasen Rail Users Group tell me there is very little interest in the poor train service locally.  In fact the representative from the Country Council left before the service on the Market Rasen line was discussed. 

You can't even go into Lincoln for a film or a meal, if you don't own a car and don't want to shell out £40 each way for taxis.  The trains stop before 9pm and the buses earlier.

It's annoying that the people in authority point to the line as it is and decide that there's no demand for an increase in services... and that the local train line, East Midlands, and the government can't make up their minds who is responsible for the level of service contracted to East Midlands - or who is empowered to change that.

I realise that a rural and less populated area such as this pat of Lincolnshire can't justify the sorts of high level of public transport I am used to in London... but this level of service doesn't even reach a basic baseline.  It's appalling.  And listening to the huge number of trains which pass through the station without stopping -feeling themeven, as the floor and ornaments rattle - is just adding insult to injury.

If people could rely on a good and frequent service to Lincoln, I can guarantee that it would be used.  How to prove that in absence of the service, I do not know.

At home with the cold callers

There's nothing guaranteed to get my blood boiling quicker than a cold caller, most especially one who seems to be running a scam.  Since I moved to Lincolnshire I have noticed a distinct increase in the sorts of PPI, you've had an accident, how's your loft insulation? calls.  I'm not at all clear how these work, but when challenged for company names and details the callers invariably ring off.

I'm registered with the telephone preference service, and I regularly report people who call me repeatedly.  One would have thought that BT or other providers might be able to tell if a company is operating a somewhat dodgy operation:  if they are making dozens of phone calls and choosing to withhold their number, I would have thought that technology had advanced far enough for BT to be able to isolate the number and run some checks on the company.

One company which didn't withhold their number was Charter Legal, who have phoned me more than once despite my pointing out I am registered with the telephone preference service, and despite promising to remove me.  They appear to be offering some sort of ringfence to protect your assets against the government - at least that was what I understood from their cold caller girl.  Their website actually states the opposite.

In general, though, the companies which do this sort of cold calling are virtually indistinguishable from the bogus callers who claim to be policemen with your credit card details or Government researchers wanting to know if you have claimed your pension rights/PPI repayment etc.  I'd ban it, and put fines in place for those who carry on.  

Goltho: the enclosure where marigolds grow

There's an official walk through the Limewoods and around Goltho which I found online, but which claims to be seven or over nine kilometres (depending on the route chosen).  We were mostly interested in the deserted mediaeval village which once clustered around Goltho church, which appears at the end of the official walk, and so we decided to do just the end of the walk.

Unfortunately the map is a poor one, which doesn't reflect what is found on the ground, nor do I think it is right about the distance - we walked for a good 40 minutes from the Wragby Market Place carpark, which is where you are instructed to leave your car, to reverse the end of the walk and get to Goltho church.  It would have been possible to drive to the place where the footpath takes one across the field, and cut that walk by 30 minutes.  I wouldn't say the walk from the market place to the footpath is particularly beautiful or interesting, although parking might be a problem.


So, from the Market Place, we walked down Bardney Road until we passed the Wragby maze and conifer centre, and then turned right and walked until we had passed the bend in the road.  It was a lovely autumn day.

Crossing the ploughed field using the unploughed grassy path, the wind was high but the weather was warm and sunny and it was exhiliarating, rather than cold.  We climbed a small path, crossed a bridge and then followed the track of the public right away straight across another field... not knowing that the site of a motte and bailey castle was buried in the field to the left of our pathway across to the church, which is clearly seen on Google Earth.

Goltho was founded in the Roman period, it is believed, was inhabited in the Anglo Saxon period and really flourished around the 12th century.  However, poor harvests in the 15th century led to its abandonment.  It can't have been completely abandoned then, as some of the gravestones in the churchyard date from the 19th century, but there is precious else to record the village as it used to be.

 I love the paradox of the name... Goltho sounds like the name of a village in Mordor, as Eelco remarked, but "the enclosure where marigolds grow" sounds romantic and pretty.  There were no marigolds today.

Strangely wikipedia says that the church was founded in 1530, by the Grantham family of Goltho Hall, although they say the village was deserted in the 15th century.  There is little to see nowadays, although the countryside is stunning.  Parts of the church including the roof were destroyed by fire in 2013, the most likely cause being a lightning strike. 






I think we will need to make a return journey to see the village properly and also the Limewoods nearby.  We were on our way to a celebration lunch, and the table was booked for one o'clock, and so we tried our best to take the most direct route back to Wragby.  Even so, I had to ask my sons to walk on ahead and get the car, as I knew that I was slowing the whole party down and we'd miss our booking.  We had a lovely meal at the Ivy in Wragby and then returned home via the Sunnyside Up farm shop in Tealby.

Parchment fan

I went for a quick look in the charity shops this afternoon.  I found a couple of display cases for pipes, which I bought for John's collection of clay pipes, from the Salvation Army, and a rather wonderful parchment fan in the Age UK shop.

It is pierced, gilded and painted with coloured inks.  It looks old to me, and some of the coloured inks on the parchment are faded, but I can find very little aboout parchment fans online that isn't modern.  I've emailed the V and A to see what they can tell me, and will have to wait and see.  Meanwhile, here's a picture.

Market Rasen: blue bin blues

I saw someone piling a vast quantity of plastic into their blue bin this morning.  Sheet plastic isn't recyclable and shouldn't go in the blue bin.  Now, having moved from another area, where the rules are different, I'm the first to admit that it can be difficult to work out what goes in which bin.  But I'm very unclear about the etiquette if one sees a neighbour filling the recycling bin with non recyclables.  Do I rush out and tell him, like a busybody?  Or would that be the neighbourly thing to do?  Too late, I've missed my chance and he's gone inside again.

I only recently learned that to be a good recycler, you should ensure that card and foil isn't contaminated with food residue, and bottles are properly washed out and clean.   You shouldn't just toss that shampoo bottle into the recycling bin - wash it out first.  And if there are food particles adhering to that pizza box, put it in the black bin and not the blue.

Recycling in Market Rasen is very different from Hillingdon Borough.  They accept aerosols, tetrapaks, plastics marked 1 and 2, as well as the normal glass, card, paper and tins and cans.  I discovered that they have a handy A-Z guide that tells you which bin to put things in.

They also have a recycling centre on the industrial estate, which takes a lot of stuff in addition - textiles, batteries, oil, soil, wood, gas cylinders, with very helpful staff (although they guard their always largely empty staff car park aggressively). 

Restaurant review: The Advocate Arms, Market Rasen

Normally when I have dined somewhere, I come home and post a review on Trip Advisor.  I'm not doing that this time - I'm really fed up with them since they allowed someone to use my BT email address to set up an account and seem to be unwilling to fix that.  So I'm going to write my review here.

The Advocate Arms has a slightly forbidding exterior, mainly caused by the weird single person revolving door which propels you into a no man's land: in front of the bar, between the restaurant and the cafe, not sure which way is up.  I've been here a few times now, so we know where things are.

We were asked to go and have a drink at the bar before being taken to our table, something that several of the restaurants in Market Rasen seem to like to ask patrons to do.  It always seems a bit odd to me... in London most restaurants (unless you are having to wait for a table to be free)
will take your drinks order when you are at the table and have the menu.  We sat in the bar and ordered a drink, but had to move to our table almost the second our drinks were delivered.

The restaurant was a bit warm and sticky, and the busiest I have ever seen it.  Despite this, the service was spot on, with waiters and waitresses appearing at regular intervals.  The food was delicious.  I ordered the citrus-cured sea trout as a starter, my companion the marinated duck breast and both were very well presented and tasted gorgeous. 

As a main course I chose the roast chicken supreme, which was delightful.  It was presented on a bed of Lincolnshire Poacher potato, with parma ham crisps and buttered green vegetables and I savoured every mouthful.  My companion had the calves liver, which was very good indeed, he reported.

For pudding we both chose the Strawberry and Champagne panna cotta, which came with sorbet and strawberry terrine and little meringue buttons.  It was perfect, it enhanced the delicate flavours of the fruit and wasn 't too sweet.  I loved it.  With two aperitifs, a bottle of prosecco, a bottle of sparkling mineral water and two coffees, the whole meal came to around £60.  The Advocate have a special offer on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday which is a bargain at £13.95 for two courses or £16.95 for three.

If I have any complaint at all, it's a tiny nit-picking one:  the restaurant uses local produce which it labels as "Lincolnshire" this and that.  If they are as careful about sourcing their ingredients as the food preparation indicates, it would be nice to have more detail about where the meat and fish come from, on the menu.

Other than that, it was an extremely enjoyable meal, at a bargain price -what more could you want? For Trip advisor one usually marks a restaurant out of five, and I have no hesitation in awarding the Advocate five stars for my meal this evening. 

Cleethorpes beachcombing

I haven't blogged a lot here recently because I have been south, and I had catching up to do, and I've had house guests.  Kate has only been here this week, and it has been lovely to have her here.  She's going back today.

The weather hasn't been great while she's been with me - mostly wet and windy - but the weather forecast was for better weather yesterday afternoon, and so we decided to go to Cleethorpes.  It gave her a chance to play the games on the pier and me a chance to beachcomb.

Ali drove us to Cleethorpes and because we had stopped off for petrol on our way, the SATNAV took us the scenic route through the countryside at Tealby and Binbrook and Waltham, which was lovely, although the sky seemed to become more threatening and not less as we aproached the coast.

We were all three of us hungry by the time we got there at 2.30pm, as we'd not had lunch and some of us hadn't had breakfast either, and so we stopped at Steele's Corner House for something to eat before we hit the beach.  It was lovely, although the experience was rather like stepping back into the 1950s, with uniformed waitresses, and an old fashioned feel to the decor and food.  It was gorgeous though.  I had the best crab salad I've had since my grandfather died.

We set off for the pier, but it really wasn't beach weather, with the sand whipping up a mini sandstorm from time to time as I beachcombed.  Although there seemed to be a deposit line along the beach in places, in many places the shells and wood had been redistributed by some sort of mechanical operation - I think they may have skimmed or bulldozed the sand. 

This made it a lot less satisfying to beachcomb, but I stuck with it, and got some driftwood, a few shells and a lot of wood and sea washed coaly stuff.  I've read that there is a submerged forest off the coast of Cleethorpes, and it is true that a lot of the wood is dark and very smooth.  But some of the "wood" may be coal dropped from ships I suppose.

It's weird how different beaches are - Cleethorpes has a lot of medium sized tellins in pairs, especially pink ones, and paired cockle shells... but no sea washed glass.  In fact I picked up quite a lot of sharp glass before realizings that I wasn't going to be able to carry all the glass from the beach.  Most sandy beaches will seawash the glass into smooth shapes which are etched by the action of the sea, but I haven't found any properly smooth sea glass on this beack - at the most it may be slightly cloudy, but still with sharpish ends and points.  I think this may be why the shells retain their definition and stay in pairs too.

Ali and Kate had fun on the pier, winning hundreds of tickets which translated to a bouncy egg and a tiny teddy figurine, but they'd had fun, and I had fun, even if the beachcombing was disappointing and the weather a bt grim.