After our whistle stop tour of Devon and Cornwall, we headed for Cambridge where my eldest sister Sarah and my brother-in-law Martin live.
As the road trip was a little too long to do in one day we decided to break our journey somewhere around half way. Jonathan went to work and found the perfect place to stop – Wayland’s Smithy – an atmospheric historic site set alongside the ancient ridgeway that is said to be Britain’s oldest road!
For at least 5,000 years travellers have used the Ridgeway with the high ground making travel easy and providing at least some protection against potential attacks.
We spent the night in the car park where the country road leading to the closest village, Ashbury, intersects the Ridgeway and about a one mile (1.6 kilometres) along the Ridgeway from Wayland’s Smithy.
When Jonathan first talked about going to Wayland’s Smithy I imagined we must be going to an ancient blacksmith’s forge but I couldn’t have been more wrong.
It is actually an Early Neolithic chambered long barrow, believed to have been constructed about 3600 BC in which seven adults and one child were buried.
It was built on top of another structure – a stone and timber box in which over a period of 15 years, 14 adults and children were buried.
The barrow sits in gorgeous glade of shady beech trees, silent except for the chattering of starlings perched up in a the highest branches.
Wayland’s Smithy is one of many prehistoric sites associated with Wayland or Wolund, a Germanic smith-god who also appears in Norse mythology.
Legend has it that an invisible smith (Wayland) lived at the site and if a traveller’s horse had lost a shoe while travelling along the ridgeway, they could bring the horse to the smithy, with a coin, and leave both there for a while. When they came back again the traveller would find the money gone and the horse newly shod. We thought the modern equivalent might be a new set of tyres but not surprisingly nothing happened!
Despite the ridgeway being on high ground, there had been so much rain that the path was really muddy and full of puddles, making the one mile walk quite laborious.
The arduous walk was well worth it as the barrow site felt very mystical and and was such a fascinating place.
From there we drove to Cambridge where we had a great evening with my sister Sarah and brother-in-law Martin. As always, we were treated to a sumptuous feast as well as great conversation and plenty of wine.
The following day we drove back to Beckenham in South London for one last night with my other sister who also spoilt us with a wonderful family dinner with my brother Pat, wife Marie and their son James.
We had really enjoyed our trip to England but it was time to leave Beckenham for Dover to catch the ferry back to Calais and then to drive back to Pijnacker where our daughter Hannah and her husband live.
Spring had sprung in the Netherlands and the countryside and all the gardens were bathed in sunshine and everywhere we looked there were lovely daffodils, hyacinths and many other flowers in bud ready to burst into bloom.
After a wonderful relaxing week we set off in the camper van for Austria where we were picking up our fellow yachtie friends, Sue and John, from S/V Catabella.
En route we stopped for some lunch at a fuel station just across the border from the Netherlands. For some reason we had completely forgotten to but milk so Jonathan went off to the garage shop to buy some while I got lunch ready.
He seemed to be taking a really long time but eventually I saw in the distance walking back to the van with a young couple – dressed in red blazers with white hearts emblazoned all over!
It turned out that they were students at the University in Lieden and they were taking part in a game/contest which involved hitching their way to Munster in Germany from Lieden.
They were competing against fellow students to be the first to get there and for safety were only allowed to hitch rides in pairs and from fuel stations.
So we had the company of Koen and Rebecca for a while. Munster was actually quite a long way out of our way so we eventually drove off the autobahn and dropped them off at a fuel station in Drevenack, about an hour’s drive from Munster.
That night we stayed in Limburg an der Lahn which looked very pretty with a very striking cathedral and a medieval centre and we agreed that we should go back and take a proper look one of these days.
Next stop Graz in Austria! We set off at 9am and around 4pm we had our first glimpses of the glorious snow covered alps.
It was reasonably late by the time we arrived in Graz so rather than arrive at Sue and John’s son and daughter-in-law’s house at “witching hour” (they have a one year old son) we decided to stay at the very comfortable and well appointed council run camper van site for the night.
Salty tales from Bali Hai on Sunday 
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