OS Explorer map 246, Loughborough: Melton Mowbray & Syston – I do not own this map, and had not visited it before starting this blog. OS Explorer map 212, Woodbridge & Saxmundham: Aldeburgh & Framlingham – I own this map, and hadn’t visited it before starting this blog. Provisionally visited 5th July 2018, only provisionally under The Rules because I visited the overlap between maps 246 and 245; but then un-visited 31st December 2018 when I visited Vesper’s childhood home, in 245 proper, causing the earlier visit to “flip” to counting for 245. Re-visited 246 for this post 24th December 2023.
Google Maps location links: Melton Mowbray, the Harvester near Loughborough
Initial note: as indicated above, this is a “re-visit” post – and is in fact only the second time this has ever happened on the blog – the previous being about the Suffolk coast in late 2020!
My previous post told you of the few days I spent in a holiday cottage in North Yorkshire with my parents just before Christmas 2023, visiting Nidderdale, Ripon and a few other places. We drove back to my parents’ house in Northamptonshire on Christmas Eve, and after looking at options for places to stop for lunch on the way, deciding on Melton Mowbray; it being fairly conveniently located, and a town none of us (I think) had visited before.
I don’t have a terribly large amount to report, really. After a brief wander through the town’s streets, we settled into a little café for lunch. It was endearingly flowery, with little flowers on the tablecloths, every piece of crockery, the curtains and I’m sure plenty more.
I had a blue cheese and mushroom toastie, which was great – I do appreciate creativity outside the standard two vegetarian toastie options of cheese-and-onion or cheese-and-tomato, and it just was very tasty. If I remember correctly, all their coleslaw was vegan too, which was great for me as a lacto-vegetarian (i.e. dairy is fine but no eggs), since I usually have to turn down coleslaw due to the egg in the mayonnaise.
I felt the town centre of Melton Mowbray was nice enough – unremarkable but lively and not at all run-down. That’s it really: after lunch, we got back in the car and drove off!
A blog musing
This was not a very interesting post. Very short, not especially interesting posts like this used to happen a lot in the early days of the blog, when I had a much broader rule for what counted as a map visit: if I were travelling through a map area and stopped for something, it’d count as a visit as long as I clearly left the route I was travelling – a motorway service station, or railway station where I changed trains, wouldn’t count; but getting properly off the motorway just to stop at a shop briefly would. My original visit to this map area is a prime example of the short, boring posts this was often resulting in.
Nowadays, The Rules are much tighter, and I only count it as a visit if I “exited my mode of transport, clearly left areas that are related to the mode(s) of transportation I was using, and did something that wasn’t purely fulfilling needs I faced as a through-traveller” – excluding things like supermarket stops and picking someone up at a meeting point. I also often just use my discretion and don’t post things that could technically count but I think are still too nothing-y.
However, I still have to put the bar somewhere. In this case I had a good wander around the town centre of a town I’d not visited before, which I think should fully count – I just didn’t really visit any specific sites of interest or note anything I wanted to comment on. So, while the boring posts are much fewer now, it looks like they do still happen. (I also don’t think I’m terribly consistent with my rule. There are some visits on a similar scale to this which I didn’t write about, I think. Oh well.)
I don’t like this, since I don’t believe there are any boring map areas, or really any boring towns: it’d be easy to find something interesting to do or talk about in the Melton Mowbray map, and in Melton Mowbray itself – Wikipedia claims it has “one of the finest parish churches in Leicestershire” for example. I feel like part of the ethos of this blog and part of why I’ve been to so much of the UK is because there just is something interesting nearly everywhere, and I love discovering the small-scale interesting things – footpaths, churches, ruins, little woods, local museums, fun place-names, random signs telling me a bit of local history. Boston, for example, has a reputation as a bit of a sad, boring, nothing-y place, but I loved my visit there. It’s just that on this visit to Melton Mowbray, I didn’t really look for anything notable, and didn’t happen to run across it either.
Maybe the answer here is to have a higher bar, and only count a visit if I really feel I saw something interesting, really appreciated something about the place itself. This is appealing; but I also like the idea that what I’m tracking as I think about my goal of visiting every map area is which areas I’ve visited: my current rule seems like a reasonable definition of “a real visit to a place, not something that’s just me happening to travel through”. Applying the higher bar feels like it fits with that less well: I do feel I’ve visited Melton Mowbray now, unambiguously.
I suppose the issue here is that two purposes of what counts as a visit are in tension: on the one hand, this is a travel blog, and a visit is something I write about on the blog, which makes me want to have the higher bar and only count a place once I’ve visited it well enough to actually appreciate it. On the other, a visit is about ticking off progress towards my goal of visiting every map area, for which I want the somewhat lower bar.
Overall, I think I’ll stick to my current rule. The short, boring posts are pretty infrequent now: I actually don’t think I’ve had one in over two years. And if I want, I can always come back and visit again, and start re-posting about places if I feel I didn’t do them justice last time! I’m content enough; all good.
Visiting all the maps! 