221: Baddesley Clinton

OS Explorer map 221, Coventry & Warwick: Royal Leamington Spa & Kenilworth – I do not own this map, but had visited before starting this blog. Visited again for this post 16th April 2024

Google Maps location links: Craven Arms, Baddesley Clinton, Warwick Castle, Warwick University

Shropshire trip

As regular readers will know, I fairly often go on holidays with one or another of my groups of friends, usually four to six people, and have a jolly time. For a long while, though, I’ve been thinking of doing something different, and running a big group trip bringing together lots of my friends from different groups. In 2023, I decided to finally go ahead with it and, with a whole year’s notice to increase the chance people would be free, contacted everyone, got their availabiltiy and confirmed they’d be interested in coming, and then booked a big house for the weekend of 13th April 2024! We went ahead, thirteen people in the end, and I really enjoyed it!

As the time of the gathering approached, I wrote up a document with various details – directions, food plans, ideas for activities, etc. – to share with the people coming. (You’re welcome to look at a redacted version of it here!) In that document, I wrote a little bit about why I wanted to do the trip, which I thought may be interesting to put here!

• Spending a few days together is my favourite way to spend time with friends; especially ones I don’t see very frequently.
  • I think the longer period and going away together (or being at someone’s house) adds something beyond shorter meetings. Partly just more time is better, but I think interactions also get better over a longer period; gives you time to “settle in” in some way that is nice. It gives a few relaxed evenings, which can be some of the best favourite friend-time. And there’s time to split off into smaller groups and things.
• So this trip just means I get an extra one of those, with all my closest friends, this year.
• I also really enjoy the logistical side of running big trips, I like cooking for people, and I like facilitating other people having a nice time! 
• Or a more historical answer:
  • I really enjoyed the similar-ish big gathering I did for my 21st birthday in 2016. A few years ago I was doing my personal budgeting and just thinking about “what could I spend my money on that would be most fulfilling”, and thought, doing another big gathering like that is probably one of the top few options.  
  • I sat on it for a while, as I’d vaguely parked it for a future significant birthday, but then I thought; the birthday part isn’t important. So this year I just went ahead with it!
  • Also thought it might be convenient to get it in before anyone starts having babies, which will add a bit of complexity.

I decided – especially after some looking to confirm it should be possible to do cheaply enough to be affordable – that I’d pay for all the accommodation, since it felt a bit weird to be asking people to come on a holiday I want to do with lots of people they don’t really know, and also asking them to fully pay for it. The nature of this trip made it a perfect time to break out one of my top tips for affordable holidays: I think there are interesting things to see and do pretty much everywhere in the country, and the point of a holiday with friends is usually to have a nice time together, not to see something very specific. So I like to just go on Airbnb, set the location to “UK”, accommodation type to “Entire place”, the number of people/bedrooms as needed; then just put the price filter low enough that there are only a few dozen results, look through and discount the ones that look dodgy or boring, and see what’s the best of the rest.

Whether it’s just that some hosts happen to set low prices, or that these places are in need of renovation or have shonky heating or something, usually you can get amazingly cheap prices doing this. Like, the cheapest few places tend to be a lot cheaper than just the averagely cheap, if that makes sense. And this trip was no exception; I’m really happy with the place I found: it was a beautiful old farm building near Craven Arms in Shropshire, with seven bedrooms, and we got it for £1,005 for four nights, working out at just £17.95 per person-space per night, which I think is really good. The low price did mean It was very dated inside, and had inconveniently few toilets/showers, but none of that is a major problem, and we had a great time! Obviously that is still a lot of money in total – it’ll be the most expensive thing I’ve paid for all year – but it’s also one of the things I’d most like to spend money on, and you could easily spend that much on a not-even-very-fancy international trip for two people; whereas I got to take 13 people on this trip!

The trip itself was actually entirely within map areas I’ve already posted about – 203 and 217 – so I won’t give a detailed narration of what we did, and will instead just leave you a handful more photos!

This actual map area

We had the Shropshire house from Friday afternoon until Tuesday morning, but I said people were welcome to attend for whatever part was convenient to them, and it turned out that No Longer Hairy and I were the only two who stayed the Monday night. On the Tuesday morning, we finished packing up and headed off. Both of us would be driving to our respective homes, NLH to Nottinghamshire, and I back to Moreton (in my parents’ car that I’d borrowed for the occasion), but we realised we had the day free and could use a little more of it together. After some research the night before, we decided to visit the National Trust estate of Baddesley Clinton together, just to the southeast of Birmingham, before heading out separate ways. We duly implemented that plan, arriving at about midday!

I have to say, it was really interesting! I think of myself as more of an English Heritage man than a National Trust one, liking my ruins, castles and abbeys more than a country house, but I enjoyed Baddesley Clinton. It’s a very pretty moated manor house, built around a small central courtyard; high medieval in origin with, as is typical, a lot of alterations and additions over the centuries.

It was definitely a big step up from what I’m used to in terms of level of visitor infrastructure: most sites I go to are either unstaffed places with a few signs here and there, but even when staffed and furnished and having a corner turned into an exhibition so on, are still nothing on what popular National Trust sites can manage. There were a good ten or so volunteers on duty in the house, standing around in various rooms to tell you interesting things and answer your questions. One room had been turned into a comprehensive display about the history of the building – the construction techniques used, complete with little models of types of woodwork; signs covering the history of the house, who lived in the house and did which alterations, clearly indicated on floorplans. The house has some notable priest holes, including one for which there’s a surviving account of its successful use, which is very cool; and a Victorian Catholic chapel, which felt unfamiliar.

And of course, unlike places that have been unoccupied for centuries, National Trust houses are full of furniture and all the trappings of the lives of the last generations to live there before it was given into the trust’s hands, which just makes for a very different experience to a castle that’s been unoccupied for the last few centuries. The signs and volunteers gave prominent mention to the group they called the “Victorian Quartet”, two related married couples who lived in the house in the latter half of the 19th century – lots of details on them, and all the other notable characters ofthe house’s history, on the National Trust website here. What I found particularly fun was that one of the ladies was an artist, and her paintings are all over the house, often being paintings of some or all of the four of them getting on with their lives, recognisably in the very same room where the painting hangs, and often with the same furniture. They seem to have had a cosy time living in the house together and doing their various hobbies!

After touring the house, we had a very nice lunch in the café, and then went off our separate ways. A very nice epilogue to a great trip!

Previous visits

I’ve been to this map area many times over the years; more than I remember since it’s fairly close to my Northamptonshire childhood home, and includes Coventry where my parents had friends who we used to visit. I’ll just talk about a couple of specific things that come to mind!

One time I came here on a school trip to Warwick Castle in June 2005. Warwick Castle, official website here, is rather a theme-park-ified castle, indeed being owned by a big entertainment company that runs many of the big theme parks around the UK, and Madame Tussauds and things like that. For that reason it’s a rather unfamiliar experience to visiting most castles, with the rooms being full of waxwork people. This clearly made an impression on ten-year-old me, since I took a lot of photos of wax people!

This map area also contains Warwick University – which is, a little oddly, not in Warwick at all but instead on the outskirts of Coventry. I’ve been to the university several times, the earliest being when I did a week of work experience there when I was sixteen, in August 2011 – this being a thing where the school had decreed that we should all do a week or two of work experience somewhere, but since it’s not very useful to take on a sixteen-year-old for such a period, everyone just ends up somewhere where your parents could prevail on a friend to take you on. I did a week helping out the administrator for a clinical trial at the university’s Clinical Trials Unit, because my cousin’s wife’s sister also worked at the university and was able to get me in! These work experience things are usually a bit of a fake pointless exercise – as I think was more the case for the other week I did with a friend of my mum’s at an engineering company in Kent, where I just spent the week messing about with engineering software – but I think I was actually of some use in the Warwick one, having created some webpages for them. It was this clinical trial about neck cancer, which it looks like completed in 2015 and published its final report two years later.

I also came to Warwick University several times while I was an undergrad in Oxford, because I was part of the Quiz Society, which does competitive quizbowl, a buzzer-based academic quiz format with teams of four who compete to answer starter questions (“tossups”), teammates buzzing in to answer without conferring and getting a penalty for answering wrongly, and successful starter questions being rewarded with a set of bonus questions for that team, on which conferring is allowed. It’ll be most familiar to British people from the TV programme University Challenge – one of the few actually interesting quiz shows, in my opinion, along with Only Connect – which uses an only slightly different format, the main difference being that UC’s starter questions are pretty short affairs, whereas quizbowl’s tend to be several sentences long, starting with really obscure clues to the answer, and getting easier towards the end of the question, so that most teams will be able to get it right by the end, and the competition is in how early you can answer.

There was also an active quiz society at Warwick, so some tournaments were regularly held there, and I’d travel over once or twice a year to be on one of the Oxford teams entering. I was never that great at it, usually in one of the lowest of the teams that Oxford would put up, but still, I enjoyed it! The tournaments would usually be “mirrors” of tournaments being held in the US, so that the question “packets” didn’t have to be to be completely written for the Warwick events, but rather just “Briticised” as people would say, changing the emphasis of, say, history and politics questions to be better-balanced for a British context.

Fortunately, I always accessed my university emails via my GMail account, so I still have all of my email history even though my university accounts were deleted when I left. I just had a look through some old quiz society emails, and have discovered that the quiz stats websites, showing how players and teams performed, are all still accessible! Here’s my record from what must have been the first tournament I was ever in, in November 2012. As you can see, I was in the Oxford E team, and had the joint lowest score of any Oxford player, with a “points per tossup” (P/TU) of 0.38, meaning I on average got 3.8 10-point starter questions out of every hundred (with each wrong buzz counting as negative half of a correct buzz). Two years later, I had clearly improved enough to be in the B team, but I notably remember that tournament because our team was called “Oxford Blastoise”. Apparently our teams were all named by the squad captain after Pokémon characters starting with letters A-E, but I wasn’t familiar with Pokémon and upon first seeing the team name, wrongly assumed it was probably some lesser-known French philosopher, and pronounced it accordingly…