CHRISTIE COMES TO CORNWALL: AND THEN THERE WERE NONE

Aidan Turner fans living in Cornwall must think they have died and gone to heaven.  Not only has the Irish heartthrob made repeated visits to the county for the filming of Poldark – one series in the bag and another to come – but in summer 2015 he turned up on the county’s south coast for the filming of And Then There Were None, a TV adaptation of the Agatha Christie novel of the same name – originally given the rather less PC name Ten Little Niggers - which was aired over Christmas.  Female fans were no doubt particularly thrilled by a scene featuring Turner clad in nothing but a towel. 

The stylish and suspenseful mini-series also included luminaries such as Charles Dance, Miranda Richardson and Sam Neill whose characters form part of a group of people who are lured to an island called Soldier Island under various pretexts.  All of the ‘guests’ have been involved in the deaths of other people during their pasts and escaped justice.  A spooky gramophone recording informs them that they are going to get their comeuppance, and a series of murders ensues until the final scene when only two of the group remain: ex-mercenary Philip Lombard (Aidan Turner) and Vera (Maeve Dermody).  The series was critically acclaimed as a highly atmospheric drama with wonderfully tense scenes, particularly over dinner as the guests all start to suspect each other.

Mullion Island - geograph.org.uk - 371703. Photo by John Garfoot, via Wikimedia Commons.

The island which forms the main focus of the story was inspired by Burgh Island in Devon, but the island used in the TV series was Mullion Island.  In real life the island is a small uninhabited island offshore from Mullion Cove, which is where the scene was filmed in which the ill-fated group of guests are rowed out to the island.  In real life, Mullion Island does not have a mansion such as that depicted in the series: the building used for this was Harefield House in Hillingdon.  In one of the most striking scenes, there is an aerial view of a clifftop with a gaping hole and seagulls circling over it.  This was filmed at the Round Hole at Trevose Head near Constantine Bay on the North Cornwall coast. However, the most dramatic scene of all is the final showdown between Vera and Philip on one of the island’s beaches, with Philip ending up lying in a pool of blood in the shallows having been shot by Vera.  In real life this beach is Kynance Cove, one of the most beautiful spots on the Cornish coast.

Kynance Cove

Mullion Cove and Kynance Cove are very close together, both of them just to the west of Lizard Point, the most southerly place in mainland Britain.  Mullion’s tiny harbour has seen plenty of pirate and smuggling activity in the past.  The harbour was completed in 1895 with its two sturdy walls protecting the harbour from fierce winter gales.  The island is a nesting site for guillemots and kittiwakes, but is not open to the public.  Kynance Cove is a riot of interesting rock formations and golden sand lapped by turquoise sea.  There is a car park above the cove from where a path leads down to the beach, taking in a cafe on the way.  Just offshore is Asparagus Island, so called because wild asparagus used to grow there.  Trevose Head is a short distance from Padstow, and its Round Hole is a natural blowhole, formed from centuries of erosion upwards from caves below.  

Mullion Cove Harbour - geograph.org.uk - 266470. Photo by Tony Atkin, via Wikimedia Commons.

BATMAN: THE NOTTINGHAMSHIRE CONNECTION

The Dark Knight Rises, the final film in the Batman trilogy directed by Christopher Nolan, stars Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne, the billionaire CEO of Wayne Enterprises, whose alter ego spends his time out and about fighting crime dressed in a bat suit, in a bid to avenge the brutal murder of his parents, Thomas and Martha Wayne, when he was a young boy.  The ancestral home of the Wayne family is Wayne Manor, and the exterior of the manor is magnificently depicted in The Dark Knight Rises by the16th century Elizabethan mansion in the suburbs of Nottingham known in real life as Wollaton Hall (the interior scenes were shot at Osterley Park House near London).  In summer 2011 the cast and crew of the film descended on Wollaton Hall along with Bruce Wayne’s Lamborghini Aventador for the exterior shots.  Apparently they left their mark while there: a production truck accidentally backed into an ancient wall and demolished it.   

The Hall was built in the 1580s by Sir Francis Willoughby, and as well as the mansion includes extensive grounds with a deer park and a botanic garden.  The house itself now houses the city’s Natural History Museum, as well as the Industrial Museum, the Yard Gallery and some reconstructed room settings.  Tours of the Hall are available for £5, otherwise admission is free plus parking charges.  Not surprisingly, since the release of the film the Hall has experienced an upturn in visitors, especially foreign tourists.

Wollaton hall from front. Photo by Lee Haywood, via Wikimedia Commons.

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But Wollaton Hall is not the only place in Nottinghamshire associated with Batman.  There is a village in the county called Gotham which indirectly provided the inspiration for the sprawling metropolis in the Batman stories known as Gotham City, which is generally accepted as representing New Jersey in real life.  The story goes that several centuries ago the Gotham villagers acquired a reputation for madness when King John was due to pass through the village.  According to tradition, any road the King travelled on would become a public highway, so the villagers feigned insanity to deter the King. The antics of the villagers were chronicled in various books including The Merie Tales of the Mad Men of Gotham, published in 1565.  The American author Washington Irving got wind of this story and took to referring to Manhattan as Gotham when writing satirical pieces about New Yorkers, and this eventually led to the writer of the Batman stories adopting the name.

Today, all such tomfoolery has been forgotten and the village is a sleepy little spot 2 miles south of the River Trent surrounded by low wooded hills.  However, the village clings proudly to its past and the link to Batman, and in 2013 a sculpture in the form of a weather vane was unveiled representing some of the legends of Gotham which features Batman climbing up the side.  Inevitably, the connection to the Batman stories, comics and films has had side effects, not all of them good.  In 2014 the village sign was stolen, presumably by a dedicated Batman fan.  Last year, however, the village sought to gain some benefit from its fame by urging Batman fans to help save a Royal British Legion building in the village which had fallen on hard times.  Also last year, Gotham Parish Council arranged for Batman and Robin to turn on the village Christmas lights in a bid to raise enough money for vital repairs to the historic Well House, a focal point for the local community. 

Gotham Legends weather vane. Photo by Palmiped, via Wikimedia Commons.

Map of Wollaton.

Map of Gotham.

A GLIMPSE INTO THE PAST: BETJEMAN'S BRITAIN

So far in this blog I have posted pieces about locations in Britain featured on the big or small screen, or in literature.  This one is a bit of a departure, because it concerns a series of radio broadcasts by the late poet laureate Sir John Betjeman.  I have just been reading a book called Trains and Buttered Toast, which includes transcripts of Betjeman’s radio broadcasts, and I found them fascinating as an insight into a Britain long since disappeared, chiefly covering the period between the wars in the 1930s.  I have picked out three of the broadcasts, covering Swindon, Plymouth and Exeter.

Swindon is often reviled for its dubious town planning and the plethora of roundabouts in its road system, but it seems things were not much better in the 1930s if Betjeman’s description is anything to go by.  He comments that “you can stand among the red brick villas which compose its streets and find it impossible to believe that the loveliest country in England is only a few miles away”.  Although he does concede that “there are no real slums in Swindon”, and that its people have “good hearts”.  He also highlights the role of the railway in the town’s development, which led to the building of Swindon New Town (and the present-day Steam Museum - see below), but he despairs that “the building went on”, and bemoans the lack of public parks in the town.  Betjeman seems to reserve a particular disdain for the houses making up the suburbs of towns up and down the country.  In Swindon’s case, he sneers at the “stained glass windows” and “sham beams” of mock Tudor houses, quipping that they are “no more Tudor than I am William Shakespeare”.  Among these suburbs he singles out the “rows of speculative houses situated in the pleasant purlieus of the gasworks”.  I particularly love his portrayal of Swindon's outward growth, describing how the town “flounders about like a helpless octopus, spreading its horrid tentacles into quiet, untroubled places”.  

Steam Museum (9331166981). Photo by Jim, via Wikimedia Commons

Plymouth will no doubt have changed dramatically since Betjeman spoke about it in the 1930s.  Since there is an important naval base there, much of the city was flattened during World War II, and much of the rebuilding that has taken place since includes some spectaculary ugly examples of mid-20^th century architecture.  In his 1937 broadcast, Betjeman notes the nautical air of the city, talking of “pink-faced naval officers drinking pink gin in exclusive bars”, while in the houses “the model ship has ousted the aspidistra in the window space”.  Union Street, which was once notorious as a red light district servicing visiting sailors, at the time of Betjeman’s broadcast about the city had “Devonport’s magnificent but decayed civic centre” at one end and at the other St Catherine’s Church, the Athenaeum, the Royal Hotel, the Assembly Rooms and the Theatre Royal.  Again he has a go at the suburbs, in this case a “special sort of villa that has spread like a rash”, with the ones on the Totnes Road “among the ugliest in England”.  He does reserve praise, though, for Albemarle Villas, the Proprietary Library, St Michael’s Terrace, Wyndham Square and Union Street itself, and he comments that there is almost as much in Plymouth worth preserving as there is in London.  Unfortunately, the Germans put paid to that idea just a few years later. 

Smeatons' Tower and the Hoe from the sea - geograph.org.uk - 1680191. Photo by Paul Buckingham, via Wikimedia Commons.

Betjeman’s broadcast about Exeter predates the coming of the M5 motorway, which had arrived at the city by 1977.  Back in the days before motorways and ring roads, traffic was forced to go through city centres, and Betjeman describes the “appalling jam of traffic which there always seems to be in Exeter High Street”.  He also rails against the “inappropriate fronts of multiple stores clapped onto mediaeval, Stuart and Georgian buildings” – a situation which has since become far worse in the era of garish chain stores in city and town centres up and down the land.  He looks on the city as a “sort of lesser Stratford-upon-Avon but with a cathedral thrown in”.  However, he applauds the Georgian architecture of Southernhay and the crescents near it.  Unfortunately, like Plymouth, Exeter suffered massively during  World War II, particularly in 1942, the year of the so-called “Exeter blitz”, part of the “Baedeker Raids”, which singled out targets for their cultural and historic significance.

                                     

                                Exeter Cathedral 3. Photo by Peter Broster, via Wikimedia Commons.

So what of the present day?  Well, Swindon makes much of its railway heritage, and is the home of the Steam - the Museum of the Great Western Railway.  Wives of railway buffs can leave their husbands to view the train memorabilia while heading over to the Swindon Designer Outlet for some retail therapy.  Plymouth’s city centre may be uninspiring architecturally, but it retains the seaside charm of the Hoe with the red and white striped Smeaton’s Tower lighthouse.  Nearby is the quaint quarter known as the Barbican, one of the few areas of the city to escape the wartime bombings, with an enticing array of pubs, restaurants and shops, and the more recently built Sutton Harbour with yet more places to eat and drink, as well as a marina.  Unfortunately, the Royal Hotel mentioned by Betjeman received a direct hit during the bombing raids, as did the Greek Doric-style Athenaeum, which was replaced by a hideous modern building which has been its home since 1961.  Exeter still has its cathedral with an attractive cathedral close, and down in the lower part of town there is a waterside development at what is known as The Quay, with restaurants, bars and shops, as well as kayaks for hire which can be used to explore the Exeter Ship Canal. 

A MAGICAL REALM BY THE RIVER WYE: MERLIN

For four years from 2008 until 2012 Merlin, a fantasy drama series about the young wizard of the same name, was a popular show on the BBC.  Loosely based on the Arthurian legends, and portraying Merlin’s developing relationship with the Prince Arthur Pendragon, and a whole other cast of colourful characters, the series required a suitably fairytale backdrop, and the makers found some of the best locations for this in the Forest of Dean and adjacent Wye Valley.  The Forest of Dean in the westernmost reaches of Gloucestershire is an elevated expanse with lots of enchanting nooks and crannies, which in recent years has gained notoriety for the wild boar roaming and breeding in the area.  The Wye Valley is an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty on the border between England and Wales.

The magical Puzzlewood, located within the Forest of Dean, featured in all five series, acting as the secret hideaway of the sinister Morgana, plus scenes featuring dragons and unicorns and druid camps.  Puzzlewood’s appeal lies in its lush, mossy rocks and gulleys, and its twisted tree roots and fantastical rock formations, which can all be explored via a maze of winding paths.  It is rumoured that JRR Tolkien took the inspiration for Middle Earth from Puzzlewood.  There are a number of attractions aimed at families, including mazes and picnic areas.  As well as Merlin, these woodlands have featured in a number of other productions, including Dr Who.

Puzzlewood. Photo by Reiner Tegtmeyer, via Wikimedia Commons

Also in the Forest of Dean, Clearwell Caves provided the backdrop for some of the most memorable scenes in the series.  The caves played the part of the caverns below Camelot’s Castle with tunnels leading to a sorcerer’s tomb in ‘The Curse of Cornelius Sigan’.  The caves also acted as the interior of the Tunnels of Andor in ‘Lancelot and Guinevere’, in which Arthur and Merlin rush to save Gwen, and they put in an appearance in ‘The Last Dragonlord’.   The caves in real life are naturally formed caves where iron ore has been mined for over 4,500 years, and continues to be mined to this day.   The caves are open to the public between February and October.  As was the case with Puzzlewood, Clearwell Caves has also featured in Dr Who.

Subterranean lake Clearwell Caves geograph.org.uk - 1794. Photo by Penny Mayes, via Wikimedia Commons

Another landmark in the area which featured in Merlin is Goodrich Castle, located near Ross-On-Wye, to the west of the Wye Valley, overlooking the river. Merlin and Arthur are seen riding up to the castle for a visit to Morgause.  This part was filmed in the Solar Block, which was the castle’s main living quarters.  The castle was begun in the late 11^th century and lasted until it fell during the Civil War.  The present-day castle, now run by English Heritage, is a romantic ruin surrounded by beautiful scenery and offering wonderful views of the surrounding area.  

                                                                      Goodrich Castle

 Map of the area.