Tag Archives: travel

Biddestone (Edge Of Raison)

The pun in this title will only mean something to you if you have seen the TV show Agatha Raison. If not, this will just be a picturesque Coltswold village post. After visiting Devizes, we drove on into the start of the Cotswolds. This is truly lovely part of the UK and it looks like it was created by film set designers. Needless to say, it is popular with TV and movies. Agatha Raison is set in the area and is filmed in Lacock and Biddestone for a good portion of the show.

We had been to Lacock before but did drive through. However, it was absolutely heaving with tourists and we decided to keep moving. Biddestone was the exact opposite. It was almost deserted. This is the center of the village in which the TV show is filmed and the titular character’s house is alongside the green. All of the villages in this area look very pretty and you can get quite blasé about it after a while.

P1A Tucked In The Back

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The Boscombe collection has a couple of interesting testbed airframes. The Avro 707 was in a previous post but another fine jet is the English Electric P1A. The precursor to what was to become the Lightning, the P1A is very similar in some respects but quite different in others. The nose is a pitot inlet without the shock cone that the Lightning adopted to house its radar. The rest of the front fuselage has quite a different shape while it also feels lower to the ground than the Lightning was. It is nice that a Lightning front fuselage is displayed alongside it for comparison.

Back To The Island So Back To The Hovercraft

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We left plenty of time to drive to Portsmouth to catch our ferry to the Isle of Wight so, naturally, traffic flowed smoothly and we got there with an excess of time. Nancy wasn’t in the least surprised that I decided to park up on the seafront at Southsea to kill some time. Oh, was this next to the Hovertravel terminal? Well, that’s lucky.

We had just enough time for one arrival and one departure before it was time to head to our ferry terminal. That wouldn’t be all though. The hovercraft passes the car ferry during its crossing so I was able to get some shots of it in operation from the deck of the ferry as we left Portsmouth. We also took a walk along the front at Ryde after lunch with Mum. Just enough time to see the hovercraft arriving and departing there too.

One interesting addition was Solent Express. This was used on Hovertravel’s services a few years ago but was withdrawn when the new hovercraft were commissioned. I had understood it was stored somewhere. Apparently, they needed space wherever that was because it is back at Ryde but still looks stored. There is plenty of seaweed around it making it look like it hadn’t gone anywhere for a while. I wonder what its future holds?

The A380s Aren’t Dead After All

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Aviation enthusiasts are an odd bunch. They love aviation but they can really hate certain types. The emotions can really run high and no type exemplifies this more than the A380. The project hasn’t been a success by modern standards and production has now ended. This provides much glee for some people for some reason. I’m not sure why they feel the lack of success for a plane makes their life better but whatever.

I have flown on the A380 a couple of times and it was a great experience. I always like seeing them. Variety is sadly lacking in modern aviation and anything different is welcome as far as I am concerned. The onset of the pandemic resulted in many airlines parking all sorts of types and the A380s were clearly a target. If there are no passengers, the largest capacity jet is not going to be helpful. The death of the A380 was widely proclaimed. However, it turns out that this was a bit premature.

A few airlines have been reinstating their fleets and more are coming back out of storage. British Airways has their fleet back in action. Emirates is using theirs heavily. At Heathrow, I also saw Qatar and Qantas using theirs again. (Qatar might be more related to their spat with Airbus over A350s and the need for any capacity they can get.) It is good news that they are still around. We shall see what the future brings for some of the other jets that are still stored.

Caen Hill Locks

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One of the items I had put on my list of things to do while in the UK was a visit to Caen Hill Locks. Located just outside the town of Devizes in Wiltshire, this is part of the Kennet and Avon Canal and it is a sequence of locks to get over the hill into the town. When you think when this was constructed and that it was all done by hand, you find it all the more impressive. From the bottom of the hill to the café at the top (where we stopped for lunch), there are 29 locks. Getting through will take a boat a fair amount of time.

Alongside each lock is a large basin. These are blocked off from the boats so I assume their purpose is to provide water capacity to prevent the traffic through the locks causing the water levels to fall too much. There were signs indicating some limitations on lock usage as a result of water shortages. The locks themselves are pretty small and the narrow boats fitted in snugly. Everything is manually operated with the boat owners operating the gates and the valves to release the water.

Walking to the bottom of the hill provided a great view back up at the alignment of the locks. From the bottom, the canal continues across the plain to the west and off towards Bristol. On the day we were there, a few boats were making their way through. Their crews were having a relaxed time and beer seemed to be prevalent! It was interesting to think back to the times when the canals were the motorways of UK commerce and these locks would probably have been quite congested with freight traffic.

Lufthansa NEOs

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Lufthansa was a launch customer for the A320neo and took delivery of some of the earliest airframes. They now have an extensive fleet of the jets and they seem to be flying in to Heathrow very frequently. I ended up shooting a bunch of their jets in my brief excursion. I am not a big fan of their newest livery but, while it looks dull on the bigger jets, I actually feel like it suits the A320 a little better.

Chilbolton Radio Telescope

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A couple of years ago, I was taking a road trip across the Cascades and I came upon a large dish alongside the road. It was a surprise and ended up being a blog post. I guess it is a little less spontaneous to search out a dish but, while I was over at Middle Wallop, meeting up with my friend Paul, I knew I was near the old airfield at Chilbolton. This had been an RAF base and then was used for test flying by Supermarine and Folland. What I didn’t know until I looked it up was that the airfield was taken over for use as a radio telescope after it closed to flight operations. I decided to swing by and see the dish. As I came over the hill, I could see it in the valley but the road was narrow and there was nowhere to stop. I got to the gate and a big sign advertised that random visitors were not welcome so I had to make do with a shot from the gate.

Is Alresford Too Pretty To Be Real?

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A short distance from Winchester is the little town of Alresford. I had flown over it as a youngster but had never actually visited and, when our friends suggested it as a good place to meet up while we were visiting, we went with their suggestion. The center of the town is quite picturesque but some of the older parts of the town are just too like a postcard to be credible. The oldest buildings include some down by the river where the old mill was. As you walked along the path by the water, it was hard to believe that some of these buildings hadn’t been created by a set designer for a period drama. This was a theme for our whole visit with so many villages with postcard-like houses.

Avro 707

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The development of the Vulcan required a lot of concept testing before the full size jets were built. Avro built a series of smaller scale delta winged jets to work out some of the issues under the name Avro 707. One of these lives at Old Sarum in the Boscombe Down Aviation Collection. It is painted a bright orange color and, while tucked in a dark hangar, it still looks striking. It would be great to get some elevation to show off the delta planform of the jet but still happy to have managed to see it. I was rather close to it so needed to shoot a variety of shots to stitch together afterwards which only worked so well.

A Middle Wallop Gazelle Is Worth A Wait

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I was ready to leave Middle Wallop when a look at ADSB told me that a Gazelle was operating in the vicinity. The Gazelles are becoming a rarity these days so this seemed worth waiting for. After a while, it vanished from ADSB and I was beginning to think it had landed elsewhere. Fortunately, it popped up again, very close this time. I was coming straight for me. Unfortunately, it turned south and skirted around the airfield. I could just see it in the distance.

Then it climbed up to the east before turning and conducting an autorotation to the field. It landed away from me and beyond a ridge so out of sight. I moved back to the balcony to see if I could see anything and was rewarded with it taxiing across the field in the distance. It wasn’t long before it was behind the fencing heading to its ramp. Still, while not a close encounter, it might be the last time I see one in UK service.