Enjoying retirement
In The Red Rose County
The weather has been mixed this second week of March 2023 so we take what opportunities we can to get out. We drove to Skipton one day to do the Castle Woods walk. It is a private woodland leased for 75 years by the owners, Skipton Castle, to the Woodland Trust. Castle Woods was once part of a great hunting woodland that stretched across North Yorkshire. What remains of that great wood is now one of England’s rare ancient woodland sites. The woods provided many of the necessities essential for survival during the castle’s early existence, including water, fuel, building materials, fishing and hunting. During the 18th and 19th centuries, the woods provided timber, building stone and, most importantly, water to feed and power the town’s woollen, corn and sawmills. Most of the woodland is a mix of broadleaf trees such as oak, ash, lime, alder, hornbeam, holly, hazel and beech. But there is also yew, Scots pine and Norway spruce. In a few weeks all the abundant wild garlic will be in flower so we will return then. Another day we took the bus to Blackburn. I couldn't resist the circle of crocuses at the bus stop. We were in Blackburn to have another lunch at Blackburn College's Scolars Restaurant, always amazing to see how they dish up an elaborate four course meal for £12.50..........There are many other training restaurants so we will have to look some out. One evening we took the train to Manchester for an evening performance at The Royal Exchange Theatre which we hadn't yet visited. Once inside the Hall you immediately see the theatre which looks like a lunar space craft, but the seven-sided theatre module really is a feat of engineering. Weighing in at 150 tonnes, the module is far too heavy to be supported by the floor of the Great Hall, but a stroll around the theatre soon reveals the solution: the module is “suspended” from four of the Hall’s enormous columns, leaving only the ground-floor seating and stage area to rest on the floor. Before our performance we sat and had a drink and looked up to see the Trading Board for the last day of trading in 1968. For this was Manchester's Cotton Exchange. The previous trading hall was double the size of the current hall. On trading days merchants and brokers, (there were often up to 15,000 a day in attendance) struck deals which supported the jobs of tens of thousands of textile workers in Manchester and the surrounding towns. Manchester's cotton dealers and manufacturers trading from the Royal Exchange earned the city the name, Cottonopolis. At its height during the last decades of the nineteenth century up to the Great Depression at the end of the 1920s, the Exchange controlled more than 80% of all the world’s trade in finished cotton. The building was seriously damaged during World War II when it took a direct hit from a bomb during a German air raid in the Manchester Blitz at Christmas in 1940. Its interior was then rebuilt with a smaller trading area. I sneaked in on the last day, and this was the board I remember. Very sad. Manchester was going down the drains in those days. The helpful girl greeting us told us that we could exchange our balcony tickets (cheapest) for prime stage-side ones which we did. It certainly is 'performance in the round'. 'Beginning' was a Rom Com for want of better description, set in a Manchester flat in Didsbury and was essentially two people talking for almost two hours. The actors involved were very good, but as there was no plot as such it did go on rather a long time. An excellent location. We will return.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Keith & Frances SmithArchives
August 2023
Categories |