Here the yeomen soldiers of the Virgin Queen waited, peering into the sea mists for the Spanish Armada to materialise, and here decades later some Royalist diehards held out for five months during the Civil War.You don't have to be particularly suggestible to experience the odd goose bump in such company, especially in the dark when the drawbridge gate shuts with a theatrical thunk behind you. The squat tower has a menacing presence against the night sky and seems quite capable of unleashing five centuries of phantasms to my racing imagination.The air is particle-charged by the wraiths of olde Albion - and beyond the ramparts, the currents that shaped this sceptred isle still gnaw at the rocky shores of the Fal estuary. I tease the car through the gatehouse into the deserted grounds and make out the battlements of Henry VIII's original fort. The seven-hour forced slog from London is not an ideal start to the weekend, though the drive is softened somewhat by the sainted Morrissey - another English monument if ever there was one - on the car stereo "I will see you in far-off places," he trills. Does he mean Falmouth?It is dark when we arrive at Pendennis Headland but we get a bright welcome from Andy Bennie (by day the catering manager at the castle, by night something closer to Igor - "the keeper of the keys") He swings open the drawbridge gates to let us in Yes, this holiday cottage has a drawbridge.
The bank-holiday pixies prance on, smugly turning and turning in a widening circle as we slouch westwards. Setting aside the rose-tinted memories of childhood holidays taken by the English seaside, what for example, might an honest heritage package to Cornwall contain? As far as I am concerned, any such tour of England's westernmost county should include mandatory lashings of rain, five-mile tailbacks in single-file country lanes, clifftops splattered with what the locals call "grockle boxes" (caravans), dank, over-priced accommodation, and the worst case of bungalow blight this side of Connemara.Back in Wiltshire it's not getting any better. It is now going into the holiday cottage business, offering "the opportunity to stay at some of our finest historic buildings". Heritage schmeritage. Stonehenge is an English Heritage site and I am reminded that we are heading (snailishly) for Pendennis Castle - another site run by it, in Cornwall English Heritage exists to preserve England's past.
As we crawl past Stonehenge on the A303, the traffic is, in time-honoured bank-holiday style, painful - slow enough for me to register some pixies joining hands with passionate intensity around the Neolithic stones They do nothing to lift my mood. Either way, if my father - a classics scholar - had been there he could have reeled off a translation. While he visited the ancient sites of Turkey and Greece before he died, he never went to Leptis Magna, the one Roman city in modern-day Libya that he longed to see. So when, much later, I had a chance to visit this sprawling and beautifully preserved city of imperial pomp and luxury-living I took it, sure that the spirit of my dad would walk with me.. Porticus Concordiae Dedicavit. The jumble of words on the plinth above our heads was just Greek to us Well, Latin.
they didn't have colour film in those days."I think the message got through on some level.International Festivals Bureau (0870-247 1204) offers two-night family breaks in Prague from £498 for a family of two adults and two children sharing, including flights and b&b.. It was fun.In fact, in Male Namesti the two of them almost came to blows over whether the black and white sgraffito on a medieval house was or was not Art Nouveau."There are naked ladies," said John."But it's black and white," Liv insisted."So ... In some places the style was known as National Romantic.""What style?""Art Nouveau.""OK," they said The label wasn't so frightening now. "And they wanted to make them look real.""Why?""I don't know! I think it was to do with celebrating indigenous people. "I bet there's a lady with Big Boobies somewhere around here," Livvie said It took us a while to find her.
She was in a semicircular mosaic over the front of the Municipal Building, sidling up to a rather distracted-looking king."Why's she naked?" John asked."At the time people just liked putting naked women on public buildings," I suggested. We took in the Hotel Central, which has plasterwork tree branches all the way up its fa?e, and Hlavni nadrazi, the main railway station which has lots of curvy metalwork and huge naked statues. That brought forth titters, of course.Prague has two kinds of Art Nouveau, that which was imposed sgraffito-style on earlier buildings and the real thing, like the glorious Municipal House where we had tea. "I know, let's try to find stone foliage and semicircular stained glass over doorways!""Why?""First one to spot some gets an ice cream."It was a good afternoon.