Yesterday afternoon, Friday, we drove down to the Rock Inn at Haytor Vale. Heavy rain and heavy traffic pretty much all of the way. Great pub, good dinner.
This morning we went to Princetown to visit the prison museum. Wind and driving rain all the way up over the moors, car splashing through pools of flood water, streams in spate, rivulets boiling up from their channels and spilling onto the road.
Approaching Princetown we got up into the clouds and thick fog.
The museum was very interesting, in a chaotic and tatty kind of way. A log book of escapes was on display. It was open on a page recording, among others: an escape lasting less than an hour before the inmate was recaptured; and the escape of Frank (the Mad Axeman) Mitchell, whose egress in 1966 was aided by the Kray twins. The Krays followed up this benevolent action by having Frank the Mad Axeman shot in the back of a van and in the head a few days later.
There was a display of things confiscated in 2016. Homemade crack pipes, electric tattoo guns made from tape player motors and biros, mobile phones designed small to fit up your bum and a wide range of improvised weapons made from filed-down toothbrushes, safety-razor blades melted into the ends of plastic handles and a Stanley knife blade sellotaped to a stick.
We drove to Okehampton and had lunch in the Fountain Inn. It’s the weekend of the Baring-Gould Folk Festival, and there was a session going on in the front bar with some singing and step-dancing.
After lunch we went for a coffee in a music shop and coffee shop in the arcade, and talked to the owner about the popularity of ukeleles.
Then we went to the Ebenezer hall where Marilyn Tucker of Wren Music introduced Bill Murray and Malcolm Tucker who waffled on for an hour about what they’d been up to in their lives.
Then to the Church hall for an excellent concert with Chris Foster and Bara Grimsdottir (Iceland) and Sardinian polyphonic singing group Sos Cantores de Galtelli. The Sardinians stood in a circle when singing, sometimes only four of them, and made such a big sound. Very good.
Back to the pub slightly late for dinner at 7pm. Finally stopped raining so we walked up the road in the dark to the bottom of Hay Tor after dinner.
