Thursday was wet yet again
but I was determined to find more of the buildings that John Corbett built for
his workers. He was the philanthropist
who ran the UK’s largest salt works of the time, at Stoke Works, which is near where
we have been moored for the last week.
My aim was to find some of the houses he built for his retired workers;
they are along the A38 which isn’t a particularly attractive location but the
houses are nicely kept.
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Row of retirement houses
for the salt workers
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Plaque showing the workers
were referred to as Salt Makers and that they were decayed rather than retired
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John Corbett’s raven
emblem on the houses – see website extract at the bottom of this blog entry for
more information
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Walking back to the boat I
passed lots of wild honeysuckle. The
larvae of one of my favourite butterflies, the White Admiral, feeds on wild
honeysuckle but not in this area. They
prefer woodlands where the honeysuckle grows on oak.
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Wild honeysuckle nearing
the end of its flowering season
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My middle son, Steve, came
up in the afternoon as he was stopping over on the Thursday night ready for our
weekend trip to Snowdonia with my middle daughter, Lauren. We went for a walk
in the afternoon and then went over to the Boat and Railway for the evening –
Karen joining us after she got home from work.
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Buddy teaching Steve how to cross lock gates
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On Friday afternoon, we
drove up to Telford to pick Lauren up from the station and continued on up to
Snowdonia. As usual we stayed in an
AirBnB as we have never had any problems at home or abroad. This one was absolutely fine – lovely and
clean etc. but Danny didn’t have any idea about running a house – he had only
recently bought it.
We all wanted showers when
we arrived but soon realised the boiler wasn’t working. It transpired that the oil tank had run
dry. Danny hadn’t realised it needed
refilling; in his mind, it was like gas and supplied continuously. He was very good and got things sorted out
very quickly.
Here I am writing about
someone who was a bit clueless about running a house when I had done something
equally stupid when packing for our weekend away. We were getting ready for the 30-minute drive
from the AirBnB to Snowdon on Saturday morning when Karen asked where her
walking boots were – it transpired I had left them on the boat. Fortunately, we were in the ideal place to
get replacements and were really lucky in picking up a good brand of £150 shoes
for £50 at the Cotswold Outdoor shop.
They had a section where they were selling off returns and you just made
an offer if you saw something you wanted.
These shoes had been returned because they squeaked! At least Karen has a spare pair now.
We knew that there was
heavy rain forecast all day on Snowdon but we hadn’t realised quite how windy
it was going to be. We each got blown over several times in the stronger gusts and had to lay on the ground until
each one eased. We continued on and were
soaked and cold by the top – wind chill was minus one in the middle of June!
The picture at the top is us looking happy at the summit - Buddy came up too but
couldn’t get in the picture.
In the evening, we popped
into Betws-y-Coed for a well-deserved drink and a meal and then made our way
home on Sunday. Undaunted we are now
booked into a cottage in the Lake District in September so we can walk up
Scafell Pike.
This extract is from the
Worcestershire historical society website:
“John Corbett (1817-1901,
born Brierly Hill) considered his name to be an anglicisation of the Latin for
raven, hence the use of the bird for his emblem. Corbett bought 6 acres of land
at Stoke Prior near Bromsgrove in 1854 on which to build his salt works. It was
then the largest of its kind in Europe. Corbett wanted to turn Droitwich into a
fashionable spa town. Corbett owned several businesses in the town of
Droitwich, he bought the Raven Hotel in 1887, and built the Worcester Hotel in
1891. He had the Chateau Impney built by the architects Tronquois of Paris and
a local architect Richard Phene Spiers, as his 'palace' between 1869-1875.”
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| Chateau Impney |
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