their visit can also choose from the range of exclusive Bakelite-themed postcards (not actually printed on Bakelite), while those who have completely lost touch with reality can choose to stay overnight at one of the museum’s range of pod caravans. Which aren’t made of Bakelite, before you ask.
THE BEAUFORT HUNT
WILTSHIRE
A thoroughly awful day out not because of the cruelty to animals, but because of the people you will have to mix with. Some of the worst kind of desperate betweeded social climbers queue up to join the Beaufort Hunt purely because there’s a chance – a tiny, weeny, itsy-bitsy chance that makes winning the National Lottery look like a dead cert – that Prince Charles will come along and kill something fluffy and squeaky. If it were Prince Philip who rocked up, there would definitely be something killed, even if it was one of the hounds that walked ‘a bit foreign’ or looked at him with slitty eyes or something.
You don’t even need to be part of the hunt to be part of it. You can, if you wish, follow it ‘on foot’ in a Range Rover at 90 miles per hour to watch the fox get torn limb from furry limb.
Some townies will tell you that the fox is frightened by the whole thing. Balderdash – anyone who has seen the hunt knows that the fox is smiling all the way through and enjoys the exercise. If it thinks it is getting away it occasionally stops to let the hounds catch up. In return for this sportsfoxlike approach, the hounds rip it to shreds in seconds, just as it would have wanted.
Hunting undoubtedly plays an important part in rural society. It is a place for like-minded aristocrats to meet and get married – especially if they are already like-parented. And it is a great social leveller – whether you are the high-born son of a duke or simply the brother of an earl, you will find huntsmen the most welcoming, gentle people who kill animals for pleasure you could ever hope to meet. And they won’t give two hoots if you went to Eton or Harrow, so long as it is one or the other.
But those country types, they won’t take any hunting ban lying down. ‘Because if hunting ever gets really banned,’ they point out, ‘what will we do with all the horses and dogs we use? We will have no option but to hack them apart with a bread knife in the middle of the street and send your daughter the photographs. After that we might poison all the lakes, just to make the point. It’s not our fault, it’s yours.’
STANTON DREW STONE CIRCLES
SOMERSET
Many thousands of visitors to Stonehenge in Wiltshire go to marvel at prehistory’s answer to the Millennium Dome and its surprising lack of size or inherent interest. Yet, astonishingly, few visitors are aware that in the nearby county of Somerset, Neolithic man built another, equally mysterious monument to disappointing bank holidays and unhappy children.
The Stanton Drew stone circles are a group of big stones so uninteresting that they aren’t even on top of each other. That’s right. A bunch of big stones which don’t even merit the word ‘henge’.
As if in apology for not having tried to balance a few on top of the others like those other guys did in Wiltshire, the Neolithic stone gatherers at Stanton Drew did, at least, offer an extra couple of circles for your visit. So it’s a bit like your plumber saying he hasn’t put in a bathroom as you wanted, but he has set up your DVD player instead and still wants paying.
The larger of the two rings, some 113m in diameter, is called the Great Circle. As if Stanton Drew’s contribution to the putting stuff in circles community wasn’t quite poor enough, not all of the big lumps are even there. According to archaeologists, the Great Circle probably originally consisted of 30 or more stones, of which just 27 survive today, and was surrounded by a ditch, which is now filled in. So at some point, someone came and took away three massive stones. For God’s sake, why?
An attraction that could scarcely be crapper if it was made of wood. Imagine that, eh? Woodhenge.
WOODHENGE
DURRINGTON, WILTSHIRE
Just two miles to the north-east of Stonehenge, outside the village of Durrington, a monument exists that makes Stonehenge look like St Peter’s in Rome. That monument is Woodhenge. That’s right. Stonehenge on the cheap.
Woodhenge was ‘saved’ from obscurity in 1925 by Alexander Keiller, an amateur archaeologist and the millionaire inheritor of the Keiller family’s Dundee Marmalade fortune, and his archaeologist friend OGS Crawford, who identified the site from an aerial photograph taken by a First World War air hero, Gilbert Stuart Martin Insall VC.
Yet while those making the discovery might have a pleasingly Boy’s Own feel to their names, the site itself is far from King Solomon’s Mines. Apart from anything else, all the wood has gone. Stonehenge, only made of wood, and missing all the wood. All that remains are circles of holes which probably had big wooden staves in them. Or maybe not.
Still, this was long before television, and Keiller and Crawford’s discovery led to a full-on, three-year-long excavation of the site led by Maud Cunnington, a fellow archaeologist whose parents can only have chosen her name from a Jeeves & Wooster story. Had she been asked, Cunnington would probably have said something like: ‘Woodhenge is a rich discovery of great historical interest that promises to significantly increase our knowledge of the pagan religious rites of Neolithic Britain, but I wouldn’t visit on a bank holiday if I were you. Why not go for a walk in the countryside and stop in at a friendly pub?’
If you felt let down by Stonehenge or enraged by the Stanton Drew Stone Circles, Woodhenge will have you spitting blood.
ABBOTSBURY SWANNERY
DORSET
Love swans? Then you will like the Abbotsbury Swannery. But if you don’t like swans, or only quite like swans, you probably won’t like it as much.
SWIMMING WITH DOLPHINS
NEWQUAY, CORNWALL
Quite what the dolphins think of this whole farrago is anyone’s guess. It seems a bit presumptuous to decide they have nothing better to do than tow what are essentially land-based animals around in the water. They have mackerel to catch for one thing. They don’t expect us to give them a piggy-back around Coventry Cathedral if they fancy knocking about outside their natural environment. Just think how stupid you would look in a cathedral with a dolphin on your back. ‘What’s that, Jeff?’ ‘It’s a dolphin on my back.’ ‘Thought it was.’
Swimming with dolphins makes as much sense as paddling with badgers or cooking with squirrels.
Despite this, people seem to think if they just leap out of a motorboat waving their arms like nobody’s business and attempt to grab on to a passing sea-mammal’s fin, the little chap will turn, smile kindly and ask where he wants to go, like an unusually smooth and wet taxi driver. They think that after
