Great British Railway Journeys (2010–…): Season 1, Episode 12 - Yatton to Weston Super Mare - full transcript
In 1840, one man transformed travel in Britain.
His name was George Bradshaw,
and his railway guides inspired the Victorians
to take to the tracks.
Stop by stop, he told them where to travel,
what to see and where to stay.
Now, 170 years later,
I'm making four long journeys
across the length and breadth of the country
to see what remains of Bradshaw's Britain.
I'm continuing my rail journey
into the West Country
using this 150-year-old Bradshaw's guide.
The arrival of the Great Western Railway
made it easy for tourists to visit resorts
like Weston-super-Mare.
And the guide commends the mildness
of the climate in these parts.
But I'm also hoping to discover how
the combination of railways and good weather
enabled Somerset to export a little bit
of sunshine to the rest of Britain.
All this week it's helping me to plot my journey
along the holiday route,
the Great Western Railway tine reaching down
to the south west of England.
Today, I 7! be finding out how the railways
created a national delicacy.
The train was perfect. You could put
a strawberry on there and it was so smooth.
And it would go all the way to the north
without being damaged.
I'll be asking
what our ancestors got up to in Cheddar.
The bones of three adults and two children
with cut marks to drop the jaw out
is all evidence of cannibalism.
And I'll be exploring one of Britain's
oldest piers.
The other thing, of course,
with piers in their early days was
it was somewhere you could promenade.
In other words, you could be seen.
My journey this week takes me from Swindon
to find out how the railway transformed
many small coastal villages
into bustling seaside resorts.
After passing through Devon,
I'll head for Cornwall
and end my journey
on the rugged headland of Penzance.
Today I'm leaving Bristol and travelling
18 miles to Yatton and the Cheddar Gorge,
before reaching Weston-super-Mare.
The Great Western Railway mainline
takes me into Somerset,
which changed forever
when the railways arrived.
This is Yatton, a nice enough station,
but my Bradshaw's guide dismisses it
as a place of no importance
except as being a junction.
What wasn't known when this was written was
that in 1869 a newline would be added here
which would make Yatton
rather important after all.
When the new branch fine was opened
Yatton became the centre
of a booming strawberry industry,
which continued right up to the 19503.
Mike Lyle
started working on the trains in his teens.
- Good morning, Mike.
- Good morning, Michael.
How lovely to see you.
Thank you for meeting me.
Not at all.
I think you know Yatton Station quite well,
don't you?
Yes, I came here as a boy
at the age of approximately 15
and it really was a hive of industry.
The new railway meant that for the first time
huge quantities of fresh,
local Cheddar Valley strawberries
could be whisked around the country.
R was quickly nicknamed the Strawberry Line.
I was invited to go down and load the fruit
onto these massive great wagons.
They were called Siphons.
And I suppose, if my memory is correct,
they were about the length
of two double-decker buses.
We would load all the trains
through the afternoon and evening.
The smell of the strawberries
was absolutely overwhelming.
I would catch the last strawberry train back to
a station which was handy for me to cycle home,
and then I would throw my bike out and I would
follow the bicycle out of the guard's van.
And then cycle home.
You and your bike
were both leaving a moving train.
Yes. Every minute counted.
Every single minute counted.
If it lost its connection then the fruit wouldn't
be in any shape to be eaten at the other end.
(Train whistle)
With the industry in decline,
the strawberry tine and its workers
became the victims of the massive
British Railways closures in the 1960s.
When you heard that branch line was closing,
what did you feel?
I wondered what I was going to do.
It was quite shocking news.
It was national news.
It affected every branch line.
I was quite in despair at the time.
50 years on, many of the disused lines
have become footpaths
miss-crossing British countryside.
So I'll be continuing the next part of my journey
on foot.
Good morning. I see you're walking
the Strawberry Line.
I certainly am.
Is it a good way to see the country
walking along this?
Definitely. You see them dotted around when
you're driving round. It's a good way to see it.
And they're normally banked up nice and flat,
easy to walk on, easy to cycle on, so yeah.
And it gets you in touch with the greenery
and the country.
Plenty to see, lots of birds around, wildlife.
It's good, yeah.
There's always something sad
about a disused railway line.
And I'm old enough to remember tracks that I
used to use being closed in the Beeching cuts.
It was inevitable, I suppose.
The railways grew topsy-turvy in the
Victorian era when people didn't have cars.
The cheery thing is that today we don't talk
about lines closing, but new ones opening.
And there's a lot of talk
that the future of travel is high-speed rail.
But for today at least I'll be ambling
to the other end of the Strawberry Line.
In its heyday
there were 250 strawberry growers here.
Only four remain today,
including fruit farmer Andrew Seagers.
Why are strawberries grown here?
What's special about the land or the water here?
I think it's because of the slopes, the hills,
the climate, and the minerals in the water.
It gives it, you know, a good flavour fruit.
How long in the year
are you getting strawberries?
We start picking about 15th of April
and we will finish in that greenhouse again
with another crop of strawberries
by the 15th of November.
That's a pretty long season you have now.
I imagine that's much more
than it would have been 100 years ago.
Yes, we would be lucky to get more than
four weeks, five weeks.
Now we take it for granted that
we can eat strawberries all year round.
But in Bradshaw's lime
strawberries were a special seasonal delicacy.
For a few weeks of the year they were picked
and transported to market each Friday,
the day after people were paid.
As we're moving down here we're beginning
to see some strawberries now
that are getting towards ripeness.
- Do you mind if I try that one?
- No. Of course you can.
- Mm. Beautiful.
- Absolutely fabulous.
There's no substitute
for taking it straight off the plant.
So the railways made it possible for a massive
amount of strawberries to be grown in Britain.
But I suppose it's the airlines
that are killing it off in Britain.
Yes, what happened was you could send
a strawberry to the north of England on a train.
The strawberries were much softer than these.
50 the train was perfect.
You could put a strawberry on there
and it was so smooth.
And it would go all the way to the north
without being damaged.
The railways were pivotal
for the strawberry growers.
But they also kick-started another
Cheddar Valley industry - tourism.
Before the railways only rich tourists would have
been able to enjoy the wonderful spectacle
of the Cheddar Gorge.
When the railways arrived
thousands of ordinary day-trippers
began to enjoy the splendour
of this magnificent area.
Reaching 500 feet in places
the sides of the ravine boast
the highest inland cliffs in the country.
My Bradshaw's guide tells me that the cliffs
of Cheddar are well worth visiting,
and says the area has achieved "some notoriety
from the discovery of two caverns in the vicinity
one called the Stalactite
and the other the Bone Cave."
And it comments on the very large number
of visitors now coming to the area.
But no Victorian could have imagined
the tourist magnet it has become today.
Cheddar Gorge now attracts
half a million visitors a year.
Many of them like archaeologist
Hugh Cornwell come to marvel at the caves.
They were discovered by eccentric sea captain
and showman Richard Gough.
Hugh. After my long trek I find you.
What a beautiful cave.
When Richard Gough discovered this
in November 1898
he came through the tunnel there and he
saw this and he called it St Paul's Cathedral.
Because of the Whispering Gallery at the top.
This is very pretty.
It's almost too good to be true.
This is a Richard Gough invention.
It's a mirror pool. He's dammed the water,
just a little skim of water.
And you can see the stalactites reflected
on the surface of the water.
Do you approve of this manipulation of nature?
Yes, I do. It's very low-intensity
human interaction with it.
Gough's reason was to show
the amazing complexity and beauty of nature.
- And I think he's succeeded.
- I thought you'd be more disapproving.
The Victorians poured in to experience
this underground labyrinth -
the first cave in Britain to be fit
with electric fight.
Before Gough turned them into
a tourist attraction,
the Caves had been home to something else.
You can probably guess from the smell
that we've now arrived at the Cheese Cave.
Glad you mentioned that.
I wondered if we had a problem.
Now, the cheeses here.
Is this a necessary part of its maturing process
or is it a touristy thing?
No, this is really genuine.
These are truckles of cheese.
They're the only really genuine Cheddar cheese
in the entire world.
Because these cheese are made
from unpasteurised milk from cows
on the Somerset Levels, very close to Cheddar.
They're made by hand in the Cheddar Gorge
Cheese Company in Cheddar.
And they are stored here in Gough's Cave.
This is genuine cave-matured Cheddar cheese.
Sounds wonderful.
Can't wait to get my hands on some.
As more areas of the cave were opened up
to cater for the tourists,
some important archaeological discoveries
were made.
And this is Cheddar Man - 9,000 years old.
The oldest complete skeleton
ever found in Britain.
That is a fantastic sight. This intact skeleton
was found here, was it?
Yes.
When the skeleton was studied in detail,
it revealed an extraordinary life and death.
Well, the story behind it, we believe,
is that Cheddar Man, as a teenager,
was hit on the head with an axe,
which created a major wound in his forehead.
That probably affected him
for the rest of this life.
But he died, we believe, in his early 203.
And we think that during that period,
the effect of the blow to the head
made him anti-social, dysfunctional,
that sort of thing.
So that when he died the members of his tribe
didn't deal with him in the normal way of burial,
but put him in a twilight zone here so that his
spirit couldn't depart to the ancestors
and couldn't roam amongst the living either.
Recent research has produced
more sinister revelations
about the people who lived in these caves.
Hugh, I hear there's evidence of cannibalism
that's been discovered in these caves.
Yes, that's true.
The bones of three adults and two children
with cut marks to drop the jaw out
to get at the tongue and to invert the skull
and out marks on the long bones,
and the breaking of long bones
is all evidence of cannibalism.
The bones are scattered across the cave floor
and mixed with horse bones.
Cannibalism did take place here,
but long before Cheddar Man.
I'm pleased to see people have turned from
cannibalism to cheese-eating.
- This is only recent.
- Only recent!
The researchers also took DNA
from Cheddar Man
to see if they could find any of his descendants
in Cheddar today.
And guess what? They found a match.
- Adrian.
- Hello. Good evening.
- Let me get a good look at you.
- Nice to meet you, Michael.
Any resemblance to Cheddar Man?
- Probably vaguely.
- I can't see it exactly.
- Come on in.
- Thank you very much.
Local teacher Adrian Target was helping
to organise the experiment
when he was also roped in to giving a sample.
So I was arranging to have my students
DNA-tested and some were apprehensive.
And so I said, “It will be all right. I'll show you
there's nothing involved. I'll have mine done."
One of the things
they obviously wanted to know was,
how much like Cheddar Man I was.
And so they did a reconstruction
of Cheddar Man's head
based on what they had from the skeleton.
Adrian, this is spooky.
Such a strong resemblance.
Obviously you don't wear your hair the way
they did 9,000 years ago, but otherwise...
It's always other people
who can see the resemblance.
Almost as bizarre is Adrian's other secret.
- Now, you know who this is, don't you?
- Yes, it's a Bradshaw handbook.
- A Bradshaw guide.
- And how do you know that?
Probably because I'm a railway nut, I suppose.
A bit of a anorak.
I've collected mainly the timetables,
rather than the guides.
Adrian, that's a serious anorak to collect
the timetables of trains that ran 150 years ago.
- I suppose so.
- Sherlock Holmes had a Bradshaw, didn't he?
- That's right.
- To the left of his fireplace.
Well, I do have some just here.
I suppose it was only a matter of time
before I met another Bradshaw enthusiast.
It wasn't long ago that they were
an essential item for every train traveller.
Must give you
a lot of interesting bedtime reading.
Thank you. That's lovely.
It's almost time to leave Cheddar,
but there's one thing I need to try before I go.
- Good evening.
- Evening.
Oh, that looks serious.
- Are these all from Cheddar?
- They are all from Cheddar.
- This is the one from the Caves?
- It is indeed.
That's the one I have to try.
Lovely big taste.
Mm, really mature and...
fresh and tangy.
- Thank you so much.
- I'm glad you're enjoying it.
Early next morning I'm ready to pop along
the coast to Weston-super-Mare.
- Morning.
- Morning.
- Morning.
- Thank you.
Running on time on a Sunday morning.
That's very good.
Yeah, we try to.
The building of the Great Western Railway made
it possible for there to be long-distance tourism.
Like railway workers from Swindon
spending a week by the seaside in Devon.
But it also led to the growth of day-tripping
and weekend visits.
So that people from Bristol and Exeter could
spend time by the sea in the Bristol Channel.
Weston-super-Mare, perhaps,
above all other seaside resorts,
grew rapidly thanks to the railway.
In 1822 it had a population of just 735.
By the end of the century
it had shot up to over 20,000.
Clearly, they weren't put off
by what Bradshaw had to say.
Weston-super-Mare - my Bradshaw guide
is not entirely polite about Weston-super-Mare.
So I'm intrigued to see what I'll find.
Bradshaw writes: “The receding of the tide
leaves a disfiguring bank of mud
along the beach,
which is a great drawback
to the enjoyment of bathing.
It says about Weston-super-Mare: at low tide
Weston is disfigured by this bank of mud.
- What do you think of that.
- I think it's right.
- Do you think it is disfiguring?
- Yeah, it's the stones and stuff.
Do you not like that so much?
It can look very dirty and polluted,
but today it doesn't look that polluted.
But sometimes, yeah, it does.
- Good afternoon.
- Hello.
- Are you visiting or do you live here?
- We live here.
I'm following an old guidebook -
it's 150 years old.
And he makes a rather catty comment.
He says the best reason to stay a long time
in Weston-super-Mare
is because of the attractive places around it.
What do you think of that? Is that unfair?
The actual Weston-super-Mare central is lovely.
- I thought you'd say that, you see.
- Yeah.
The other thing he says is that he thinks the bank
of mud that's left at low tide is disfiguring.
- Would you use that word?
- No, it's a natural thing, surely.
You can't have lovely Cornwall beaches
everywhere, can you?
You're saying if it's a natural thing
you shouldn't call it disfiguring.
No! Of course not. It's part of Weston.
Everybody knows it's like that down here,
but they still come down here.
Wow, you really are loyal to your town.
At least Bradshaw is more positive
about one local attraction - Birnbeck Pier.
He says: "The bay sweeps a flat sandy beach
to Worle Hill,
having beyond it the rock or island of Birnbeck,
across which a new pier has been made
with a landing stage for steamers. "
The pier was still bustling 50 years ago,
but severe damage from storms in 1990 made it
unsafe, and it was closed to the public in 1994.
The only way to appreciate it is by water.
So I've tagged along with RNLI
who used to have a base on the pier.
Nigel is of 24 local volunteers.
You've got a RNLI slipway there.
You use that sometimes?
We don't any more.
That got condemned a while back.
Just fell into disrepair really.
We now operate on the north side
using a new method
with tractors and trailers launching
on a shingle beach.
Does it make you sad to see it
in this dilapidated condition?
It does, yeah. It's quite an old pier.
I just about remember it
from when I was a wee lad.
And to see it like it is now
is devastating really.
But my visit to the pier
is cut short by a real emergency.
Get the guys back on here.
They want No2.
Thank you.
So...er... there I was out in Lifeboat No.1
And er...a call came through.
Luckily we had Lifeboat No.2 alongside us.
But they've been called to an emergency.
Somebody is drifting in a raft.
It's quite a long-distance job,
so they've got to take the bigger craft.
Luckily we had the smaller boat alongside.
- Hello.
- Hi. How are you? Welcome aboard No.2.
Thank you very much.
Thank you, guys.
With all that excitement
I'm glad to get my feet back on dry land.
- That was great. Thank you very much.
- Take it easy.
Bye. Thank you.
This old pier may be very down on its luck today,
but it was still a massive tourist attraction
until the late 1950s.
Pier archivist Stan Terrell
remembers how popular it was
and has traced its history back
to Bradshaw's day.
Stan, why do you think the Victorians
were so crazy about piers?
The very fact
that they so enjoyed going on boats.
But with a pier, you could be on a boat,
as it were, and you felt safe.
You had the water underneath you.
I think they loved that, being able to see.
The other thing with piers,
especially in their early days was
it was somewhere you could promenade.
In other words, you could be seen.
And you could see others.
One of the reasons the pier was such a hit
was that it was the nearest spot for
Welsh people to get a drink on Sundays.
Cardiff tourists would pour from the steamers
into the bars on the first booze cruises.
Paint a picture for me. At the height of
the Victorian era, people arriving by steamers,
what would it have been like down there?
Bags of excitement, I guess.
As many as 13 steamers queuing up
to discharge their passengers.
When they eventually got on the island,
enjoying themselves,
with all the amusements, the helter-skelter.
I've heard it said that town business people
didn't like it,
because all the business was coming into the
old pier and very little of that came into the town.
One history of the pier
is about pleasure and steamers.
Another history of the pier is to do with warfare.
Is that right?
Quite correct.
In 1942 the Admiralty took this pier over.
It became then known as HMS Birnbeck
and they staffed it with scientists.
They developed the Bouncing Bomb,
but it was only the theoretical work
that was done in that instance.
I have to stop you there. You're telling me
the Bouncing Bomb was developed on a pier?
Yes, it was, yes. The idea apparently for
choosing the pier to put their scientists on,
was that first of all, you've probably noticed
how secluded we are, away from prying eyes.
And secondly, we have the third highest
rise and fall of the tide in the world.
So that one of the objects was to develop
weapons they could fire into very deep water.
And they wanted to be able to examine
those explosives at low tide.
So those were the two reasons it was chosen.
So Birnbeck Pier has rather an important part
in the history of World War Two.
Oh, yes, I'd say so. Yes.
It's a really beautiful day.
The sun's been out, there's a breeze off the sea.
You can see for miles.
This is the British beach holiday at its best.
Think Bradshaw must have seen it
on a rainy day,
because Weston-super-Mare has tots to offer,
including one very traditional seaside attraction.
Kevin Mager's family has run the donkey rides
here for more than 100 years.
Tell me about Weston-super-Mare in its heyday.
There were donkey rides.
People used to come from the station.
It used to be packed all the way down the road.
There used to be lines of them
coming down in the mornings.
- And what was the beach like in those days?
- The beach...
We used to have to keep a track for the donkeys
to walk along to keep the people out of the way.
They'd be all sat in their deckchairs and they'd
sit on the track. We used to try to move them.
- It's a wonderful beach, isn't it?
- It's a lovely beach.
It's nice and flat. It's safe.
The tide doesn't come in...
it comes in twice a day.
How did your family get into donkeys?
Well, years ago everybody had coal businesses.
They were coal merchants.
And they went in the summer, cos there was
no coal, they went to doing donkey rides.
That's how I think it happened,
cos we did it as well.
Many years ago we had a coal business.
- The two businesses go together perfectly.
- Yes.
Winter and summer.
Is this your first time on a donkey?
- Did you enjoy it?
- Yeah.
- Was he nice and gentle and safe?
- Nice and gentle and safe.
Yeah.
By the 19705
Weston-super-Mare was in decline,
thanks to cheap package holidays abroad.
These days visitor numbers
are back up to around six million a year.
Perhaps the eco-friendly trend
towards holidaying in Britain
is again boosting the town's popularity.
When I remember childhood summers,
I think of strawberries and beaches and piers,
and boat rides and, yes, the occasional donkey.
These were the things mentioned in Bradshaw,
largely invented by the Victorians,
and made possible by the railways.
And they're at the heart
of the British seaside holiday.
Even today.
Next time I'll be discovering why Torquay
became a magnet for Victorian invalids.
You've got 3000 miles of Atlantic Ocean
on your doorstep,
nice clean air coming in off the Atlantic,
so that's good for your lung disorders.
I'll be fishing for salmon
on the beautiful Dart Estuary.
I tell you, Nick, these city hands have not done
work like this in their lifetime, probably.
And I'll be spending Britain's
first local currency.
When you shop in the supermarket, 80%
of that money leaves Totnes the next morning.
This is a currency that can't go anywhere else.
His name was George Bradshaw,
and his railway guides inspired the Victorians
to take to the tracks.
Stop by stop, he told them where to travel,
what to see and where to stay.
Now, 170 years later,
I'm making four long journeys
across the length and breadth of the country
to see what remains of Bradshaw's Britain.
I'm continuing my rail journey
into the West Country
using this 150-year-old Bradshaw's guide.
The arrival of the Great Western Railway
made it easy for tourists to visit resorts
like Weston-super-Mare.
And the guide commends the mildness
of the climate in these parts.
But I'm also hoping to discover how
the combination of railways and good weather
enabled Somerset to export a little bit
of sunshine to the rest of Britain.
All this week it's helping me to plot my journey
along the holiday route,
the Great Western Railway tine reaching down
to the south west of England.
Today, I 7! be finding out how the railways
created a national delicacy.
The train was perfect. You could put
a strawberry on there and it was so smooth.
And it would go all the way to the north
without being damaged.
I'll be asking
what our ancestors got up to in Cheddar.
The bones of three adults and two children
with cut marks to drop the jaw out
is all evidence of cannibalism.
And I'll be exploring one of Britain's
oldest piers.
The other thing, of course,
with piers in their early days was
it was somewhere you could promenade.
In other words, you could be seen.
My journey this week takes me from Swindon
to find out how the railway transformed
many small coastal villages
into bustling seaside resorts.
After passing through Devon,
I'll head for Cornwall
and end my journey
on the rugged headland of Penzance.
Today I'm leaving Bristol and travelling
18 miles to Yatton and the Cheddar Gorge,
before reaching Weston-super-Mare.
The Great Western Railway mainline
takes me into Somerset,
which changed forever
when the railways arrived.
This is Yatton, a nice enough station,
but my Bradshaw's guide dismisses it
as a place of no importance
except as being a junction.
What wasn't known when this was written was
that in 1869 a newline would be added here
which would make Yatton
rather important after all.
When the new branch fine was opened
Yatton became the centre
of a booming strawberry industry,
which continued right up to the 19503.
Mike Lyle
started working on the trains in his teens.
- Good morning, Mike.
- Good morning, Michael.
How lovely to see you.
Thank you for meeting me.
Not at all.
I think you know Yatton Station quite well,
don't you?
Yes, I came here as a boy
at the age of approximately 15
and it really was a hive of industry.
The new railway meant that for the first time
huge quantities of fresh,
local Cheddar Valley strawberries
could be whisked around the country.
R was quickly nicknamed the Strawberry Line.
I was invited to go down and load the fruit
onto these massive great wagons.
They were called Siphons.
And I suppose, if my memory is correct,
they were about the length
of two double-decker buses.
We would load all the trains
through the afternoon and evening.
The smell of the strawberries
was absolutely overwhelming.
I would catch the last strawberry train back to
a station which was handy for me to cycle home,
and then I would throw my bike out and I would
follow the bicycle out of the guard's van.
And then cycle home.
You and your bike
were both leaving a moving train.
Yes. Every minute counted.
Every single minute counted.
If it lost its connection then the fruit wouldn't
be in any shape to be eaten at the other end.
(Train whistle)
With the industry in decline,
the strawberry tine and its workers
became the victims of the massive
British Railways closures in the 1960s.
When you heard that branch line was closing,
what did you feel?
I wondered what I was going to do.
It was quite shocking news.
It was national news.
It affected every branch line.
I was quite in despair at the time.
50 years on, many of the disused lines
have become footpaths
miss-crossing British countryside.
So I'll be continuing the next part of my journey
on foot.
Good morning. I see you're walking
the Strawberry Line.
I certainly am.
Is it a good way to see the country
walking along this?
Definitely. You see them dotted around when
you're driving round. It's a good way to see it.
And they're normally banked up nice and flat,
easy to walk on, easy to cycle on, so yeah.
And it gets you in touch with the greenery
and the country.
Plenty to see, lots of birds around, wildlife.
It's good, yeah.
There's always something sad
about a disused railway line.
And I'm old enough to remember tracks that I
used to use being closed in the Beeching cuts.
It was inevitable, I suppose.
The railways grew topsy-turvy in the
Victorian era when people didn't have cars.
The cheery thing is that today we don't talk
about lines closing, but new ones opening.
And there's a lot of talk
that the future of travel is high-speed rail.
But for today at least I'll be ambling
to the other end of the Strawberry Line.
In its heyday
there were 250 strawberry growers here.
Only four remain today,
including fruit farmer Andrew Seagers.
Why are strawberries grown here?
What's special about the land or the water here?
I think it's because of the slopes, the hills,
the climate, and the minerals in the water.
It gives it, you know, a good flavour fruit.
How long in the year
are you getting strawberries?
We start picking about 15th of April
and we will finish in that greenhouse again
with another crop of strawberries
by the 15th of November.
That's a pretty long season you have now.
I imagine that's much more
than it would have been 100 years ago.
Yes, we would be lucky to get more than
four weeks, five weeks.
Now we take it for granted that
we can eat strawberries all year round.
But in Bradshaw's lime
strawberries were a special seasonal delicacy.
For a few weeks of the year they were picked
and transported to market each Friday,
the day after people were paid.
As we're moving down here we're beginning
to see some strawberries now
that are getting towards ripeness.
- Do you mind if I try that one?
- No. Of course you can.
- Mm. Beautiful.
- Absolutely fabulous.
There's no substitute
for taking it straight off the plant.
So the railways made it possible for a massive
amount of strawberries to be grown in Britain.
But I suppose it's the airlines
that are killing it off in Britain.
Yes, what happened was you could send
a strawberry to the north of England on a train.
The strawberries were much softer than these.
50 the train was perfect.
You could put a strawberry on there
and it was so smooth.
And it would go all the way to the north
without being damaged.
The railways were pivotal
for the strawberry growers.
But they also kick-started another
Cheddar Valley industry - tourism.
Before the railways only rich tourists would have
been able to enjoy the wonderful spectacle
of the Cheddar Gorge.
When the railways arrived
thousands of ordinary day-trippers
began to enjoy the splendour
of this magnificent area.
Reaching 500 feet in places
the sides of the ravine boast
the highest inland cliffs in the country.
My Bradshaw's guide tells me that the cliffs
of Cheddar are well worth visiting,
and says the area has achieved "some notoriety
from the discovery of two caverns in the vicinity
one called the Stalactite
and the other the Bone Cave."
And it comments on the very large number
of visitors now coming to the area.
But no Victorian could have imagined
the tourist magnet it has become today.
Cheddar Gorge now attracts
half a million visitors a year.
Many of them like archaeologist
Hugh Cornwell come to marvel at the caves.
They were discovered by eccentric sea captain
and showman Richard Gough.
Hugh. After my long trek I find you.
What a beautiful cave.
When Richard Gough discovered this
in November 1898
he came through the tunnel there and he
saw this and he called it St Paul's Cathedral.
Because of the Whispering Gallery at the top.
This is very pretty.
It's almost too good to be true.
This is a Richard Gough invention.
It's a mirror pool. He's dammed the water,
just a little skim of water.
And you can see the stalactites reflected
on the surface of the water.
Do you approve of this manipulation of nature?
Yes, I do. It's very low-intensity
human interaction with it.
Gough's reason was to show
the amazing complexity and beauty of nature.
- And I think he's succeeded.
- I thought you'd be more disapproving.
The Victorians poured in to experience
this underground labyrinth -
the first cave in Britain to be fit
with electric fight.
Before Gough turned them into
a tourist attraction,
the Caves had been home to something else.
You can probably guess from the smell
that we've now arrived at the Cheese Cave.
Glad you mentioned that.
I wondered if we had a problem.
Now, the cheeses here.
Is this a necessary part of its maturing process
or is it a touristy thing?
No, this is really genuine.
These are truckles of cheese.
They're the only really genuine Cheddar cheese
in the entire world.
Because these cheese are made
from unpasteurised milk from cows
on the Somerset Levels, very close to Cheddar.
They're made by hand in the Cheddar Gorge
Cheese Company in Cheddar.
And they are stored here in Gough's Cave.
This is genuine cave-matured Cheddar cheese.
Sounds wonderful.
Can't wait to get my hands on some.
As more areas of the cave were opened up
to cater for the tourists,
some important archaeological discoveries
were made.
And this is Cheddar Man - 9,000 years old.
The oldest complete skeleton
ever found in Britain.
That is a fantastic sight. This intact skeleton
was found here, was it?
Yes.
When the skeleton was studied in detail,
it revealed an extraordinary life and death.
Well, the story behind it, we believe,
is that Cheddar Man, as a teenager,
was hit on the head with an axe,
which created a major wound in his forehead.
That probably affected him
for the rest of this life.
But he died, we believe, in his early 203.
And we think that during that period,
the effect of the blow to the head
made him anti-social, dysfunctional,
that sort of thing.
So that when he died the members of his tribe
didn't deal with him in the normal way of burial,
but put him in a twilight zone here so that his
spirit couldn't depart to the ancestors
and couldn't roam amongst the living either.
Recent research has produced
more sinister revelations
about the people who lived in these caves.
Hugh, I hear there's evidence of cannibalism
that's been discovered in these caves.
Yes, that's true.
The bones of three adults and two children
with cut marks to drop the jaw out
to get at the tongue and to invert the skull
and out marks on the long bones,
and the breaking of long bones
is all evidence of cannibalism.
The bones are scattered across the cave floor
and mixed with horse bones.
Cannibalism did take place here,
but long before Cheddar Man.
I'm pleased to see people have turned from
cannibalism to cheese-eating.
- This is only recent.
- Only recent!
The researchers also took DNA
from Cheddar Man
to see if they could find any of his descendants
in Cheddar today.
And guess what? They found a match.
- Adrian.
- Hello. Good evening.
- Let me get a good look at you.
- Nice to meet you, Michael.
Any resemblance to Cheddar Man?
- Probably vaguely.
- I can't see it exactly.
- Come on in.
- Thank you very much.
Local teacher Adrian Target was helping
to organise the experiment
when he was also roped in to giving a sample.
So I was arranging to have my students
DNA-tested and some were apprehensive.
And so I said, “It will be all right. I'll show you
there's nothing involved. I'll have mine done."
One of the things
they obviously wanted to know was,
how much like Cheddar Man I was.
And so they did a reconstruction
of Cheddar Man's head
based on what they had from the skeleton.
Adrian, this is spooky.
Such a strong resemblance.
Obviously you don't wear your hair the way
they did 9,000 years ago, but otherwise...
It's always other people
who can see the resemblance.
Almost as bizarre is Adrian's other secret.
- Now, you know who this is, don't you?
- Yes, it's a Bradshaw handbook.
- A Bradshaw guide.
- And how do you know that?
Probably because I'm a railway nut, I suppose.
A bit of a anorak.
I've collected mainly the timetables,
rather than the guides.
Adrian, that's a serious anorak to collect
the timetables of trains that ran 150 years ago.
- I suppose so.
- Sherlock Holmes had a Bradshaw, didn't he?
- That's right.
- To the left of his fireplace.
Well, I do have some just here.
I suppose it was only a matter of time
before I met another Bradshaw enthusiast.
It wasn't long ago that they were
an essential item for every train traveller.
Must give you
a lot of interesting bedtime reading.
Thank you. That's lovely.
It's almost time to leave Cheddar,
but there's one thing I need to try before I go.
- Good evening.
- Evening.
Oh, that looks serious.
- Are these all from Cheddar?
- They are all from Cheddar.
- This is the one from the Caves?
- It is indeed.
That's the one I have to try.
Lovely big taste.
Mm, really mature and...
fresh and tangy.
- Thank you so much.
- I'm glad you're enjoying it.
Early next morning I'm ready to pop along
the coast to Weston-super-Mare.
- Morning.
- Morning.
- Morning.
- Thank you.
Running on time on a Sunday morning.
That's very good.
Yeah, we try to.
The building of the Great Western Railway made
it possible for there to be long-distance tourism.
Like railway workers from Swindon
spending a week by the seaside in Devon.
But it also led to the growth of day-tripping
and weekend visits.
So that people from Bristol and Exeter could
spend time by the sea in the Bristol Channel.
Weston-super-Mare, perhaps,
above all other seaside resorts,
grew rapidly thanks to the railway.
In 1822 it had a population of just 735.
By the end of the century
it had shot up to over 20,000.
Clearly, they weren't put off
by what Bradshaw had to say.
Weston-super-Mare - my Bradshaw guide
is not entirely polite about Weston-super-Mare.
So I'm intrigued to see what I'll find.
Bradshaw writes: “The receding of the tide
leaves a disfiguring bank of mud
along the beach,
which is a great drawback
to the enjoyment of bathing.
It says about Weston-super-Mare: at low tide
Weston is disfigured by this bank of mud.
- What do you think of that.
- I think it's right.
- Do you think it is disfiguring?
- Yeah, it's the stones and stuff.
Do you not like that so much?
It can look very dirty and polluted,
but today it doesn't look that polluted.
But sometimes, yeah, it does.
- Good afternoon.
- Hello.
- Are you visiting or do you live here?
- We live here.
I'm following an old guidebook -
it's 150 years old.
And he makes a rather catty comment.
He says the best reason to stay a long time
in Weston-super-Mare
is because of the attractive places around it.
What do you think of that? Is that unfair?
The actual Weston-super-Mare central is lovely.
- I thought you'd say that, you see.
- Yeah.
The other thing he says is that he thinks the bank
of mud that's left at low tide is disfiguring.
- Would you use that word?
- No, it's a natural thing, surely.
You can't have lovely Cornwall beaches
everywhere, can you?
You're saying if it's a natural thing
you shouldn't call it disfiguring.
No! Of course not. It's part of Weston.
Everybody knows it's like that down here,
but they still come down here.
Wow, you really are loyal to your town.
At least Bradshaw is more positive
about one local attraction - Birnbeck Pier.
He says: "The bay sweeps a flat sandy beach
to Worle Hill,
having beyond it the rock or island of Birnbeck,
across which a new pier has been made
with a landing stage for steamers. "
The pier was still bustling 50 years ago,
but severe damage from storms in 1990 made it
unsafe, and it was closed to the public in 1994.
The only way to appreciate it is by water.
So I've tagged along with RNLI
who used to have a base on the pier.
Nigel is of 24 local volunteers.
You've got a RNLI slipway there.
You use that sometimes?
We don't any more.
That got condemned a while back.
Just fell into disrepair really.
We now operate on the north side
using a new method
with tractors and trailers launching
on a shingle beach.
Does it make you sad to see it
in this dilapidated condition?
It does, yeah. It's quite an old pier.
I just about remember it
from when I was a wee lad.
And to see it like it is now
is devastating really.
But my visit to the pier
is cut short by a real emergency.
Get the guys back on here.
They want No2.
Thank you.
So...er... there I was out in Lifeboat No.1
And er...a call came through.
Luckily we had Lifeboat No.2 alongside us.
But they've been called to an emergency.
Somebody is drifting in a raft.
It's quite a long-distance job,
so they've got to take the bigger craft.
Luckily we had the smaller boat alongside.
- Hello.
- Hi. How are you? Welcome aboard No.2.
Thank you very much.
Thank you, guys.
With all that excitement
I'm glad to get my feet back on dry land.
- That was great. Thank you very much.
- Take it easy.
Bye. Thank you.
This old pier may be very down on its luck today,
but it was still a massive tourist attraction
until the late 1950s.
Pier archivist Stan Terrell
remembers how popular it was
and has traced its history back
to Bradshaw's day.
Stan, why do you think the Victorians
were so crazy about piers?
The very fact
that they so enjoyed going on boats.
But with a pier, you could be on a boat,
as it were, and you felt safe.
You had the water underneath you.
I think they loved that, being able to see.
The other thing with piers,
especially in their early days was
it was somewhere you could promenade.
In other words, you could be seen.
And you could see others.
One of the reasons the pier was such a hit
was that it was the nearest spot for
Welsh people to get a drink on Sundays.
Cardiff tourists would pour from the steamers
into the bars on the first booze cruises.
Paint a picture for me. At the height of
the Victorian era, people arriving by steamers,
what would it have been like down there?
Bags of excitement, I guess.
As many as 13 steamers queuing up
to discharge their passengers.
When they eventually got on the island,
enjoying themselves,
with all the amusements, the helter-skelter.
I've heard it said that town business people
didn't like it,
because all the business was coming into the
old pier and very little of that came into the town.
One history of the pier
is about pleasure and steamers.
Another history of the pier is to do with warfare.
Is that right?
Quite correct.
In 1942 the Admiralty took this pier over.
It became then known as HMS Birnbeck
and they staffed it with scientists.
They developed the Bouncing Bomb,
but it was only the theoretical work
that was done in that instance.
I have to stop you there. You're telling me
the Bouncing Bomb was developed on a pier?
Yes, it was, yes. The idea apparently for
choosing the pier to put their scientists on,
was that first of all, you've probably noticed
how secluded we are, away from prying eyes.
And secondly, we have the third highest
rise and fall of the tide in the world.
So that one of the objects was to develop
weapons they could fire into very deep water.
And they wanted to be able to examine
those explosives at low tide.
So those were the two reasons it was chosen.
So Birnbeck Pier has rather an important part
in the history of World War Two.
Oh, yes, I'd say so. Yes.
It's a really beautiful day.
The sun's been out, there's a breeze off the sea.
You can see for miles.
This is the British beach holiday at its best.
Think Bradshaw must have seen it
on a rainy day,
because Weston-super-Mare has tots to offer,
including one very traditional seaside attraction.
Kevin Mager's family has run the donkey rides
here for more than 100 years.
Tell me about Weston-super-Mare in its heyday.
There were donkey rides.
People used to come from the station.
It used to be packed all the way down the road.
There used to be lines of them
coming down in the mornings.
- And what was the beach like in those days?
- The beach...
We used to have to keep a track for the donkeys
to walk along to keep the people out of the way.
They'd be all sat in their deckchairs and they'd
sit on the track. We used to try to move them.
- It's a wonderful beach, isn't it?
- It's a lovely beach.
It's nice and flat. It's safe.
The tide doesn't come in...
it comes in twice a day.
How did your family get into donkeys?
Well, years ago everybody had coal businesses.
They were coal merchants.
And they went in the summer, cos there was
no coal, they went to doing donkey rides.
That's how I think it happened,
cos we did it as well.
Many years ago we had a coal business.
- The two businesses go together perfectly.
- Yes.
Winter and summer.
Is this your first time on a donkey?
- Did you enjoy it?
- Yeah.
- Was he nice and gentle and safe?
- Nice and gentle and safe.
Yeah.
By the 19705
Weston-super-Mare was in decline,
thanks to cheap package holidays abroad.
These days visitor numbers
are back up to around six million a year.
Perhaps the eco-friendly trend
towards holidaying in Britain
is again boosting the town's popularity.
When I remember childhood summers,
I think of strawberries and beaches and piers,
and boat rides and, yes, the occasional donkey.
These were the things mentioned in Bradshaw,
largely invented by the Victorians,
and made possible by the railways.
And they're at the heart
of the British seaside holiday.
Even today.
Next time I'll be discovering why Torquay
became a magnet for Victorian invalids.
You've got 3000 miles of Atlantic Ocean
on your doorstep,
nice clean air coming in off the Atlantic,
so that's good for your lung disorders.
I'll be fishing for salmon
on the beautiful Dart Estuary.
I tell you, Nick, these city hands have not done
work like this in their lifetime, probably.
And I'll be spending Britain's
first local currency.
When you shop in the supermarket, 80%
of that money leaves Totnes the next morning.
This is a currency that can't go anywhere else.