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REGULAR TRAVEL WRITER NIGEL HEATH SHARE’S SNIPPET OF HIS LATEST BOOK…
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could move into straight away. Our hopes raised, Marc opened the door to the left and we were confronted with
an old
CORNWALL AND THE FAMOUS JAMAICA INN thrown-like commode
macerator sitting on a green, and obviously moth-eaten carpet in a light and airy room with a large window looking out over the courtyard and surrounding houses. So, its future use as our potential bathroom with shower was a no- brainer and I felt just a little tingle of excitement at the prospect of possible things to come. But nothing could have prepared us for what was to follow when Marc turned on his heels, opened the third white door and again led us up the winding wooden stairway to the top floor. Now we were confronted with a scene of utter dereliction and it was obvious that no one had been up here for years, because while the magnificent curved oak-beamed ceiling supported bare roof slates, the floorboards were completely rotten and venturing any further would have been perilous.
IN holiday mode when the borderline between dreams and reality can blur a little, my wife Jenny and I with absolutely no experience of major DIY projects and no command of the French language, wandered into an estate agency in a small town in Southern Normandy and ended up buying an old house in serious need of a complete renovation. It was March 2008 when we had gone out to stay with her life-long friends at their holiday home in the mediaeval village of Lassay les Chateaux in an area called the Pays de la Loire, and prior to that it had never entered our heads to become French property owners. The three-storey detached town house in a narrow and quaint little street called Rue Dore behind the square was the third property that Mark the agency owner showed us on that fateful morning.
Pushing open its white front door we stepped into a house that had been in the same family for over sixty years and had clearly seen little change in the whole of that time. The long narrow hallway with its lofty ceiling was dark, and ended in a white wooden door beyond which was an old toilet. Then turning right out of the hall, we looked into a gloomy lounge with a big stone fireplace and a window looking out onto the street. Now entering the kitchen, our eyes fell immediately on an antiquated wood-fired range standing in the large fireplace, the likes of which we had never seen before!
While the opposite white tiled wall was lined with a worktop and a range of very old white Formica cupboards, the end wall had a large metal framed window and an old glass
door
opening onto a gloomy courtyard. We fell in love immediately with the curved, dark wooden bannister leading us up and round to the first-floor landing and window,
we were
where now
faced with three old white doors.
The one ahead opened into a large bedroom with a lovely old wooden floor and two windows looking out onto the street below and it was immediately obvious that this was one space we
Shaking hands with Marc and promising to get back to him, we walked the few yards along the lane to a covered alley between the buildings and emerged onto the square with the tabac bar and its tables and chairs on our left. I ordered two ice cold lagers and we sat there in the sunshine looking across the square to the tall and imposing Mairie, or town hall, trying to get our heads around all that we had seen. The fact that neither of us could speak a word of French seemed to have been left out of the equation, but Jenny’s friend had a good command of the language, as had several of her friends, so I guess we simply thought we would get by until we acquired a basic understanding of French.
Now strolling across the square, we followed the alley beside the Mairie and down the long flight of gently sloping steps to an extensive rose garden. Crossing an adjoining public car
park, we followed the quiet road out of the village
enter Lassay’s restored four-tiered and mediaeval English Garden.
Here small plots surrounded by neat
box-type hedges and trained espalier apple trees were crammed with herbs of many varieties, whose sweet scents lingered on the air as we passed. Did villagers come and help themselves to the herbs and fruit, we wondered as we came upon a small fountain, before making our way to the lower level and turning right to enter Lassay’s beautifully-restored and slate-roofed lavoire, where yesteryear villagers came, baskets in hand, to do their washing.
But a far more stunning sight followed as we stepped forward to reach the edge of the lake with its perfect mirror reflection of the multi-turreted chateau and towering ramparts rising from the far shore. No wonder we had fallen in love with this small place tucked away in its sheltering fold of rolling hills.
Strolling around the lake and up the lane under the chateau ramparts, we made our way back to our friends’ house where that evening, we started having a reality check.
The house would need a huge amount of work to transform it into a comfortable holiday home and besides that, being in the heart of the village, there
was no garage and, more importantly, neither did it have a garden or a view... Our illustrated French Pied-a-Terre Adventure by Nigel Heath is now available from Amazon books.
before turning right to 16 | THE WONDER OF WEST WALES
July/August 2024
CORNWALL AND MOOR... TALES OF THE FAMOUS JAMAICA INN
BY NIGEL HEATH
WAVES of mist were drifting in across the bleakness of Bodmin Moor
as my wife
Jenny and I pulled into the car park of the famous Jamaica Inn.
It was instantly obvious to see how authoress Daphne du Maurier was inspired to write her famous novel of the same name after she and a friend became lost while out riding on the moor and were guided back to the remote inn by their horses. And one has only to step inside to experience the heady atmosphere of smugglers and daring do, surrounded by pictures and memorabilia of those days of the 1780s when smugglers evaded the excise men to land a quarter of the tea and half the elicit brandy in secluded bays all along the norther coasts of Cornwall and neighbouring Devon. Indeed, fact then became merged with
fiction when I spotted a brass plaque on the floor of the bar marking the spot where Du Maurier’s drunken and remorseful inn keeper and master smuggler Joss Merlyn was murdered.
Moving closer to more recent times I was surprised to read how another famous novelist Alasdair Maclean of HMS Ulysses fame purchased the Jamaica Inn in 1962 and enlisted the support of his master mariner brother to oversee its running. Apparently, he had become tired of writing
his twenty-nine action-packed novels and had decided to become an hotelier instead and also acquired two others in Somerset and Worcestershire. A grant in 1972 enabled him to redevelop more of a stable block and the inn became a hotel, but in the eleven years he owned the inn he only stayed once for three days when he was described as a real gentleman. After an excellent dinner and a comfortable
night in a room with a long view towards Brown Willy, or the Hill of Sparrows, the highest point on the moor at 1,378ft, we had breakfast and it took just a thirty-minute drive to reach the fabulous Eden Project. Here
six spectacular
Biomes seemingly sprouting mushroom like out of a giant former clay pit, house one of the largest rainforests in captivity. Now we wandered around wild and cultivated exterior landscapes being drawn
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