Mamble and Crowl, Worcs

Finally got to Mamble, which was a bit of a disappointment, to say the least. A little place with its most open area on a downward piece of the hill, a pub and a church and almost nothing else. Plainly we’ll have to rewrite the song:
Now we’ve been to Mamble
That lies above the Teme,
And there’s no one much in Mamble,
At least as we have seen.
No doubt they breed and brew there,
Still lazy as the claim,
But I doubt that any song there
Sets the local pub aflame.
However, we also went to the other Crowle, in Worcestshire. This has a totally different atmosphere to the Crowle up north, which seemed run down and devitalised. Crowle, Worcs, is probably a dormitory suburb, but the houses are both old thatched roof style and modern, the church has a sense of quiet about it, and there’s a modern parish hall at one end of the village. No sign of any Crowls in the church graveyard, so maybe we’re a hardy lot!
This morning, however, we went to church at the local place just down the road, in the village of Wolverley. This was a fairly High Anglican place, seemingly occupied by widows (only a couple of blokes that I could see) and not very many of them. There was a choir, however, all in heavenly-blue robes, and there were a couple of guys in amongst them too, so that supplemented the numbers on both sides.
The minister was a woman, but she isn’t the vicar, apparently. He was away doing a service elsewhere. She spoke well in her short sermon, and made a good point about reaching out to others in her comments on John’s Gospel.
At the end we took a brief look around the place, and there was a list of former vicars, going way back to the 13th century. One John Crowle stood out among them. He was vicar around 1545, and had an alias: Yewes. Not sure what that had to do with anything!
Of course he may have no connection with my part of the family, but it’s good to see someone in the wider clan doing a good job all that time ago.
Anyway, both the Wolverley church and the Crowle church are named after St John the Baptist. The Wolverley one, which is in the picture, is built on a hill. This is probably a good thing, apart from its biblical significance, because in June this year, Wolverley's lower reaches were flooded twice. We saw a man digging out the stream that runs past his house, and replacing the rocks that had been shifted from his garden wall. He's planning on building a much higher wall around that side of the house, even though the stream is at present more than a metre below the foundations.

Owl or Crow?

Mike standing in the Market Square at Crowle, under a specially provided cover. Note that the toilets are to hand, as is a telephone box. Full marks for the people of Crowle.

We finally made it to Crowle today - or Kroll, as the locals pronounce it. Seemingly even the locals have a bit of difficulty deciding which way to go on the pronunciation side of things: we spoke to two or three people and got mixed responses.
Anyway, this isn’t the Crowle we originally aimed for a few days ago - that one was in ,. This one is up north, closer to Scunthorpe. We’re camped at the only Crowle site listed in our book, although in fact, the site is three or four miles away from the village of Crowle.
Crowle is not a small village, but I’d suspect it’s a dormitory suburb for some larger town - the aforementioned Scunthorpe, for instance - rather than a town that survives by itself. At first sight, it’s not that appealing: there are quite a lot of run-down buildings in the centre of the village, and there’s a kind of uninspiring look to the buildings that aren’t run down. None of the charm of some of the country villages we’ve come across, not helped by the colour of the bricks they use here.
It didn’t help either, perhaps, that it’s Sunday, and so most things were closed and most people weren‘t out and about. We’ll go in again tomorrow, and check it when there’s a bit more life on the streets.
The most lively thing were the hoons: motorbikes roaring through the main street (so narrow at one point it has to have lights so traffic going one way doesn’t bang into traffic going the other), or youths on three-wheeler motor bikes doing wheelies, or open-top cars trying to do full speed in a 30 mph area. Or the boys playing football in a car park with a huge sign: No Ball Games.
There’s a canal going past Crowle, and a large water area surrounded by caravans and permanent holiday homes. Again there wasn’t much life there, but it is well after the summer holidays, so no doubt in season, the place is humming.
We stopped off at Derby on our way here. It's quite a large place, at least the size of Dunedin, I'd think. The service at the Cathedral was just ending as we arrived outside the door, and so we went in, to see what the building looked like. And joined in the queue for a cup of coffee. One woman asked Celia whether she'd enjoyed the service, and Celia had to say, Yes, she had.
The Cathedral isn't one of the old 12th or 13th century places that abound in England. It's obviously been rebuilt at some point; the style is 18th century perhaps for the most part, although the front of the building appears to date from a lot earlier. Consequently it's a very light building inside, clean and with bright colouring. The congregation appeared to be a good mix of ages, and there was a good sense of fellowship going on.
We walked further into the town, and came across the Australian bar, but the young man putting signs out didn't seem quite to appreciate me asking him if you had to be an Australian to work there.