A Weekend In The Forest

With this being a longer drive than our recent log cabin holidays, we booked off a long weekend from work and started making our way over at lunchtime.

To break up the journey, we made a few detours en route - the first of which wasn't far away - the Stoke Mandeville Stadium. This is the birthplace of the Paralympics, and there is a small museum dedicated to the history - including mementos from previous games.

We parked up and went inside the centre, took a look around at the medals, sweatshirts and torches along with videos and particular attention to the 2012 ones in London, which I was lucky to attend. We grabbed some food at the café, and then headed off on our cross country route through the Cotswolds.

As we arrived in the heart of the Costwolds, on the edges of the village of Burford, we drove down the main road for views of this quaint place.
We didn't stop as the traffic was bad and we were short on time - but we didn't need to, as we could see the place from the car.

We turned around and headed back to the A40 to head further towards the Welsh border. Not long after crossing the River Severn at Gloucester we turned off the main road and started winding our way through the hills around the Forest of Dean. Before long we had arrived at our log cabin for the weekend.

After grabbing supplies in Coleford, we headed back to the cabin for dinner and a nice evening soak in the hot tub.

The following day we headed out to see some of the local sights. We began by trying to visit Symonds Yat - a quaint village in the valley of the River Wye. We had planned to view from the top of the hill at the Forestry England car park, however en route we found the road was closed so we ended up doing a huge diversion that took twice as long. Then once we got here found we had to drive down into the village, where the roads and parking were tight and limited.

We pulled up, took a quick look around and then headed back en route to our main sight for the day - Hereford.

Upon driving into the city centre, we stopped at the supermarket to get a few more refreshments for the weekend, before parking up and walking across the River Wye. Just around the corner was the almost 1000 year old Hereford Cathedral.

We walked inside this huge building and made our way to the Mappa Mundi, the largest mediaeval map known to still exist, dating from 1300. In keeping with the traditional style of the time, it is orientated facing East, and shows the known world with Jerusalem in the centre, and is definitely not to scale.

This museum area, which was built as an annex to the original cathedral, leads on to the Chained Library of books, somewhat reminiscent of that in the Harry Potter films.

We took a look around before leaving the cathedral and heading towards the High Street where there was a market on, and a protest for Gaza, outside the beautiful (but sadly under refurbishment) Jacobean building right in the city centre.

As it had started to spit with rain, we headed back to the car via the cathedral and made our way towards Ledbury. However as we were at a set of traffic lights on the edge of the city centre, we felt a smash from behind - a lady with other things on her mind had crashed right into the back of us.

Inspecting the damage, it was thankfully rather superficial - the bumper was cracked, but that was about all. It had shaken us up, but we were fine.

We continued on to Ledbury as planned, and upon our arrival we wandered over to the High Street where we could see the beautiful 400 year old Market Hall.

We then wandered around the corner and up a quaint cobbled street leading to the church.

By now it had been quite a long day out and about, so we headed back to the lodge to enjoy some more time in the hot tub and play some games.

That night we went for a wander around the forest, where illuminated animals had been placed around the site.

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This was all part of a Winter Lights event, which made for a nice evening at this time of year.

The next day was more chilled - we went for a short walk around the woods, close to the Welsh border.

We lit the log fire again that night, and enjoyed our last evening away.

In the morning we packed up our stuff, and enjoyed our last views of the forest, before loading the car and heading towards home.

We drove through the heart of the Forest of Dean, before we ended up on the road that runs alongside the River Severn. After a stop at Oxford Services, we eventually made it home after a nice weekend.