Ironbridge
Trip Start
Jun 10, 2007
1
5
104
Trip End
Ongoing
Ironbridge,
United Kingdom
Saturday, June 23, 2007
We found our first b & b of the trip without issue and with great pleasure. It is nice to have our own room and bathroom as it is amazing how many people actually snore!
We walked the towns main strip and checked out their bridge made of iron (hence the town name) and their museum of the gorge. This place is so little but has such a rich history. It fueled the industrial revolution (pardon the pun). The methods of ironmaking and mining developed here changed how the world worked.
It is pretty wild to be at the heart of it all hundreds of years later looking back at what this place started.
After some delicious curry in a local pub we stopped in another watering hole on the way back
Dentist office 100 years ago...
. It was fabulous as we chatted it up with the bartender and some locals before meeting a couple of Scots. We shared a few pints and then we started to discuss whiskey. We tried to keep up but it didn't work out so well. As one of them put it, "I am like a donkey with strawberries... I can't have just one". They were quite funny but they got harder and harder to understand the more they drank. Needless to say we were in bed by 10:30. The next day we started off with a traditional English breakfast and headed off to a Victorian town. Blists hill is a recreation of a English town set in 1900. It is 50 acres of streets, shops, mills, schools, the works. Each of the places has people living and working like it was at the time (see pictures). For example the town chemist had all of these old school remedies and medications in his shop next to the dentist with his old tools... It was a pretty scary office with some seriously intimidating gadgets.
Back to Wales!
