Week Monday 30 April to 06 May
This week was spent largely staying
with friends and relatives. Each made us very welcome and provided us with
wonderful hospitality.
On Monday we set out from Blackpool
for Manchester to stay with Andy and Sally Bell (Daniel and Abigail), another
couple who had been on our course up in Toronto. We told them that were wanting
to go to Ffald-y-Brenin, a Christian Retreat Centre in Wales, and they lent us
Roy Godwin’s book “The Grace Outpouring” – the story of Fflad-y-Brenin. Upon
checking the Retreat’s website for its location, we discovered that they were
having their monthly prayer meeting the very next day, so we decided to attend
it. We would need to get there by 10.00 am – about a 4 hour journey. So we set
out in the daylight at 6.00 am the following morning.
It is amazing the length of
sunlight hours that we are experiencing even though it is still spring. The sun
rises soon after 5.00 am, and is not setting until well after 9.00 pm. The
journey took us through the north of Wales and down the coast to Fishguard.
What a delightful and quaint place this
part of Wales is. We drove down windy roads, passing from one small village to another, decorated with stone houses and slate roofs, fields outlined neatly with stone walls. If it wasn’t for the modern cars and farm machinery, the scenes could well have been from an earlier era. This region seemed to be sparsely populated, mainly farming.
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| Welsh Village |
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| Coastal Scene and GORSE! |
We discovered on this journey just
how invaluable our little GPS (or Sat Nav as they call them here) is. By just
putting into it the postcode of Ffald-y-Brenin, we received direction along an
absolute maze of narrow two way tar-sealed roads (which were for the most part
only wide enough for one car). What a privilege it was to see countryside that we
suspect the majority of tourists would never see.
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| Two way road? |
We arrived at the prayer meeting
after it had just started and spent the day there. In the afternoon we had a
guided tour around the facilities at Ffald-y-Brenin. There was a tremendous
sense of the presence of God there, especially at the cross on the hill. The
attention to detail spoke of the labour of love which was devoted to bless and
refresh those who came.
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| Entrance way |
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| In the Prayer Room |
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| Inside the Chapel |
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| The Headland with the Cross |
The following day took us through
the south of Wales, and a visit to the Moriah Chapel where the 1904 Welsh
Revival essentially started and spread from.
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| Moriah Chapel |
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| Evan Robert's Sepulchre |
It was in south Wales that we came
upon the industrial area, and no doubt the majority of the Welsh population.
Our destination for the day was Bath with Tim and Judith Clarke who were
another couple that we met in Toronto.
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| Judith and Tim |
Tim and Judith took us around some of the
sights of Bath including a walk along part of the canal system that had been
set up several centuries ago to aid transport.
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| Houseboats on the Canal |
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| Canal running in a viaduct over the Avon River |
They also took us to Bradford-on-Avon,
where we saw some historic buildings.
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| Old Cafe in Bradford-on-Avon. Note how plumb the walls are! |
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| A tithe barn (1379) - farmers tithed their grain to Lord of the Manor |
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| View of Bath from Victoria Park |
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| View over farmland from our bedroom window |
We spent the next morning in Bath, exploring the
Cathedral and some of the other sites in the inner city before heading off to
stay with Neil and Pat Fursman, Karen’s relatives in Radstock.
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| Inside Bath Cathedral |
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| Neil and Pat in Cheddar Gorge |
We had a great time catching up on who’s who,
sharing photos and talking about some of our ancestors.
They also took us on
some sight-seeing, the Cheddar Gorge and the Wells Cathedral.
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| Moat around the Bishop's Palace in Wells |
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| Wells Cathedral |
There we saw what
is claimed to be the oldest residential street in world.
