For a village, Eyam seems to sprawl rather a great deal. And so once we found a free car park (bizarrely next to the pay and display one, which was empty, obviously) we found ourselves right outside the museum. However, we could see that there was a queue of children long enough to strike fear into the hearts of any rational person, and so decided to walk down the hill into the village instead. It didn't take us long to find a second hand bookshop, where Rose bought two books (and overpaid for them), apparently the woman in charge hadn't got any change, which smacks of a) unprofessionalism and b) bullshit, but as it was a charity she was inclined to let it go.
Not having brought a bag we decided to take the books back to the car, and then decided to chance our arm in the museum. Well it wasn't so much tedious... it was more tedium infinitum. There were a few nuggets of information to be gleaned, and the odd chuckle raised at some of the suggestions of ways to ward off the plague (excessive lechery and consumption of alcohol being two) but mostly it was a very simple story, a story which could perhaps be told on one side of an A4 sheet of paper, being strung out with various contrivances.
Added to this there was a very annoying man, reading out every single information board to his children. I had visions of Rose venting her spleen at him and him apologising profusely, explaining that his wife was blind or something (truly an Inbetweeners moment in the making). But thankfully after a while he pissed off upstairs and left us in peace.
After the museum we set off in search of the famous 'courgette and lime cake serving' cake shop (which is NOT Eyam Tea Rooms, that's over the road). We went to order a sandwich from the menu only to be told we were looking at the wrong menu and the eat in menu was twice the price. To be fair, the eat in menu included a lovely salad and crisps and coleslaw and was all round pretty awesome as egg sandwiches go.
We were pretty full after that, but felt as we had gone to so much trouble to find this cake shop, and as we were somewhat unlikely to pass this way again any time soon, we really ought to try a piece of cake. So we had a huge piece of carrot cake, which I thought was nice, but Rose thought was indifferent. It was definitely served too cold, and that didn't help. It was a 4/5 piece of cake as far as I was concerned but Rose rated it 2-3 (which was harsh in my opinion, but there you are).
Presented with a bill for two sandwiches and a bottle of coke (but no cake) we took our leave calmly, but swiftly, and returned to the car. On driving up out of the village we found the road blocked by a landslip (we suspected a ruse by the cake shop owner, eager to extract payment before we left) and had to drive an awful long way around about trying to find a different route to our hotel.
On the way in we had seen houses built right under cliffs that must have been 100ft high. Nets had been erected to catch small pieces of rock that fall, but in the case of a landslip these peoples' houses would be well and truly crushed to dust.
No comments:
Post a Comment