Hartlepool. The boundary of a hundred bar comedians’ jokes. Marooned though wish during a bottom of a Football League. And don’t even discuss that aged story about a hangman’s wire and a monkey…
So far, so clichéd, then. But don’t start shouting during a behind when we contend I’ve customarily enjoyed one of a many engaging days out for a prolonged time in a aged North Sea port.
Hartlepool’s fortunes were founded on a sea and now it has incited to that nautical birthright to find a share of a tourism pound.
The town’s caller charity is built – utterly literally – around HMS Trincomalee, Britain’s oldest warship still afloat (rather than propped adult in a dry wharf as with HMS Victory or Cutty Sark).
Launched in India, in 1817, a sail-driven frigate returned to Hartlepool – her home pier from 1862 to 1877 – 170 years after for a vital replacement pursuit which, nevertheless, has left 60 per cent of a strange fabric intact.
Around a wharf has been built an authentically windy mock-up of an 18th century pier with a chandlery, sword-maker’s workshop, pub and captain’s residence, a whole venue being marketed as Hartlepool’s Maritime Experience.
It’s probable to entrance a dockside and Trincomalee directly – though to get a many out of those dual aspects of a knowledge it’s good value flitting by a highly-realistic audio-visual facsimile of life ‘below deck’.
Both there and on a boat itself are fascinating contribution to be schooled during each turn. For example, notwithstanding all that smashing aged rigging, there’s indeed customarily a integrate of feet of wire on a boat – a length that rings a ship’s bell.
Everything else, we see, is cable, a nautical tenure for any wire once given a specific purpose – from suspending a hammock to holding adult one of Trincomalee’s 3 masts.
Although it’s not customarily on offer to visitors, we had a payoff of scaling a categorical pillar paraphernalia to a wind-buffeted roost on one of a ‘tops’ – a height designed to prop a paraphernalia divided from a pillar and to offer as an regard and gun-firing post.
It was value a cold for a view: a town, a aged and new docks, shipping out to sea and, over a considerable array of attention along a banks of a River Tees, a cliffs of a Yorkshire seashore right down to Whitby.
Normal physique heat was easy pleasantness of lunch in a captain’s cabin – beef a la mode (stew) and jam blimp to contemporary recipes – afterwards it was opposite to ‘old’ Hartlepool and another museum with a troops theme, a Heugh Battery.
This is a 19th/early 20th century fortified gun placement and surveillance post, tighten by a streets where 110 civilians were killed by a German naval barrage in Dec 1914.
Now it binds an considerable collection of arms, from 18th century muskets around Second World War anti-aircraft guns to a 1970s Chieftain tank, all within reach of a waves.
If we imagination creation a weekend of it afterwards during slightest dual member of a common bill hotel bondage could be speckled from adult a rigging.
However, we were propitious adequate to stay somewhere rather some-more superb – Wynyard Hall, a former home of spark barons a Marquesses of Londonderry and now a four-star hotel.
Having enjoyed a excellent dinner, we late to a library where wine, blockade and a crackling record glow brought on a warmest of winter glows.
There’s most to suffer in Hartlepool, afterwards – and I’m not joking, either!
Travel information:
Hartlepool’s Maritime Experience: Jackson Dock, Hartlepool, TS24 0XZ. 01429 860077. www.hms-trincomalee.co.uk
Heugh Battery Museum: The Headland, Hartlepool, TS24 0PS. 01429 270746. www.heughbattery.com
Wynyard Hall: Wynyard Park, TS22 5NF. 01740 644811. www.wynyardhall.co.uk