We happened to visit on one of the days when graduation was taking place which made for some nice people-watching.

The main draw of Bath, though, was its Roman Baths, built on what was an ancient shrine to the Goddess Sulis (hence Bath’s roman name of Aquæ Sulis).

The SS Great Britain was originally conceived to be a wooden ship driven by paddlewheels, but a combination of factors led to a couple of design changes. Brunel was overseeing the project in Bristol when he saw an iron-hulled ship dock in the city for the first time and sent associates off to investigate it; their reports of its benefits along with Brunel’s weighty reputation persuaded the financial backers of the ship to accept a switch to using the stronger but lighter iron as the material for the vessel. A second alteration to the original plans occurred when a ship driven by propellers arrived at Bristol and Brunel discovered that the reduced space required (therefore more passengers or cargo) plus greater efficiency that propellers provided over paddlewheels was worth further changes.

It was these changes that we looked at first with our visit to SS Great Britain starting under its iron hull. Fans of painted and rusting metal are now in for a treat.

We quite enjoyed some of the Brunel-stylised signs around the museum and liked the tip of the top hat to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy with the dehumidifier names. Those dehumidifiers were a necessary addition after the ship’s recovery and conversion to a museum when the ambient humidity started to cause such damage to the hull that its estimated lifespan was given as only 25 years.

The propellers on the SS Great Britain were replicas of the first set that were found to be terrible. It’s a bold move by the museum curators. Following sea trials the six-bladed design shown below was replaced by a four-bladed one instead. In later life it even went to a three-bladed design too although the ship was always designed to use sails when conditions were favourable instead of or as well as the engines.

The design changes to the SS Great Britain caused delays to her completion – big projects running over initial estimates is just a fact of life – and things were further compounded when she was finally floated out into the harbour; her width and depth required that the lock gates be modified (after many months of wrangling) in order to allow the ship to egress. The first few seasons of sailing were also beset with problems – the ship required even more changes to fix flaws with the design; it rolled, it was slow, blades broke, wear and tear seemed exceedingly high – culminating in the ship running aground off Ireland. Getting her afloat and towed to Liverpool resulted in the ship’s owners – Great Western Steamship Company – running out of money, and SS Great Britain was eventually sold twice, each time with extensive refits and investments in newer technology engines and stabilising features, and wound up being used almost exclusively on the London to Australia route taking emigrants down under and returning with the gold that was attracting a lot of them in the first place. At this time (1850s onwards) SS Great Britain would have carried just over a hundred crew with around five hundred passengers plus cargo.

Along the dock beside the museum ship there was a nice display showing how supplies and personal belongings would have been stored prior to a sailing south. Luggage beside a ship would be something we’d come to see a lot over the years following this visit to Bristol as our own appreciation for hopping aboard a cruise ship would take off later in 2013 on our second ever cruise (which you can read about here, if you’re interested: Crown Princess, Norwegian Fjords).

Inside SS Great Britain was a surprise, and a very pleasant one too. Living in Portsmouth, we’ve visited the Victory and Warrior many times and these are both very functional vessels, and I suppose we expected a little more of the same, not quite twigging that Brunel’s ship in Bristol was for paying passengers. The dining room in particular was quite opulent.

If you’re looking for an odd reason to visit SS Great Britain because all the normal ones just aren’t floating your boat then why not take a pee aboard a piece of history designed by this country’s most famous civil engineer? Yes, the toilets on the museum ship are actually functional, and that was handy because we both needed to go anyway.

SS Great Britain has some decidedly odd decorations on its prow. Your guess is as good as mine as to what they represent; the set square might refer to Brunel’s engineering; the cogs to the machinery parts of the engine; but the rest? If anyone ever moans about the hull art on modern cruise ships then you can always refer them to this nineteenth century steamship and say “Well, yeah, but would you rather have a scythe and bouquet?”

After carrying in excess of thirty thousand passengers during her lifetime the SS Great Britain was converted to a sailing ship in 1882 to begin a new life of transporting coal. Her final voyage came just four years later when a fire broke out aboard and she made for the Falkland Islands for repairs. The Great Britain’s mizzen mast is on display in the islands’ capital and, indeed, we saw it a few years after this when we visited Stanley. Repairs were deemed economically unviable, however, and the ship was used as a floating storage hulk until 1937 when she was towed to Sparrow Cove and scuttled. Donations from philanthropists in 1970 allowed the ship to be re-floated and towed on a pontoon back to the United Kingdom and returned to the state in which you can now see her if you’re ever visiting Bristol.

Back in 2013 we headed to this spot on the west coast of England to use it as a base for exploring the surrounding area. A seaside location that we could come back to at the end of each day and enjoy some sea air walks, perhaps some tacky pier-end entertainments, and a pub or two absolutely suited the way we liked to have breaks.

We booked into the Beachlands Hotel at the time, it being close enough to walk into the main part of the town but not right in the middle of it, and having car parking too. The bonus was a swimming pool that we enjoyed using. One of our fondest memories of this hotel, though, was splashing out on an evening meal there one night and being seated outside the dining room ahead of our table being ready then being offered canapés. The canapés were thick slices of cucumber with a dollop of cream cheese on the top and they amused us immensely. We often talk about them now.

Anyway, after our drive up from Portsmouth and checking in, unpacking, and freshening up, we went for a walk down to Weston-super-Mare seafront and if it’s photographic evidence of this you’re after then you’ve come to the right place.

The beach at Weston-super-Mare has a lot of sand but depending on the time of day that you visit not much in the way of water. The bits that sort of look like water in the photos here are generally just wet sand reflecting the light from the sky. Weston-super-Mare actually has the second largest tidal range in the world with the difference between low and high tides over one and a half kilometres.

On a later visit to this part of the world in 2017 we would actually see the sea during another walk along Weston-super-Mare seafront.

The “Super Mare” part of the town’s name comes from Latin but it’s not “extraordinary lady horse” if that’s what you’re thinking while I’ve conveniently placed this paragraph just above photos of some equine animals on the beach. These are donkeys, silly, and while I’m not a fan of having working animals and would certainly never ride one they did seem to be looked after fairly well and were in decent spirits as far as my reading of donkey facial expressions go. “Super Mare” means “on the sea” and suggests that the town was named at high tide otherwise the commonly-used term of “Western-super-Mud” might have come into use a lot earlier instead.

We reached the Grand Pier and we felt compelled to walk down and around it. Should you ever need to slow us down if we’re pursuing you then you could do a lot worse than construct a few piers in our way and we’ll be sure to check them out.

The pavilion on the pier in the photo below is the third such one as it won’t surprise you to learn that since its original construction in 1904 there have been a few fires that have required substantial repairs. Our travelling experiences and visits to historical buildings suggest piers almost love catching fire as much as churches do.

We don’t talk about the kinky hot dog figure on Weston-super-Mare’s Grand Pier.

That brought our walk along the seafront at Weston-super-Mare to an end for this first night of our 2013 visit to the West Country. All that remained was to wander into town and find a pub or two to drink in. With this being pre-2016 there’s a good chance this would have been a Wetherspoons pub. We, like all good and decent people, don’t frequent their small-minded establishments any longer.