BIG TURN UPS IN ‘TROUSER TOWN’ T
P&O CRUISES is offering a 12-night cruise on Aurora (R814) from £1,299 per person for a sea view (outside) cabin. Departing August 19, the price includes kids’ clubs, full board meals and entertainment on board.
Departing from and returning to Southampton, ports of call are La Coruna, Madeira, Tenerife, Gran Canaria, Lanzarote and Lisbon.
To book, see pocruises.com, call 03453 555 111 or visit your local travel agent. HEY say it’s good to have relatives in high places. Although when your 11-year-old daughter is clinging to a vertical concrete wall, over 100 feet up, you might not share that sentiment.
Of course, she wasn’t in any real danger and was, in fact, having the time of her life – otherwise this would have been a rather dark introduction to a light travel feature.
We were at ROKT, a huge climbing gym that sprawls through the vast spaces inside a former flour mill in the West Yorkshire town of Brighouse.
While most of the climbing areas are indoors, ROKT boasts the UK’s highest man-made outdoor climbing wall, 36 metres straight up the side of an old grain silo that is taller than the Tower of London.
Owner Euan Noble has turned the once-derelict premises into a haven for climbers from all over the UK and a busy activity centre for families who can take part in Nerf battles, yoga, spin classes, or attempt to free themselves from the fiendishly-plotted Escape rooms.
Although Euan is also a health and anti-obesity campaigner, with the ear of the government, not everything he has created here is about running around like a mad thing. Next door to the outdoor climbing wall (known as ROKTFACE) and beside a pretty stretch of the Calder and Hebble Navigation canal he has a pub called the Millers, regularly voted one of the best in Yorkshire, and above it a restaurant called 47 Grains – another nod to the flour-milling past of the location.
So parents like me, whose climbing days are so far in the past they’d need Dr Who to find them, can sit with a pint in the beer garden and watch their offspring climb the giant wall.
If I had managed to get to the top myself, though, I would have been able to enjoy the breathtaking views across picturesque Calderdale, our holiday destination for the weekend.
Home base was Elmet Farmhouse in the tiny village of Pecket Well, high up above the bustling market town of Hebden Bridge.
Beautifully restored by owner and design historian Lesley Jackson, Elmet is a Grade II listed farmhouse dating from around 1728, with its own glorious views of Calderdale.
From its stone mullion windows or – when the weather is kind – from a seat in the garden, you look out across Hebden Bridge and neighbouring Heptonstall, enjoying the same view immortalised by photographer Fay Godwin on the cover of the book of photographs and poems she produced in 1979 with the late Poet Laureate Ted Hughes, entitled Remains of Elmet.
Hughes, born in nearby Mytholmroyd, had a cousin who lived in the neighbouring cottage to Elmet Farmhouse, and would have been a familiar face in the little lane leading to the houses in the 1950s and 60s.
Artists of all kinds have long found themselves drawn to Hebden