MOFFAT MANIA

The drive up the M6 was long and boring. It took four hours to drive 125 miles. We fetched up at Moffat, on a much more amenable site. I didn’t even need to reverse the caravan. The town is a treasure. Sweetly coloured and gaily painted, it nestles prettily against a backdrop of forested hills. It’s small enough to explore in an hour. The sound of the church clock was particularly mellifluous, chiming sweetly on the quarter-hour. The farmers’ market sold delicious local produce and I ate Moffat quiche for lunch and Moffat steak pie for dinner on day one. Yum, yum. The dog and I limped down to the park. A mallard lay face-down in the boating lake, its feet tangled in weed, drowned. All the park benches were dedicated to local people who had died. Some of the messages were prosaic, some were touching. All the evidence I needed that Moffat had once been served by a railway lay at the western end of the park. For a start, the park was called ‘Station Park’, which gave some sort of a clue. Then there were the remains of a small railway bridge and an embankment. At the other side of the park, an attractive ex-railway hut had been retained. I guessed that rail traffic had ceased sixty years or so ago. I presumed that there would once have been quite vigorous freight traffic – animals, wool etc, and I wondered if a spur to Moffat had been built from the West Coast Main Line, say from Beattock. I didn’t know that William Wallace, Robert the Bruce and Air Chief Hugh Dowding had all been born in the town, though not all at the same time. Holidays are just as much about education and exploration as travelling hopefully. I left Moffat, my holiday at an end, with mixed feelings. I liked the town enormously and I had no great wish to come home, but maybe I was getting fed up with the drudgery of caravan life and the smell of damp grass. Communal toilets and enforced bonhomie had certainly lost their allure. It’s the little things about the holiday that I shall recall with affection – like swishing at nettles with my stick in a lay-by near Clitheroe so that I could get into the van, seeing a barn owl fly past the site at Slingsby with a field mouse clutched in its talons, listening to the fearful and distressed trumpeting of the bull in the field behind the van at the same site, talking to the little deaf girl clutching a cribbage board at Moffat, finally, throwing a ball to an excitable Border Collie named ‘Toke’, the oddly-named pet of an elderly couple from Bangor-on-Dee. On balance, I quite like caravanning and shall certainly try it again.