Gilsland to Liverpool, Merseyside, UK (Olympic Day 6)

This is our last family history day and it will be packed. Last night we arranged for what seems to our hosts to be an early breakfast at 8am. I get a continental breakfast which is reasonably sized, but Sean goes for the English breakfast - sausage, English bacon (more like ham or Canadian bacon than like the strips that we get in the US), broiled tomato, sautéed mushrooms, baked beans, fried egg, toast and tea (black tea with milk and sugar) - yikes! Since these B&Bs make most of their money off of hikers, who are trying to cover the 73 miles of Hadrian's wall from the Irish Sea to the North Sea, they load up them up with a bazillion calories and send them off for a day of walking.

While we are eating, the other guests come in for breakfast. There is a Canadian couple  from Vancouver Island and a Canadian woman who now lives in Sheffield and who is somehow related, but I'm not sure how. It turns out that the guy has attended seven Summer Olympics beginning in 1972! They are "hiking the wall" and then will commute to the Olympics from Sheffield (note: this is a two hour commute one-way!). They are very interested to learn that "affordable" Olympic housing can be found by waiting until shortly before the Olympics. They are also interested to hear what events we will see as they focus exclusively on Athletics. We'd like to talk more, but we have to hit the road or we will not see everything on our agenda. Perhaps we will run into them again in Rio?!

Our first mission for the day is to go over and look at Hadrian's wall (another World Heritage Site for our life list!). Here is a picture:

 

 Not exactly the Great Wall of China although when constructed around 130AD, it was fourteen feet high and ten feet wide and had a nine foot deep ditch running the length on one side. There is a very interesting article in National Geographic magazine about the Roman frontiers. They explain how the Roman empire, after 600 years of expansion, realized that they had run out of good places to expand into and shifted over toward protecting the areas that they already had. Here in Northern England, they clearly run out of good places since the area was rugged, rocky and surrounded by barbarians like the Scots. I learned that there was another wall, the Antonine Wall, built in 142AD across the middle of Scotland, but it took only 20 years for the Scots to overrun that line of defense. In fact, the whole wall building era was the beginning of the end for the Roman empire. By placing most of their defensive force at the frontier, they opened up huge areas of the empire to attack whenever the barbarians broke through the border. If it is any consolation, the Great Wall had the same problem and took a lot longer to build.

Our first stop for the day is Hareshaw Linn near the town of Hexham almost due east from Gilsland. Mom believes that this is the earliest residence of her ancestors after they decided that it was easier to pillage England while living there rather than commuting from Denmark or Norway by Viking longboat. We are driving approximately along the length of Hadrian's Wall and see a number of hikers along the way. The land in this part of England reminds me very much of where I grew up in Massachusetts. I see broad U-shaped valleys where the glaciers moved and the same strange glacial hills called drumlins that form where the dirt and rock churned up by the glacier eventually was dropped when the glaciers retreated. And everywhere, there are rocks.

After about an hour, we are getting close to the right place - and again running into differences between Google driving directions and the actual road signs. We drive into the small village of Bellingham (pronounced bel-ling-jum) and are looking for a right turn onto a particular road. We don't see the correct turn and then find our way out of the village and back into the rolling countryside. After a few miles, we decide that we've gone off in the wrong direction and head back to Bellingham. Beth goes into a shop looking for directions and finds that the only right turn in the village is the one that we want (and is told that no one refers to this road the way that Google does). In a few minutes, we are there. There is a footpath along Hareshaw burn (stream) to Hareshaw Linn, which is a waterfall. There is a small museum in town, but we don't have time today. It would be interesting to find out why the stream and waterfall were named after a Hareshaw and how long ago that was. This is clearly not great farmland - too rocky and hilly, so we can understand why the Hareshaws eventually moved into Scotland and even later into Northern Ireland. Anyway, here is a picture of Mom at this site:

 



Next stop is the village of Castle Donington, about four hours south of here. Along the way, we pass a large number of huge power plant cooling towers. In the US, these would be nuclear power plants, but in the northeast corner of England, these are pretty likely to be coal powered. You may have heard the saying "carrying coals to Newcastle" as a definition of doing something useless. This is because Newcastle, very close to Bellingham, has more coal than they know what to do with.

Castle Donington near Nottingham (as in "The Sheriff of") because this is where our particular group of Robies comes from. Here are my known direct ancestors:

1. John Roby (b 1455, d 1515)
2. Thomas Roby (b 1501, d 1552)
3. Thomas Roby (b 1536, d 1588)
4. Thomas Roby (b 1576, d 1653)
5. Henry Robie (b 1619, d 1688)
6. John Robie (b 1650, d 1691)
7. Ichabod Robie (b 1679, d 1753)
8. John Robie (b 1712, d 1788)
9. Edward Robie (b 1747, d 1837)
10. Thomas Robie (b 1785, d ?)
11. Archibald Robie (b 1830, d 1886)
12. Daniel Clark Robie (b 1867, d 1937)
13. Herman Daniel Robie (b 1907, d 1970)
14. Eugene Douglas Robie (b 1930, d 2005)
15. me
16. Sean

It is not everyone who can trace their family back 16 generations over 550+ years! The first five of these people were born in Castle Donington. In fact, the Roby family was known to be in Castle Donington in the 13th century, but we cannot trace the direct line farther back than John. 

While Thomas (the 3rd) signed his will Thomas Robie, this spelling was not common. His son Henry Robie was the first in the family to move to the New World in 1639 - taking up residence in Hampton, NH. Family history says that Henry was escaping the tax collector! From there, my family stayed within a 50 mile radius of Hampton for the next 10 generations. Interestingly, Henry's 2nd cousin John Robey moved to Maryland in 1654 and all Robeys descend from him. As far as we know, all Roby/Robie/Robey families are related.

It is a long ride from Bellingham to Castle Donington, but we finally get there. Here is a picture of the town:

 



There are two places we are looking for. We hope to find John Roby's tombstone at the old church in the picture. There also supposed to be an old tudor style house called the Key house that was built by Thomas Roby (the 3rd). The town is a warren of one way roads that all seem to go in the wrong direction. While looking for a way to get to the church, we find the Key house:

 

 

It is called the Key House, because a key was supposed to have hung on the outside of it. There is one up under the Gables directly above Sean's head in this picture. What was the key to? The long gone castle in Castle Donington? I have no idea.

After this brief photo-op, we pile back into the car to try to get to the church. This is easier said than done. Our Audi is clearly not built for these narrow roads and I spend most of my time trying to avoid shearing off my sideview mirrors. After a series of turns, we get to the church:

 

The church was built in the 13th century and my relatives were surely buried here, but alas, there is no longer a cemetery here. I seem to remember a picture of a tombstone taken by my uncle Ken in perhaps the 1960's, but either the cemetery is no longer here or it is in a different place, but we don't have time to find out. We stop for gas - it costs 50 pounds (around $80) to fill up the tank that was only 3/4th empty. I don't want to hear anything from Americans about the high cost of gasoline - the people in Europe clearly have it much worse.

We stop at a market to buy some snacks and it begins to pour outside - of course our rainware is still in the car. We sprint back to the car and get underway after drying our glassed off enough to see where we are going. Unfortunately, this is not a brief shower. It rains for the next 90 minutes or so.

Our final stop on our way to Liverpool is the village of Roby - where the Roby family in Castle Donington are supposed to have come from. Roby village was originally called Rabil which is Norse for boundary village/farm and is listed in the famous Domesday book in 1086AD. How they got from Rabil to Roby is beyond me. Anyway, it is just off the main M62 motorway between Manchester and Liverpool. We have what I think are pretty good directions to a spot where there is supposed to be an old Celtic cross that marks the original location of the village. Unfortunately, our driving directions are again not matching reality - we know we are in trouble when we go around a traffic circle that is supposed to have two exits and it has four. After several attempts, we finally give up the hunt for the village and settle for finding Roby road:



From here, it is only a 15 minute drive to our hotel. After 8+ hours, I am very glad to get out of the car for a while! We have a nice Italian dinner with Mom in the hotel. Tomorrow, she has an early morning flight back to Dublin via the Isle of Man and we have a mid-morning train trip to London. We are not sure whether we'll be able to check out of the hotel, drop her at the airport, drop our rental car and still get to the train station in time so we agree to hire a taxi to take Mom to the airport.

It has been a great day and a great five days with Mom. We say goodnight to her and settle down to watch some Olympics on TV. There was some early repeat coverage of race eight of the Finn class sailing where Team GB's Ben Ainsley is trying to win his fourth gold medal in sailing. He has been having a lot of trouble in this regatta and is definitely in catch-up mode. He finishes 3rd in the race, but more importantly, finishes one place ahead of Denmark's Jonas Hogh-Christensen, who has been leading the competition since the beginning.

After the sailing, BBC coverage switches to track cycling for the Men's team sprint finals. This is like team pursuit where two teams start on opposite sides of the velodrome and sees who crosses the finish line first. In this case, each team has 3 members, each of who must lead their team for one lap. The big news is whether Sir Chris Hoy can win his 6th gold medal to become the British athlete with the most gold medals. In the qualifying round, Team GB sets an Olympic record of 43.065 seconds. In the first round, they decide to get serious and set a world record 42.747 seconds to beat Japan by (for sprint) a huge margin of 1.2 seconds. Then in the final, they go even faster and lower the world record to 42.600 seconds to beat France by 0.4 seconds. Hoy has already knighted, I wonder what he gets for winning his sixth gold medal.

Steps for the day: 4500