Kippers and colleges

There can be few more pleasant ways to spend a warm sunny autumn afternoon than sprawling back on rugs and cushions in a punt on the Cam - especially when someone else is wielding the pole and getting his trousers wet.

The girls sitting for hours either side of an empty coffee cup in the window of a cafe while they sketched Kings College Chapel opposite were enjoying themselves, too; and so were the tourists biking round the narrow streets between the colleges; and also the people drinking in The Eagle beneath a stained ceiling covered in the shaky signatures, written with cigarette lighters, of the young men of the RAF and USAF who were stationed near here during the war. The pilot of the Memphis Belle is amongst them - the first American plane to complete a 25-mission tour.

For us it's the last day of our tour, too. Just some bits and pieces in London and then we'll be away home.

We started the day with kippers and we'll end it with scampi in the pub. Brain food - what else would you eat in Cambridge?

Bon appetit

Down in the lobby of the Tardis-like George Hotel in Stamford, a 900 year-old coaching inn, there is a portrait of a sweet-faced boy called Daniel Lambert who had the body of a blimp. He was born in Leicestershire in 1770 and died here in 1809, weighing 335kg, necessitating the removal of part of a wall to allow his body to be taken to be buried. Despite measuring, for example, a metre around the knee, he was charming and intelligent, and much missed by the ladies after his death.

I was put in mind of Daniel when the head waiter in the hotel's excellent restaurant, rolled back the lid of the giant silver trolley to reveal a rib of beef quite 60 centimetres long. It carved like a dream and melted in the mouth, and along with the succulent scallops and tempura-fried shaved courgettes, the prosciutto-wrapped beans, cheeses by named people and home-made chocolate truffles, it threatened to bring on a case of the Daniel Lamberts.

So much for my intentions of being prudent, just ordering the turbot. In the absence of turtle soup on the menu, I felt I had to go for this fish as just this afternoon, in the cavernous Elizabethan vault of the kitchen at Burghley House, I had admired the diamond-shaped copper turbot kettle on the long polished oak table (held together only by wooden dowels); although the dozen or so 300 year-old turtle skulls mounted on the chimney breast were a bit chilling.

The house is magnificent and well worth seeing, full of ornament and wow-factor decorations, but I enjoyed almost as much simply walking through the grounds, past herds of twitchy fallow deer and imperturbable sheep, to the town where the low sun brought out the full beauty of the creamy limestone and the rolling green hills set about by oak and ash.

It's another undiscovered gem, like Lincoln, but I'm going to shut up about it now in case you take it into your head to go there and, in finding it, change it. There's a law about that, you know. One day the details may even come back to me.

Don't read this

Shhh. Don't tell anyone. Don't even read this, in case you're tempted to come to Lincoln: because Lincoln is a delight, a gem, a treasure; and it seems that hardly anyone knows about it.
Ok, it was Sunday afternoon when we got here, but I was assured that the streets in the old town, the Uphill, are always quiet, that even in summer there are no crowds, and that because this small city isn't on the way to anywhere else, the coaches don't come here.
That means these steep narrow streets, higgledy-piggledy brick, stone and timbered houses, and glorious Cathedral are an absolute joy to wander around and discover. Not that we had much time for that: one afternoon. It's a crime.
Still, thanks to Brian, who has a comprehensive knowledge of the place and its history, as well as a mischievous line in jokes, we had a crash course in St Hugh and his swan, the swineherd and his 16 silver pennies and the imp with the 20p spotlight. And that was just the cathedral - to find out about the creepy prison chapel, the gentleman executioner and Captain Birdseye vs the Roman arch, you'll just have to come and ask him yourself.
Or, rather, don't.

Cheers!

Purely in the interests of research, we've visited a pub or two on our journey around these islands, and I have to say it's been a pleasure, whether jammed around a table of friends in The Glasshouse on the side of May Hill, eating Welsh lamb shanks in Y Brennan tucked beneath Harlech Castle, or sitting by an open peat fire in Sean's in Athlone, allegedly Ireland's oldest pub.

In Ireland live music was a constant: original guitar ballads, keyboard comic songs, traditional diddly-dee on fiddle and bodhrin, or unaccompanied singing. I was pleased not to leave Ireland without hearing Black Velvet Ribbon and Wild Rover played apparently without irony; but best of all, and hilariously unexpected, was one old man's alternative version of Flowers of the Forest. It was an absolute joy: Google it.

Arthur's Day

1759 was when Arthur Guinness established his brewery, world famous in the world for the velvety stout; and 250 years later, on 24 September at 17:59, Guinness aficionados all joined together to raise a pint to Arthur.

"Don't grab!" snapped the barmaid, struggling under the weight of a tray with 8 full - and free - glasses, as the time approached and some people were still empty-handed. One minute to six, a count-down and then, "To Arthur!" - across Dublin, Ireland and even the world. It was a stirring moment in the annals of mass advertising.

Arthur Guinness gave Dublin much more than a smooth pint of porter: on a long ramble around the streets today with Pat Liddy, the last in our series of knowledgeable enthusiasts, we saw many of the pies in which the Guinness family had a finger. We also ate one - with the stout in it, not any fingers - served by Jamie, from Christchurch.

And later that night I stood on the ferry, watching Ireland slip away into the dark as so many emigrants did 160 years ago, on the way to Liverpool and beyond.

Both sides now

In the 1870s the landed gentry at Strokestown Park had the leisure to worry about the handicap of left-handedness in their children and fitted the schoolroom with desks where the attached chair was offset so that it was only possible to write with the right.

Meanwhile, the tenant farmers on the estate had more basic worries: food, rent and Major Denis Mahon, the land agent, who advised his employer that the best solution to the problem of starving, poverty-stricken tenants was "mass emigration" as it was cheaper to send them to Canada than to the local workhouse.

At Swinford, Tom Hennigan's family was luckier: they managed to pay their rent and avoid eviction, and sitting in the small cottage today by the glowing peat fire, rain falling softly on the thatch and geese honking in the yard, he told us his stories. We'd seen the baskets before, the half-doors, the loft beds; but Tom was born in this bed, came home from school to eat potatoes baked on this hearth, sat in the firelight to hear these tales told over and over. Today he made it all real for us.

A mighty craic - or several

What was best about today? It's hard to choose.

It could have been the eager young man at the Museum of Country Life explaining how yesterday's random walls were make-work shemes for men to earn their aid; or rationalising boys in skirts up to the age of 13. Or driving past great beetling bare hills with green fields at their feet and black peat bogs dug with deep channels. Or the passionate amateur archeologist describing how 15 people and 4 cattle fitted inside a stone cottage not much bigger than our bathroom, as clouds swirled over the mountain top behind him and waves broke high on the rocks beyond a pewter lake. Or listening to his stories about the people who fled this deserted village in the hope of a better life in foreign lands, leaving behind all that was familiar.

Or maybe cantering on a well-mannered grey mare through the shallows along a pebbled beach to a headland where a fierce current swirled through the narrow channel cutting it off from one of the 300 islands in the bay; and then turning to see St Patrick's church clear and tiny on the top of his mountain where pilgrims climb up barefoot one morning a year.

Or standing by the simple and powerful Famine Memorial, a ship with skeletons forming the rigging.

Or maybe in the yard bar of Matt Molloy's pub in Westport, where a man with a pony tail played his own comic songs and shared his excitement about flying to New York tomorrow to perform - another Irishman heading off across the Atlantic full of hope. Good luck to him.